“I hear through the grapevine that you and Miss Tavistock shared a degree of…simpatico?”

“She’s way too rich for my blood. And I’m too poor for hers.”

“I do not usually ask for favors,” said Daumier quietly. “Neither does Hugh.”

And you’re asking for one now, thought Richard. He sighed. “How can I refuse?”

After he’d hung up, he sat for a moment contemplating the task ahead. This was a baby-sitting job, really-the sort of assignment he despised. But the thought of seeing Beryl Tavistock again, and the memory of that kiss they’d shared in the garden, was enough to make him grin with anticipation. Way too rich for my blood, he thought. But a man can dream, can’t he? And I do owe it to Bernard and Madeline.

Even after all these years, their deaths still haunted him. Perhaps the time had come to close the mystery, to answer all those questions he and Daumier had raised twenty years ago. The same questions MI6 and Central Intelligence had firmly suppressed.

Now Beryl Tavistock was poking her aristocratic nose into the mess. And a most attractive nose it was, he thought. He hoped it didn’t get her killed.

He rose from the bed and headed for the shower. So much to do, so many preparations to make before he headed to the airport.

Baby-sitting jobs-how he hated them.

But at least this one would be in Paris.

Anthony Sutherland stared out his airplane window and longed fervently for the flight to be over and done with. Of all the rotten luck to be booked on the same Air France flight as the Vanes! And then to be seated straight across the first-class aisle from them-well, this really was intolerable. He considered Reggie Vane a screaming bore, especially when intoxicated, which at the moment Reggie was well on the way to becoming. Two whiskey sours and the man was starting to babble about how much he missed jolly old England, where food was boiled as it should be, not sautéed in all that ghastly butter, where people lined up in proper queues, where crowds didn’t reek of garlic and onions. He’d lived too many years in Paris now-surely it was time to retire from the bank and go home? He’d put in many years at the Bank of London’s Paris branch. Now that there were so many clever young V.P.s ready to step into his place, why not let them?