Free The Good Thief's Guide to Paris by Chris Ewan Page A

it might stay that way. There was no guarantee I wasn’t about to be disturbed at any moment and as far as I could tell, there was no emergency exit or alternative way of leaving the apartment other than the front door. But still, I didn’t feel entitled to leave quite yet. Despite logic telling me that Bruno had the painting, it would have been remiss of me not to conduct a quick search of the apartment to make absolutely certain it was gone. After all, it wasn’t completely out of the question that Madame Ames might have suspected that someone was after her painting and had hidden it.
    So I looked at my watch and I told myself that I would search every possible hiding place I could think of in the next fifteen minutes. And that’s what I did. I searched the bed and the mattress and the wardrobe. I checked behind the dressing table and I searched the adjoining bathroom (though only very quickly, because I couldn’t imagine anyone hiding a painting where it might get wet). I poked my head inside all of the kitchen cupboards as well as the storage cupboard out in the hallway. Lastly, I went through every single one of the paintings in the main living area in an orderly fashion, including the canvases that had been clipped to the easels. I even checked the wallpaper pasting table for hidden compartments, of which there were none.
    And once I was done, once I was absolutely sure the painting was nowhere to be found within the apartment, I shrugged my shoulders, collected my suitcase, primed the intruder alarm and relocked the door behind me. Then I retraced my steps up onto the roof and down into the adjoining hotel, even letting myself into the room I’d paid for with a novel device known as a key. Once there, I flushed my disposable gloves down the toilet and I stashed my empty suitcase inside the wardrobe. Finally, I walked downstairs to the lobby, returned my room key to Quasimodo, bid him a snappy goodbye and made my way outside.

EIGHT
    Paige was sat behind the makeshift cash desk at the front of the Paris Lights bookshop when I entered. Her hair was tied back from her pale face with a black ribbon and she was holding a paperback novel in her right hand, her gimlet eyes scanning the pages. The book had a dark, foreboding cover and it was written by one of those Russian guys I’ve never been able to get to grips with. She seemed engrossed, her pupils jittering from left to right and back again, like miniature typewriter carriages imprinting the words on her brain.
    I approached the cash desk and cleared my throat. Paige glanced up from her book, then did a double-take when she saw it was me.
    “Hey there stranger,” she said, setting the book down and tucking a stray curl of hair behind her ear. “Where did you disappear to the other night?”
    “An appointment,” I told her. “You have a good time?”
    “Sure. Missed you, though.”
    “Looked that way.”
    She frowned, and the veins at her temple pulsed beneath her skin.
    “Italian guy – has a long arm,” I said.
    “Paolo?”
    I shrugged.
    “Silly,” she told me, reaching out and squeezing my hand. “You know, I read your book. It’s fun.”
    “You sound surprised.”
    “Truthfully? I was. But I sat here yesterday and I read it between customers and, yeah, I liked it a lot.”
    “Well, that’s something, I suppose.”
    “I even put my main guy on hold for you,” she added, and lifted the paperback for me to see.
    “Dostoevsky? Really?”
    “You don’t like him?”
    I curled my lip. “I happen to think it’s pretty obvious whodunnit by the end of the first chapter.”
    Paige rolled her eyes and blew a raspberry at me. Then she pointed beyond a group of customers towards a chipped trestle table on the other side of the room. The table was situated below a dusty candelabra and I could see a few copies of my novel displayed on it, beside a smouldering incense stick.
    “I talked to Francesca. She’s the owner of this place. She said you could