Deadly Slipper (25 page)

Suddenly the kitchen door banged. Mara dived down behind the sofa.

“Allo?”
cried a woman’s voice.
“Julian? C’est moi, Francine Léon. Vous avez oublié vos oeufs
.” There was a silence as Madame Léon waited, with the eggs that Julian had forgotten, for a response.

“Bon,”
Madame Léon called, even though it was apparent that Julian wasn’t there.
“Je les mets dans le frigo.”

Mara heard the refrigerator door open and close, and then the clack of the kitchen door as Madame Léon left. Raising her head, Mara saw Madame Léon cut across Julian’s back garden on her way to her own, adjoining property.

Mara let her breath out and moved to the bathroom. The medicine cabinet was full of bottles and tubes, including a vial of prescription tablets and a jar of something that, as best she could make out, was a preparation for hives.

In another room she found a dented metal cabinet crammed with cardboard boxes stacked precariously one atop another. The boxes were filled with prints and slides of not only flowers but plants of every description. The backs of many of the prints were inscribed in Julian’s untidy script, providing cryptic details on identification, date, and place.

She had only the bedroom to go. The bed was unmade. Clothes trailed over every piece of furniture. One leather slipper, trodden down at the heel, had
been kicked under a scarred walnut armoire; the other lay by the door. She checked out Julian’s bedside table, stirring around in the contents of the single, shallow drawer: reading glasses, nail clippers, throat lozenges, buttons. Her cell phone went off.

“Hello?” she answered tensely.

“Mara? That you? You sound funny. It’s Prudence. Look, I know you wanted me to ring you if Julian left. Well, he took off just around twelve.”

“But it’s nearly twenty past,” Mara exclaimed, with a glance at her watch. “Why didn’t you call me straightaway?”

“Couldn’t, sweetie,” returned Prudence’s voice. She seemed to be blowing on something. “He went right in the middle of me doing my nails. Takes an age for them to dry. Matter of fact, they’re tacky even as we speak.”

Mara cursed as she disconnected. If Julian were returning for lunch, he could be walking through the door at any moment. So far she had come up with nothing.

She rammed the drawer shut and hurried back into the front room. Julian’s wildflower book still lay on the floor behind the sofa where she had left it. She scooped it up and shoved it back on the shelf, not where it had been, but at the end of a row of books, wedging it upright with a small plastic box. Her hand hesitated over the box. She took it down and flipped back the hinged lid. It was filled, as she had expected, with personal and business cards. She
riffled through them quickly, spotting her own among them, and then another card that caused her to catch her breath. She pulled it out and studied it with narrowed eyes, puzzling over it, and then coming to a conclusion. She did not know if she was sorry or exultant as she slipped it into her pocket.

A volley of barks at the front of the house alerted her. Through a window she glimpsed Jazz, head thrust out of her car, happily greeting Julian’s arrival. By the time Julian walked in the back door, Mara was seated at his kitchen table, reading a crumpled newspaper. The kettle was heating on the gas burner.

“Hi,” she said, affecting casualness although her hands were shaking. She had to force herself to look at him. “Hope you don’t mind me making myself at home. I just dropped by and was about to leave when Prudence called.” She gestured at her cell phone. “She happened to say you might be on your way here, so I thought I’d wait. I—er—I’m making some tea.”

“You’re a stranger,” he said coolly. He seemed on edge, suspicious of her presence in his house. Nevertheless, he must have thought tea was a good idea because he took down a couple of mugs and rinsed out the teapot. “What did you want to see me about?”

“Oh.” She stopped. What
did
she want to see him about? She glanced nervously at the newspaper which she had found on the kitchen counter, hoping for inspiration. A front page photograph of le Mur’s mangled Ferrari, in all its graphic detail, saved the
moment. “I just wondered if you’d gotten the film developed. The one you shot at La Binette.”

If it occurred to Julian that she could have as easily phoned for the information, he didn’t show it. In fact, he looked evasive. “Er, no. Not yet.” He stuck his head in the fridge and pulled it out again. “Haven’t had time. Have you had lunch?”

“Who, me? Oh, don’t worry about me. I can’t stay.” Figuratively she kicked herself. That was stupid. She had just said she’d been prepared to wait. “That is, just the tea. Then I have to run.”

