Oddly enough, there was a bar-tabac beneath Ursule Genoux’s apartment, one of the few, Verlaque imagined, in this part of the 8th arrondissement. He rang the brass buzzer labeled GENOUX, and a female voice replied, instructing him to go up the stairs to the first floor. He had wondered how a secretary—even one who worked for a famous writer—could afford this neighborhood. A first-floor, street-side apartment partly explained things: noisy and dark. Or she may have bought it decades ago—that is, if she owned the apartment.
Mme Genoux was standing inside her open door when Antoine got to the top of the stairs, and she held out a long thin arm and shook his hand. “Please come in,” she said, stepping aside. He quickly took in the small entryway that was surprisingly painted a bright, cheery yellow that made him think of van Gogh. Two old-fashioned umbrellas stood in a ceramic stand and a selection of straw hats hung on hooks. She ushered him into the living room, which, despite his prediction, was not dark but bright thanks to three very tall windows.
“Lovely room,” he said. The walls were covered in small oil paintings and prints of lakes and mountains—that he could have expected of an elderly professional secretary—but the furniture was polished, and the antiques from periods he admired, like the Regency. The walls were painted the same yellow as the entryway.
“Thank you. Please, sit down,” she said, gesturing to an armchair covered in blue silk.
“You must have been surprised to have received my phone call,” Antoine began.
“But you didn’t call,” Mme Genoux answered. “Your secretary did.”
Verlaque couldn’t tell whether he was being chastised. Perhaps Mme Genoux was insulted that the magistrate hadn’t called himself, or she may have simply been pointing out his good secretary’s work. “Yes, of course,” he answered. “What I meant was, you must have been surprised to receive a call about the death of Agathe Barbier after all these years.” While he waited for an answer, he looked at the former secretary. She was tall, as tall as Marine, but with wider shoulders. The hair that fell to those shoulders was fine and straight, and streaked with gray. Her eyes looked light brown, but he couldn’t quite tell.
“No, that didn’t surprise me either,” she answered.
He looked at her, slightly shocked by her reply. “Would you care to explain?”
“I’ve never believed that one can just fall off of a boat.”
“The sea was rough—wasn’t it?”
Mme Genoux answered, “Yes, but Agathe wasn’t a dimwit. She would have been careful.”
“But I understood that Mme Barbier was very ill with seasickness. She would have been desperate for fresh air, and her illness may have thrown her off balance.”
Mme Genoux pursed her lips. “So why are you here?”
“The magistrate at the time—”
“Daniel de Rudder.”
“Precisely,” Verlaque answered. “Rudder has requested that the case be reexamined.” Verlaque did not explain why, nor would he have if Mme Genoux had asked, but she did not. “How long did you work for M Barbier, Mme Genoux?”
“Thirty years and three months,” she answered. “I began in 1979, shortly after The Receptionist was published.”
“Did you have an office?”
She made a sweep of the room with her hand. “Here. There’s a small office between this room and the bedroom. M Barbier would walk across the pont des Invalides every morning from their apartment in the 7th, carrying a recorded tape of the chapters he’d dictated the day before. He called it his morning constitutional.”
“And so you wouldn’t have done much work for Mme Barbier?”
“Oh yes, I did,” she replied. “M Barbier didn’t write every day—especially as he was becoming more and more well known and in demand. Interviews and such. So we agreed that on the days when he didn’t need me to transcribe his drafts, I would do errands for madame, if she needed me, that is.”
Mme Genoux seemed to relax more, especially as she explained her duties for the Barbiers. Verlaque tried to continue with questions of a similar theme. “Did M Barbier ever learn to type his books into a computer?” he asked. “That must have been so much work for you.”
“But it was my job,” she answered. “And I loved it. No, he bought himself a laptop a few years ago, but he said it was enough work returning e-mails and looking up the weather, so he would keep using the Dictaphone for his books. And by then his books had changed—”
“Indeed,” Verlaque said. “The romances.”
“They were longer books, so they took more time to type, but they were . . . less . . . complicated.”
Verlaque smiled. “And that week in Sardinia in 1988,” he continued. “You went because M Barbier was writing a book?”
“Yes, I usually went along when the Barbiers took long vacations.”
“How did everyone get along that week? And afterward, on the boat?”
“There were arguments,” Mme Genoux answered, picking at her long linen skirt. “I told the Cannes police at the time, after Agathe . . .”
“Yes, you told them that the day Mme Barbier died, you overheard a fight between her and M Pelloquin.”
“Yes, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying, as the wind had picked up. We were all there, except for M Barbier, who was napping down below. He was drinking a lot in those days.”
Verlaque remembered the spent limes in the sink and noticed that Mme Genoux referred to her boss of thirty years by his surname but called his wife by her Christian name. “What was Alphonse Pelloquin like?”
Mme Genoux squinted and
