The Hotel Riviera (6 page)

The noise of a car pulling into the gravel parking lot broke the silence. Surprised, I glanced at my watch. Almost two
A.M.
All my guests, with the exception of the brutish Mr. Falcon, were home, and in any case Falcon drove the Harley. Car doors slammed, then I heard heavy footsteps crunching on the sandy path heading to my cottage.

A trickle of fear ran up my spine. It was the middle of the night, everyone was sleeping, I was alone. Even if I screamed no one would hear me, tucked away in my private little corner, shaded by thick hedges of oleander and honeysuckle.

I was suddenly so hot with fear, I could
hear
my heart thudding. I ran to the door, threw on the bolt, ran back, locked the windows, grabbed the phone…
I'd call the police. They'd be here in what? Five minutes? Ten? Fifteen?…Oh God, it would be too late
.

The bead curtain clanked as it was thrust aside, then someone knocked. I forced myself into absolute stillness, hoping whoever it was would think no one was here and just go away…after all, there was nothing worth stealing anyway…But did robbers knock?

“Madame Laforêt,” a commanding French voice said. “Open up, please. It's the gendarmes.”

The police
. At two o'clock in the morning? I was already fumbling with the bolt and the lock. And then my heart stopped its thudding and sank like a stone. It must be about Patrick, I thought. They've found Patrick.

I got the door open and stood looking at the man facing me, big and bulky in a battered Panama hat and a crumpled white jacket. The top buttons of his shirt were open and a tuft of black chest hair stuck out above his loosely knotted yellow tie. He didn't look like a policeman and I edged quickly back behind the door. Then I noticed the pair of uniformed gendarmes behind him.

I clutched my hand to my sunken heart like a soap opera queen. “What is it, what's happened?”

The big man removed his battered Panama and held it to his chest. “Madame Laforêt,” he said, “allow me to introduce myself. I am Detective Claude Mercier of the Marseilles police. These gentlemen are my colleagues from the local precinct. I need to talk to you.”

The
Marseilles
police? It couldn't be
good
news. I held open the door and they strode past me. Their authoritative masculine presence seemed to suck all the air out of my small pretty room. I couldn't breathe…Anything could have happened, I told myself, sinking legless into the sofa. Anything…But these were the
good
guys, they were on
my
side…weren't they?

“Vous permettez, madame?”
Detective Mercier pulled up a chair. He sat facing me, leaning forward, elbows resting on his spread knees, twirling the brim of his Panama between his fingers. He stared into my face.

When I could stand his silence no longer, I blurted out, “For God's sake, why are you here at two in the morning? What's happened? Is it Patrick?”

The detective placed his hat carefully on his knees. He sighed as he sat back, hands clasped, fingers linked, thumbs twirling slowly.

“Madame Laforêt, your husband's car, the silver Porsche Carrara, has been found abandoned in a garage on the outskirts of Marseilles.” He held up his hand. “And no, madame, your husband was not in the vehicle. Right now the Porsche is being gone over by forensics, with the proverbial fine-tooth comb, for any signs of…” His voice dropped a dramatic register. “Of violence.”

That final softly spoken word echoed through my brain.

Detective Mercier was suddenly gentle. “Madame Laforêt, why don't you tell me everything you know about your husband's disappearance. It would be in your best interest. And of course, madame”—he leaned conspiratorially toward me, speaking so softly only I could hear him—“I will look after you
personally
. I'll see that you are well taken care of, that you are treated with respect.” His eyes locked onto mine. “After all, a woman like you,
a lady
…”

So that's why the police were here at two in the morning. They thought I had killed my husband. Detective Mercier was being nice to me to get me to confess.

“I've already told the police everything I know,” I said, suddenly cautious.

Mercier's dark brows folded into a straight line. “Are you telling me you know nothing? That your husband simply left one sunny morning and never came back?”

I nodded yes, and I felt the sweat slide icily between my shoulder blades. I said, “But now you've found his car, surely you'll be able to track him down? You and your colleagues in forensics…?”

The detective stopped me with that upraised palm again. “Forensics deal in
death,
Madame Laforêt.”

I gaped at him. “What do you mean? Where is my husband?”

Mercier lumbered to his feet. He walked to the door with the gendarmes following him. As he opened the door I heard the thunder, rumbling closer. He turned and looked back at me. “We were hoping you would be able to tell us that, Madame Laforêt,” he said. “Since you were the last person to see him, and you are a suspect in his possible murder.”

Miss N

Mollie Nightingale couldn't sleep either. It was her talk with Lola that was the culprit, she decided. Mentioning Tom had been a mistake. This always happened: it triggered off her subconscious, bringing him back again, larger than life—and twice as dead.

