Chapter 31

Just as Fen was plucking up the courage to cross the room and speak to Adrienne Tambour, Henri came back, leading a simpering wine waiter behind him.

‘Ah, here you all are. Enjoying the music, I see, wonderful.’ They all refreshed their glasses and Henri courteously pulled Fen away from the chic fashionistas. ‘I must introduce you to the director of the board. He’s a fine fellow and, dare I say, another of us grieving for our lost friend.’

Fen could just imagine Rose here, holding court with the Diors or nattering with the aged countesses. ‘She must have touched a lot of hearts round here.’

‘And quite a few canvases,’ Henri said wryly, as he steered Fen through the groups of guests enjoying themselves.

She tried to keep an eye on where Madame Tambour was, and saw her talking to the bewigged older lady with the tiara. With thoughts of alibis in her mind, Fen pulled at Henri’s sleeve to slow him down so she could ask him something.

‘When I left you earlier, was it Michel Lazard I saw entering your gallery?’

Henri frowned. ‘Yes. A coincidence indeed. He had the cheek to ask me if I wanted to buy some art of very dubious provenance. He should know better. I sent him away with a flea in his ear. Now, please, no mention of that charlatan as I introduce you to Claude and Berenice.’

Henri ushered Fen in front of him and she was soon shaking hands with an older crowd.

‘Enchanté, mademoiselle,’ the man named Claude kissed her hand instead of shaking it and then caught Fen unawares as he spun her around on the spot. Fen silently thanked Christian for the spin round the dance floor a little while ago; aside from being jolly good fun, it had prepared her for this sort of thing. ‘I see you have brought me another dancer, eh, Renaud?’ Claude laughed and turned back to his previous conversation.

‘Ignore him, chérie,’ Henri squeezed Fen’s shoulder and then turned himself to engage in conversation with a very aristocratic-looking lady who was dripping in diamonds. Fen was just wondering how many carats there must be on her fingers alone when another hand was stuck in front of her to shake.

‘Good evening, mademoiselle.’ The man was tall but portly, a chin or two’s extra weight filling out his pale face. His blond hair was swept over to one side and his eyebrows, being blond too, didn’t do much to break up the monotony of his vast forehead. He wasn’t a good-looking man, but he had a certain presence and his voice, even in those few words of introduction, held Fen’s attention.

‘Good evening,’ she replied and let him kiss her hand. ‘My name’s Fenella Churche, Fen.’

‘Fen Churche…like the station in London?’ The man laughed and Fen nodded, trying not to let the old joke get to her. The man carried on with his own introduction. ‘Don’t worry, I have a humorous name also. Valentine Valreas, at your service. Val Val!’ He laughed and Fen smiled too, genuinely amused.

‘Monsieur Valreas…’ Fen let the name register. ‘I recognise your name, where might I have heard it?’

‘Perhaps you are a local of a small town in Provence?’ He raised an eyebrow and Fen shook her head. ‘Or a lover of fine art who comes to my auction house – both of which are called Valreas!’ He laughed again and then accepted another couple of glasses of champagne from a passing waiter. He passed one to Fen.

‘Thank you.’ Fen took a sip. ‘And yes, that’s it, Monsieur Valreas, I’ve heard of you in connection to selling art.’

‘Please, call me Valentine. And tell me, how do you come to be at this fine institution tonight? Are you a collector, as I have my card here somewhere…’

‘I’m a guest, a very lucky one,’ Fen raised her glass to Valentine, who had started to look through his evening jacket pockets for a business card. ‘Monsieur Renaud invited me tonight. I fear he has taken pity on me as our mutual, and very dear, friend Rose Coillard was…well, she died very recently.’ Fen saw as she spoke the countenance of the man’s face change. He stopped looking through his pockets and went from being exceptionally jovial to having the proverbial face like thunder just as she had mentioned Rose’s name. ‘Monsieur?’

‘Ah, Rose Coillard.’ He spat her name out as if she were a dirty word. ‘You know that woman had the gall to come and see me, just the other day? Oh, some excuse or other, but I sent her packing. “Do not darken my door again with your fakes and forgeries, Madame!” I said to her.’

Fen was gobsmacked by Valentine’s words. ‘Surely…I mean, Rose never meant to sell her paintings as—’

‘Didn’t she?’ Valentine downed his champagne in one swig and smacked his lips. Luckily, this calmed him somewhat. ‘I’m sorry, of course, for her death. She was murdered, they say?’

‘Yes, most violently.’

