Here I must apologise for the way in which I was forced to spend some of your money, sir. I do hope you will forgive me. But I went to this hotel all unknowing and it was not until I was inside that I began to realise what sort of place it was. By then the woman who runs it had demanded money of me, and I had paid her, thinking that I was renting a room. It was only when I was asked to choose a girl that I realised my mistake.
I looked up and grinned. Truly Jules was a very poor liar; but I had a sneaking admiration for his cheek.
Naturally, I was horrified, but I decided to disguise my shock, in order to be able to ask questions. So I told the old woman that I wished to wait, and asked to talk a bit. She took this to be a sign of nervousness – and I was really not very comfortable – and got one of the girls to join me.
I will not go into the details, if you do not mind, but we talked for some time. She was really very nice. And she remembered the death of Mr Wichmann very well. Not surprisingly, perhaps, as the house was closed down by the police for a while, and all the people who worked there had to find their work on the streets, which they do not like very much.
The girl involved was called Virginie – none of them have second names – but she knew little else about her. They do not talk very much about their lives, it seems. Mr Wichmann was not a regular visitor, he came once and went with one of the girls, and apparently glimpsed Virginie as he left. He was found the next morning in his room dead, with a knife wound through his heart. Virginie had vanished.
At least, this is what that girl said. The girl Virginie was never seen again, and I do not think the police looked very hard for her. She was, by all accounts, quiet and very well behaved. She associated little with her colleagues, but preferred to sit and read while waiting for a client. She was not very popular with them, as they gained the impression she considered herself better than they were.
I hope, Mr Cort, that you do not consider that I have wasted my time and your money in finding all this out, and that you approve of my efforts. I will take the train back tomorrow morning.
I burned the letter, once I had read it carefully; I do not keep stray pieces of paper around if they are not needed. Then I sat and thought. The connection, from Elizabeth Lemercier to Virginie to Countess Elizabeth Hadik-Barkoczy von Futak uns Szala was easy for me to see. And if all of this, or enough of this, was in the diary, Elizabeth was correct to be worried. If Jules had got the story right, then she could face the guillotine.
But there was no time to do anything today, nor anything to do. I had to wait for Drennan to resurface; I was dependent on him. Still, I thought about the problem carefully as I made my way to Longchamp after lunch. I was not looking forward to it. I hate horse-racing; I have never seen the point of it. Horses I like – I used to go riding quite often when I stayed with the Campbells in Scotland in my youth – and there are few finer experiences than getting up on a good horse at dawn, and riding off over the moors. The beasts have their own personalities; they really can become your friend, if you know how to deal with them. But racing around a course, with thousands of overdressed, pampered spectators shouting them on? The animals are so much more worthy than the people, who generally have little interest in the horses at all. They are there to be there, to be seen and to waste money. My day at Longchamp was not for pleasure.
I had a frantic morning gathering more information on François Hubert than M. Steinberg had been able to give me. And I was still in a state of shock over my encounter with Simon. It had deeply disturbed me; I did not see what else I could have done, but the ease with which I came to that conclusion, and acted on it, I found unsettling in the extreme. So, with François Hubert I was sloppy; I allowed myself to pay far too much for trivial information, gave away too much, because I was in a hurry and over-tired.
My efforts at least produced enough to make me confident of success. M. Hubert was the head of the bonds department at Credit International; it was he who oversaw the bank's participation in loan issues, who determined what stake they would take. All very well; most large banks now have such people and they are growing in importance. That in itself was not a great deal of use. More important was the information that M Hubert liked gambling far too much for a man in his position, and that he liked a whole succession of women more than a married man should. Put those together and you had a picture of someone deeply in debt and, naturally, you begin to wonder where the money was coming from. Such a person can be persuaded to answer questions with no great difficulty.
