‘Does everyone know what I am?’ she asked in a small voice.
‘They know only what we told them, that you were abducted from England.’
‘But Pascal will tell them how I went to him for clients.’
Etienne’s heart tightened in sympathy for her. There was so much in his life that he was ashamed of, but he had chosen his path, she had been pushed on to hers. ‘I think you’ll find Philippe can tell a plausible tale or two, and no other man is going to come forward and say something different. Besides, Pascal is a madman, no one will pay much attention to anything he might say.’
She was silent for some little time, and he guessed she was mulling that over.
‘Tell me how you have been,’ she asked suddenly, as if she wanted to dispel memories of Pascal and her ordeal in that attic room. ‘I didn’t expect to ever see you again, but I’ve thought about you a great deal in the last two years.’
‘I’ve got a little cottage now, I’m clearing the land to grow crops. I’m out of the business I used to be in.’
‘I’m glad of that,’ she said. ‘It must be a great relief to your wife too.’
He nodded. He wasn’t going to tell her about his misfortunes, she’d had enough of her own. ‘Try to sleep now,’ he suggested. ‘I’ll be close by if you need me.’
‘Don’t you want to know how I ended up back in France?’ she asked.
‘Of course I do, I just didn’t think you were ready for that.’
‘It might help me lay some ghosts.’ She grimaced. ‘I did become the top girl at Martha’s, there were times I even loved it there. But Martha was a snake, she only paid me a pittance because she said she had to get back what she’d laid out for me.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. When I told you she was a good woman I was repeating what I’d heard. But even basically decent people can turn where money is concerned. So how did you get away from there?’
‘I pretended I was just going for a walk, and went off to become the mistress of one of my clients,’ she said. ‘It was the only way I could get free, and I thought I could then save up enough to get back to England.’
‘I hope he was a good man,’ Etienne said, and caressed her cheek gently.
‘I believed he was, he was kind and I liked him. I really wanted to make him happy,’ she said as her eyes filled with tears. ‘But he changed as soon as he’d set me up in a little house. He didn’t talk to me, he’d never tell me in advance when he was calling, wouldn’t take me out anywhere, he just used me and made me feel so bad about myself. Why did he change like that, Etienne? It was like I’d just swopped one prison for another.’
Etienne sighed deeply, and picked up her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers. ‘It was probably because he’d fallen for you and he was afraid you’d deceive him. I’d say he was very unsure of himself.’
Belle explained briefly about how lonely she was and how she got to know Miss Frank in the hat shop and arranged to help her make hats.
‘I never dared tell Faldo where I went every day, but learning to make hats cheered me so much. On nights when he didn’t call on me I spent my time designing too. Miss Frank even got an order for one of my designs and I really thought I was getting somewhere. But then Faldo died.’
‘He died? How?’
‘He had a heart attack, while we were –’ She stopped abruptly, dropping her eyes. Etienne guessed by that exactly what Faldo was doing when he died.
‘He was hateful to me that night,’ she said in a small voice, tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘I asked him why he didn’t talk to me or take me out anywhere, and he said all kinds of horrible things and hit me. Then he started pleading with me and saying he couldn’t help himself because he wanted my heart. He said that, then he forced himself on me like a madman.’ She broke down then and all Etienne could do was hold her hand and wait till she could finish.
‘He had some kind of turn while he was doing it,’ she sobbed. ‘I ran for help, but by the time I got back with a policeman he was dead. Later, when a doctor got there, he said it was a heart attack.’
Etienne could well imagine just how terrible all that was to a young girl who had no one to turn to. He’d met plenty of young women who when anxious to get out of a brothel had put their trust in an older man. It usually turned sour, perhaps because the kind of men who offered a new life to a one-time whore were usually inadequate themselves.
‘You must have been so frightened,’ Etienne said.
Belle nodded. ‘I went to Miss Frank, I thought she would help me, but when I told her about everything she turned against me too. So I packed up my things and got a passage on the only ship that would take me. That was bound for Marseille.’