Tom was a man who'd lived dangerously and he'd died violently, as she had predicted he would.

“Rubbish,” he'd said, dismissing her fears with a contemptuous curl of the lip as he stood in front of the mahogany cheval mirror that had been her father's, knotting his tie—always a striped silk rep, he must have had two dozen of them, all the same style but in different colors. It was Mollie's task each morning to select the “colors of the day,” which pleased her, made her feel in some small way she was sharing part of his life. Silly, she knew, but that was the way it was between them.

Tom had lived his life as the hard-nosed detective at Scotland Yard with a reputation for pushing the envelope into dangerous territory. And she'd had her life as the refined schoolmistress, head of a select London day school for girls where calm and decorum were the watchword and the only crimes were sneaking a smoke in the bathroom or—the worst—cheating in a test.

Her and Tom's lives could not have been more different and, like creatures from alien planets, they met cautiously in the neutral territory of her tiny London flat, and also—when Tom the workaholic could no longer claim he had to work weekends and was actually forced into going—at her favorite place, the equally tiny cottage in the village of Blakelys.

Mostly, though, Miss Nightingale was at the cottage alone on weekends, soaking up the peace and quiet, and quite often, the drizzle as she gardened enthusiastically, spilling her spare love and emotions—those not reserved for Tom—into the heavy brown earth where she'd created a tangled beauty of a garden from the simplest of country flowers. She had sculpted daisies into topiaries; built great banks of delphiniums and hydrangeas; and scattered spring primroses under the lime trees, the true old-fashioned pale yellow primroses that came after the great clusters of daffodils, which, corny though Tom said it was, somehow always caused Mollie to quote Wordsworth:

“A host of golden daffodils,” she'd say, admiring that springtime bonanza, while huddling from the cold wind under several layers of jumpers and cardigans. She thought Wordsworth had got it exactly right. Then, in summer, came her joy of joys, the roses, especially the climbing variety, the Gloire de Dijon with its huge cabbagy blooms in palest buff tinged with yellow and apricot and with a scent that knocked her socks off on a fine summer morning. And Golden Showers, which, true to its name, shimmered over the honey-stone cottage walls with golden abandon.

“A difficult plant,” Tom had said about her Gloire de Dijon, “but like a beautiful woman, worth the extra attention.” Which had left her wondering what on earth Tom knew about beautiful women who needed extra attention.

She'd taken a long look at her husband of five years (they had found each other later in life when she was in her fifties and he a couple of years younger), contemplating what it might be like to have been young and beautiful and courted by the handsome, dangerous Tom Knight. Her Knight in Shining Armor, she'd called him when he'd finally suggested, after drinks in a pub on the Kings Road—a place to which she was unaccustomed—that perhaps their lives should be joined.

Not exactly at the hip, of course, he'd added jokingly. After all, I've got my life and you've got yours. But it seems to me, Mollie, we get along very well. We've known each other a few years now, and you are exactly the kind of woman I need to add ballast to my life.

And she'd smiled and flushed a rosy pink that he said matched her dress, and two months later she found herself “plighting her troth” as she liked to call it, with this world-weary man with the eyes that said he'd seen it all and then some, and an expression in his taut, lean face that said, better not mess with me, fella, I'm smarter and tougher and harder than you are.

Blakelys Manor had been her girlhood home, but all Miss Nightingale had inherited, after the tax man had taken his share, was the gardener's old cottage, crammed now with treasures from the Blakely Nightingales' exotic past. She and Tom had “honeymooned” in that old cottage, which was to become their “true home.” Then finally,
her
home. Alone.

Sighing, Miss Nightingale sat up in the comfortable bed in the Marie-Antoinette room at the Hotel Riviera, bringing her thoughts deliberately back to her plans for the following day. And what exactly were her plans? she wondered as she pushed her plump feet into pink velvet slippers and shrugged a pink cotton robe over her Marks & Spencer lavender nightie. She smiled, remembering Tom saying how she looked like a summer garden in her favorite pastels, and how later she'd worried about whether that was a compliment or not.

He was difficult to read, Tom was, or at least in the beginning he was. Later, though, he'd opened up to her. He enjoyed her simplicity, he said, and her uncomplex, unworldly approach, and that's when he'd begun to share his “other life” as a detective with her. His
real
life, he called it. And of course Mollie's own life became more exciting as she began to live vicariously through him.

It was at the cottage over after-dinner brandies in front of the fire on a bitter cold winter's night, that she first coaxed the story of his latest case out of him.

It was a real toughie, he said worriedly, because it was a particularly gruesome murder and there was a dearth of clues. Plus it involved a child, something that incensed every cop who had to deal with such perversion.

