Presumed Dead, page 7
When she finally came out of her bedroom and padded barefoot through the house, she found him in the kitchen stirring a saucepan of bubbling bolognese sauce. He’d obviously showered, shaved and changed because his hair was clean and nicely combed back and he was wearing a white open neck shirt with navy blue slacks. The white shirt showed his deep suntan off to perfection and was protected from the volcanic bolognese sauce by a blue and white striped chef’s apron. Alice thought he looked very attractive.
Cool evening air streamed in through an open window and mixed with the wonderful aroma of onions and garlic. A small table with a red and white check cloth was laid for two with a single candle, a bottle of red wine and a basket of sliced French stick. A portable CD machine played Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Philippe didn’t hear her come in.
Alice stood watching him for a few moments, drinking in the scene, then said, ‘Mmm, that smells good.’
He stopped stirring the saucepan and came slowly towards her. ‘You look wonderful,’ he breathed, then, taking her hands he asked ‘How are your cuts and grazes?’
‘Much better thank you, all nice and clean. I think the best thing is to let the air get to them now.’
He looked at her hands, then at her knees and said, ‘I think you are right. They are healing nicely.’ Letting her hands go, he went back to stirring his saucepan.
‘Thank you for all those things you left out for me,’ she said. ‘It was very kind of you.’
‘I hope the makeup and hair things were all right, it was all they had in the village shop.’
‘You went out specially to get those things for me?’
‘Yes, and to get some fresh bread. You can not eat in France without fresh bread.’
‘That’s true,‘ she said, wandering over to the table and helped herself to a piece of the bread. ‘I love French bread.’
‘I’m glad you found something that fitted you,’ Philippe said, looking at the dress. ‘Tomorrow, I will take you into Nîmes and you can choose some clothes for yourself. I’m sure you would prefer to wear your own things.’
‘No,’ she protested, ‘you’ve done too much for me already. I’ll just wash out my shorts and top and make do with those until I go home.’
Putting his wooden spoon down again, he came and stood in front of her and said, ‘Now look, I know it is important for a woman to have nice clothes and to feel good in what she wears, and I am sure you do not feel comfortable in Louisa’s things. It would give me great pleasure to take you shopping, please don’t deny me that.’
‘You are the most considerate man I have ever met,‘ she said, smiling.
‘Good, it is settled then. Tomorrow after breakfast, we go to Nîmes. Now, Madame, your dinner is ready.’
Alice sat down at the table while Philippe dished up two steaming bowls of spaghetti bolognese. The food and wine were delicious and they were both too busy eating to say very much during the meal. After they had emptied their bowls and loaded the dishwasher, they took their wine outside and sat on the veranda in the cool night air, looking up at the moon and stars. There was perfect silence, except for the occasional sound of a distant car, snaking its way along the road, piercing the darkness with yellow pools of light.
Alice sipped her wine appreciatively, letting warm contentment flood over her. ‘You know Philippe,’ she said softly, ‘you’ve told me hardly anything about yourself. Whenever we’ve spoken, it’s always been about me.’
‘What do you want to know?’ he asked.
‘Everything. I want to know everything about you.’
‘Let’s see,’ he started. ‘I am forty one years old, I am the senior partner in a firm of architects in Nîmes, I live in this house and my hobby is mountain climbing.’
‘Is that it?’ Alice asked.
‘What else do you want to know?’
‘Where you were born, what you were like as a little boy, where you went to school, when you got married… everything.’
They talked long into the night about their lives and the way they felt about things. Alice told him about her early life in the States, how her mother had died shortly after she’d been born, how her father had brought her up with the help of an English nanny, about her university days, her charity work, and sadly, about her father’s recent death.
Philippe told her all about his early childhood in Nîmes, his time at university in Paris, the climbing expeditions he’d been on, his early jobs, about setting up his architect’s practice, about buying and rebuilding the house they were sitting outside, and about his five year marriage to Louisa. He told her how he’d wanted children but Louisa had been against it because it would have meant her giving up climbing. It had been a real disappointment to him.
