He frowned. “It might well be very relevant.”

“Why?” I asked. “How could a message from America affect a murder in Paris?”

“We are trying to find out who might have a reason to kill Reynold Bryce,” he said. “We can fill in details of his life in Paris but we have no knowledge of his life in America. For all we know he had enemies over there.”

“Mr. Bryce has not lived in America for many years,” I said.

He shrugged. “Maybe he had swindled someone, or he stood to inherit money, or was leaving his fortune to the wrong person. There are many reasons that might make a person choose to kill. Old hatreds can simmer on for years.” He paused. Apart from the ticking of a clock in a nearby room and the sound of a chair being moved, there was silence in that foyer.

“I’m sorry, I can’t help you with any of this,” I said, now desperately racking my brains for a message that would not implicate me in any way. “My message was simply from a young cousin, thanking Cousin Reynold for the picture that he painted for her tenth birthday.”

“I’ll need the names of these cousins,” he said. “And you say you’ve just arrived in Paris. Are you sure you haven’t attempted to see Mr. Bryce before?”

“Of course not. I’ve only just arrived in Paris.”

He was continuing to stare hard at me. “The housekeeper reported an American woman visitor on the day he was killed. Where were you two days ago?”

“That is easy to answer. I was at a pension in Le Havre with a group of American women. I was recovering from a very bad case of seasickness and too weak to travel.”

“I see.”

“I only arrived in Paris yesterday.”

“And your first task in a strange city, after you had been sick and too weak to travel, was to come straight to Reynold Bryce, whom you apparently don’t know, to deliver a message from a child about a painting.” He paused and stroked his mustache. “Interesting, don’t you think? If it was my first day in Paris I’d be enjoying the sights, sitting in a café, going to the Louvre, and I’d wait for a convenient moment to visit a man I didn’t know. Unless, of course, the message wasn’t quite so innocent—a warning maybe? A threat? You did say it was no longer relevant.”

“No. Absolutely not.” And as I said the words I felt a chill run down my spine. They were Reynold Bryce’s words to Gus, scrawled across the postcard. “And I don’t know why you seek motives from America when surely it is most likely that the murder was committed for the simplest of reasons.”

“Such as?”