‘Well, I am sorry that you have lost your friend. But Paris will not mourn the passing of Le Faussaire, I tell you that.’

‘Was she…’ Fen still couldn’t believe that Rose had been the infamous forger, but she decided that Valentine wasn’t the man to have this reasoned debate with at this moment. After a brief hesitation, Fen carried on, ‘…so very awful?’ She could feel herself on the brink of tears. Here she was in these sublime surroundings, drinking champagne with Paris’s high society, a society Rose was very much part of, and yet in this gilded room were two upstanding people, Valentine Valreas and Adrienne Tambour, who were adamant that Rose was nothing more than a tuppenny forger. Perhaps Rose Coillard wasn’t the person Fen had thought she was after all?

Luckily Valentine pressed a hand to Fen’s arm, and although his fingers felt like warm sausages, she was pleased of the comfort. Perhaps he was going to tell her that he had made a mistake.

His voice softened. ‘No. She was not awful, as you say. But her paintings have caused quite the ruckus. There is not a dealer now between here and Marseille who is not cursing her name in case one of their precious, and valuable, pieces is a fake.’

At that, Valentine Valreas nodded a goodbye to Fen and left her as he merged back into the group of patrons and philanthropists, gallery owners and Louvre staff, who were all orbiting around Henri and his friends.

Valentine’s words, and sentiments, had knocked the wind out of Fen’s sails and her heart was no longer in the party. Noticing that the Dior siblings and Pierre Balmain had already gone, on to another more fashionable party perhaps, she decided to slip out, too. She whispered her goodbyes and thanks to Henri and crept out of the back of the room and into the vast atrium of the grandest art gallery in Europe.

There was no queue for the cloakroom and moments later she was back out into the chill of the autumnal night. An owl hooted from somewhere in the Tuileries and Fen sought out a bench on which to sit so that she could loosen the buckles on the velvet T-bar shoes she’d found in Rose’s closet. They’d matched perfectly with the cobbled-together outfit, but only now as she sat down did she realise quite how much they’d been pinching all evening. The relief was exquisite and she let her back rest against the bench as she massaged her blistered feet.

While I’m here…she thought to herself, allowing herself a few minutes’ more rest, and before I forget…

Fen reached into the small evening bag she had brought with her and pulled out the table napkin from the café on which she’d started to create a crossword-like grid. She found a pencil from an old dance card at the bottom of the bag and quickly jotted down a few more words as she thought of them. Why these words in particular struck her she didn’t know, but she kept writing until the grid looked like this:

Fen carefully folded the now quite tatty napkin, popped it back into her bag and put her shoes back on.

‘You’re meant to be able to solve your own puzzles,’ she grumbled to herself as she limped out of the Louvre’s main courtyard, and only made it twenty yards or so before she slipped the shoes off again, deciding that barefoot through the chilly streets of Paris was preferable to the pain. ‘No shoes and no clues,’ she sighed as she made her way back, the words of the grid tumbling like a waterfall through her mind. Somewhere in that grid was the answer, she was sure of it.

Fen made it home without stepping on anything too painful or foul, and appreciated Simone’s help in carefully unstitching her from the bodice she had created earlier that evening. Tipper was less than helpful, trying everything he could to get Fen’s attention until she picked him up and held him. She was rewarded by quite a few licks to the face while Simone worked around them both.

‘He’s still missing Rose, I think.’ Simone said, trying to pat the dog, who burrowed his way further into the nook of Fen’s elbow. ‘Tch, silly pooch. Oh, James says he’ll meet you in the Café Chat Noir tomorrow morning at nine,’ Simone told her as she unravelled the orange silk of the former turban.

‘Did you have a nice evening together?’ Fen could sense there was something at play here, Simone wasn’t her usual confident and opinionated self and she hadn’t asked Fen about the party at the Louvre at all.

‘James is a gentleman,’ was all Simone would say and from that Fen inferred that James hadn’t perhaps played into the younger woman’s waiting arms as much as she would have liked.

Fen changed the subject. ‘I met your friend Catherine, tonight. She must have been so brave…’

Simone brightened. ‘She was. Did they ask after me? I don’t know why Henri didn’t invite me, too,’ she said with a little huff.

‘I didn’t realise you were all so close. Henri with the Diors and Balmain, too.’

‘He’s been kind to me,’ Simone said and gave Fen a gentle push away, the bodice now completely undone and spooled on the parquet floor of the studio. ‘Time for bed. Don’t forget your date with James in the morning.’

‘No, rightio. And thank you, Simone. Goodnight.’