All the time that Philippe was speaking, Alice listened and asked questions. She found him fascinating. Intelligent yet simple, strong yet gentle, willful yet kind, but above all, she found him considerate and sensitive. He was all she had ever wanted in a man, almost the complete opposite of her husband, whom she’d grown to regard as insensitive, selfish and grasping.
It was after two a.m. before they turned in. Philippe locked up while Alice rinsed the wineglasses, then they walked to the back of the house together, where Philippe wished her goodnight at her bedroom door then went into his own room, closing the door behind him.
She smiled to herself as she got ready for bed. How completely typical of him not to press his advantage, she thought dreamily, which is just as well. After all that wine and the moonlight, I wouldn’t have taken much persuading! With that thought, she climbed into her own bed and turned out the light.
By the time Alice was asleep, the search parties in Chamonix had completed a sweep of the Mer de Glace both up and down from the Montenvers terminus. The weather conditions had been appalling, with visibility down to just a few feet, and the searchers were exhausted. In order to ensure that the entire area was thoroughly searched, two teams of men with dogs were spread across the full width of the glacier, just feet apart, and equipped with lanterns and poles for probing the thick snow and the ice crevasses.
One team had worked their way up the glacier as far as the point where it split into two smaller floes and became too steep to traverse, whilst the other had worked down the ice until it petered out and melted into the river Averyon.
Now they were packing up for the night. Their next job was to work their way up the Charpoua Glacier, but because of the avalanches, that was far too dangerous a job to tackle in the dark, even for ten thousand Euros. They would be back at first light.
Chapter 6
David Wiseman left the small hotel in Calais town center in time to catch the eight a.m. ferry to Dover. He’d read in his guidebook that the white cliffs of Dover were well worth seeing, so had decided against using the Channel Tunnel. He checked his hire car in at the rental desk in the ferry terminal, then bought a ticket and joined the boat as a foot passenger.
One of his tails had followed him in and had been standing behind him in the queue at the ticket counter to see what he bought. When his turn came, he bought two tickets for the same ferry: one for a foot passenger and one for a car with driver. He quickly went outside to give his partner the car ticket then hurried back into the terminal, just in time to follow David onto the courtesy bus that took them out to the ferry.
Alice slept late, and the first thing she registered when she woke up was the delicious smell of coffee. Gasping for a cup, she quickly threw on her bathrobe, rinsed her face, dragged a comb through her hair and padded into the kitchen.
There were fresh bread and croissants on the table and a percolator full of dark, steaming coffee on the stove. Philippe had a newspaper spread out on the side and was scanning it intently when Alice came in and wished him a cheery good morning.
Instead of looking up at her and smiling as she’d expected, he looked deeply concerned and said, ‘I think you had better sit down. There is a story about you in the paper.’
Alice sat at the table looking anxious while Philippe folded the paper then handed it to her. The first thing she saw was her own face staring out of the page at her. She recognized it instantly as her passport photograph, she’d always hated it. She wondered how they had got hold of it. Above it, the headline AMERICAN HEIRESS MISSING IN THE ALPS leapt out of the page. Frowning, she started to read aloud in French. ‘A massive search was launched yesterday for Lady Webley, believed to be lost or injured somewhere near the Mer de Glace glacier, south of Chamonix in the French Alps. Alice Webley is the wife of British nobleman Sir Ross Webley, and owner of the massive American Sanderson Corporation, conservatively estimated to be worth five hundred million US dollars.
Lady Webley was seen at seven thirty a.m. on Monday leaving her hotel in Chamonix. Workers next saw her on the Montenvers rack railway around eight a.m. as she traveled up to the Mer de Glace. The last positive sighting that the Peloton de Gendarmerie de Haute-Montagne have been able to establish was at around eight forty five a.m. on a path leading down onto the Mer de Glace, where she was noticed by two climbers.’