It's the loss of innocence I keep thinking about, Tom said to her, brandy glass clasped between his big hands, staring into the flames leaping in the grate. I can't stop thinking about what the poor little thing must have gone through before the bastard finally killed her.

How do you know it was a man? she asked quietly. Tom turned and looked at her, his eyes narrowed into slits. Bloody hell, Mollie, he said, you know what? You're a bloody genius. Excuse the bad language. Then he'd gotten up and made a phone call or two, slung on his anorak, said goodbye and see you when I see you, and hurried into the frosty night in the old green Land Rover, heading for the M4 and London.

It turned out the mother and her boyfriend were the killers after all, and after that, Tom would often talk to Mollie about the difficult cases. She learned a lot about violent crime: about the murders; the rapes; the gang assassinations; things she'd previously only read about in newspapers. And Tom found her lucid mind and simple reasoning a great help. For a while.

Sighing, Miss Nightingale pulled open the shutters leading to her tiny balcony and stepped out into the sultry night. Lightning flickered across the sky and the heavy scent of night-blooming jasmine filled the air. She couldn't grow jasmine in the Cotswolds, at least not in her little patch of garden; it just wouldn't “take,” didn't like the chilly nights, she supposed, so it gave her special pleasure to smell it now and catch the gleam of its white petals in the darkness.

Her room was the smallest in the hotel, and because it was on the shady side and quite dark, Lola had sponge-painted it a yellow that was meant to be primrose but had turned out more egg yolk. There was a comfy double bed with an iron frame and gauzy curtains, a pair of mismatched nightstands painted Mediterranean blue and a bleached-pine farmhouse armoire found on one of Lola's country antiquing expeditions. On the small table by the window were a water carafe and a glass, a pile of books, and Miss N's knitting—currently a long stretch of stripes, a winter muffler that, in fact, she would give Lola as a parting gift.

A comfortable blue velvet chair was placed near the window and two pretty lamps with country-toile shades completed the décor. This room was the cheapest in the hotel because it was on the corner overlooking the parking lot. Not that Miss N found that a hardship, because the straw matting strung over the graveled space to keep the sun off the guests' cars was now covered with deep blue convolvulus and it made for a pretty sight. Plus, if she craned her neck a little as she did now, she could catch a glimpse of the sea, and the red and green riding lights of the small sloop still anchored there.

She was just thinking, how wonderful to be aboard that little sloop with the waves lapping outside your window and the sea rocking you soft as a baby in its cradle, so calm, so peaceful, so silent, when headlights beamed down the lane. A large black car gunned into the lot, then squealed to a stop, gravel crunching, right beneath her balcony.

Miss N shrank back; she didn't want to be spotted in her bathrobe and slippers with her hair in a net to preserve its careful waves. And besides, who could this be, arriving so late? The car had Marseilles license plates and it certainly did not belong to any of the guests.

The passenger door was flung open and a weighty man in a crumpled white jacket with a broad-brimmed Panama hat slammed over his eyes hauled himself out. He didn't bother to close the door; he left that to the two gendarmes who slid quickly out after him. He stood for a minute getting his bearings, then with a grunt and a wave of his arm for them to follow, he strode down the sandy path toward Lola's cottage.

Miss N drew in a shocked breath. The police! At this time of night they were definitely here on business. And that could only mean Patrick.

She sank into the white rattan balcony chair, staring after them, waiting, wondering. It seemed a long time before they came back, and when she heard their footsteps, she leaned over the balcony to get a better look. The big man lifted his head and looked right back at her.

Oh dear! Oh my! she said to herself, shrinking back against the wall, flushing with embarrassment. And then she thought about her Tom and how this pasty-faced, overweight, sweating detective in his white jacket and Panama hat couldn't hold a candle to him, and she pulled her dignity together and stepped silently back into her room, closing the shutters behind her.

She waited until the sound of the car disappeared into the distance. Lola's alone, she thought. Lord knows what they have just told her. It's about Patrick, though, I'm sure of that. Maybe they have found him…or found his body is more like it.

Wrapping her pink robe tightly around her, she opened the door and crept along the hallway. She padded down the stairs and out the front door, hurrying softly in her slippers, down the path to Lola's cottage.

Rounding the thick oleander hedge, Miss N stopped. No lights showed. No sound came from within. She hesitated, wondering. Should she knock and say, it's me, Lola, it's just Mollie Nightingale wondering if everything is all right?

Sighing again, she shook her head, then she turned and walked slowly back through the gardens. Something bad had happened, though, she felt it in her bones. And her old bones surely knew a thing or two about trouble.

She turned for one last look at the shuttered house by the sea. The only lights were the red and green ones on the small sloop anchored out in the bay.