Game of Patience by Susanne Alleyn Page B

who’d been indiscreet at one time or another. One of them seemed like the sort who might turn to murder, but she’d been with a whole raft of friends all that day who can swear where she was. The rest, I expect they were just like your Beaumontel woman: born victims, timid, terrified that their husbands should find out. They’d never have told anyone about Saint-Ange, much less shot him themselves.”
    “So that leaves us with the other alternative, doesn’t it?”
    They walked the short distance to the Palais-Égalité, collected the manservant Thibault, who had found work in the household of a nearby bachelor, and continued to Rue du Hasard. The porter Grangier, Aristide noticed, was now perched dutifully on a stool in the foyer, though slouched back against the wall and comfortably snoring.
    No one interrupted them as they climbed the stairs to Saint-Ange’s apartment. Brasseur peeled the official seals from the door and unlocked it.
    “We’ve been pursuing the idea that someone must have come here with the intention of killing Saint-Ange, as he richly deserved,” said Aristide, as he strode through the foyer and into the salon. “That Saint-Ange was the target, and the first to die, and that Célie Montereau was merely an unlucky bystander. But what if she wasn’t?”
    “That changes matters,” Brasseur agreed. “We know she had something to hide, after all. But how do you prove it?”
    “Well, I don’t know if anything can be proven yet, but … Thibault, I want you to think back. Try to remember exactly what you did and saw when you came in that morning and found the bodies.”
    Thibault scratched his head and gazed around him. “All right, well, I came up the stairs …”
    Aristide nodded. “Go out to the landing, please, and do exactly what you did then.”
    Thibault obediently returned to the landing. After a moment Aristide heard him say, “I took out my latchkey, but then I found the door was open, so I came inside. I thought Saint-Ange had forgotten to lock it the night before, since that’s part of my job, of course.” He tiptoed into the foyer and shut the door behind him. “Then I went along here and into the salon, to light the fire. I’d built a fire the day before, but the weather was fine and he’d said it wasn’t necessary to light it. But I knew he’d want a fire when he woke up and took his breakfast. So I came in here,” he continued, entering the salon, “and there was the young lady, lying right in front of me.” He knelt near the center of the carpet. “I touched her to see if there was any help for her, but she was cold as a stone … then I saw him, over behind the sofa. I could just see his boot sticking out.”
    “Célie Montereau was lying right in front of you?” Aristide echoed him. “Show us exactly where she was lying.”
    “Here,” the manservant said, gesturing. Brasseur nodded.
    “That’s what Didier said, more or less.”
    “But Didier moved the body, like a fool,” said Aristide. “Thibault, would you lie on the carpet in the position in which you found the young lady? It seems ridiculous, I know, but this is important.”
    Thibault grinned weakly and obeyed. “She was lying on her back, so.” He arranged himself, knees slightly bent, arms askew, one hand raised near his head.
    “And this is precisely where she was lying, and her position, to the best of your recollection?” Aristide said. “Her head here, and feet there?”
    “Yes, citizen.”
    “Célie was shot first,” Aristide said to Brasseur. “She had to have been.”
    “We ought to have seen it,” Brasseur agreed.
    “If she’d been a witness to that struggle between Saint-Ange and the attacker, she might have run for it immediately and escaped; or she might have frozen, cowered, tried to hide as best she could. But instead she’s right here, nowhere near any piece of furniture large enough to have hidden her or protected her. She was standing when she was shot, and she saw