by Rhys Bowen
“Was she the only person in there?” Watkins asked. “Nobody else was trapped inside”
The inspector shook his head. “It was the middle of the night, luckily. She ran the place alone after her husband died. A lot of work, if you ask me. I think she got a local girl in to help wait on tables at weekends, but she did all the cooking and clearing up herself.” He paused, then asked, “Look, do you want to come into my office and sit down? I don’t know what else I can tell you. As I say, the report stated that there were no signs of the fire being deliberately set, so that was pretty much that. We sent the report on to her insurance company and they paid out as far as I know.”
“And Madame Yvette never came to you before the fire? She never mentioned that she’d been threatened?”
“No. She never came to us. Are you saying that she received threats where she is currently?”
“She got two threatening letters and she felt she was being watched,” Evan said.
“Was she the one killed in the fire?”
“No, she’s alive and well. She got out in time,” Watkins said. “Our body is an unidentified male, probably French. And he was dead before the fire started—stabbed.”
“Fascinating,” the inspector said. “What does she have to say about it?”
“She claims to have no knowledge of anyone else being in the place. She’d already locked up for the night. She has no idea who he was.” Watkins said. “Essentially she’s given us her name, rank, and serial number, nothing more. If she knows anything, she’s not talking. That’s why we decided to come down here and see if we could unearth any skeletons in her closet.”
“I’m afraid not,” Inspector Morris said. “Not with us, at least. Of course, we’re just the local chaps. The highlight of our week is usually a breaking and entering, or a drunk and disorderly.”
“So if we were dealing with something on a bigger scale,” Watkins said cautiously, “importation of drugs from across the channel, for instance . . . you wouldn’t have any ideas on that score?”
“I think you’d have to ask HQ about that,” Inspector Morris said. “But we’d have received a directive to be on the lookout if they’d had any suspicions about this area. Of course drugs are probably coming in all the time in dribs and drabs, but it’s so easy these days, who can check? You can go across on the morning ferry, do your shopping and come back on the afternoon boat and half the time they don’t even check your passport.”
“But if it was a large-scale operation—an international group of organized crime?” Evan asked.
“Then it would be HQ, with Scotland Yard providing assistance in all probability. You’re not saying that these restaurant fires had anything to do with that kind of thing, are you?”
“We’re just trying to examine all possibilities,” Watkins said. “We need to find out how a man she apparently didn’t know was found dead inside her locked, burned-out restaurant.”
“I’d check with our HQ if I were you,” Inspector Morris said. “They have a drug task force. All I can tell you is that we never received any hint that there was anything suspect about that place.” He reached for the nearest phone. “Look, do you want me to call Lewes and see who’s around to answer questions today?”
“Uh—no thanks. Maybe we’d better wait until we’ve cleared this with the D.I. at home,” Watkins said quickly. “He might want to have a chat with your drug squad himself. We don’t want to overstep our directive.”
“No, you certainly don’t want to do that.” The inspector gave a tired smile.
Watkins extended his hand. “Thanks for the offer, and for your help.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t been of much help to you, but we had no reason to suspect we were dealing with anything other than faulty wiring in an old building. Let me know what the outcome is, will you? I’d like to find out if I’d had a hotbed of drugs under my nose and never knew it.”
“We’ll keep you posted if we find anything,” Watkins said.
They came out to a stiff sea breeze from the Channel. The water was dotted with whitecaps. A ferry was just leaving Newhaven bound for Dieppe. They stood for a moment watching it before Evan said, “I notice you got cold feet suddenly.”
Watkins nodded, still not taking his eyes off the ferry. “It occurred to me that we have no directive to look into anything more than a murder and an arson fire. I don’t want to put my foot into anything that might spoil the D.I.’s big roundup—his Operation Armada. It’s amazing how word gets around, isn’t it?”
“And if the drug route into Wales is part of an organized crime ring, they’ll probably have tipsters all over the place.” He shook his head. “Funny, but I don’t picture her as a cog in the wheel of organized crime somehow.”
“People can find themselves trapped in these things, can’t they? Maybe she owed protection money or she was a small-time user and next thing you know, they’re leaning on her to do them a favor.” The ferry was now just a dark blob in an angry sea. Watkins turned away and started to walk back to the car. “Or it might turn out that this has nothing whatever to do with drugs. I just wish we had one solid lead. I feel like I’m floundering in the dark.”
“So are you going to call the D.I. and then go back to the local headquarters in Lewes?”
Watkins stared out to sea again. “I don’t fancy facing the D.I. at the moment. He thought this jaunt was a waste of time to start with.”
“Maybe we should try the local paper,” Evan suggested. “They would have reported the fire, and who knows—they might have come up with some interesting tidbits the police didn’t know about.”
Watkins sighed. “It’s worth a try, I suppose. It can’t do any harm—although we’re not exactly dealing with the Sun down here, are we? I mean they’re not likely to be digging down for deep dark secrets.”
Evan grinned. “More like who won the baking contest at the townswomen’s guild?”
They checked at the nearest telephone booth for the newspaper offices and then drove back into Eastbourne.
