Belle

by Lesley Pearse

  But after he left her there, thoughts of what he’d been a party to were like having a thorn in his foot that he was unable to get out. He had nightmares of Belle being ill treated, imagining brutish men forcing themselves into her. He hated himself for not being clever enough to find some way of getting her back safely to England, while still making sure his wife and children were protected.

  This was why he eventually told Jacques he couldn’t work for him any longer. He made out it was only because he wanted to spend more time with his family and Elena couldn’t manage the restaurant alone.

  He would probably never know for certain whether the fire that killed them was Jacques’s revenge, or a genuine accident. But there was one thing he was certain of – if he did find Belle, then he was determined to expose this evil trade in children and young girls. He’d already lost everything that was dear to him, he had nothing more to lose other than his own life, and he’d die happy if he knew no more children would suffer that way.

  The Trois Cygnes hadn’t changed. There was the same faded red and white checked half curtain on a brass rail across the window, peeling paint and the same blast of cigarette smoke, mildew and garlic as Etienne opened the door. A wizened old man was playing the accordion just the way he remembered, and although the faces of the customers were different, they were the same mix of whores, pimps, struggling artists, dancers and students. A few of the older ones might even be the same he used to drink with all those years ago. But his memory of this place was that it had been bursting with life, with heated arguments about politics and art. Colourful characters, strong opinions and eccentricity used to be the order of the day, but the present customers looked surly, jaded and dull.

  ‘Etienne!’

  He looked over to where the shout came from at the back of the bar, and smiled at the delight in the woman’s voice. It had to be Madeleine, even if the years hadn’t been kind to her.

  She wriggled her way through the close-packed tables and chairs, fat now and in her mid-forties, but she still had a smile to light up a room.

  ‘Madeleine! I hoped you’d be here,’ Etienne said and held out his arms to embrace her. He’d learned everything about lovemaking from her, and even more about life. In her thirties she’d been a flame-haired beauty, with a soul as beautiful as her face. Her hair was still red, but all too clearly dyed, and the porcelain-like complexion was muddy and lined now. Yet all the warmth she’d had was still there, and as he held her the years slipped away and he felt as he had at twenty.

  ‘Let me look at you,’ she said, stepping back a little. ‘More handsome than ever, and a suit that tells me you won’t need me to buy you a drink! But what brings you here? I heard you’d become a recluse.’

  ‘I came looking for you,’ Etienne said.

  She took his hand and led him to a free table right at the back of the bar, calling to the barman to bring them cognac. As he had half expected, she’d heard about Elena and the boys – bad news always spread far and wide – and as she offered condolences her eyes filled with tears of sympathy.

  ‘It is good to see your heart is still as big,’ he said, taking her hand across the table. ‘After the way I left you, I wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d wished bad luck on me.’

  ‘You were never for me, I always knew that,’ she said, and he noticed her green eyes were still as vivid. ‘If you’d stayed we would’ve destroyed one another, and I was too old for you too. But let’s not talk about that – tell me why you are here in Paris. You weren’t one for social calls, as I remember.’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that anything I say must stay between us?’ he reminded her.

  ‘Of course.’

  Etienne outlined Belle’s story. ‘You were right in believing I’d become a recluse. If I hadn’t got a message to say Belle had disappeared I would have finished clearing the land around my cottage and planted some crops and got some chickens.’

  Madeleine laughed. ‘Surely not! You a farmer?’

  ‘Working the land suits me,’ he said. ‘I hope I can go back to it. But first I have to find Belle to put things right.’

  ‘She may have just gone off on a jaunt with this client of hers.’

  ‘No, she has left all her belongings at the hotel she was staying at.’

  ‘Pssst,’ Madeleine said scornfully. ‘A few clothes would not hold a girl, not if the man was rich and could buy her new ones.’

  ‘I would say that is true of many women, but not Belle,’ he said staunchly. ‘She would’ve sent a message to her landlady so she wouldn’t worry.’

  ‘Two years as a whore would’ve changed her. She won’t be the girl you knew any longer.’

