Free Murder at Renard's (Rose Simpson Mysteries Book 4) by Margaret Addison Page B

him, for the designer turned and looked at her. For a moment their eyes locked and Rose felt as if she could see into his very soul. She saw, as if in acknowledgment, his lips turn up into the briefest of smiles. It was not a pleasant smile. Rose hurriedly looked across at Madame Renard who, perhaps mercifully, had turned her attention to the papers on her desk and so was oblivious to the look that had passed between designer and shop assistant.
    When Rose turned back to look at the designer, his face was expressionless and his eyes blank. For one moment she wondered if she had been mistaken. Perhaps she had imagined it after all. But she still felt his fury in the atmosphere as if it were a tangible thing, even if it had retreated to the very edges of the room; it still lurked in the shadows only partially obscured.
     
    Madame Renard, on opening her office door, was immediately confronted with the spectacle of her son rifling through the papers on her desk in what could only be described as a furtive and frustrated fashion.
    ‘Jacques, whatever are you doing here? Mais qu'est-ce que vous faites là?’
    ‘Ah, Mama …’
    The young man had the decency to blush as he put down the papers he had been holding, his right hand still hovering over them as if he were reluctant to let them go. ‘I thought you were having a lie down. Rose said you had a headache.’
    ‘So you thought that you’d take the opportunity to go through my private correspondence?’ admonished his mother, her dark eyes blazing.
    ‘Of course not. I was doing nothing of the sort, Mother,’ retorted her son. ‘How can you think such a thing?’
    ‘But I catch you in the very act,’ cried Madame Renard, her voice rising. ‘You pretend that I do not find you rummaging through the papers on my desk? You have the cheek, the nerve to suggest that I am imagining things? That what I see with my own eyes,’ the proprietor paused to make a flamboyant gesture to emphasise the ridiculousness of it all, ‘it is not true?’
    ‘All right, Mother, for goodness sake don’t go on so,’ Jacques said hastily. He flung himself into a chair. ‘But as it so happens, I was doing nothing of the sort. No,’ he held up a hand as she made to protest, ‘I daresay it did look as if I were going through your papers, but I wasn’t. That’s to say I was only glancing through them to make sure they weren’t what I was looking for. My papers, I mean. I wasn’t actually reading yours as such.’
    ‘Whatever are you talking about? You make no sense. Why should there be your papers on my desk?’
    ‘I thought I might have left something on your desk by mistake. The other day. You weren’t here. I came in here to write a note for Marcel. I didn’t think you’d mind, only I think I may have forgotten something. That’s to say I may have put it down and not picked it up again.’
    ‘And what is this thing of such significance that you put down on my desk and will not say what it is? Why so mysterious? It is important, yes? You sneak in here like a thief in the night. You scatter my papers this way and that –’
    ‘I did nothing of the sort. And as to my … it was nothing.’
    ‘ Non . I do not believe that, Jacques. It was something and it was important, and you did not want me to find it. Why so secretive? What have you to hide, eh? You are in trouble, oui ? You have got into a scrape, as they say? Out with it, my boy …’ She paused and waited, clicking her fingers impatiently, her bangles jangling, but Jacques was silence.
    ‘Ah,’ she said at last, ‘you say nothing, but you do not contradict me. I am right, am I not?’
    ‘No, you’re not as it happens,’ replied Jacques rather sulkily. He searched his pocket for cigarettes. ‘But it will do no good my telling you. You won’t believe me, you never do. I could tell you until I’m blue in the face, but you’d never listen.’ He looked away, his forehead furrowed and a sour look appearing for a