Presumed Dead (8 page)

‘You are the most considerate man I have
ever met,‘ she said, smiling.

‘Good, it is settled then. Tomorrow after
breakfast, we go to Nîmes. Now, Madame, your dinner is ready.’

Alice sat down at the table while Philippe
dished up two steaming bowls of spaghetti bolognese. The food and wine were
delicious and they were both too busy eating to say very much during the meal.
After they had emptied their bowls and loaded the dishwasher, they took their
wine outside and sat on the veranda in the cool night air, looking up at the
moon and stars. There was perfect silence, except for the occasional sound of a
distant car, snaking its way along the road, piercing the darkness with yellow
pools of light.

Alice sipped her wine appreciatively,
letting warm contentment flood over her. ‘You know Philippe,’ she said softly,
‘you’ve told me hardly anything about yourself. Whenever we’ve spoken, it’s
always been about me.’

‘What do you want to know?’ he asked.

‘Everything. I want to know everything
about you.’

‘Let’s see,’ he started. ‘I am forty one
years old, I am the senior partner in a firm of architects in Nîmes, I live in
this house and my hobby is mountain climbing.’

‘Is that it?’ Alice asked.

‘What else do you want to know?’

‘Where you were born, what you were like as
a little boy, where you went to school, when you got married… everything.’

They talked long into the night about their
lives and the way they felt about things. Alice told him about her early life
in the States, how her mother had died shortly after she’d been born, how her
father had brought her up with the help of an English nanny, about her
university days, her charity work, and sadly, about her father’s recent death.

Philippe told her all about his early
childhood in Nîmes, his time at university in Paris, the climbing expeditions
he’d been on, his early jobs, about setting up his architect’s practice, about
buying and rebuilding the house they were sitting outside, and about his five
year marriage to Louisa. He told her how he’d wanted children but Louisa had
been against it because it would have meant her giving up climbing. It had been
a real disappointment to him.

All the time that Philippe was speaking,
Alice listened and asked questions. She found him fascinating. Intelligent yet
simple, strong yet gentle, willful yet kind, but above all, she found him
considerate and sensitive. He was all she had ever wanted in a man, almost the
complete opposite of her husband, whom she’d grown to regard as insensitive,
selfish and grasping.

It was after two a.m. before they turned
in. Philippe locked up while Alice rinsed the wineglasses, then they walked to
the back of the house together, where Philippe wished her goodnight at her
bedroom door then went into his own room, closing the door behind him.

She smiled to herself as she got ready for
bed. How completely typical of him not to press his advantage, she thought
dreamily, which is just as well. After all that wine and the moonlight, I
wouldn’t have taken much persuading! With that thought, she climbed into her
own bed and turned out the light.

By the time Alice was asleep, the search
parties in Chamonix had completed a sweep of the Mer de Glace both up and down
from the Montenvers terminus. The weather conditions had been appalling, with
visibility down to just a few feet, and the searchers were exhausted. In order
to ensure that the entire area was thoroughly searched, two teams of men with
dogs were spread across the full width of the glacier, just feet apart, and
equipped with lanterns and poles for probing the thick snow and the ice
crevasses.

One team had worked their way up the
glacier as far as the point where it split into two smaller floes and became
too steep to traverse, whilst the other had worked down the ice until it
petered out and melted into the river Averyon.

Now they were packing up for the night.
Their next job was to work their way up the Charpoua Glacier, but because of
the avalanches, that was far too dangerous a job to tackle in the dark, even
for ten thousand Euros. They would be back at first light.

David Wiseman left the small hotel in
Calais town center in time to catch the eight a.m. ferry to Dover. He’d read in
his guidebook that the white cliffs of Dover were well worth seeing, so had
decided against using the Channel Tunnel. He checked his hire car in at the
rental desk in the ferry terminal, then bought a ticket and joined the boat as
a foot passenger.

One of his tails had followed him in and
had been standing behind him in the queue at the ticket counter to see what he
bought. When his turn came, he bought two tickets for the same ferry: one for a
foot passenger and one for a car with driver. He quickly went outside to give his
partner the car ticket then hurried back into the terminal, just in time to
follow David onto the courtesy bus that took them out to the ferry.

Alice slept late, and the first thing she
registered when she woke up was the delicious smell of coffee. Gasping for a
cup, she quickly threw on her bathrobe, rinsed her face, dragged a comb through
her hair and padded into the kitchen.

There were fresh bread and croissants on
the table and a percolator full of dark, steaming coffee on the stove. Philippe
had a newspaper spread out on the side and was scanning it intently when Alice
came in and wished him a cheery good morning.

Instead of looking up at her and smiling as
she’d expected, he looked deeply concerned and said, ‘I think you had better
sit down. There is a story about you in the paper.’

Alice sat at the table looking anxious
while Philippe folded the paper then handed it to her. The first thing she saw
was her own face staring out of the page at her. She recognized it instantly as
her passport photograph, she’d always hated it. She wondered how they had got
hold of it. Above it, the headline AMERICAN HEIRESS MISSING IN THE ALPS leapt
out of the page. Frowning, she started to read aloud in French. ‘A massive
search was launched yesterday for Lady Webley, believed to be lost or injured
somewhere near the Mer de Glace glacier, south of Chamonix in the French Alps.
Alice Webley is the wife of British nobleman Sir Ross Webley, and owner of the
massive American Sanderson Corporation, conservatively estimated to be worth
five hundred million US dollars.

