Free The Coral Thief by Rebecca Stott

only once,” I stammered, understanding the threat implicit in his words.
    “Yes,” he said. “I know that. You saw her at half past three on the afternoon of July twenty-third. In the Louvre, I understand. I looked for your report of that meeting in my file, M. Connor, yesterday, but I did not find it. Perhaps I did not look carefully enough.”
    “I didn’t think it was—”
    “Let us say that your report has gone missing. We will call it a bureaucratic error. We will say it is not important. Of course the next report you write for the Bureau will not go missing. And now, M. Connor, I must ask for your identity papers—your passport?”
    “My passport, M. Jagot? Why do you need my passport?” I reached into my jacket pocket.
    “We have rules in Paris, monsieur, and those rules say that a man or woman who is part of a police investigation cannot leave the city. Your papers will be safe with me, M. Connor. You have my word.” He took them from me and folded them into a silver case.
    “For how long?” I stuttered. “I mean to return to England.”
    “Until we know what is what, M. Connor. And how long does that take? Who is to say? Of course, if we find Mme. Bernard, or if someone brings her to us, then we close the files. We say this is finishedbusiness. But until that moment, it is unfinished business. You may go now, monsieur, but you must not speak of our meeting. Not to anyone, you understand? It is a private matter.”
    I stood up. “M. Jagot—” I began to remonstrate.
    “Au revoir
, M. Connor.”
    The one-armed man did not meet my eye as I passed him. He spat into the undergrowth.
    Furious at Jagot’s veiled accusations and threats and conscious of being tangled up in a web that was as thick as a forest and over which I had no control, I resolved to walk in the Jardin until I had seized on a plan. I slipped into the lecture hall in the amphitheater between lectures, waiting until a group of students talking animatedly to a professor I did not recognize had spilled onto the gravel path outside. The empty lecture hall, curved seats raked high behind me, smelled of furniture wax and heated bodies; on the blackboard a chalked diagram of a cuttlefish, tentacles sprawling, had been marked with arrows and letters, all its parts labeled; over to the left on the same board someone had pinned a drawing of what looked like a crocodile. On the lecturer’s podium a series of monkey skulls had been arranged in a row.
    Despite everything, I reasoned with myself, this particular knot would unravel in a few days, when Jagot had tracked down Lucienne Bernard and recovered my things. He would come to see my innocence. I might have gone to see the British ambassador to plead my case, or found a lawyer to petition for the return of my passport, but my story was now full of embarrassing kinks, each of which undermined my claim to innocence. Why had I not called the guard in the Louvre? Why had I failed to make a report to Jagot despite having given him my word? Why had I fallen asleep on the mail coach with objects of such value and consequence? No matter how you looked at it, it didn’t look good.

N THE FOURTH OF AUGUST,
the HMS
Bellerophon,
which had been anchored off the coast of Torbay for almost a week, finally set sail, heading for deeper waters. Beyond the gaze of the English journalists, who had positioned their telescopes at all the seaward—facing windows of all the lodging houses of Plymouth hoping to catch a glimpse of the famous greatcoat, the Emperor of France was about to board a new ship, the HMS
Northumberland,
a forty—four-gun ship of the line. The
Bellerophon,
for all its fighting glory, for all the mythology of its name, was not fit or young enough, the admirals said, to take the Emperor the full distance to Saint Helena, an island in the Atlantic Ocean, thirteen hundred miles from the nearest landmass. On board, the Emperor, his spirits low, began a new game of cards
.
    Two days before, when