Alice looked up at Philippe, totally perplexed. ‘What does it mean?’ she begged, close to tears. ‘I was with you in the refuge on Monday morning. These people couldn’t have seen me. Why are they lying?’
‘We both know you were not at the hotel or on the Montenvers train on Monday,’ Philippe, who had had more time to think about it, said. ‘But if your body was to be found on the glacier, your husband had to get you up there somehow legitimately. Remember, we wondered how he intended to explain your sudden transportation from England to the mountainside? Now we know.’
‘You think he bribed people to say they saw me?’ she asked incredulously.
‘No, he was far cleverer than. Read the next part.’
Alice read on. ‘Lady Webley had only been in Chamonix since Sunday afternoon, when she arrived alone from England. Staff at the hotel say Lady Webley stayed in her room all Sunday evening, then left early on Monday morning dressed for walking. She wasn’t reported missing until late on Monday night when her concerned husband raised the alarm after being unable to contact her by telephone from Monte Carlo.’
She looked questioningly up at Philippe again.
‘Your husband is a very clever man,’ he said. ‘He obviously got someone to impersonate you on Sunday afternoon and Monday morning so that he would have a perfect alibi and the authorities would know where to look for your body.’
‘But who could he have got to do it?’ Alice asked, then, furrowing her eyebrows she said, ‘Wait a minute… something’s coming back to me. Remember I told you how I thought that Ross and Alex had carried me by my feet and shoulders, and that there was something strange about Alex? Well I remember now. Alex was wearing my yellow suit and a blond wig!’
‘Surely you are not saying a man could have impersonated you?’ Philippe scoffed. ‘I do not believe it. You are much too feminine. No man could ever come close!’
‘Thanks for the compliment,’ Alice said, ‘but you don’t know Alex. When he first came to work for us, I suspected he was just a tiny bit effeminate. To be honest, I thought Ross had chosen someone like that specially so that I would feel safe when he was away, I was flattered. Now I come to think of it though, he’s about my size and I can easily see him being able to pass for me in the right clothes and a wig.’
‘But what about your beautiful eyes?’ Philippe persisted. ‘He could never imitate those!’
‘Sunglasses!’ Alice said triumphantly. ‘Let’s face it, every woman with long blond hair and sunglasses looks exactly the same. It’s the classic stereotype! Even men with sunglasses and long blond hair sometimes get whistled at in the street. All anyone ever sees is the hair and the glasses, not the face or the figure.’
‘Maybe you are right, but for now it does not matter anyway. What matters is that he has established a perfect alibi for himself and no one is going to believe he tried to kill you.’
‘You’re right,’ Alice sighed. ‘But you know, I still can’t believe he did it. What possible reason could he have?’
‘I can think of about five hundred million reasons,’ Philippe said menacingly.
‘You’re kidding. You think it’s my money he’s after?’
‘Certainly, what else? How long ago was it that you inherited your father’s company?’ he asked.
‘About four months,’ Alice answered slowly. ‘It was just before the school holidays.’
‘And how long do you think it would have taken him to plan the perfect murder?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Then I will tell you… about four months.’
Alice looked away, trying to come to terms with what he was saying. ‘But I’m always giving him money! If he wanted more that badly, why didn’t he just ask me for it?’
‘Because he wanted it all, not just some of it,’ Philippe said. Then shaking his head, he added, ‘He must have an incredible ego.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because only someone with a massive ego would put his wishes above the life of another person, and, he is supremely confident. Read the rest of it.’
Turning back to the paper, Alice read, ‘Monsieur Webley hurried back to Chamonix on Tuesday to help in the search for his wife, but found that due to bad weather conditions on the glacier, the search was about to be suspended. Determined to find her, Monsieur Webley put out a radio appeal for volunteers to form a search party and offered a reward of ten thousand Euros. Answering his call, hundred of men with dogs are now scouring the Mer de Glace in search of Madame Webley and the reward money. As darkness fell last night, no sign of the missing woman had been discovered.’
