‘What can you tell me about Jouet?’ she asked.
‘By all accounts, he led a simple life. Lived in the same apartment he inherited from his parents when they died. No debt. Two teenage children. Wife, Anne-Marie, works at the boulangerie downstairs on weekdays while the children are at school, and the owners had only nice things to say about her.’
‘So Jouet was not a gambler? No debts?’
‘The Metro are checking his bank records, but he seems squeaky clean.’
‘No mistress?’
‘Of course.’ He laughed and slapped his thigh. ‘We French men are famous for our mistresses.’
Charlie smiled and shrugged. ‘I’ve heard it’s the national sport. More popular than football!’
The detective looked momentarily stumped at her audacious comment. Bullseye. Two could play at this game.
‘You didn’t answer my question. Is there a mistress? Could that be a motive?’
‘None so far. I think our victim is more of the church-on-Sunday type.’
‘Are the two mutually exclusive?’ Charlie took another sip of her drink as she raised an eyebrow.
‘No. Of course not.’
‘Must be something.’ Charlie finished her martini, enjoying the warm liquid sliding down the back of her throat. The evening sun hit her shoulders and she moved her hair to one side. The detective looked at her hair, her face and traced the line of her shoulder with his eyes.
He coughed. ‘There’s one significant detail I’m able to share from the limousine company. Jouet had a standard float of twenty-five hundred francs on his person when he left Paris, but this was not on his body. Stolen, along with the limousine—which we cannot track as yet.’
‘That’s a paltry amount to resort to shooting someone in the back of the head for. Could it be an accident?’
‘In my experience, one rarely places the nozzle of a gun at the nape of the neck and pulls the trigger by accident.’
‘Also true,’ said Charlie. ‘Do you know what kind of gun?’
Allard shook his head. ‘We’ll need the autopsy. No shells or bullets found near the body. Handheld.’
‘Okay. If we come back to Mael … Twenty-five hundred francs may not be a paltry amount to him. That could keep him in food and drink for a month.’
‘That wanderer could well belong to one of the finest winemaking estates of the Loire. His velvet suit could be his signature.’
‘I doubt an heir to a Loire Valley vineyard would be napping on a park bench, sipping cheap wine from a flask.’
‘You assume it was cheap wine. But what of the limousine? What if it was a car robbery gone wrong? The perpetrator hired the car, then made it disappear. That’s premeditated.’
‘Do many peoplemurdersomeone for a vehicle?’ asked Charlie as the waiter put the rillette on the table with a basket of bread. She scooped some rillette onto a slice of baguette. ‘This is delicious, by the way,’ she said with a half-full mouth.
The waiter returned with a bottle of Vouvray and two glasses. He put a glass in front of each of them before holding the bottle out for them to see the label.
‘Merci.’ Charlie nodded, indicating he should pour the wine.
‘Merci,’ said Allard, lifting his glass to the waiter as he walked away. He smiled as he took a sip. ‘This is good. Back to Jouet. The client could have booked the car to Tours and planned to do away with the driver before stealing the limousine. Whether “doing away” in this case was just dropping the driver on the side of the road and it went wrong and the driver was shot, or whether it was a premeditated homicide, is yet to be determined.’
‘You already said nobody is accidentally shot in the base of the neck,’ said Charlie, helping herself to more rillette. ‘Twenty-five hundred francs and a car. Not just a car, a limousine—thatwould be pretty hard to hide,non? Ordinary people don’t just get about in limousines.’
‘Unless the culprit has their own uniform. We’ve put a notice out with the licence plates, but that will take time. No police force has the resources to track all the black limousines in France, let alone Europe.’
‘Perhaps,’ agreed Charlie.
‘Hello.Bonjour!’