  ‘It is over twelve years since I met you, but I’d say you still have the same values,’ Etienne argued.

  ‘Where you are concerned, maybe.’ She shrugged, implying that he was a special case. ‘But a girl who works the top hotels has to be smart and hard-headed. I did it myself, remember.’

  ‘I know Belle is in trouble,’ he insisted. ‘I feel it, so does her landlady. She was a fille de joie too.’

  That seemed to change Madeleine’s mind. ‘Fair enough. So what do you want of me?’

  ‘Have you ever met or do you know anything about a man called Edouard Pascal?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and sat up with a jolt as if startled. ‘He used to come to the Marais nearly every week. I went with him two or three times, but I didn’t like him, he gave me the creeps. None of the other girls liked him either. But this was eight years ago or more. I haven’t seen him since.’

  ‘What did he work at?’

  ‘He didn’t say. He was well dressed but I don’t think he had much money – an office worker maybe?’

  ‘He’s the concierge at the Ritz now. He was getting Belle clients.’

  Madeleine’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘That makes me think you are right to be worried about her. The reason I remember him so well was because he liked it rough. He bit me very hard, and slapped me when I complained. The other girls talked about him too.’

  ‘Do you know where he lives?’

  ‘We don’t take down addresses in this line of business,’ she replied with a humourless chuckle. ‘Mostly we don’t even get real names. But he wanted us to know his, like it made him feel important.’

  ‘Ever met a man called Le Brun?’ Etienne asked.

  ‘A few dozen,’ she said dryly.

  Etienne said that he thought this Le Brun must be very rich and good company as Belle’s landlady claimed she was excited at meeting him.

  ‘Well, that cuts out most of them,’ Madeleine said. ‘It wouldn’t be Philippe Le Brun, would it? The millionaire that owns the restaurants? I know a girl who went with him. He took her out to supper and dancing. She said he gave her such a good time she’d have done it again for free!’

  Etienne knew nothing of the man she mentioned, but then his contacts in Paris tended to be at the other end of the social scale. ‘Is the girl you know around here?’

  Madeleine looked amused. ‘Do you think a man like him would want a street girl? She was a dancer, and got her clients through the manager at the theatre. But she married and moved away. That doesn’t happen very often, she was one of the lucky ones.’

  Etienne sensed that Madeleine couldn’t help him any further, and he was suddenly very tired. ‘I must go now, Madeleine,’ he said. ‘You’ve given me a great deal to think about. Thank you.’

  ‘I wish I could be more help,’ she said. ‘But you know where to find me if there’s anything else I can do.’

  He paid the bill and handed her fifty francs. ‘Buy yourself something pretty,’ he said. ‘Emerald green, you always looked lovely in that colour.’ He got up and leaned down to kiss her. ‘Take care of yourself.’

  Over breakfast the next morning Etienne sensed Noah didn’t trust him. He wasn’t surprised – with what the man knew about him, only a fool would trust him. But it transpired Noah had never met Belle; his
connection was that he had been sweet on Millie, the whore Belle had seen murdered. When Etienne began to explain that he’d grown fond of Belle on the sea voyage, Noah bristled.

  ‘Did she tell you she has a sweetheart back in England?’ he asked waspishly.

  ‘You mean Jimmy, I presume?’ Etienne replied. ‘She told me about him, though she said he was just a friend. But whatever Jimmy was to her, there was nothing between Belle and me, if that is what you fear. She had been through a terrible ordeal at Madame Sondheim’s and I was a married man who loved his wife. We were like the uncle and niece that we pretended to be.’

  ‘Jimmy loves her,’ Noah said stubbornly.

  Etienne could see that carefully brought up Noah was somewhat naive. His foray into Annie’s brothel was his first glimpse of London’s underbelly, and though his heart was in the right place and there was no doubt about his sincerity, he had a rather idealistic view of both people and life.