‘You’re right,’ Alice said angrily. ‘He’s so damn sure I’m on that glacier and so desperate to prove me dead so he can collect the money, he’s willing to do anything, including risking other people’s lives. But it’s going to backfire on him.’
‘In what way,’ Philippe asked.
‘Because he’s given me the perfect excuse to divorce him, and he won’t get a dime.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Philippe said quietly, sitting down opposite her. ‘Like I said before, no one is going to believe you survived being thrown out of a plane. When you do eventually go home, he will just look like a concerned husband who has been searching for his lost wife, not a murderer. You, on the other hand, could be made to look very bad.’
Alice was shocked and asked. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Imagine what a clever lawyer could do with the situation,’ he said. ‘While the loyal Sir Ross desperately searches the mountains for his lost wife, sparing no expense, offering a large reward, the unfaithful Lady Webley is shacked up in the south of France with another man.’
‘That’s outrageous!’ Alice snapped.
‘Maybe, but he could easily turn the whole thing around and divorce you for adultery. He could claim half of your company and maybe even get custody of Charles.’
‘But nothing has happened!’ Alice insisted.
‘We know that,’ Philippe said, ‘but who are they going to believe, a seemingly adulterous wife making wild accusations of attempted murder, or a dedicated, heroic husband?’
‘There must be some way of proving what he did to me,’ Alice said angrily. ‘We can’t just let him get away with it! If he ever got his hands on Sanderson’s it would be a disaster! It’s not so much the money I’m worried about, it’s the stability of the company and the job security of thousands of people, I have a responsibility to them. He would spend money like a drunken sailor and the company would be bankrupt within a year! And another thing, the only way he’d ever get Charles is over my dead body!’
‘Calm down,’ Philippe said. ‘We will find a way to stop him. We have a little time to think about it while they search the glacier. After all, they are not going to find you, are they? Let’s have our breakfast, do some shopping, then we can talk about it again later. I am sure we will be able to think of something.’
Alice sighed and put the paper down. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘you’re the doctor.’
.
By coincidence, David Wiseman was reading a translated version of the same syndicated story in The Times while he ate his breakfast on the Calais-Dover ferry. To say he was both shocked and highly suspicious would have been an understatement. He put the paper down, took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to get his thoughts in order.
Ever since he’d left old lady Schutz in Weggis, his FBI-trained mind had been going over and over what she’d told him, trying to rationalize her very strong arguments. He could easily believe, having met Webley, that he was capable of murder. He’d met his type plenty of times before. And now, he thought, the second wife, who just happens to be worth five hundred million dollars, has mysteriously disappeared. That’s mighty convenient for Webley.
He put his glasses back on and re-read the story, hoping to pick up something he might have missed, but there was nothing. He knew for sure that Webley was on the boat on Sunday night, because that was where he’d met him. He was also sure Webley would have a watertight alibi for the whole of Monday. That meant there had to be someone else involved, someone who could bump his wife off and make it look like an accident. But one thing was certain, from what he’d learnt and seen of Webley, this was no accident.
He was still thinking it through when the announcement was made asking all foot passengers to make their way to the rear of the ferry for disembarkation.
The two men who had been following David had switched roles during the sailing. The man who had been driving the car now followed him onto the courtesy bus and into the terminal building, where he stood in line at the Avis car rental desk while David filled out a form. As soon as the tail had noted the registration number of the rental car, he hurried out of the door and joined his colleague in their car outside. David came out a few minutes later struggling with his luggage, and after looking around for a moment, headed across the road to the small lot where the rental cars were parked. He soon found the blue Rover, stowed his luggage, and gingerly pulled away from the ferry terminal in the unfamiliar right-hand-drive car, following the signs for London. His tails followed, still at a discreet distance.
