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

“As I said, the couple would need to leave where they’ve been living and come away to a place where none of us is known. The wife would want to be with her real husband in any case. To look after him till the end. And she wouldn’t go back to wherever it was they lived before, that’s until after his death, and after the divorce. Then it would be all right.”

“What divorce?”

“Well, she’d need to divorce you eventually, so you could marry me again. That’s after you’d officially enjoyed a miraculous cure. She’d be left with all the money we’d given her. A middle-aged widow with capital shouldn’t find it hard to attract a new man. I feel she’d want to marry again, too,” mused my romantic wife. “The divorce would be uncomplicated. We’d get it someplace where it’s easy.”

“America,” I provided, just to add colour to the crazy scenario.

“Yes, perfect. I expect that’s where we’ll end up in any case.”

“You mean because I wouldn’t always be running into old friends and colleagues there? People who’d read in the paper I was dead.”

“Mm, partly. But I think you’d probably have to grow a beard, too.”

“Only if you will as well, darling, to complete our disguise.”

She giggled, then sighed. “You know, the whole thing would be a true act of mercy. And we’d still be left with all that money, plus whatever remained of what we get for the château. We’d make a fresh start. Something in the country still. Not a vineyard, but with clean air for rearing the children.”

We’d put off having a family till things got better. “What if the couple have kids?” I asked.

“If they do, we’ll have to deal with that when the time comes. You’re being negative, darling,” Helen remonstrated.

“Because the whole thing’s pie in the sky,” I countered. “We’ll never find the luckless patient. And if we do, the idea’s still too complicated.”

Except it was exactly three months later when Pierre Boulanger found what he had termed the “perfect couple” for our generosity — and it was hardly complicated at all.

Boulanger spent most of his normal working day visiting hospitals and the homes of invalids — which is what Helen had discovered during that first telephone conversation. When she was sure we knew him well enough to risk it, she outlined our plan, emphasising its deeply humanitarian aspect. She never mentioned the two million pounds, only the amount of the insurance money we were ready to give to some terminally ill patient and his wife if a swop could be engineered.

Our new acquaintance seemed so moved by our generosity that we seriously thought he would burst into tears. Later, he firmly rejected our offer of a finder’s fee for himself. “It’s for the good of all,” he pronounced portentously. This had been during his third visit to the château in as many days. We had let him recruit himself as an honorary grape picker who stayed each evening to share our simple supper, and which led to his becoming our equally honorary scout for the patient we needed. And who better for the job, it quickly proved, than resourceful Pierre?

Henri and Michelle Rabut were a sad couple. She was forty-seven years old, still very comely, and working at the checkout in a supermarket in St-Jean, a small town close to Limoges. Or that was what she had been doing until her slightly older, farm-labourer husband had been told by the doctors that he had a wasting blood condition for which there was no known cure. He had, at the most, six months to live. Boulanger first met them two months after this when they had applied for extra government assistance. St-Jean was a hundred and fifty miles northeast of Bordeaux, well outside his normal territory, but he had been temporarily seconded there due to illness in the Limoges office. By this time, Michelle Rabut had already quit her job to look after Henri at home — she wouldn’t countenance his spending more time than necessary in a hospital.

Like his wife, Henri Rabut came of simple country stock and was endowed with a heap of innate peasant common sense. He was fatalistic about his condition — a realist resigned to his fate and concerned only to provide for his wife in her widowhood. The couple were childless like us, hut, in their case, due to Henri’s impotence. His blood condition had first been revealed during tests at a fertility clinic.

Miraculously, it was clear from our first meeting that Henri could be accepted as my slightly older brother. If it came to a border official’s cursory glance at a passport photograph, we all believed there was no doubt he could be taken for me. The prospect of the two-hundred-thousand-pound bounty (about two million French francs) had been explained to Henri by Boulanger, and it was a credit to our conscientious go-between that both Henri and his wife considered us heaven-sent and inspired benefactors.