“Close call,” she told Jazz as she drove off ten minutes later. She reached the intersection with the main road and turned onto it, trying to collect her thoughts. The card pointed her in an unexpected direction. However, she still lacked anything tying Julian directly to Bedie.

Or did she? Alain had suggested that Bedie had met Julian by chance, gone with him because of her interest in orchids. An idea began to form in her mind.
Wildflowers of the Dordogne/Fleurs sauvages de la Dordogne
, 1983, which included many species of wild orchids. Bedie could have seen Julian’s book in any bookstore and bought a copy. In fact, hadn’t Scott said that Bedie had taken some kind of book on flowers with her? Given her keen interest, she would not have hesitated to seek Julian out—he was described in the biographical blurb as “an authority on local flora living in Grissac.” And it would have been easy—she could have simply looked him up in
the phone book, just as Mara herself had done. The more Mara thought about it, the more plausible her idea seemed. It could be the very link she needed. But was it enough?

An oncoming truck bearing a load of chickens rumbled past, crowding her onto the verge of the narrow road. Then she remembered the Bird’s-nest Orchids. She threw her head back in mirthless laughter.

“Damn it, Jazz,” she cried. “It’s been staring me in the face all along.”

Julian had pronounced Bedie’s photo to be an almost certain match with his colony in the Bessède Forest, based on the law of probability.
A stand this big is rare
, he had said.
The chances of there being two like it are low.
By the same argument, if the colony was as exceptional as Julian claimed, what were the odds that Bedie had simply stumbled on it by herself? Mara had seen the spot. It was in the middle of nowhere. Julian himself had raised the question of how Bedie had come to be there. The only reasonable answer was that someone who had known about the colony had led her to it.

“And that person,” she addressed her dog with grim finality, “could only have been Julian.”

He had been clever, initially feigning astonishment at Bedie’s photograph, carrying out the charade of consulting Géraud, pointing out that the stand as he had originally seen it was scarcely recognizable as the one Bedie had captured on film. But he had
guessed that the colony was representative of a much larger growth—his own words in print gave him away—and as the expert he should have made the connection. Finally, Julian’s photo was dated 1980. This meant that, when Bedie had turned up in 1984, he had already discovered the plants and would have been able, and for his purposes more than willing, to guide her to them.

Yet Mara was still nagged by a troubling point. She did not accept Alain’s idea that the camera had belonged to some unknown third person. Her sister had taken those photos, she was sure of it. The Bird’s-nest Orchids clearly placed Julian with Bedie near the beginning of her trail, so Julian must have known that Bedie had a camera with her and that she was photographing orchids. Maybe he had even helped her set up some of her shots. So how was it that he did not know about the
Cypripedium?
And why, as Alain had asked, didn’t he destroy the camera? The only conclusion she could draw was that Julian must have left Bedie before she found the Lady’s Slipper. But why would he have done that?

A sickening picture began to form in Mara’s head. Bedie alone in the forest. Something, perhaps a sound, alerts her. She looks back, listens. Uncertain, she moves on. Other sounds, soft, persistent, follow in her wake. Looking over her shoulder, she begins to have her first intimation of real danger. Her pace quickens to a rapid walk. Now, as she realizes the full nature of her peril, she begins to run, fleeing in
terror, throwing off her backpack, her camera, all encumbering gear, to speed her flight.

A car honked frantically as it swept past, missing the Renault by centimeters. Mara careened wildly, downshifted, and pulled to a lurching stop onto the verge of the road. She pressed her face into her hands, trying to get her breathing under control.

It wasn’t good enough for Julian to attack and kill. The predator needed to stalk his prey. Just as he had “lost” her in the bog and directed her to pace off squares in the forest in order to afford himself the pleasure of the chase, so must he have sent Bedie on her way and then, cruelly and at his leisure, hunted her down. Orchid freak though he was, his focus would have been entirely on his victim, not on what she was photographing. He never thought about the camera she had been carrying. He never knew about the flower that he now coveted so greatly. And the irony of it was that she, Mara, had put the evidence of Bedie’s remarkable discovery right into his hands!