“Nice country, this,” Evan commented as he drove between hills covered in smooth green grass on which sheep were grazing. “Sort of clean and fresh, if you know what I mean.”
“You make it sound like a deodorant ad,” Watkins said. “And don’t go breaking into song, either. I’m not feeling ultracheerful at the moment.”
“Have last night’s steak and wine come back to haunt you?”
Watkins shook his head. “No, I’m just trying to decide what we should do now. We know the restaurant burned down but everyone here thinks it was an accident and they had no suspicions about Madame Yvette or anything illegal going on. It doesn’t look as if we’ll get much further on our own.”
“We’ve only been here half a day, Sarge. Give it time.”
Watkins sighed again. “I’m afraid we’re barking up the wrong tree. The body in the restaurant might have had nothing at all to do with Madame Yvette or her restaurant. It could turn out to be a botched robbery or even Welsh extremists having a falling out . . .”
“Come on, Sarge,” Evan said. “Two restaurant fires in two years? There’s something going on here and Madame Yvette’s mixed up in it somehow.”
The offices of the Eastbourne Herald and Evening Argos were in a modern glass building on the outskirts of the town.
“You’ll want the archives center.” The girl at the reception desk had startingly red lips, long red nails, and a curtain of hair that covered one eye, but she looked impossibly young underneath the veneer. “It’s down the hall on the right. It’s all interactive now. The back issues are on our website.”
“Bloody ’ell,” Watkins muttered as they opened the door and found themselves facing a table with a computer on it. He looked around hopefully. “So what do we do now?”
“Do you need help?” A large, motherly woman appeared outside the half-open door.
Watkin’s face lit up. “We’re actually not very good with these things,” he said. “D
o you think you could find us someone who could trace a back issue for us?”
The woman smiled, crossed the room and hit a key on the keyboard. “It’s loading now,” she said. “Just click on the date that you want. Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Just click?” Watkins looked at her dubiously. “Are you sure I can’t blow up anything?”
She laughed. “It’s ever so easy. It only took me a two-day course.” She patted his shoulder reassuringly. “So where are you gentlemen from? Wales?”
“That’s right,” Evan said.
“I thought so. I could hear the accent.” She looked pleased. “You’re a long way from home then, aren’t you? I’ll go and get you that tea.”
“Humiliating, that’s what it is,” Watkins muttered as the woman walked away. “First our Tiffany and now a woman old enough to be my mother. I feel like a proper charlie. I’m going to take a course as soon as I get home.”
“Maybe P.C. Davies will give you private lessons,” Evan teased.
Watkins grinned. “I wouldn’t say no to that, but I got the impression she’d rather be working one-on-one with you than with me.” The program finished loading, leaving them with a screen full of choices. “You could do worse,” he added.
“Oh, come on, Sarge,” Evan felt himself blushing. “She was just being friendly.”
“Friendly, my foot. She fancies you, boyo.”
Evan nudged Watkins. “Go on, then. Click on the button of the year that you want.”
Watkins pushed the mouse in Evan’s direction. “You do it. I’ll probably wipe the whole thing.”
Evan leaned across and clicked. “We don’t know what month it was, do we? So we’d better start with January and work forward.”
“I’m glad it’s only a weekly and not a daily,” Watkins said. “We could be here all night.”
Items of local news flashed to the screen and vanished again. Borough council grants for improving the swimming pool. Hooliganism on the pier. The tennis tournament at Devonshire Park . . .”
“Surely it would have made the front page?” Watkins said in frustration.
“Unless it was a big week for news—it’s not likely to shove out Martina Hingis winning the tennis tournament or the Eastbourne Show.”
They got as far as September. “Wait.” Evan put his hand on Watkins’s arm. “Page three. There it is.”
A somewhat fuzzy black-and-white picture of the devastated site came onto the screen under the headline LOCAL RESTAURANT BURNS DOWN.
Evan skimmed the article. There was nothing that the police hadn’t already told them. Fire started in the middle of the night . . . quick response of local fire brigade saved owner’s life . . . She was rushed to the East Sussex medical center burn unit.
Then the article concluded, “This is the second tragedy to strike the vivacious Frenchwoman, whose husband died in a yachting accident three years ago. Since that time she had valiantly tried to keep the restaurant going single-handedly and was gaining a reputation for her haute cuisine.”
“Nothing much there,” Watkins said.
“Except for one thing,” Evan pointed out. “Her husband didn’t just die. He was killed—in yet another accident.”
“So either this woman is a walking Jonah,” Watkins began, “or she’s good at making things look like accidents. We should check on how much the insurance policy was for—and whether there was a big policy on her husband’s life.”
Evan nodded. “Of course there is another option. It’s just possible that someone’s out to get her in a big way.
Chapter 17
Watkins looked up sharply. “You think that could be it? A hate crime? A vendetta?”
Evan shrugged. “We’ve no way of knowing at the moment, have we, but you have to admit it’s just as good a possibility as anything else. Her husband falls off his boat, her first restaurant burns down, and then her second restaurant burns down. Someone could be after her.”
Watkins shook his head. “If you’re right, you’d have thought she’d have got the hint by now and mentioned something of this to the police. She must at least suspect who’s behind it.”
