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Chapters (45)
  1. The Man With No Face
  2. Also by
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Epigraph
  7. Contents
  8. INTRODUCTION
  9. CHAPTER ONE
  10. CHAPTER TWO
  11. CHAPTER THREE
  12. CHAPTER FOUR
  13. CHAPTER FIVE
  14. CHAPTER SIX
  15. CHAPTER SEVEN
  16. CHAPTER EIGHT
  17. CHAPTER NINE
  18. CHAPTER TEN
  19. CHAPTER ELEVEN
  20. CHAPTER TWELVE
  21. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
  22. CHAPTER FOURTEEN
  23. CHAPTER FIFTEEN
  24. CHAPTER SIXTEEN
  25. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
  26. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
  27. CHAPTER NINETEEN
  28. CHAPTER TWENTY
  29. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
  30. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
  31. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
  32. CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
  33. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
  34. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
  35. CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
  36. CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
  37. CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
  38. CHAPTER THIRTY
  39. CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
  40. CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
  41. CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
  42. CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
  43. CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
  44. CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
  45. CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

The policeman said, ‘An Englishman going by the name of Michael Ritchie. Almost certainly an alias. He had been staying here at the auberge for the last couple of days, and I have no doubt it was he who searched Gryffe’s house before you. The night before last he checked out in a hurry, apparently after getting a telephone call at the inn. He made inquiries at reception about train times to Brussels.’

An ugly little thought wormed its way into Bannerman’s mind. He pushed it aside.

Du Maurier lit a fresh cigarette. ‘You’d never seen him before, I take it?’

Bannerman said, ‘Yes, I had. Yesterday morning at the Gare du Midi. He was waiting on the platform, and got on the same train as me.’ He remembered the face peering at him through the waiting-room window.

‘So he caught a train from here to Brussels, then came straight back on the same train as you.’

‘A lot of trouble for someone to go to not to kill me.’

Du Maurier said, ‘Perhaps he just wanted to frighten you.’

‘They did that all right. Scared the shit out of me!’

‘They?’

Bannerman said, ‘He was just the piper, Inspector. Someone else was calling the tune.’ And when du Maurier frowned Bannerman smiled. ‘A Scottish idiom. Just means somebody else sent him. Someone who’d rather I dropped this story.’

‘Perhaps.’

The policeman drew Gryffe’s poste restante card from his jacket pocket and held it up.

‘You forgot to tell me about this.’

‘So I did.’

‘And do you want to now?’

‘Not really.’

‘Then you’d better take it.’ He held it out.

Bannerman pulled back the covers and very gingerly swung his legs over the side of the bed. He took the card and looked at du Maurier with genuine surprise.

‘It’s of no use to me,’ the policeman said. ‘And in any case, my superiors would only bury it.’

‘I thought you’d had a crisis of conscience about feeding me information.’

Du Maurier’s head fell a little and an odd melancholy washed over his face. ‘Things have changed since then.’

Bannerman frowned. ‘What’s changed?’

The policeman sighed. ‘The night before last, just a few hours after you visited her, Tania Slater went missing. An alarm was raised after an apparent break-in at the clinic and her room was found empty.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I

The afternoon editions of the evening papers were on the streets. The sounds of traffic, of people laughing, of the paper-boy calling headlines, floated through the doors of the café. Tucked away in a side street off the Boulevard Adolphe Max, this place felt removed from the life that flowed around it like a stone in a stream.