The Paris Time Capsule (3 page)

B
ut then she found herself wandering across to the Left Bank. It was the tiny streets there that entranced her. She became lost wandering through the maze-like alleys. Cat couldn’t count the number of photos that she took of gorgeous offbeat shops, or wistful fountains on street corners.  She was enchanted.

After two hours, Cat felt as if she were afloat, immersed so completely in what she was doing that the time must ha
ve simply flown by. It was an experience that she hadn’t had for a while.

With only half an
hour to go, Cat bought a baguette from a stall back in the Tuileries gardens. She ate it on one of the seats and watched children play with miniature sailing boats on the ponds in front of her.

“I trust you had a satisfying dejeuner?” Monsieur Lapointe was ready at exactly three o’clock.

“
It was perfect, actually.” Cat hid her camera under the mahogany table.

“
Maintenant,” he said. “We come to the reading of the will.”

It
still seemed so unlikely that Isabelle de Florian had left anything of great value to Virginia. An armoire perhaps? Something sentimental that she wanted her friend to keep in order to remember her by?

But, there was that large key.

“Madame Jordan.”

“
I’m ready.”

“
Madame de Florian’s will was written in 1940.”

“
What did you say?”

Monsieur Lapo
inte appeared to be carrying out a fierce internal discussion.

“
Alors,” he said, finally. “Our instructions are clear. Her entire estate is left to you. I think you will understand.”

“
But, Isabelle de Florian left everything to my grandmother, when she was, how old?”

“
She was in her twenties, Madame.”

“
But her parents?”

“
Madame de Florian’s parents both died of … how do you say it … the Spanish influenza, according to my late predecessor’s notes.”

“
Oh,” Cat whispered. A picture that she always tried hard to conceal shot into her mind: her own parents, lying side by side on a road four years ago, bodies by the small car they had bought brand new, now a tangled mess.

“
People did not take for granted they would live through the invasion, Madame. I think if you consider that -”

“
She had lost both her parents already. She had no way of knowing whether or not she would survive.” Cat’s voice was soft.

“
So. We are ready to read out the will?” Monsieur Lapointe glanced at his assistant. “There is nothing that you require Madame Jordan? Café?”

“
No. No café.” Cat felt a jolt of sympathy for this Isabelle de Florian. Being alone with no family in New York had been tough for Cat. Surely, though, Isabelle de Florian had found love, had a family since then? So what had happened to her descendants? Or had the poor woman lived alone all her life?

Something
seemed to shift in the room as Monsieur Lapointe reached for the will.

He paused for a moment, looked at Cat.
“Friendships formed during the war years, even during the inter-war years, were often unusually intense. The previous generation had been … lost so… it is impossible for us to understand.”

“
You don’t think they were?” She took in a breath. “I mean do you have any evidence that Isabelle and Virginia were lovers?”

“
Madame. Really. I am not in a position to say.” He rolled his eyes to the ceiling.

Instantly, Cat slumped back in her seat.
“Sorry,” she said. “Irrelevant. It just seems so sad. I mean, the only person she had to leave everything to was my grandmother, even after all this time?”

Monsieur Lapointe formed his
fingers into a small tent shape on the table. “Madame, I have done my … how you say it, due diligence. I have contacted the Mairie in Saint-Revel, the village where Isabelle de Florian spent her later years in Provence to check that there were no living relatives. I waited six weeks. I hear nothing.”

Cat blew out a breath.

“I will commence.”

Small cars and push bikes bustled along the narrow street outside Monsieur Lapointe’s office. Pedestrians huddled against the now steel grey afternoon while Cat stood on the building’s stone steps, turning the key over in her hand. The idea that it belonged to an apartment in Paris had not settled properly in her head. The idea that the apartment was hers seemed stranger still. Even up to just before the reading of the will, Cat had been sure that the inheritance was not going to be of any real significance.

She
reached in her bag for her phone, but as she worked out the international dialing codes to call Christian, the lights came on in the street. Shop windows sent glades of yellow out onto the footpath. The buildings’ interiors seemed so inviting that Cat put her phone away and pulled out her camera instead.

Well over an hour
and fifty photographs later Cat checked her watch. To be sensible, she should wait until the morning to see the apartment. But to be sensible, she should have stayed home in New York.

The very name of the street on which the apartment sat had enchanted her from the moment Monsieur Lapointe read it out
even in his prosaic way. Rue Blanche. Cat had conjured up images of girls in white muslin dresses tripping along the nineteenth century Parisian streets as soon as the word was uttered. She signaled a passing taxi.