  ‘She would be a very easy girl to love,’ Etienne agreed. ‘And God willing, you will be able to take her back to Jimmy, her mother and Mog, the lady she told me so much about. If you think that I have come here to claim her for myself, you are mistaken. I’m merely trying to right a wrong.’

  Noah seemed less wary after that and listened as Etienne told him what he’d discovered the night before. ‘My suggestion is that we both go to meet my friend Fritz and see what he’s come up with. I don’t like the sound of this Edouard Pascal, and he and the man Le Brun are possibly in it together, maybe others too. We will have to tread very carefully and find out as much as possible about both of them before we make a move.’

  ‘What do you mean, “others”?’

  Etienne sighed inwardly. As Noah had been to Paris several times in the past and tried to investigate the other missing girls, he thought that by now he would have cottoned on that it was big business. ‘Vice is universal, Noah,’ he said. ‘Fortunes are made out of it.’

  ‘I see,’ Noah looked very glum. ‘So she may have been taken anywhere in the world?’

  ‘That’s right, but my hunch is that if she is still alive, she’s here in Paris. There is a ready market for very young girls, but Belle is too old for that, so unless they had a buyer already lined up for her, it would take some time for them to offload her.’

  Noah looked really alarmed now. ‘Does that mean you think she’s already dead?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t,’ Etienne said more firmly than he really believed. ‘But we do have to keep that possibility in the back of our minds.’

  Gabrielle came into the dining room just as the two men were getting up to leave. Etienne had already told her about what he’d discovered the previous night. ‘Be careful,’ she said, looking very anxious. ‘I would hate to see either of you hurt.’

  Etienne put his hand on her shoulder. He had glimpsed the vivid scar on her neck earlier when her scarf slipped, and instinct told him how she had got it. ‘We’ll be fine, now stop worrying. You did the right thing getting us here, we’ll take over now.’

  Fritz was already at Gustave’s when they arrived. It was a small café-bar, and Fritz was sitting at one of the tables outside. Etienne introduced him to Noah, then asked if he had anything for them.

  ‘Yes and no. Found out that Edouard Pascal is an oily son of a bitch. He’s roughed up a few women in his time, and has only been working at the Ritz for three years. Before that he worked as an undertaker.’

  ‘An undertaker!’ Etienne exclaimed.

  Fritz nodded. ‘Seems strange he went from that to being a concierge in the best hotel in Paris, and my money would be on him bribing or even blackmailing someone to get the job. Those men usually come up through the ranks. I smell something fishy.’

  Etienne nodded. ‘What about Le Brun? Someone told me last night he could be Philippe Le Brun, a restaurateur.’

  ‘That’s who I came up with too. He’s larger than life, very rich, a ladies’ man with a taste for whores, though by all accounts he treats them well. But my source said that on the night in question he was seen with a statuesque blonde dancer until the early hours.’

  Etienne frowned. ‘So we can rule him out?’

  ‘Of seeing your girl that night, but he has been seen twice with the same girl recently, young, very pretty with dark curly hair, and my source thinks she was English.’

  Both Etienne and Noah beamed. ‘Is he approachable?’ Noah asked.

  ‘I couldn’t say,’ Fritz replied after a moment’s thought. ‘But I’m told he goes for coffee in Le Dôme in Montparnasse most mornings.’

  Etienne thanked Fritz, then he and Noah left the café. ‘Shall we go to Le Dôme and see him?’ Noah asked.

  Etienne was torn two ways. His gut reaction was to investigate Le Brun further before contacting him, but Belle had been gone for three days and maybe they needed to shake things up a little.

  ‘Yes, I’ll tell you on the way there how we are going to play this,’ Etienne said as he hailed a cab.

  *

  Noah entered Le Dôme feeling decidedly nervous. He’d left Etienne further down the street.

  There were only about ten people in the café, mostly men in twos and threes. One man was sitting alone at a table in the window reading a newspaper. Noah took the table next to him and while pretending to consult his diary glanced surreptitiously at his neighbour.

