Belle - Lesley Pearse [213]
Belle gave a smile then, a weak, watery one. ‘Yes, I’m convinced, but I have just one more question. Was Kent hanged for killing Millie?’
Etienne wasn’t sure this was the right time to talk about that, but if he fobbed her off she would just worry about it too. ‘No, he wasn’t. There wasn’t enough evidence to charge him with her murder. Noah has compiled quite a dossier on the man’s crimes, and it wasn’t just you he sold to a brothel, there were many other girls too. They are all still missing, and it’s Noah’s hope he can expose all those who had a part in it both back in England and here in France.’
‘Then he’ll need me to be a witness?’
Etienne hesitated. He was afraid if he said that her evidence was vital she would become scared again.
‘No one is going to ask you to do anything you don’t want to do.’
‘I want him punished, for Millie’s sake. And unless he is, and that horrible Madame Sondheim, then such things will just go on and on. But I wouldn’t want people like you or Lisette to get dragged into it.’
‘I shall be fine. I was just hired to escort you to America, you were not under age, and I had no choice either. I also have my own reasons to want the guilty punished, and I will assist the gendarmes with that. As for Lisette, she is as much a victim as you are, and Noah is sweet on her too, so she’ll be looked after. Once the top people are arrested it usually follows that many others beneath them feel able to tell what they know. Noah hopes we may find the other girls too; they’ve all got families desperate for news of them.’
‘Then I must be a witness,’ Belle said. ‘It would be very cowardly not to be.’
He smiled down at her, moved by her courage. ‘It won’t be easy for you. To be the main witness in a trial of this importance will mean your name will be in the newspapers, and people will talk,’ he warned her.
‘Let them talk,’ she said. ‘Bad men have to be stopped.’
‘Were you here all night again?’ Noah asked when he arrived at the nursing home the next morning to see how Belle was and found Etienne sitting outside her door looking hollow-eyed and unshaven.
‘Yes, I was afraid she’d have nightmares,’ Etienne said.
‘Did she?’
‘No, she slept remarkably peacefully. But before you go in to see her, let’s go outside and talk. Then I’ll introduce you properly before I go back to the Mirabeau to get cleaned up.’
Noah had long since lost all his reservations about the Frenchman, even if he had been a gangster, and for him to wait outside Belle’s door for forty-eight hours was further evidence of the man’s trustworthiness and his affection for her. They walked along the passage, down the stairs and out into a small courtyard garden at the back of the nursing home. It was a warm, sunny morning, and the sheltered garden was beautiful, bright with red and yellow tulips and a small tree laden with white blossom.
They sat down on a bench and Etienne told Noah that Belle was prepared to be a witness in any court proceedings.
‘It turns out the police here have had some suspicions about Pascal for some time,’ Noah said. ‘Not only do they believe he tricked the old lady into giving him that house, but another girl, Claudette something or other, disappeared about eighteen months ago, and they think now he may have killed her.’
Etienne said that somehow it didn’t surprise him and asked if she’d been a prostitute.
‘No, she worked in a department store. A friend who worked at the same place and shared a room with her reported her missing when she didn’t come home one night. She said that she was sure that a male customer who kept coming into the store to see her friend was responsible. She didn’t know the man’s name but the description she gave of him at the time fits Pascal. It was the girl’s opinion that he had been waiting for her friend when the store closed and persuaded her to go somewhere with him.’
‘Surely they followed it up?’
Noah shrugged.