In the back seat
she called Christian’s mobile. When she was put straight through to voice mail, she pushed away the tiny feeling of relief that an explanation could be put off for a few more hours. She left a brief message and told him all was well.

“
Rue Blanche, Madame?” The taxi driver asked. He pronounced his words with great emphasis, giving the flutters that were already in the pit of Cat’s stomach another kick-start.

He stopped the taxi
after several minutes and turned around. “You are sure, Madame?”

Cat burrowed in her bag for the fare.
“Oui, oui,” she said, her words coming out with more abruptness than she had intended. She didn’t look at the building until she had paid the driver and climbed out onto the street.

“
Oh, my,” she breathed, when she looked up above her head. “Oh, my goodness, help.”

The building appeared to be different from anything else in the street. An elegant black iron fence ran the entire length of it. The fence was waist-high and spiked. There was a gate right in the middle, in front of the closed front door.

But
it was the building that made Cat gasp. It was not one of Paris’ typical old houses with several rows of windows sitting flush to the front. Neither did it appear to be one of Haussmann’s elegant grand dames. This building was in a style of its own, its windows curved at their tops, massive decorative ironwork fanning out over the street above the black front door. The over sized upstairs windows were shuttered. The entire building looked as if it had landed from another world.

Would Ca
t’s key open the front door? Madame de Florian’s apartment was most likely on one of the upper floors.  It was more than obvious that this apartment was not going to be just some ordinary flat.

She would
have to go inside and have a very quick peek.

J
ust as Cat pushed open the gate a voice came from behind her.

“
Catherine Jordan?”

This was spoken with very little French accent at all. In fact it was spoken in a charming British voice. Slowly, Cat turned around. A man stood at the gate.

“Excuse me?”

“
I could say the same to you.”

Cat looked up at the
man. Chestnut hair curled above his tanned face. His brown eyes caught hers, but they held more confusion than anything else. He might have spoken with a British accent, but the way he threw his arms in the air was more than Gallic enough to convince Cat he was French.

“
What did you say?” Had jet lag befuddled her brain? Had the man said her name? Cat moved back towards the pavement.

But he blocked her, stood right in her path. He appeared to have a firm grip on the black gate that was between them.

“Excuse me,” she said again.

He didn’t move.
“Not before we talk.”

Cat reached out towards the gate then pulled her hand back. It was too near the man’s.

“Game’s up. You can go back to New York.”

Cat felt her jaw drop. She reached in her bag for her p
hone. “I need to make a call.”

The man reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a wallet. He didn’t take his eyes off her for a second. Cat felt a quiet shudder pass through her system. Heaven help her. She was alone in Paris.

“If there are going to be any calls for help,” he said, holding out an expensive looking business card. “I’ll be the one making them, not you.”

Cat glanced down at the small white card. Slowly, s
he reached out and took it, sliding it on top of her phone, and at the same time, pressing on the part of her screen that would turn the phone on.

She cleared her throat, and, in a swift movement, took a look at her phone. 

“Darn it,” she said, stabbing at the thing to wake it up. The screen remained black after several jabs.

“
Like me to read the card for you?” The man leaned against the fence now.

“
I have to go.”

He raised a brow, and stayed where he was.

Cat resisted the urge to glare at him. She looked at his card.

“
Mean something to you, Madame Catherine Jordan?”

Cat tried to duck past him, but he caught her shoulders and didn’t let go.
“I don’t think so.’’

“
For goodness sakes, let me go!” Wildly, she cast about for ideas. Who could she contact? Her phone was dead. She could try to run back to her hotel, or into a shop. He would look like an idiot chasing her around Paris. Then she could get someone to call the police. At the very least, she needed support. She needed the French lawyer.

Loic
Archer was the name on the man’s card.

He was still blocking her way.

“Isabelle de Florian was my grandmother, Madame Jordan.”

Cat stopped still and looked at him.

“What did you just say?”

“
We both know what I said.”

Cat cast about for ideas.
“Photo ID?”

He didn’t take his eyes off her
still, but he reached into his wallet again, produced a driver’s license.

A twitch passed across his features.
“Anything else? Birthmarks, the scar on my knee when I fell into a river aged ten? Or would you prefer my grandmother’s pension card Madame Jordan?”

Cat passed back the license.

“How about this?” Loic Archer put a hand into his coat pocket and pulled out another photograph. It was of him, with an old woman whose grey hair was swept into a soft bun, and whose brown eyes were a mirror image of Loic Archer’s. There were vineyards behind them, purple grapes fat and ready to pick.