Etienne raised one eyebrow. ‘I wish I’d known.’
Belle squeezed his hand. ‘I thought about you on the voyage, but I wouldn’t have dared ask anyone if they knew you, in case the wrong people got to hear about it. But I was a fool there too. You’d think I would have learned by then not to trust anyone.’
‘Who did you trust there?’
‘Well, first it was another passenger on the ship, a man called Arnaud Germaine. He took me to the house of a friend of his, Madame Albertine. Do you know either of them?’
Etienne gave a wry half-smile. ‘I don’t recognize the name Germaine, but I have heard of Madame Albertine. She is well known for introducing handsome young men to rich older women.’
Belle frowned at this, wondering if the young men she had met at Madame Albertine’s house, Clovis included, were potential gigolos. Afraid she might have been mistaken about the older woman’s intentions towards her, and embarrassed about what happened with Clovis, she didn’t wish to say anything further about Marseille.
‘Well, let’s just say I regretted telling her all about myself,’ she said. ‘So I caught the train to Paris.’
Etienne remembered that Gabrielle had said Belle arrived at the Mirabeau wearing an evening dress beneath her coat, without any luggage, so he guessed she had had some kind of humiliating experience in Marseille which she didn’t wish to reveal.
‘We all make the mistake of trusting the wrong people sometimes,’ he said soothingly. ‘I certainly have, many times. But sometimes we also put our trust in the right ones, as you did with Gabrielle, and I did with Noah and Philippe.’
‘I thought I was seeing things when you came hurtling through that door,’ she said with a faint chuckle. ‘I even forgot to be embarrassed at having no clothes on.’
Etienne smiled back at her. ‘In years to come we’ll think we were in a scene in a penny dreadful. It’s a shame I didn’t think to say, “Unhand her, you scoundrel.” ’
Belle managed a real laugh at that. ‘It is so good to see you again. When I was back in New Orleans I used to wonder if you were really as handsome and mysterious as I remembered or whether that was just because I was so young and naive. But you are everything I remembered.’
‘I’ve often recalled how you took care of me when I was seasick, and how beautiful you looked that last night before we got to New Orleans. It was so hard to leave you in New Orleans, Belle, I’ve always wished I hadn’t taken you there.’
‘You had no choice,’ she said firmly. ‘And don’t feel bad about it, for in some ways it was the making of me.’
‘How can you say that?’ he asked.
‘I grew up, I became self-reliant,’ she said with a shrug of her shoulders. ‘I learned a lot about people. But don’t let’s do this “I wish I hadn’t” stuff. All the time I was in that room at Pascal’s I kept doing that, and it just drives you mad.’
Etienne had been impressed on the way to America by Belle’s ability to accept things she couldn’t change, and he was very glad she was still that way. ‘Fair enough. So what else would you like to tell me, or ask me?’ he said.
‘I left a lot of money in my room at the Mirabeau. Did Gabrielle find it?’ she asked.
‘I found it,’ he said. ‘It’s all still there, perfectly
safe. And Gabrielle has a big heart underneath her dour exterior. Noah went back there last night and told her you’d been found and where you were. He said she lit up like the Eiffel Tower, she’d been beside herself with worry. But tomorrow or the next day you can go back to see her. She can’t wait to see you.’
Belle closed her eyes then, and Etienne thought he would wait until she was sound asleep, then creep out.
But a few minutes later her eyes flew open. ‘I know I said we weren’t to do the “I wish I hadn’t” stuff, but have you ever felt that it would be better to just die rather than live with the awful things you’ve done?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I have,’ he admitted, remembering that it was only a few months ago that he thought of nothing else. ‘But listen to me, Belle. One in every five women in Paris are filles de joie, and a large percentage of them have had no choice but to make a living that way, just like you. You didn’t steal or hurt anyone, in fact you gave your clients a great deal of pleasure, so you must not feel bad about it.’
