I stared at him. ‘Now you say that, I recall Billy mentioning it. Something to do with the war, wasn’t it?’
‘No, that’s apocryphal. I think it was far more nefarious, something to do with smuggling in the house that originally stood on this site. But who cares? It’s our lifeline. Help me. We’ll be free in two minutes.’
‘Why did your father have the door locked?’
‘I don’t think it was Dad, actually.’ Luc looked bleak. ‘It was Jess. I used to play in the tunnel with my friends when I was a kid, but once Jess came to live with Dad she was always saying it was unhealthy down there, so at some point she had it locked.’
He ran his fingers round the door frame for the ninetieth time as if he could somehow get a purchase to prise it open. I couldn’t see it happening. The door was notonly firmly locked with no key but the wood rock solid. Oak, I’d say, probably at least five centimetres thick and seasoned by centuries of history. It was the only thing of any age or quality in the whole dismal place. You couldn’t have broken through it with an executioner’s axe.
‘If I only I had a screwdriver,’ Luc lamented. ‘I could take the lock out.’
‘Oh, well,’ I said resignedly, plodding back to the garden bench. ‘Someone will rescue us one day.’
‘Who, pray? Nobody knows we’re here.’
‘At least we won’t collapse from dehydration. We’ll just get drunk.’
Luc came and sat down again next to me. ‘We haven’t any glasses,’ he sighed. ‘Or, for that matter, a corkscrew.’ Unable to sit still, he jumped to his feet and once more crossed the cellar to pointlessly examine the locked door.
Corkscrew… yeah, a corkscrew. I could have murdered a glass of wine. Perhaps Luc could pull a cork with his teeth…Corkscrew!I almost fell off the bench as I remembered. I don’t know how I could have forgotten because the wretched thing had been irritating me on and off all day with clunking against my thigh. But reverently, with infinite respect, I slowly withdrew Carl’s Swiss Army knife from the leg pocket of my combats. I opened it. How many functions had Carl claimed it had? It seemed to have a hundred. I levered out as many as possible without crucifying my nails. And there it was. A screwdriver. Padding soundlessly across the cellar, I tapped Luc gently on his shoulder, whereupon he jumped about two metres in the air.
‘My God, you gave me a fright!’ he cried.
‘For heaven’s sake.’ I started to giggle. ‘Who on earth did you think it was? We’re not exactly throwing a party down here.’ With a triumphant flourish, I produced the Swiss Army knife from behind my back. ‘There you go, sunshine. Never let it be said that I am not resourceful.’
Twenty minutes later, we were back in the kitchen.
‘Jesus, it was stinky in that tunnel, wasn’t it? Jess was right. It isn’t just unhealthy down there, it’s a sewer.’ Taking off Luc’s tweed jacket, I sniffed the sleeve of my jumper, pulled a face and caught sight of my reflection in the kitchen window. ‘And my hair looks as though it’s been nested in by a murder of crows.’
‘What a beautiful phrase,’ Luc mused dreamily. ‘A murder of crows.’ Off he drifted into a Luc-like little reverie. But presently he came back down to earth. ‘However, you look fine, Alix, miraculously fine, in fact, considering what you’ve just been through.’
‘What I’ve just been through is a deeply pongy tunnel.’
In fact, the tunnel beneath the Villa Matisse had been miraculously fine too, and, even though you might have expected something out ofRaiders of the Lost Ark, astonishingly cobweb and spider-free. It was the poisonous smell that did for us, like rotten eggs or something a good deal worse. Septic tank? Don’t go there. The smell was so bad it must have deterred every arachnid south of Paris.
Once able to draw breath without choking to death on fumes, the first thing we’d done on gaining the kitchen was check our phones. Weirdly, when Tom haddeparted on his criminal little spree, he had left both of them reposing peacefully on the kitchen table. The guy certainly didn’t qualify as what you might call an arch-villain. He’d also even left not only the Sabatier knife but his gun, which on close examination proved to be, as Luc had indeed suspected, not merely a replica but practically a child’s toy. Every Matisse cut-out had gone from the salon, however, plus all the other paintings that had hung there, which was doubtless all Tom had been interested in.
Luc had immediately phoned Jess, who had left a stream of messages for him.
‘Nicole is with her,’ he had told me, phone clamped to his ear, to my intense relief. ‘She’s fine, shocked and upset of course, but fine. I always insisted she go to Jess if she was ever on her own in an emergency. Jess said Nicole can stay with her for the time being while I sort things out. As you heard, I explained we had got home to find Tom playing silly buggers.’
Now we were sitting at the kitchen table knocking back two vast cognacs Luc had poured for us.
‘At least Tom didn’t steal the Courvoisier,’ he said wryly. ‘That would have been beyond serious. Jess thinks I should call the police,’ he then remarked, replenishing our glasses. ‘It seems Tom coerced Nicole into letting him into the house out of hours to steal the pictures by threatening to tell the authorities where she was hiding.’
‘But how did he know? I thought you were keeping it a deathly secret.’
‘I was but, oh, you know.’ Luc exhaled a sigh. ‘Nicole’s been here for months, her presence odd and unexplained.It wouldn’t have taken much for anyone to work out that something was going on with her. I’m aware, for instance, that Billy knew what was what.’
‘But no way would Billy have told Tom! He can’t stand the creep!’
‘Of course he wouldn’t have,’ Luc agreed swiftly. ‘Billy’s a star. No, dim as he is, I have no doubt Tom worked it out for himself.’
I thought a minute. ‘You know, I think Tom tried to do it before, steal the pictures, that is. It was the night I arrived ten days ago.’ I paused, thinking back. The ten days seemed like ten years. ‘It was well after midnight, and as my taxi drew up outside, I saw Tom running away from the house and thought it weird at the time. Now I realise as well that Nicole was always at her most uneasy when he was around. Not surprising. He was blackmailing her.’
‘The bastard!’ Luc thumped the table with his fist.
‘Are you going to call the police now?’
