Ellie Investigates

I woke in the guest room with a plan, which was an improvement on the last time I'd woken with one.

It was not a romantic plan. It involved a yellow legal pad, three pens, and a flask of Madame Roux's very bad coffee. I propped myself against the headboard at six in the morning and wrote the date, and under it, in capitals, WHAT DO WE ACTUALLY KNOW.

I have spent a long time of my working life reading documents, and the one lesson that has never failed me is that the people who lie to you are rarely tidy about it. They leave seams. You do not find them by deciding who is guilty. You find them by laying the facts side by side and looking for the places where they don't quite meet.

I wrote down what I had.

One. A text in the night, from "Petit", sending Julien up the hill before dawn. Petit's name. Whose number?

Two. A forged power of attorney, with Dubois's seal on it. Someone knew the seal.

Three. My account details, in an envelope, in the second drawer of the study desk. Someone knew where to look.

Four. A brake line that failed cleanly. Bastien Morel: "Cleaner than I'd have expected."

Five. A man who knew about an entail no one had told him.

I looked at the five lines. Then, underneath, I wrote a sixth, and underlined it twice, because it was the one I least wanted to see.

Six. Camille looked at the window.

***

Julien found me at the kitchen table at one in the morning two nights later, surrounded by paper.

I had not heard him on the stairs. I looked up, and he was standing in the doorway in a grey jersey, one hand on the frame, looking at the legal pad and the printouts and the cold cup beside them. I waited for him to say something sensible about the hour.

He didn't. He crossed to the sink, filled the kettle, and made two cups of tea, moving carefully on account of his ribs. He put mine at my elbow. Then he took the blanket from the back of the sofa and laid it over the back of my chair, so that it just touched my shoulders, and stood there for a moment as if he meant to say something.

"Goodnight, Ellie," he said.

"Goodnight."

It was nothing. It was a cup of tea and a blanket. But it was the first thing he'd done in weeks that felt like asking, rather than deciding, and I held on to it for the rest of the night like something warm.

***

Petit received me in the cellar office, a low stone room that smelled of yeast and sulphur, among a great many invoices. He was sixty-odd and built like a barrel, with the permanent expression of a man who has been right too often to be pleasant about it. He had disapproved of me, silently, from the moment I'd first walked across the courtyard. I'd always rather liked him for it.

"The frost," I said, in my careful French. "The night of the accident. You sent a message to Monsieur Julien."

He gave me a long look. "I send no messages."

"He said you texted him. About the north parcel."

"I do not text." He pronounced the word with contempt. "I have a telephone. I use it as God intended, to ring people. If there is frost in the night, I telephone the house. There was a frost warning, certainly. It came to nothing. I had it in hand."

"Then who sent the message?"

"That," Petit said, with sudden attention, "is what I would like to know."

I went home and asked Julien for his phone. He handed it over without a word. The thread was there, under Petit (new). Two days before the accident, from a number he didn't recognise: C'est Petit. Nouveau portable. Garde ce numéro. Then, on the night itself, at 4.10 in the morning: Gel au nord. Viens avant l'aube. P.

"I saved the number," Julien said quietly. "It seemed a natural thing."

"Did you ring it back?"

"I... no. I assumed—" He stopped.

I photographed both messages and sent them to Adjudant Lemoine. His reply came within the hour. It was brisk and not unkind, and it said the number was a French prepaid line, unregistered, bought for cash, and now dead.

***

It was Madame Roux who told me about the cognac, though she did not know she was telling me anything.

I found her in the Domaine kitchen, polishing a copper pan that did not need it. I asked, as casually as I could, whether anyone had visited the house in the weeks before the accident, and she answered at length, in the manner of a woman who has been waiting for someone to ask.

"The notary's clerk. The man about the roof. The young woman from the bank who knows nothing about wine." She frowned at the pan. "And Monsieur Rousset, of course, the Tuesday before. He brought a bottle of cognac for Monsieur Julien, a very good one. Monsieur was down in the rows, so I went to fetch him. Monsieur Rousset waited in the courtyard."

"By himself?"

"By himself. He admired the old car. He walked all around it." She sniffed. "He asked if it was reliable."

I put my hand on the table to keep it steady.

"And did he ask anything else?"

"Only whether the estate office was kept locked." She looked up at me, faintly puzzled. "I said of course it was. He said he'd always thought a locked door was the saddest sort of lie."

When I got home, I sat down on the bottom stair and tried to remember the rainy Saturday in January. I had been at the market. Julien had been in the cellars. Madame Roux had been in the garden, in her oilskin, tending a bed of leeks.

It was Lucas, in the end, who gave it to me. I was helping him with his reading that evening, a book about a badger, when he glanced up and said, apropos of nothing, "Théo came in once, you know. When it rained."

I kept my voice flat. "Did he?"

"Maman said he could use the toilet. He was very long." Lucas wrinkled his nose. "He asked me where Papa kept his keys. I said in the bowl. He said bowl like it was funny."

I turned the page of the badger book. My hand was perfectly steady.

"And where were Papa and Ellie and Madame Roux?"

"Out." Lucas shrugged. "You always go out on Saturdays. It's boring when you're not here."

He went back to the badger. I sat very still with the lamp making a small warm circle on the page, and I felt the thing I'd been refusing to look at settle fully, finally, into place. A gap. An unobserved hour in a house I had been so careful, for so long, to leave alone.

I had given them the time myself.

***

I did the last of it at midnight, at my laptop, using the company-search subscription my work pays for, which is the one genuinely useful thing it has ever given me.

Rousset Conseil, SAS, registered in Lyon two years earlier. A domiciliation address, the kind that is nothing but a postbox. No accounts filed. A single director, Théo Rousset, no previous mandates. His professional profile was fourteen months old and had no history before that, only three hundred connections and the word insurance where a career should be.

Years in insurance, he'd said, over cheese. There wasn't a trace of them anywhere.

I almost closed the laptop. Then, because I am the sort of person who cannot leave a seam alone, I looked at the registered agent for the Lyon box. A Geneva fiduciary, Fidumont SA. A small, quiet company that handled paperwork for other small, quiet companies.

I searched the name. A dozen results came up, and I scrolled past eleven of them.

The twelfth was a dissolution notice. Rochat Conseil SA, Lausanne, wound up five years earlier. Sole administrator, one T. Rochat. Registered agent: Fidumont SA, Geneva.

It was nothing. It was a coincidence of paperwork, and there are only so many fiduciaries in Switzerland. I wrote it on the pad anyway, on a new line. Then, because it looked lonely there, I wrote the two surnames next to each other, the way you do when you suspect two things of being one.

Rousset. Rochat.

T.

I looked at the letter for a long time. Then I drew a ring around it, twice, in ink.