‘I didn’t feel bad, not until Pascal. But he brought home to me what selling my body really meant. In his way he was right, why wouldn’t I let him have me? I was up for sale. Why didn’t I see just how low I’d sunk? I could have worked as a waitress, or cleaned for people. But I thought I was too good for that. How could I think being a whore was better?’
Etienne leaned forward, scooped her into his arms and held her tightly. ‘He was bad, not you, Belle. Don’t you dare begin to think you deserved what he did to you. Death isn’t a solution, it’s just the coward’s way of escaping the hurt. The brave thing to do is to put the past where it belongs, behind you. I’ve seen those hats in your sketchbook, and you have real talent. So think of going back to England with the slate wiped clean, of becoming a milliner and achieving your dream.’
She began to cry then, not the sad little whimpers he’d heard before, but great heaving, cleansing sobs. Etienne continued to hold her as she wept, knowing that the healing process could not begin until she let it all out.
She cried for a very long time, but gradually it began to abate. Etienne got a wet facecloth and bathed her swollen eyes. ‘Do you think you can sleep now? Have I convinced you that you are safe, that Pascal is locked up and that you are going home to England very soon?’
Belle gave a smile then, a weak, watery one. ‘Yes, I’m convinced, but I have just one more question. Was Kent hanged for killing Millie?’
Etienne wasn’t sure this was the right time to talk about that, but if he fobbed her off she would just worry about it too. ‘No, he wasn’t. There wasn’t enough evidence to charge him with her murder. Noah has compiled quite a dossier on the man’s crimes, and it wasn’t just you he sold to a brothel, there were many other girls too. They are all still missing, and it’s Noah’s hope he can expose all those who had a part in it both back in England and here in France.’
‘Then he’ll need me to be a witness?’
Etienne hesitated. He was afraid if he said that her evidence was vital she would become scared again.
‘No one is going to ask you to do anything you don’t want to do.’
‘I want him punished, for Millie’s sake. And unless he is, and that horrible Madame Sondheim, then such things will just go on and on. But I wouldn’t want people like you or Lisette to get dragged into it.’
‘I shall be fine. I was just hired to escort you to America, you were not under age, and I had no choice either. I also have my own reasons to want the guilty punished, and I will assist the gendarmes with that. As for Lisette, she is as much a victim as you are, and Noah is sweet on her too, so she’ll be looked after. Once the top people are arrested it usually follows that many others beneath them feel able to tell what they know. Noah hopes we may find the other girls too; they’ve all got families desperate for news of them.’
‘Then I must be a witness,’ Belle said. ‘It would be very cowardly not to be.’
He smiled down at her, moved by her courage. ‘It won’t be easy for you. To be the main witness in a trial of this importance will mean your name will be in the newspapers, and people will talk,’ he warned her.
‘Let them talk,’ she said. ‘Bad men have to be stopped.’
‘Were you here all night again?’ Noah asked when he arrived at the nursing home the next morning to see how Belle was and found Etienne sitting outside her door looking hollow-eyed and unshaven.
‘Yes, I was afraid she’d have nightmares,’ Etienne said.
‘Did she?’
‘No, she slept remarkably peacefully. But before you go in to see her, let’s go outside and talk. Then I’ll introduce you properly before I go back to the Mirabeau to get cleaned up.’
Noah had long since lost all his reservations about the Frenchman, even if he had been a gangster, and for him to wait outside Belle’s door for forty-eight hours was further evidence of the man’s trustworthiness and his affection for her. They walked along the passage, down the stairs and out into a small courtyard garden at the back of the nursing home. It was a warm, sunny morning, and the sheltered garden was beautiful, bright with red and yellow tulips and a small tree laden with white blossom.
They sat down on a bench and Etienne told Noah that Belle was prepared to be a witness in any court proceedings.
‘It turns out the police here have had some suspicions about Pascal for some time,’ Noah said. ‘Not only do they believe he tricked the old lady into giving him that house, but another girl, Claudette something or other, disappeared about eighteen months ago, and they think now he may have killed her.’
