Game of Patience by Susanne Alleyn Page A

his suspicions. He needed only the proof. No doubt he knew all the places where women think their secrets will be safe. He stole your letters and promptly deserted Victoire, having no further use for her.”
    “Oh, the beast,” she whispered. “Poor stupid Victoire.”
    “So he demanded money in exchange for the letters?”
    “Yes. He asked for far more than I had. My husband is wealthy—he owns two foundries and they make cannon for the army—but he rarely gives me money. Saint-Ange wanted fifty louis in gold. I told him I would bring him what I could. Today … today was the fourth time I’d come. I thought I should never be free of him.” She broke off, eyes pleading. “Have you found the letters?”
    Aristide shook his head. “Not yet. If the police find them, I assure you the commissaire or I will take great pleasure in handing them back to you ourselves.”
    “And now we can guess why the dead girl was there,” said Dautry, after Madame Beaumontel had left them, discreetly veiled once more.
    “Well, he couldn’t have secured such a comfortable income from a few rents.” Aristide grimaced. “Go on back to headquarters. I’ll come by shortly, after I lambaste Didier for overstepping his authority.”
    “He won’t take kindly to you telling him off.”
    “I really don’t care. When will that man remember it’s no longer 1793?”
    #
    Aristide returned to the commissariat and elbowed his way to Brasseur’s office through the midmorning crush of inspectors, clerks, complainants, and the inevitable half-dozen men and women of all sorts and conditions who were presumably spies with information to sell, waiting furtively or patiently on benches in the outer chamber. He found Brasseur looking much more pleased with himself than before.
    “Here’s another stroke of luck. The girl from Rue du Hasard’s been identified.” He waved a creased form at Aristide. “Just as you suggested; she’s no cheap slut. Her father visited the morgue at the Basse-Geôle yesterday and identified her; her name is Célie Montereau.”
    “Montereau?” Aristide echoed him. “Wasn’t there a member of the National Convention named Montereau, an ex-aristocrat, quite wealthy …”
    “The same. Honoré-Charles-Éléonor Montereau, formerly the Comte de Soyecourt. We’re to question him this afternoon, after a visit to the morgue to see what they have to say there. In Montereau’s mansion in the faubourg Germain if you please. You’ll have to show me how to mind my manners in a house like that.”
    “My uncle was a lawyer, not a duke,” Aristide said absently as he followed Brasseur through the clamor of the antechamber. Brasseur grunted.
    #
    It was market day outside the Châtelet and their hired fiacre rolled slowly through the disorderly cluster of farm-carts and stalls, where leather-throated vendors hawked their wares. Cabbages, turnips, onions, and apples lay stacked in careful pyramids beside cheeses, sausages, and jumbled heaps of old clothes and shoes, the tattered castoffs of the prosperous. Amid the bustle, the beggars shuffled or crouched in corners, mutely stretching out grimy hands.
    The fiacre left the marketplace behind and approached the looming walls of the Châtelet to halt in a gloomy, vaulted passage of sooty masonry that provided a public way through the center of the old fortress. To their left, a small door led to the Basse-Geôle de la Seine, the morgue where unidentified corpses and victims of violent death were sent. Leaving Dautry, who refused to accompany them inside, behind in the cab, Brasseur exchanged a few words with the dour clerk on duty. They passed through a grille that the clerk unlocked for them, and the faint odor of spoiled meat drifted to their nostrils as they descended a short staircase.
    The stagnant smell was far stronger in the chill, lamplit cellar below, hanging like fog over the half-dozen shrouded figures lying on their stone tables. A second clerk, a pop-eyed man with