Evan and Elle (22 page)

She put the question but this time he didn’t even turn around. After a few minutes they left again.

“Just what were you getting at?” Watkins asked as they left the mother superior and made their way back to the front door. “And why did you want to see him so much?”

“It was just a thought,” Evan said. “There’s a young kid in Llanfair, young Terry. He’s a proper tearaway, always in trouble, out on his bike until all hours. He claims a foreigner asked for directions to the restaurant right before it burned down. He said the man had dark curly hair and looked sinister.
I assumed he’d seen the same man I saw, the one we now think is the victim. But what if someone else had been on his trail, or trying to find Madame Yvette?”

“Philippe du Bois?” Watkins shook his head incredulously. “He’s lost all contact with the real world. She said so.”

“Crazy people can be very cunning when they want to.”

“You’ve seen him now. You want me to believe that he slipped out of this place, went over to England, then found his way to Wales, killed someone and got back again?”

Evan sighed. “I suppose it is a little far-fetched. If he’s checked as often as they say, someone would have noticed him missing. And he would have needed money and a passport—which he might have had, of course. I just wanted to see whether he could have possibly rented the car, not our victim. But you’re right. Now I’ve seen him I think it’s highly unlikely that it was him. We’ll have to put Terry’s sinister stranger down to too much television.”

“And he didn’t react at all to the mention of Jean Bouchard’s name,” Watkins said. “So where now? To the orphanage to check on Yvette?”

“I wouldn’t say no to a bite of something to eat,” Evan said. “It’s been hours since we had breakfast.”

“Sounds good,” Watkins said. “Let’s find out where this orphanage is first, shall we?”

They found the young nun at the reception desk and asked her the question. She looked puzzled. “Zere is no orphanage ’ere, monsieur.”

“But we were told it was in Abbeville.” Evan managed the words in French.

“Once I sink zere were zee orphans who live in our convent,” she said. “Wait ’ere. I bring one of zee sisters who perhaps remember zis.”

She bustled off and a few minutes later returned with a round-faced nun who smiled shyly at them.

“Zis is Sister Angélique,” the young nun said. “She once ’elped wiz zee orphalines.”

The nun nodded.
“Les petites filles,”
she said, holding out her hand to indicate the height of the children.

“Ask her if she remembers Yvette Hétreau.”

The older nun’s face became animated. She spoke rapidly to the younger woman, nodding and smiling as she talked.

“She remember ’er,” the young nun said at last. “She was very clever—no? She leave ’ere when she is maybe sixteen and she go as
au pair
to work in England and zen later Sister Angelique ’ear zat she become zee famous chef. Sister Angelique say she is very proud of ’er.”

“Does Sister Angélique know anything about her marriage or where she lived more recently?”

The older nun shook her head when asked the question.

“She ’eard no more from Yvette after she write to say she will study at zee Cordon Bleu school in Paris. She wish Yvette would write to her or come to visit.”

“We’ll tell her to write,” Evan said and the old nun’s face lit up again.

“All right, let’s go over what we know so far,” Watkins said. They were sitting in an outdoor café on an old square and
working their way through a basket of croissants and brioches.

“We’ve established that Jean Bouchard could have got his hands on Philippe du Bois’s identity. We’ve learned that Yvette went to England as a young girl and then to the cooking school, but we’ve no proof of her marriage or what she did when she came out of cooking school. I’d like to know what the Bouchards did before they came to England. Did they own any previous restaurants that burned down, or did they get themselves mixed up in undesirable company.”

“And how do you think we’re going to find that out?” Watkins reached for another croissant and helped himself to another spoonful of apricot jam to go with it.

“I think it will be easy enough to come up with the marriage certificate,” Evan said, “but I think that maybe we should go to Paris and check on her time at the cooking school.”

Watkins grinned. “Any excuse to get to Gay Paree, eh?”

“Not me, Sarge,” Evan said. “I can’t say I like big cities, not even Paris. And I certainly don’t want to drive there. I don’t harbor a death wish at the moment. When we get to the outskirts I suggest that we find a place to park the car and then take the metro.”

Delicious smells wafted through the hallways of the Cordon Bleu school, reminding Evan it must be lunchtime, even though they had had a late breakfast at Abbeville. He felt exhausted and his nerves were frazzled from driving into
Paris. They had left the car at a suburban metro station, but even getting that far had necessitated driving the wrong way around several roundabouts and negotiating some giant French lorries on narrow streets. Then they had had to navigate through a couple of changes of train to bring them to Rue Léon-Dehomme and the cooking school.

“I wonder if they have samples of their work for tasting?” Watkins echoed his thoughts. “A bifsteak and pommes frites would fill the spot nicely.”

“I don’t think people pay to go to a school like this to learn to cook steak and chips,” Evan retorted.

The young woman at the reception desk was probably Dutch but certainly multilingual. Her English had only the slightest trace of accent.

“Yes, we can check on a former student for you,” she said after she had examined their police credentials. “What year was she here?”

“We don’t know that,” Watkins said. “It must have been at least seven or eight years ago.” He looked at Evan for confirmation of this.

“Do you know if she did le Grand Diplôme or did she just take one of our intensive courses?’

Watkins looked at Evan. “I’d imagine it was the whole thing,” Evan said. “She says she’s a qualified chef.”

“Then it would be le Grand Diplôme,” the girl said. “That will be easier to trace for you. Okay. What name was it?”

“Her name is Yvette Bouchard,” Evan said, “but we have no way of knowing if she was already married when
she was here. Her maiden name was Hétreau.”

The girl frowned. “It would be easier to look up if you knew the year,” she said. Then her face lit up. “I know—we have class pictures on the walls of students graduating from our diploma program. Please look at them and see if you can find her. I’m awfully busy and that would save us all time.”