Lady Webley was seen at seven thirty a.m.
on Monday leaving her hotel in Chamonix. Workers next saw her on the Montenvers
rack railway around eight a.m. as she traveled up to the Mer de Glace. The last
positive sighting that the Peloton de Gendarmerie de Haute-Montagne have been
able to establish was at around eight forty five a.m. on a path leading down
onto the Mer de Glace, where she was noticed by two climbers.’

Alice looked up at Philippe, totally
perplexed. ‘What does it mean?’ she begged, close to tears. ‘I was with you in
the refuge on Monday morning. These people couldn’t have seen me. Why are they
lying?’

‘We both know you were not at the hotel or
on the Montenvers train on Monday,’ Philippe, who had had more time to think
about it, said. ‘But if your body was to be found on the glacier, your husband
had to get you up there somehow legitimately. Remember, we wondered how he
intended to explain your sudden transportation from England to the
mountainside? Now we know.’

‘You think he bribed people to say they saw
me?’ she asked incredulously.

‘No, he was far cleverer than. Read the
next part.’

Alice read on. ‘Lady Webley had only been
in Chamonix since Sunday afternoon, when she arrived alone from England. Staff
at the hotel say Lady Webley stayed in her room all Sunday evening, then left
early on Monday morning dressed for walking. She wasn’t reported missing until
late on Monday night when her concerned husband raised the alarm after being
unable to contact her by telephone from Monte Carlo.’

She looked questioningly up at Philippe
again.

‘Your husband is a very clever man,’ he
said. ‘He obviously got someone to impersonate you on Sunday afternoon and
Monday morning so that he would have a perfect alibi and the authorities would
know where to look for your body.’

‘But who could he have got to do it?’ Alice
asked, then, furrowing her eyebrows she said, ‘Wait a minute… something’s
coming back to me. Remember I told you how I thought that Ross and Alex had
carried me by my feet and shoulders, and that there was something strange about
Alex? Well I remember now. Alex was wearing my yellow suit and a blond wig!’

‘Surely you are not saying a man could have
impersonated you?’ Philippe scoffed. ‘I do not believe it. You are much too
feminine. No man could ever come close!’

‘Thanks for the compliment,’ Alice said,
‘but you don’t know Alex. When he first came to work for us, I suspected he was
just a tiny bit effeminate. To be honest, I thought Ross had chosen someone
like that specially so that I would feel safe when he was away, I was
flattered. Now I come to think of it though, he’s about my size and I can
easily see him being able to pass for me in the right clothes and a wig.’

‘But what about your beautiful eyes?’
Philippe persisted. ‘He could never imitate those!’

‘Sunglasses!’ Alice said triumphantly.
‘Let’s face it, every woman with long blond hair and sunglasses looks exactly
the same. It’s the classic stereotype! Even men with sunglasses and long blond
hair sometimes get whistled at in the street. All anyone ever sees is the hair
and the glasses, not the face or the figure.’

‘Maybe you are right, but for now it does
not matter anyway. What matters is that he has established a perfect alibi for
himself and no one is going to believe he tried to kill you.’

‘You’re right,’ Alice sighed. ‘But you
know, I still can’t believe he did it. What possible reason could he have?’

‘I can think of about five hundred million
reasons,’ Philippe said menacingly.

‘You’re kidding. You think it’s my money
he’s after?’

‘Certainly, what else? How long ago was it
that you inherited your father’s company?’ he asked.

‘About four months,’ Alice answered slowly.
‘It was just before the school holidays.’

‘And how long do you think it would have
taken him to plan the perfect murder?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Then I will tell you… about four months.’

Alice looked away, trying to come to terms
with what he was saying. ‘But I’m always giving him money! If he wanted more
that badly, why didn’t he just ask me for it?’

‘Because he wanted it all, not just some of
it,’ Philippe said. Then shaking his head, he added, ‘He must have an
incredible ego.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because only someone with a massive ego
would put his wishes above the life of another person, and, he is supremely
confident. Read the rest of it.’

Turning back to the paper, Alice read,
‘Monsieur Webley hurried back to Chamonix on Tuesday to help in the search for
his wife, but found that due to bad weather conditions on the glacier, the
search was about to be suspended. Determined to find her, Monsieur Webley put
out a radio appeal for volunteers to form a search party and offered a reward
of ten thousand Euros. Answering his call, hundred of men with dogs are now
scouring the Mer de Glace in search of Madame Webley and the reward money. As
darkness fell last night, no sign of the missing woman had been discovered.’

‘You’re right,’ Alice said angrily. ‘He’s
so damn sure I’m on that glacier and so desperate to prove me dead so he can
collect the money, he’s willing to do anything, including risking other
people’s lives. But it’s going to backfire on him.’

‘In what way,’ Philippe asked.

