“Monsieur Dornay?” I finally recovered enough to say.
“It would seem,” Brodie replied. He looked up at me.
“Are ye all right?”
I nodded. “I wasn’t expecting a body among the rubbish. Next time, I’ll be better prepared.” I could have sworn one corner of his mouth curved upward, then quickly disappeared.
“Did ye find anything else?”
I shook my head. “It does seem that there might have been a confrontation in this room.”
He looked about, taking in everything in the atelier in a sweeping glance.
“Did you find anything?”
“There was little food in the kitchen. If the woman we saw brought food from market, there was no sign of it. It did seem, however, that someone had eaten in the parlor and there was a half-full bottle of wine.”
“A last meal for Monsieur Dornay?”
Brodie shook his head. “There were two plates and two glasses with red color on the rim of one.”
A guest? Angeline Cotillard had worn vivid red lip color.
“The same shade we found on that cigarette at Sandringham?”
“It appears so,” he replied as he proceeded to search the pockets of the man’s vest, the shirt, and then turned him over so that he could search the pockets of his trousers.
I had seen all of this before. Still, a dead body was a gruesome sight even if the person hadn’t been stabbed to death, which Monsieur Dornay obviously had.
It was the sound the body made, that release of air from the lungs as the chemist Mr. Brimley had once explained, that could be quite startling. As if the man might simply get to his feet and then carry on a conversation.
Brodie held up a piece of paper.
“You found something?”
He handed it to me then continued his search of the last of the pockets that revealed nothing, then proceeded to remove the artist’s boots and search them as well.
“Aye, just as I thought,” he announced as he removed a thick roll of currency from one of the boots.
“A considerable amount of money, and all of it is in English notes.”
Payment of some sort? For what? One of those paintings? That seemed unlikely based on what I had seen in the room.
Dornay was quite talented, but he was no Rembrandt or Cézanne. Yes, even I knew the difference between. Although that was as far as it went.
What I did know by the condition of the room and the rest of the apartment was that Monsieur Dornay apparently struggled financially as so many artists did. It was difficult to find an audience, much less those who would pay considerable sums for a piece of art.
“The papers I handed ye?”
I unfolded one of them and read the information printed in French. “They’re travel papers.”
He stood, finished with his search. “For where?”
“Brussels, and there is a handbill for an art exhibit of several French Masters to be given at the Royal Museum there.”
“When?”
“The twentieth through the twenty-first.”
