The Hotel Riviera(25)

“Sorry,” he said. Then, exasperated, “Between you and Lola I seem to have been saying ‘I’m sorry’ all morning.”

Once they were out of the marina, Jack let out the throttle. Dangling a hand over the side, Miss N gazed into the clear turquoise water, enjoying the cool spray on her arm. In all her years of coming to the C?te d’Azur she had never once been on the water, only looked at it from the shore. Now she was enjoying herself.

Over the clatter of the little outboard, she shouted, “So how old are you anyway, Jack Farrar?”

“Bloody hell,” he said, sounding almost as English as Tom. “You never give up, do you.”

“My husband said that was one of my better characteristics.” She thought Jack was a really handsome man, especially when he laughed.

They were alongside the sloop now and Jack shut off the outboard, letting the dinghy drift astern. He grabbed the line trailing in the water, tugged the dinghy alongside, and secured it with what Miss N sincerely hoped was a good strong nautical knot.

“I’m forty-two, Miss N,” he said, climbing aboard the sloop. “Young enough.”

“Young enough for what?” she asked, innocent as a cherub.

He really laughed then, throwing back his head delightedly, as he helped her aboard. “I’m beginning to think you’re a very wicked lady. And the answer is young enough for sex, love, and rock ’n’ roll—in that order.”

“Well, of course I’d prefer to reverse the first two, but at least you included love.” She sat on a pile of coiled rope, beige-sandaled feet tucked neatly under her. She pushed her glasses up her nose, pushed up her sleeves, straightened her sunhat, and accepted Jack’s offer of a cold drink. “Lemonade is fine, thank you,” she said.

“No lemonade. Coke, orange juice, Evian.”

“Evian will do nicely.”

She liked that he poured it into a glass for her and didn’t just hand her a bottle as so many people did these days. Manners count, she’d always taught her Queen Wilhelmina’s girls, and so does politeness; they smooth the rougher edges of our lives, keep us civilized.

“Now about Lola,” she said. “Or to be more exact—about Patrick.” She gave him a sharp look. “What d’you think’s happened to him? Has he run off with another woman and left Lola in the lurch? Is it money trouble? Or is he dead?”

“There’s only one answer to that,” Jack said. “He’s dead. I feel it in my bones.”

“Hah! So do I. And my bones don’t lie. And that, my dear Jack, leaves us with the dilemma of whether Patrick was murdered. And whether or not Lola did it.”

Jack took a long slug of the icy Stella Artois. “Do you think she did it?”

“Of course not. This is an outside job, and to tell you the truth I haven’t any idea where to start looking for Patrick, or his killer. But there has to be a motive. Whoever killed Patrick had something to gain. This is no spur-of-the-moment crime of passion, it’s too clean, too neat, and the body has been cleanly disposed of. It took the police six months just to find the car, which leads me to believe it was dumped in that Marseilles garage recently. No silver Porsche is just going to sit in a public garage space unnoticed for six months, now is it?”

Jack nodded in agreement. “I knew Patrick, of course,” she added. “I’ve been coming to the hotel ever since it opened. He was always in and out of the place. Handsome chap, a bit smooth, a lady-killer. And he loved that car almost as much as he loved himself. That Porsche gave him an image, a fa?ade he presented to the world. That car was Patrick. Or at least he thought it was.”

“So, the car disappears, Patrick disappears, the carre appears…what next?”

Miss N leveled a look at him from behind her Queen Elizabeth glasses. “What do you think?”

Jack looked across the stretch of shining blue water at the Hotel Riviera. So beautiful, so peaceful; a place where a man could unwind and leave his daily cares behind, nurtured by a taffy-haired woman called Lola.

“I think Lola might be in danger,” he said quietly. “I feel that in my bones too.”

Miss N nodded. “I’m afraid you’re right,” she said, but she was also thinking it would be jolly nice for Lola to have a man around the house. Especially one like Jack Farrar. “A girl couldn’t ask for a better bodyguard,” she said.

Jack’s eyebrows rose. “Me?”

“Who else?” She smiled. “And thank you for offering,” she added, leaving him totally bewildered, and somehow saddled with the responsibility for Lola Laforêt’s safety.





Chapter 24




Lola

Miss N had made arrangements to meet Jack Farrar for drinks and a “conference” here at the hotel at six-thirty, but I was afraid to look at the clock, ticking away the minutes, because it meant soon I would have to face reality, and somehow I knew it would not be good.

I wandered forlornly into the kitchen. Nadine took one look at my worried frown and said in French, “Is this going to become a habit then, this moping? Because if so it’s highly unbecoming.”

“I have a headache,” I said. So she wrung out a cloth in ice water, sat me into a chair, and held it over my eyes. It was so damn cold I yelled at her and heard her laugh.