Etienne said that somehow it didn’t surprise him and asked if she’d been a prostitute.
‘No, she worked in a department store. A friend who worked at the same place and shared a room with her reported her missing when she didn’t come home one night. She said that she was sure that a male customer who kept coming into the store to see her friend was responsible. She didn’t know the man’s name but the description she gave of him at the time fits Pascal. It was the girl’s opinion that he had been waiting for her friend when the store closed and persuaded her to go somewhere with him.’
‘Surely they followed it up?’
Noah shrugged. ‘The police here seem almost as sloppy as in England. They did ask a lot of people whether they’d seen Claudette with anyone, but I suppose in a city the size of Paris it is difficult to find someone when they haven’t even got his name. As they didn’t find Claudette’s body and she had no close relatives to push them harder, her details were just filed away and, until now, forgotten. Philippe translated all this to me, so something might have been lost in the translation, but they did say they intended to do a thorough search of Pascal’s house and garden today.’
‘Has Pascal said anything about Belle yet?’
‘Apparently he refused to say a word for the first few hours they had him in custody, but around four o’clock yesterday afternoon he claimed he picked up Belle on the street, and she’d gone with him to his house willingly. He then said that after having sex with him she demanded five hundred francs, and said if he didn’t give it to her she was going to tell his wife and his employers.’
Etienne shook his head in disbelief. ‘So that’s his excuse for locking her in a room for days and then raping her again and threatening to kill her?’
‘He said he panicked,’ Noah said wryly, raising one eyebrow. ‘But as it turned out he played right into our hands by saying that. You see, Philippe had already said that Pascal had acted as a go-between for him and Belle, as Philippe had seen her having tea in the Ritz a few weeks earlier and he’d asked Pascal who she was. Philippe said Pascal stopped Belle as she was leaving the hotel and said there was a gentleman who wanted to meet her. And the upshot of that was Philippe taking her out to dinner a couple of times.’
‘That was quick thinking,’ Etienne said approvingly. ‘It might make some think Belle was a bit fast, but that’s less damaging to her than the truth.’
‘Exactly. Philippe isn’t the kind of man people doubt; he’s a well-known, upright citizen who just happens to be a ladies’ man, and besides, he clearly was very taken with Belle, the gendarmes must have sensed that. And as Philippe himself pointed out, if a body is found, that will be the main thrust of Pascal’s trial, and Belle will only have to play a very minor part in it. And it is extremely unlikely that any other client of hers will come forward.’
‘Didn’t the gendarmes ask what she did for a living?’
‘Yes, and Philippe said she was a chambermaid at the Mirabeau. It was Gabrielle who suggested that.’
Etienne was impressed that Philippe appeared to have thought of everything. ‘Did you say anything about Belle being abducted and brought to France?’
‘No. If I had brought that up, Kent might get word of it and disappear before the police have a chance to arrest him. Anyway, it wasn’t a good idea to muddy the waters.’
‘You did well,’ Etienne said. ‘I never did thank you for turning up so promptly at Pascal’s house. It was a very nasty situation, and I can’t tell you how relieved I was when you came charging in. What made you come so promptly? You surely hadn’t had time to eat your dinner?’
Noah half smiled. ‘The way you rushed out made me feel tense. Then I just got this gut feeling something was wrong. When we got to the house the man from next door was standing outside looking up at the windows. He was worried because you were still in there. So Philippe booted the door in. I don’t think I’ve ever been so shocked by anything as the scene in that room. The blood, the smell, Belle’s white, terrified face. Thank God you found her! He must have planned to kill her, he couldn’t have just kept her there indefinitely.’
‘I think you’re right,’ Etienne mused. ‘But from what he said, I’d say he got her there thinking he could keep her there as his mistress. How could any man be so deluded as to think he could win a woman’s heart with force and cruelty?’
‘Speaking of hearts, has Belle asked about Jimmy? I think we should send a telegram to Mog saying we’ve found her, but I wouldn’t mind betting that will make Jimmy come charging over here.’
Belle Page 48