‘Because he’s given me the perfect excuse
to divorce him, and he won’t get a dime.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Philippe said quietly,
sitting down opposite her. ‘Like I said before, no one is going to believe you
survived being thrown out of a plane. When you do eventually go home, he will
just look like a concerned husband who has been searching for his lost wife,
not a murderer. You, on the other hand, could be made to look very bad.’

Alice was shocked and asked. ‘What do you
mean?’

‘Imagine what a clever lawyer could do with
the situation,’ he said. ‘While the loyal Sir Ross desperately searches the
mountains for his lost wife, sparing no expense, offering a large reward, the
unfaithful Lady Webley is shacked up in the south of France with another man.’

‘That’s outrageous!’ Alice snapped.

‘Maybe, but he could easily turn the whole
thing around and divorce you for adultery. He could claim half of your company
and maybe even get custody of Charles.’

‘But nothing has happened!’ Alice insisted.

‘We know that,’ Philippe said, ‘but who are
they going to believe, a seemingly adulterous wife making wild accusations of
attempted murder, or a dedicated, heroic husband?’

‘There must be some way of proving what he
did to me,’ Alice said angrily. ‘We can’t just let him get away with it! If he
ever got his hands on Sanderson’s it would be a disaster! It’s not so much the
money I’m worried about, it’s the stability of the company and the job security
of thousands of people, I have a responsibility to them. He would spend money
like a drunken sailor and the company would be bankrupt within a year! And
another thing, the only way he’d ever get Charles is over my dead body!’

‘Calm down,’ Philippe said. ‘We will find a
way to stop him. We have a little time to think about it while they search the
glacier. After all, they are not going to find you, are they? Let’s have our
breakfast, do some shopping, then we can talk about it again later. I am sure
we will be able to think of something.’

Alice sighed and put the paper down.
‘Okay,’ she said, ‘you’re the doctor.’

.

By coincidence, David Wiseman was reading a
translated version of the same syndicated story in The Times while he ate his
breakfast on the Calais-Dover ferry. To say he was both shocked and highly
suspicious would have been an understatement. He put the paper down, took off
his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to get his thoughts in
order.

Ever since he’d left old lady Schutz in
Weggis, his FBI-trained mind had been going over and over what she’d told him,
trying to rationalize her very strong arguments. He could easily believe,
having met Webley, that he was capable of murder. He’d met his type plenty of
times before. And now, he thought, the second wife, who just happens to be
worth five hundred million dollars, has mysteriously disappeared. That’s mighty
convenient for Webley.

He put his glasses back on and re-read the
story, hoping to pick up something he might have missed, but there was nothing.
He knew for sure that Webley was on the boat on Sunday night, because that was
where he’d met him. He was also sure Webley would have a watertight alibi for
the whole of Monday. That meant there had to be someone else involved, someone
who could bump his wife off and make it look like an accident. But one thing
was certain, from what he’d learnt and seen of Webley, this was no accident.

He was still thinking it through when the
announcement was made asking all foot passengers to make their way to the rear
of the ferry for disembarkation.

The two men who had been following David
had switched roles during the sailing. The man who had been driving the car now
followed him onto the courtesy bus and into the terminal building, where he
stood in line at the Avis car rental desk while David filled out a form. As
soon as the tail had noted the registration number of the rental car, he
hurried out of the door and joined his colleague in their car outside. David
came out a few minutes later struggling with his luggage, and after looking
around for a moment, headed across the road to the small lot where the rental
cars were parked. He soon found the blue Rover, stowed his luggage, and
gingerly pulled away from the ferry terminal in the unfamiliar right-hand-drive
car, following the signs for London. His tails followed, still at a discreet
distance.

.

Back up on the glacier, the search was
going slowly. At first light, the teams had traveled up the mountain on a train
laid on especially for them, and had reassembled at the Montenvers Hotel,
overlooking the Mer de Glace. The dogs had been tied up outside in the driving
snow whilst the men crowded into the hotel’s restaurant for a briefing. They had
been told the plan was to walk to the base of the Charpoua Glacier where it
joined the Mer de Glace, then to spread out along its width and to climb,
searching as they went.

By mid morning, they had managed to cover
the first hundred yards or so of the Charpoua Glacier, but in near whiteout
conditions. The men moved slowly up the steep ice, one step at a time, gently
probing the snow filled crevasses with long poles whilst the dogs sniffed and
snuffled around them on the ends of their leads.

The search was being hampered here and
there by the recent avalanches, which had deposited huge mounds of snow on the
glacier. The men had to probe through each mound carefully, sinking long poles
down through the snow until they hit the solid ice of the glacier. It was slow
and dangerous work.

Someone from the radio station in Chamonix
had tipped the rest of the media off about the search, and a growing band of
journalists, including a camera team from one of the national television
companies, had invaded the Montenvers railway terminus and hotel. There was an
air of excitement and expectancy among the ghouls from the press as they
crowded around Jacques Batard from the PGHM, who was coordinating the search by
radio. Each one, it seemed, was determined to be the first to get photographs
or live footage when the body was finally found and brought up off the glacier.