  He was big, as tall as Noah, and well built, with the kind of ruddy face of a man who ate rather too well. The waistcoat clearly visible beneath his dark, impeccably tailored jacket was emerald green embroidered with silver thread. It seemed to match what Fritz had said about the man being larger than life. Noah watched and listened as he greeted another man at the back of the café. Noah guessed from odd words he understood that it was some light-hearted banter about a recent event. He liked the man’s deep, throaty laugh, he seemed very amiable.

  Noah ordered his coffee and leaned towards his neighbour. ‘Excusez-moi. Etes-vous Monsieur Le Brun?’

  ‘Je suis en effet,’ he replied, and smiled. ‘You are?’

  ‘Noah Bayliss and I’m sorry, I speak very little French.’

  ‘All the English do,’ he responded with a belly laugh. ‘But I like to practise my English, so that is good.’

  ‘Could I share your table?’ Noah asked. ‘I have things I wish to ask you.’

  The man indicated that was fine, but his expression had tightened a little, as if he was apprehensive at being questioned.

  Noah moved to Le Brun’s table, then, to try to put him at his ease, asked him which restaurant he would recommend where Noah could take a young lady he wanted to impress.

  This seemed to do the trick. Le Brun suggested that if he wanted to splash out, Le Grand Vefour was where Napoleon used to take Josephine, and the food was exquisite. He went on then to tell him a few other places which were less expensive but good, one of his own restaurants among them. Noah wrote the names down in his diary.

  Le Brun asked him if he was on holiday in Paris, and then Noah took a deep breath and said that actually he’d come to try to find the daughter of one of his friends.

  ‘I had an address of the hotel she’d been staying at, but she has disappeared,’ he said. ‘It’s very strange as she left all her belongings behind. That isn’t like Belle at all. I’m getting worried now.’

  He watched the man’s face, hoping that dropping her name would make him react, and he wasn’t disappointed.

  ‘Belle?’ Le Brun said, his eyes widening. ‘I know someone of that name.’

  In Noah’s time as a journalist and investigator for an insurance company he had become astute at gauging the truthful and the dishonest. This man might be a philanderer, but he wasn’t a deceiver.

  ‘You do? What does she look like?’ he asked, leaning forward eagerly.

  ‘Like her name, beautiful with dark curly hair. But the name is just coincidence for this girl is a fille de joie.’

  Noah’s heart raced.

  ‘You understand that expressi
on?’ Le Brun asked a little anxiously.

  Noah nodded. He didn’t reply immediately as he needed time to plan his answer.

  ‘I have every reason to believe that’s exactly what our Belle is,’ he said quietly. ‘You see, she was abducted from London two years ago, and myself and her family have been searching for her ever since. We feared she was dead, but then I got a telegram telling me she was here in Paris. I arrived too late though, she had disappeared.’

  ‘Mon Dieu!’ Le Brun exclaimed and his face had become less ruddy. ‘I spent the evening with her just ten days ago. I hoped to see her again soon, she is very –’. He stopped short, and Noah knew he’d suddenly realized this meeting was not pure chance.

  ‘Yes, I know, I found a note in her room from the man who makes her bookings,’ Noah said. ‘Forgive me if I have been underhand, but I’m sure you can appreciate I had to tread carefully. You see, that note said she was to meet you in Montmartre. Her landlady said she was excited to see you, but she never returned.’

  ‘Now look here, I never …’ Le Brun blustered angrily.

  ‘I know,’ Noah said soothingly. ‘Clearly she was lured out under the pretext of meeting you. But if you liked her, I would be so grateful if you could tell me all you know about her, and the man who arranges your meetings. It would of course be in strictest confidence.’

  Le Brun put his hands over his face for a second in the gesture of a man who felt cornered. ‘I really liked her,’ he said. ‘She was funny, sweet-natured and interesting in every way. I promise on all I hold dear that I have not seen her since …’ he paused to take a small diary from his jacket pocket, ‘March twenty-sixth. I took her to Maxim’s that night.’

  ‘I do believe you,’ Noah said. ‘Tell me about Edouard Pascal. He introduced you to Belle, I believe?’