Watkins nodded. “Good idea. At least we know what she looks like. That’s one thing we do know.”

They followed the girl to the front corridor. Solemn groups of young people in chef’s hats stared at them from black frames, dating back to the turn of the century when the groups were mostly composed of males with droopy mustaches.

“How old would you say she is now?” Watkins asked. “Late thirties? That means the earliest she could have done this course was about sixteen, seventeen years ago. Okay, let’s start over here.”

They scanned photos from the early eighties, moving slowly down the hall. At last Evan pointed at a face. “Look, that’s her.”

“Finally!” Watkins nodded. “All right. We’ve got the class number. Let’s see what we can find out.”

The young woman looked up and tried to manage a friendly smile as they came back. “Have you found her? Brilliant. Okay, let’s go and see what we can turn up in the records.”

She led them down stone stairs into a gloomy basement. “I’m afraid our filing system was still terribly primitive ten
years ago. Now of course we’ve got it all on the computer.” She pulled open a drawer in a big filing cabinet and took out a folder.

“Yvette Hétreau, did you say? Yes, here she is.” She pulled out a single typed sheet with a passport-size photo clipped to the top and handed it to them.

Evan looked over Sergeant Watkins’s shoulder.

“Wait a second,” he said. “That’s not her.”

“Didn’t I give you the right one?” the Dutch girl asked. “You said Yvette Hétreau, didn’t you?”

“Someone must have mixed up the photos,” Evan said. “This isn’t Madame Yvette.”

“Are you sure?” Watkins peered more closely at the photo. “It was taken a long time ago, remember.”

“It’s not unlike her,” Evan said, trying to bring a picture of Madame Yvette into his mind. “Same kind of hairstyle, same Roman nose but . . .”

“People change and put on weight,” Watkins pointed out. “And she was burned in a fire, remember.”

Evan shook his head. “There’s something about the shape of the face—this one is more heart shaped. Madame Yvette has a longer face. And look at the way she’s smiling. You can’t change your smile, Sarge.”

“This isn’t the person you’re looking for?” The Dutch girl looked confused.

“It’s not the person whose photo we saw in the entrance hall,” Evan said. “We recognized her there easily enough.”

“Is it possible the photos got mixed up?” Watkins asked.

“I suppose it’s possible, although I can’t see how or why,” the girl said. “Student chefs have to submit a photo
with their application and it stays attached to it. No one would have any reason to remove it.” She put the folder on top of the filing cabinet. “Please, look through these applications and see if you can find the person whose photo you saw in the hallway.”

They went through the applications one by one. Then there she was—a younger, prettier version of Madame Yvette smiling at them. “This is her,” Watkins and Evan said at the same time.

The name on the form was Janine Laroque.

“Yes, they do look a little alike,” the Dutch girl said. “They both do their hair in the same way. So you say this is really Yvette Bouchard? I should put the pictures back where they belong.” She unclipped the photo, then stopped with the photo lying in the palm of her hand.

“I think you gentlemen are mixed up,” she said. “Look at this.”

On the back of the photo a spidery French hand had written, “Janine Laroque, Paris, 17 Feb. 1988.”

“I don’t understand,” Watkins said.

“Unless . . .” Evan began.

“Unless what?”

“There’s only one explanation,” Evan said. “That the person up in Wales right now isn’t really Yvette Bouchard.”

“Who the hell is she?” Watkins demanded, as soon as they were back on the crowded Paris street “And what has happened to the real Madame Yvette?”

Evan was wrestling with probabilities and he didn’t like any of them. In his heart he had wanted to find that the woman he knew as Madame Yvette was an innocent victim. Part of his eagerness to come with Watkins and solve the mystery had been the desire to clear Yvette’s name. He realized he had cast himself as the knight in shining armor again, ready to rescue the damsel in distress, or what Bronwen would call his boy scout syndrome.

And now it appeared that he had been duped—taken in by a pretty, helpless woman. Sweet, gentle, abandoned Madame Yvette, appealing for his help, had been using him—hoping to keep the police from delving deeper into a shady
past. She had identified him correctly as the softhearted village constable. Had she also added “not too bright” to that description? Now Evan saw that she had probably planned the whole thing—the threatening notes, the phony seduction, too.

“No wonder she didn’t recognize her husband when he came into the restaurant,” Watkins said, chuckling. He was beginning to enjoy himself, clearly looking forward to going home with the riddle solved and the criminal apprehended. “Boy, what a shock that must have been for her.”

“He must have told her who he was,” Evan continued the scenario, “which was why she was so upset when she came to our table and nearly set fire to us when she tried to cook the crêpes suzette.”

“What are they? Pardon my ignorance but I don’t go eating at posh places like you.”

“Crêpes suzette, you mean? They’re little pancakes. You flambe them in liqueur—you set them on fire.”

“I know flambé. I’m not that much of an ignoramus. I’ve flambéed in my time.”

Evan grinned. “I remember. Hamburgers on that new barbecue last year, wasn’t it?”

Watkins gave him a withering glare. “Okay, so the husband showed up at the restaurant and found out she wasn’t his wife . . . She panicked when she realized she’d been found out, lured him into her flat, stabbed him and then set fire to the place to cover up the crime.”

“It certainly looks that way.”

“What other explanation could there be?” Watkins asked.

Evan thought, then shook his head. “I don’t know. It all seems to tie in, doesn’t it?”

“There are still a lot of things we don’t know and we’ll have to find out. Why did he decide to show up then, after having been missing all that time?”

“I thought he’d already decided that—he’s been missing long enough to be declared legally dead. If they had taken out an insurance policy, his wife could now legally collect. They probably planned this whole thing between them, either for the money or because it was prudent for him to vanish.”