Justice Hall

scrubbed-bare tables and the aroma of coffee and croissants. I manoeuvred until I was at a window table, which I shared with several changes of patrons during my own extended breakfast. I drank more coffee than I had at any one time since the Palestine wanderings (with an unfortunate effect on my nerves) and ate the equivalent of a couple of large loaves of bread, presented in a variety of shapes and sizes, from brioche to baguette, all laden with butter and preserves. Feeling like a child at a birthday party, quivering with excitement and stuffed with sweet things, I paid my bill, abandoned my table, ducked in and out of an unfortunately maintained lavatory, and traded the restaurant for the now-open shops.

Two hours in the brasserie, two more examining each shop’s wares with minute attention and a few purchases, and soon the noon hour would be upon me and I would be thrown out onto the street, to reclaim my window seat and eat yet more food. (I had, at least, left a good tip, by way of apology for my lengthy occupation.)

However, as the shopkeeper wrapped my parcel, too polite as he did so to point out that every other door on the street was closed tight and that all civilised persons were already seated at their tables, I saw a taxi pull up in front of the Hughenfort door. The driver got out to ring the bell, and I hastened to pay and scramble to find a taxi of my own.

Taxi drivers, too, are civilised people. It took me ten tense minutes to find a man hungrier for cash than for dejeuner and to urge him back to my target. To his disgust, we then sat at the end of the road, the engine idling, while the other driver and the two Hughenforts pushed the last of their cases into the car and got in. Only when the other taxi was moving did I allow my driver to follow.

We travelled little more than a mile through the city, ending up not far from the railway station where we had begun on the previous day. The taxi turned into a quiet street and came to a halt before a run-down block of flats that were considerably less appealing, both aesthetically and in their local amenities, than the house we’d come from. Mme Hughenfort would not, I thought, wish to remain here for long, not with her young son in tow: The butcher’s looked flyblown, the nearest greengrocer’s was two streets away, and there wasn’t even a boulangerie in sight for their morning baguette.

“Hotel Carlton,” I said to the driver. He swivelled around to stare at me, at this crowning instruction to the day’s fare, but for once I couldn’t be bothered coming up with a story.

He took me to the Carlton, accepted my money, and sped off to see what he could salvage of his lunch hour, shaking his head at the mad ways of foreigners.

Had I been in London, my next step would have been to discover who owned the building in which Mme Hughenfort had taken shelter. In this bastion of Gallic officialdom, however, it was a task I thought I would leave to Holmes, who was not only male but spoke better French than I. Instead, I thought I might go back to the woman’s neighborhood and show some photographs.

After the long lunch-time closure.

Besides which, I was growing quite fond of my brasserie’s fare.

Following lunch, with my coat still turned to show honest cloth and the dumpiest of hats on my head, I took out the envelope of family photographs Alistair had given me and began to work my way up one side of the street and down the other. My basic story was that I was a second cousin of Mme Hughenfort, but the embroidery I tacked on to that thin beginning varied with my audience. In the brasserie, where I started my community interrogation, there was an inheritance involved, a solid pile of francs for Mme Hughenfort if she could prove, well, “family concerns” (I let the precise nature of those concerns trail into speculation). To the good mistress of the flower stall there was a reference to a family madman, to the stout pair who ran the needlework shop a tinge of romance and scandal, and to the tobacconist a simple wager that had got complicated. And so it went, in the shops, among the neighbours. What I learnt, both through my deliberate efforts and through fortuitous accident, was most intriguing.

Her missing neighbours returned as darkness was setting in, and they contributed their own pieces to the puzzle.

Finally, as the rich odours of Lyonnais cooking crept into the evening air to mix with the damp from two rivers, I turned my steps back to the Carlton, where I was given, along with my key, the news that my husband had arrived. I held my breath as I inserted the key in the lock, knowing full well that with Holmes, arrival did not necessarily mean presence. But when I flung open the door, he was there, damp from the bath and working to get the cuff-links through his shirt. He looked up in surprise at my abrupt entrance, his thinning hair still tousled from the towel and giving him an absurdly boyish look. I laughed aloud in sheer pleasure: the perfect end to a satisfying day.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Say one thing for Holmes: Pompous he may occasionally be, but he does understand the need for physical expression when high spirits erupt, and he accepted my flinging myself into his arms and whirling around the room in a vigorous waltz with nary a repressive grumble. He even hummed an accompaniment for half a dozen twirls until I released him and subsided into a chair to loose my coat and free my tired feet.

“You have had a successful day, I perceive,” he commented.

“I know all about Madame Hughenfort and young Thomas,” I announced grandly.

“All?” he said, one eyebrow raised.

I waved away his skepticism. “All of importance. But if I begin now we won’t eat until ten o’clock, and considering the length of French meals, we shall still be at table when the cafe au lait appears on the bars.”

I had read rightly the sign of his crisp clean shirt: He, too, was ready to dine.

“An ascetic priest limits himself to thin soup and a prayer at midday,” he commented. I turned to the dressing-table to do my hair, and met his eyes in the glass.

“Did M Tony follow you all the way here?”

“Into Lyons, yes, although not, naturally, into this hotel, an institution not suited to a simple man of the cloth. I led him into the slums and lost him there. I spent three weeks here, back in the nineties,” he explained. “That sort of neighbourhood changes little in three decades.”

My hair rescued from disarray, my day shoes changed for evening wear, a gossamer Kashmir wrap with silver beads transforming my plain dark dress into formality, I placed my arm through his and went to dine.

Subdued piano music and the distance between the tables made it safe to speak. After we made our choices and approved the sparkling young Rhone in our glasses, I recounted my day. When I had finished following our pair to their hide-out near the gare, I paused to let the waiter clear our soup plates.

“It’s so nice when things go as easily as that,” I remarked. “It was as if nothing could go wrong: She couldn’t see me behind her, she didn’t leave while I was in the lavatory, her taxi didn’t take off while I was still hunting for one. Sometimes things go right.”

“Too much so, you think?”

I began to protest indignantly, that I should certainly have noticed if the woman had been leading us by the nose, but instead I paused, to do his question justice, before I shook my head. “She’d have had to know me, know my level of skills, in order to set it up so precisely. You might have been able to ensure I followed you without its seeming planned—might have—but not a stranger.”

He nodded, accepting my conclusion. We suspended my report long enough to appreciate properly my sole and his Coquilles St. Jacques, before I picked up with my tale in the afternoon. “With her and the boy safely out of the way, I began the rounds of shopkeepers and neighbours, with a story for each of them that was more style than substance. You know the routine: indignation and a demanding of rights for the strong woman, the impression of tears and lace handkerchiefs for the older women, hints that somebody will get it in the eye for the young men drinking at the bar. Madame’s only lived here for eight or nine months—came from Clermont-Ferrand, one of them thought; or Bourges, thought another; although a third swore he had seen her before, in the old city, a good two years ago.

“So I showed the photos, as we agreed, of the family she had either swindled or lost, depending on the story of the moment. No, no, they’d never seen any of those peculiar-looking English people.” I went into as much detail