“
Yes?”

“
Yes.”

Cat glanced up and do
wn the street. It had become quieter in the past few minutes. The sky had turned from grey to indigo, and a light mist fell on the pavement. She put her hands in her pockets.

“
At least come somewhere and talk to me,” Loic Archer said. He seemed to struggle for a moment. “You can choose the venue, if it makes you feel better.”

Cat sighed. I
f this Loic Archer was some sort of relative of Isabelle de Florian, then she would have to talk to him, or she would look like a fool. It would hardly do to admit that she didn’t know whether the old woman in the photograph was Isabelle or not. 

Clearly,
Loic Archer was going to cause all sorts of problems with the will whether he was a relative or not, given he had presumably already been to Isabelle’s lawyer, and someone had told him her name, not to mention the address of the apartment. Monsieur Lapointe could have tried to contact her since their meeting on her poor dead phone.

On the other hand, if the man standi
ng in front of her was a con artist, then she needed to report him immediately. She couldn’t let him go away. His card said he was a winemaker and that he was the proprietor, as far as Cat could translate, of Mas d’Amiel, a vineyard in Provence.

If this was true, he wasn’t poor then, so unlikely to be desperate to con her. On the back of his card, there was an elegant map showing that his apparent property was just outside the village of Saint Revel. The very same village that Monsieur
Lapointe had mentioned in the interminable reading of the will. But Monsieur Lapointe said he had contacted the Mairie, had no response.

She looked at him.
“If I’m not satisfied with your explanations, Loic Archer, we’re going straight to the police.”

“
Sounds like a plan,” he nodded. His brown eyes warmed a little.

It was one thing to move in a certain direction, quite another to know where you were going. For some reason, which even Cat could not quite fathom, it seemed imperative to lead the way.

“There’s a good bar just down the street,” Loic said.

“
I’m sure.”

“
This way.” Loic stopped outside a modern bistro, all stainless steel. A couple of tables were free in the windows, but the bar area looked busy, so it was not isolated. The strains of soft jazz drifted out into the evening.

“
How about this?”

“
Sure.”

He held the door open.

“Madame Jordan -”

Cat thought for a moment.
“It’s Cat.”

“
Cat.”

He
indicated for her to sit down, then followed her and ordered two wines.

“
I only heard about Grand-mere’s … will this morning. We thought she’d never written one.” He seemed to be struggling with this. “I came straight up to Paris. I just finished with Monsieur Lapointe.”

Cat watched him.

“I have a right to certain information. Sorry if I frightened you.”

Cat took a large sip when the wine
came. “Monsieur Lapointe said that he had written to Isabelle’s village six weeks ago.”

“
I went away for a while after the funeral. I’ve been in Italy. My mother went to stay with friends too. She couldn’t bear to be alone. It brought back too many memories for her of losing my father … well. The Mairie’s office had forwarded the letter to me but it was marked private. My staff left it alone.”

“
If this is true, it’s terrible timing.”

“
So it seems.”

He reached into his pocket, pulled out
a leather wallet, handed it to Cat. “I brought my passport as well. For Monsieur Lapointe. It might reassure you on top of the driver’s license.”

Cat scanne
d the document carefully. Everything looked in order, if she was any judge of such things. In the end, though, it would be Monsieur Lapointe who made the final call.

“
So, you’ve been in Italy?”

“
Opera.”

“
Really?”

“
You don’t like it?”

Cat handed him
back his passport. “I … really couldn’t say.”

“
I’ve been in Milan and the lakes.”

“
Oh.”

“
You never go to either?”

“
Oh, my goodness!”

“
My goodness.”

Cat put her glass down. The wine had gone to her head.
“You sound British, though.”

“
Half. My father was from the UK. He came down to Provence in his twenties; fell in love with Sylvie, my mother. Never went home.”

“
Oh.”

“
Anything else, Cat?” He poured another glass of wine for them both.

Cat stopped herself from putting her hand out to cover the glass.

“You won’t like my next question.”

“
I don’t know why Grand-mere did it. I have no bloody idea.”

“
No idea at all?”

“
Why my grandmother would leave an apartment in Paris that none of us knew existed to an American girl, a stranger to us all? I assumed you were a fraud. Or an idiot. Someone who likes paying inheritance tax.”

Cat toyed with her glass.

Loic rested his head in his hands for a moment. Then he looked up at her. “Talk to me now, Cat.”

“
But what are you going to do?”