“And may be too afraid to tell the truth. She was pretty upset the first night she came to me with a threatening letter.”
Watkins started to get up. “I’m going to call home and see if they’ve made any progress on the fingerprints on those notes. I bet they haven’t checked them against French lists. And I’d dearly like to know if this really was the beginning of the trail. What made her come to England in the first place? Had someone been threatening them back in France? Had they owned yet another restaurant which burned down over there?”
“Maybe we should just pop over and see for ourselves,” Evan suggested, half joking.
“Go to France? You’re not serious, are you?”
“I wasn’t, but it’s not so far-fetched. You can drive through the chunnel in half an hour these days.”
“Not that we’d have any idea where to begin in France.”
“We know she went to cooking school in Paris, and we know where Philippe du Bois is.”
“Hardly enough to warrant charging across the Channel.”
They broke off as the woman came back with two cups of tea and shortbread biscuits sitting in their saucers. “Here you go,” she said. “How have you been getting along?”
“We found the article we were looking for,” Evan said.
The woman peered at the screen. “Oh, that restaurant fire. I remember it. It was so sad—she’d lost her husband and then she nearly lost her own life. I remember because I’d just lost my husband around that time, so I felt for her.”
“This man drowned, did he?” Evan asked.
She nodded. “He was a very keen sailor, apparently. Anyway, he went out in bad weather and they never found him. Fishermen found a mast floating in the area where his boat had been, but they never discovered either the boat or his body. Of course, that’s not unusual around here. The tides can whisk a body through the Channel and dump it in France or out in the Atlantic.”
“So the husband was never found.” Watkins stared at the screen. “It gets more complicated by the minute, doesn’t it?” He looked up at the woman. “Do you happen to remember when this accident happened?”
She chewed on her lip. “Not off the top of my head. I know it was at least a couple of years before the restaurant burned down and I know it was late in the year to be sailing—around this time of year, maybe.”
“It said in the article that her husband died three years previously,” Evan pointed out. “Go back and try September three years earlier.”
“Go back and . . . who do you think I am, Bill bloody Gates?”
The woman chuckled. “It’s not hard, really it’s not. Here, move over. I’m not supposed to do this for visitors but J’ve got a few minutes to spare. Watch. You just go back a screen, select the year here, and there you are. A five-year-old could do it.”
“A five-year-old does do it,” Watkins said bitterly. “That’s just the problem.”
The woman slid out of the seat and Evan took her place. “Of course, there might not have been a whole article on an accidental drowning. It could just have been an obituary.”
They worked their way through several issues and then finally there it was. “Jean-Jacques Bouchard, Restaurateur.” It was only a a few lines in the obituary column, with a photo above it. Evan stared hard at it.
“I wish the photo was better,” he said.
“Why—do you think you know him?”
Evan took a deep breath. “He looks like a younger version of the man who came into the restaurant that evening.”
“Are you sure?” Watkins peered at the grainy snapshot. The man was squinting into bright sunshine and his curly hair was windswept. He looked like a sailor.
“I wouldn’t swear to it and the photograph’s not very good, but it looks like him, right enough.”
“Well, I’ll be . . .” Watkins beg
an. He looked up at the woman. “Is there a way of printing this out?”
“You just click on Print.” She started to explain, then thought better and did it for them. A sheet of paper emerged from a printer in the corner. Evan took it. “This is wonderful. Thank you. You’ve been a big help.”
She gave him a very nonmotherly smile.
“Finally we’re getting somewhere,” Watkins said as they left the newspaper offices.
“Yes, but where?” Evan asked. “Frankly I’m more confused than when we started.”
“How about this—what if her husband didn’t really die in the boating accident?”
“You mean he faked his death?”
“People do, don’t they? Maybe he just wanted to get away from her and start a new life.”
“Or maybe someone really was after him, so he decided to vanish conveniently,” Evan suggested.
“But then, according to you, he shows up at the restaurant again. She wasn’t pleased to see him and she stabbed him.”
“There’s only one thing against that. I saw him come in. I’d swear she didn’t recognize him.”
“She might be a good actress.”
“Not that good.” Evan shook his head. “That had to be an Oscar-winning performance. She was at our table at the time. There was no feeling of tension, no flicker of reaction. If you were Yvette and your husband who had been missing for five years, showed up, you’d react, wouldn’t you?”
“Unless this was something they had planned between them. She might have been in contact with him, so she was expecting him that evening.” Watkins put the key in the car door. “Five years. That’s significant, don’t you think?”
“You mean he can now be declared legally dead?”
“Exactly. So if there’s a large insurance policy to collect on, this would be a good time to reappear.”
“But then why would she stab him?”
“Because she wanted the insurance money for herself.” Watkins slapped his hand against the car door as he opened it. “It’s all fitting together nicely now. All we need to do is get some proof that our body is really her missing husband—dental records would do nicely—and I think we’ve got ourselves a case.” They got into the car and Watkins started the engine. “I think this deserves a celebration, don’t you? That pub we ate at last night wasn’t bad. Let’s go and see if they do a good lunch.”
