Either way, something felt very wrong. Ben kept the pistol in his hand as he finished checking the downstairs and crept silently up the sweeping marble staircase to the floor above. More valuable artwork and antiques everywhere; again nothing that seemed remotely out of place.

Not until he came to the master bedroom, swept his torch around and saw the signs that he’d been worried he might find. The empty, dark bedroom was dominated by a princely four-poster, draped in red satin fleur de lys. In the corner by a tall window stood a Second Empire marble-topped dressing table. Beside the table, a slender antique gilt chair lay knocked onto its side on the rug. A woman’s hairbrush lay on the floor close by. There were some makeup items on the dressing table: a little mascara bottle with its cap unscrewed, an eyeshadow brush set in a leather case, a tube of lipstick. Ben went over, tucked his pistol in his belt and slipped off his left glove and touched a fingertip to the mascara applicator brush. Still moist. He replaced his glove, picked up the hairbrush, and shone his torch over it to see the long, silvery-blond hairs enmeshed in its bristles.

The signs were subtle, but the message they gave out to Ben was clear. He was getting a déjà-vu memory of entering Romy Juneau’s apartment that morning. Because something had happened here, too. Something bad.

And his guess was that Madame Segal’s absence from her home couldn’t be explained by anything as simple and mundane as a trip abroad. Which would also potentially account for the fact that the burglar alarm was disarmed. If the two of them had gone off together, they wouldn’t have left their beautiful home and all its fine contents unprotected. That didn’t make sense.

Only one possibility did make sense.

What Ben was seeing had all the hallmarks of an abduction.

Chapter 30

If Ben was right, and whoever had broken into the chateau sometime in the last few hours had taken Julien Segal’s wife away against her will, then it couldn’t be a coincidence that her husband just happened to be mixed up with vicious men for whom murder and kidnap were a routine event. And it also reinforced Ben’s doubts that the story of Segal’s overseas trip was true, whether the staff at ICS believed it or not.

So where were the Segals? Were the couple together somewhere, captive, or perhaps dead? Had the suspicion that had fallen on Romy Juneau led Nazim to suspect his business associate of betrayal also, and take steps to eliminate not just him but his wife? Did that mean Madame Segal was in on the whole thing too? Or was she just collateral damage, another tie to be cut?