Death Before Breakfast by George Bellairs

taken our friend Jourin in as a lodger. There’s also a sort of manhole in the plaster-board roof of Barnes’s cubby-hole which probably gives access to a sort of loft between the ceiling and the main roof of the garage. Barnes seemed very anxious to get me away from the place. I didn’t see much interesting except the bed, on the ground floor. Perhaps you might make a chance to explore the contents of the room through the trapdoor in the ceiling. Do your best, old chap.’
    â€˜Very good, sir.’
    â€˜I don’t want to start getting search-warrants, yet. They might scare off anybody up to jiggery-pokery. I’ll have to leave it to your ingenuity. I’ll be back to-morrow afternoon, I hope, unless something long and important turns up.’
    â€˜Right, sir.’
    â€˜There’s one other thing, too, we mustn’t forget. The medical career of Dr. Macready. He holds a good Scottish degree and his name’s still in the Medical Directory, as a registered practitioner. That means he’s not committed any misdemeanours which might get him struck-off. A clean record, in fact. He’s a history of good service and solid practice in Willesden district up to about seven years ago. Then he began to drink heavily and neglect his work. That was before his wife died, so it can’t have been her death which broke him up. I grant you, it might have been boredom or disappointment turned him to the bottle. But it may be something else. You might take this job over personally, Cromwell. Go down there and enquire. Ask that garrulous barber, for a start, if he’s been down there long enough to know the local history. What broke-up Macready’s life? That’s what we’d better try to find out. I think that’s all, thanks.’
    â€˜Have a good trip, sir. What time do you leave?’
    â€˜Two o’clock. I’ll be in Paris before four, I hope.’
    Cromwell went away to a quiet spot to sort out his many duties, then he joined Littlejohn again and they went out for lunch. The Superintendent was driven to London airport and was in Paris, as he expected, before four. It was dark when Luc found him at his hotel in the Boulevard de la Madeleine. They dined early and talked a long time, for they hadn’t met for years. Littlejohn was in bed and asleep before eleven.

Chapter 8
Sens
    The morning in Paris was dry and sunny and as they drew nearer their destination, the idea of fishing in the Yonne seemed reasonable after all.
    Luc had picked up Littlejohn early in his old car. He looked a bit older than when last they had met. His hair and the large moustache of which he was very proud, were greyer, but he was his old alert, humorous self. A smallish, thick-set, typically Gallic man, grown a bit fatter in his retirement in the valley of the Orne, where food was good and life was sweet. His mother had been Norman and he had inherited from her the property to which he had retired. His father had come from Arcy-sur-Cure, which made Sens and the Yonne his homeland.
    Luc wore the same kind of hat, soft and turned down all round, and shabby raincoat as in the old days.
    They made good going through the suburbs of Paris, Fontainebleau and the flat country of the Seine and Yonne valleys and, just before noon, they reached Sens. There Luc spent a lot of time trying to persuade Littlejohn to join him in a meal of the famous snails of Bourgogne, but he contented himself with the local ham, washed down with a Côte Saint-Jacques, a great but scarce rosé wine of the neighbourhood. They lunched at a famous hotel and Luc asked the landlord if he knew Etienne Jourin.
    The landlord, a Burgundian like Luc, looked first at the remains of the feast scattered on the table before the two detectives and then made a gesture of resignation with his shoulders, like one who from a feast of the gods is suddenly brought back to earth and dry bread.
    â€˜I know of him, and he is nothing to be