It was a coincidence, for that matter, that Mr. Tuke should have had that talk with Parmiter not long before his meeting with Mile Boulanger; or, conversely, that he should meet her when he did. Cecile herself might be classed as the most striking coincidence of all. For Harvey had known of her for some time. She was a very confidential clerk at the headquarters in London of the Fighting French Navy, soon to become once more the navy of a liberated France. Mrs. Tuke, who was French, and who held high rank in the Service Feminin de la Flotte, the equivalent of the W.R.N.S., often mentioned her valuable assistant. Mr. Tuke, however, had never met Mlle Boulanger until the Sunday immediately following his lesson in the methods of an obituarist.
Yvette Tuke had just returned from France. Apart from her rank in the Service Feminin, one is not a Garay of the famous Clos Garay for nothing. To oblige a daughter of one of the greater Burgundies, strings had been pulled and urgent duties discovered, and Yvette had got herself conveyed by air to a newly freed Paris, and from Paris to Dijon, where after four anxious years she was able to spend four hours with her parents. She had used this mission to learn all she could about the relatives of exiles who would have to wait some time longer before they could even revisit France. Mile Boulanger had an aunt and some cousins in the Cote d’Or, and it was for news of them that she called that Sunday afternoon—it was the 20th of August— at the Tukes’ flat in Westminster, Mrs. Tuke having flown back only the evening before.
It might be described as yet another coincidence that Mr. Tuke was just beginning his holiday. However, since the day was Sunday, and his wife had been away in that France which was almost as much his country as hers, he would no doubt have been at home in any case when the visitor was announced.
There was at a first glance nothing particularly French about Cecile Boulanger, except her navy blue uniform with its cross of Lorraine and the letters F.N.F.L. in gold on her round cap. As was to appear, she was half English, and she spoke that language idiomatically and with scarcely a trace of accent. At a second glance, her dark good looks, if one excepted a short nose, showed her Latin strain. Her hair was almost black, her brown eyes large and liquid. Her mouth was a little pinched and fretful, and Harvey put her down as capable and conscientious, rather fussy, and without much sense of humour. He estimated her age, correctly enough, at the middle or late thirties. He had then no reason, however, to feel any special interest in Mile Boulanger; and, having been introduced, he left her with his wife and retired to his study.
It was a quarter of an hour later that his wife came in to him.
“Tea is in,” she said. “And Cecile wants your advice.”
“What about?” Harvey asked suspiciously.
“She will tell you. The police know about it, and they say it was an accident. But I think Cecile is frightened.”
When Harvey re-entered the drawing-room, Mile Boulanger was sitting bolt upright, her eyes on the door. With her little round sailor’s cap removed from her severely waved hair, she appeared older. Her look seemed to search Mr. Tuke’s dark and devilish face rather anxiously. Being neither vain nor self-conscious, he did not always realise how formidable his satanic features sometimes appeared to strangers. Cecile Boulanger was perhaps already regretting her impulse to confide in this somewhat terrifying personage.
Mrs. Tuke, reading her thoughts, rested a hand lightly on her shoulder as she passed on her way to the table where a silver spirit-stove heated a gleaming kettle, which was singing briskly. Harvey sank into a chair beside the guest. “What is the trouble, Mile Boulanger?” he asked.
Cecile was still eyeing him warily.
“It seems rather silly now,” she said.
“Perhaps we can make it seem sillier, and then it will altogether cease to trouble.”
The kettle emitted a jet of steam. Mrs. Tuke, her charming face set in a little frown of concentration, ladled tea from a rosewood caddy. Then she looked up.
“Cecile thinks somebody tried to kill her,” she announced in her direct way.
“Dear me,” said Harvey. “Why?”
Mile Boulanger twisted her hands together. “It was perhaps only an accident after all,” she said.
“I meant, why should anybody wish to kill you?”
“Oh, that is such a long story.”
“All the same, let us have it.”
She still hesitated in a way which seemed rather odd in one who had the air of being normally very self-sufficient. Then, encouraged by a little nod from Mrs. Tuke, she took the plunge.
“Well, to begin with, Mr. Tuke, a few months ago a cousin of mine was killed in the blackout. He was run over. Everybody said it was an accident. He was an Englishman—I am half English—and an officer in the army. I didn’t know him very well, but I had dinner with him sometimes, and I liked him. He was always kind——”
“We may as well have his name,” Mr. Tuke said.
“Yes, of course. It was Dresser. Sydney Dresser.”
Yvette looked sharply at her husband. Mile Boulanger, though she was watching him closely, detected no change in his enigmatic face; but his wife knew that the name meant something to him.”
“Go on,” he said.
“Sydney was killed in March,” Cecile continued, more at her ease now the plunge was taken. “The next thing that happened was what Mrs. Tuke spoke of. My accident. . . . It was on the 10th of April. I live in Pimlico, and I’d been to one of the cinemas near Victoria Station. When I came out it was after nine, and quite dark. I walked down Wilton
