Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 116, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 709 & 710, September/October 2000

To be honest, Boulanger’s car just about compared with our château in the elegance stakes. The place was an unlovely, broken-down farmhouse with three acres of not very fruitful vines, all on the wrong side of the hill, in any case, for the ripening of perfect grapes. We had bought it three years before, in a moment of abandon, because it was cheap, and seemed to us to be overflowing with romantic potential. We had tired of our humdrum London jobs — mine at a bank, Helen’s at a bookstore — as well as our even more humdrum existence in commuter land. Confidently, we had opted to exchange all that for a healthy, French rural life, supported by the income our ownership of an honest brand of paysant cru wine would surely generate. The trouble was, it was only the peasants who benefited when we failed to sell the stuff to anyone in the higher echelons of society. Worse, selling the château itself was proving even more difficult than flogging the wine: We’d been trying since year two.

The only possible upside to what had become our penurious state was one that offered financial succour for Helen alone. When we had sold our unpretentious London suburban house for a handsome profit (there had been an English property boom on at the time), Helen had insisted that we insure my life for two million pounds for five years — until we were well established in the new life. She didn’t care for the prospect that if anything happened to me in the interim, she would be left with a wine-producing business to run single-handed, while, by then, possibly encumbered with young children, in a foreign clime. Her own father had been killed in an accident when she was fourteen, and her mother had struggled to keep his business and the family afloat before expiring a few years later herself — Helen believed from exhaustion.

We had paid the whole five-year life insurance premium in advance, to qualify for a fabulously low rate. Even so, there was nothing fabulous in the fact that I had to expire before there could be any benefit.

“Have you ever thought that we could fake your death?” Helen had ruminated in bed one night. We were in the middle of our third abysmal grape-picking season.

“You mean, have me fail to return from a sailing trip? Or have my clothes found abandoned on a lonely beach? They wouldn’t pay out for years in case I turned up again. And if they figured it was suicide, they wouldn’t pay at all,” I countered firmly. I’d checked the policy frequently with vaguely the same sort of idea in mind.

“No, I mean really die. Not you, of course, my sweet. Someone else who we’d pretend was you.”

“You’re not suggesting murder?” My wife is a lovely, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-the-mouth, English-rose innocent. Six years younger than me, she had been piously educated at an expensive Catholic school, at least until the family fortune gave out. The very notion of murderous...

“Of course not,” she responded primly. “But there must be tragic cases of middle-aged Frenchmen dying of incurable conditions, with distraught wives worried like hell over what to live on when they’re left alone. I know I would be.” She was good at entering into the spirit of her fantasies. “Nobody gets much of a pension before they’re past sixty, and the French state widow’s pension is lousy anyway. We simply need to find an impoverished, terminally ill patient who looks vaguely like you, so you can... can swop places,” she embellished, warming to the task.

“And swop wives too?” I questioned.

“Of course. But that bit’s only pretend.” She frowned, as if I’d spoiled her train of thought with such a trivial point, then added, “We promise the couple, say, ten per cent of what we’d get from the insurance company—”

“You mean, two hundred thousand pounds?” I interrupted.

“Yes. That’s more than three hundred thousand U.S. dollars, leaving us with... nearly three million dollars,” she calculated wistfully, as if we had the money already. She was thinking in dollars because we’d originally planned to emigrate to Oregon. That was before we’d both been seduced by the French château. “The husband would have to come away with me somewhere, pretending to be you,” she continued, “before he... he passes on. When he does, I identify the body as yours, and we quietly pay his share to his wife, or whatever.” She paused, then completed with a rare spurt of genuine commercial practicality. “Perhaps it would need to be a down payment of a hundred thousand pounds, and the rest on death.”

“So how would we raise the first hundred thousand pounds, ahead of my untimely demise?” I questioned with feeling.

“We could sell the château for a really knockdown price. We wouldn’t need it anymore.”

She was right there. The place would probably fetch more than that, even in a distress sale. “And what about the ‘wife or whatever’?” I went on doubtfully. “How does she explain what’s happened to a previously ailing patient when what she ends up with is lusty me?”