Then something else occurred to her that further underscored Julian’s capacity for duplicity. The cheapness, the gratuitousness of it almost made her cry with rage. The newspaper she had been pretending to read in Julian’s house had been a copy of last Tuesday’s
Sud Ouest.
Every paper in the region covering le Mur’s fatal accident had been sold before midday, according to Paul. So how had Julian, who was supposed to have been at La Binette from the crack of dawn until late afternoon on Tuesday, gotten a copy?

“The bastard,” she fumed to Jazz, putting the car in gear and shooting forward in a spurt of gravel. “It was a lie. He never went there at all.” The whole thing had been a fabrication from start to finish.

•

“Mara was around yesterday,” Mado called out from the back of the bistro. “She was asking questions about you.”

Julian paused, thumbtack in hand. He had stopped by to post a notice on the Chez Nous bulletin board for old Hilaire. In fact, he had helped the farmer to compose it:
Perdue. Chienne pointer blanche et truitée noir. Très gentille.
Lost. White-and-black-spotted pointer bitch. Very gentle. Julian had wanted to add
très gourmande
, but had held his tongue.

“Oh? Like what?”

“Oh,” the redhead said evasively, coming up to peer at his hand-lettered sign, “your background.”

“My background? What d’you mean, my landscaping qualifications?”

“Of course not,” said Mado, giving him a shove. “Your romantic background,
abruti
.”

“Cut a long story short,” broke in Paul from the bar, “I think she’s making moves on you. She was asking me about your love life, former girlfriends, names, dates, the lot.”

“Names—?” Julian was extremely alarmed.

“Don’t worry,” Paul grinned. “I didn’t tell her much. Anyway, she already knew about your ex. I just said that since then you’ve had a couple of girlfriends,
nothing serious. Oh, and she wanted to know if any of them were still in the area.”

Julian looked aghast. “What did you tell her, for Christ’s sake?”

Paul shrugged. “Well, what could I say? I mean, I’ve never seen any of them since, have I?”

“She’s got a bloody nerve!” Julian fumed. “It’s a damned invasion of privacy.” And it wasn’t the only one he had experienced of late. Someone—he now knew exactly who—had been in his house, rummaging about in his mess. Nothing had been taken, but the telltale signs of disturbance were everywhere.

“Take it from me,
mon vieux,”
Paul advised, enjoying his friend’s discomfiture, “when a woman starts checking up on you like that, it’s a serious sign. They only ever ask those kinds of questions if they’re planning on moving in.”

•

The card was slightly soiled, printed on heavy buff stock in Garamond type. Alain studied it carefully, holding it between thumb and forefinger.

“It was the very last place I looked,” Mara exclaimed. “I could so easily have missed it.”

“Things happen for a reason,” Alain said softly.

“You see what it could mean, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

Then she told him what she wanted them to do.

He thought about it for a moment. “All right,” he said. “I’m game.”

Later that night, Mara dialed a number and spoke
with a woman named Ingrid. Swedish, Mara judged, from her up-and-down accent.

•

The property, situated outside of Souillac, was set into a hillside well off the road. A modern wing—mostly glass, from what Mara could see—had been added to the original stone structure, giving the house the appearance of being at odds with itself. The result, Mara thought, of a combination of money and bad taste.

Ingrid, or so Mara guessed, answered their knock. She was tall, white-blonde, friendly, and wore a bikini that left most of her buoyant breasts and buttocks bare.

“Bonjour. Yes?
Ah, c’est vous.
You must be the one who called last night,” she said, mixing singsong English and French.

They introduced themselves. She smiled broadly and shook their hands. Mara was amused to note that Alain seemed to regard Ingrid, and at the moment he was regarding quite a lot of her, with a look of stern disapproval.

“Entrez.
Jackie is on the phone, but I can show you around, if you want.” She took them through a large room furnished in glass and chrome and out to a rear terrace.

The garden, Mara had to admit, was magnificent, built on several levels to accommodate the uneven lay of the land. Steps led down past beds of perennials to a free-form pool bordered by bamboo and fed by a
fall of water running over deeply pitted boulders, giving it the air of a secret grotto. A winding path led the eye away to a line of cypress standing like sentinels against a clear blue sky. The sloping side of the garden was built out as an extensive rockery.