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

It had been my idea that Helen and the Rabuts should move to England for the remainder of Henri’s life — with me nearby, but in the background. It was bound to be less complicated and quicker if the insurance claim on my life was made in my native country. It would also be wiser, I thought, if no one in the community where the threesome settled had sight of me. In public, Michelle and I would have looked a touch less convincing as a couple than Helen and Henri, a point that might have prompted suspicion or at least nosy enquiry if the four of us had been living together. Better, I thought, to keep things simple, with Michelle posing as the friend and helper to Helen and her sick “husband.”

Henri, although by now seriously debilitated, could still cope with the journey across the Channel with the help of a wheelchair. He didn’t own a passport, so the plan made a useful opportunity for him to acquire one. The photograph used in it was of me, with my eyelids drooped a little, my hair cut short like Henri’s, and my cheeks sucked in to emulate his. We took it as a good omen that the photo fooled the local priest in St-Jean, who signed it on the back as a true likeness of Henri before it went to the passport office. This encouraged us to have Henri travel as me on my passport, and for me to travel by separate route as Henri: That worked too.

As predicted, we had disposed of the château within a week of it being put up for sale, and the money came through much more quickly than expected. This was because the asking price had been so low that the buyer was scared we might change our minds. In fact, we got far less than we had paid originally for the place, but it was sufficient to provide the Rabuts with their down payment, with enough left over to cover our expenses before poor Henri passed on.

Since it was now midwinter, it was easy for Helen to rent a seaside cottage at short notice in a thinly populated part of Devonshire, within reasonable reach of a doctor and a town with a hospital, in case such a facility proved necessary. Once the three of them had settled in, she put it out at the village post-office-cum-store that she, her gravely sick husband Edward, and their indispensable friend and housekeeper Michelle, were there because, despite having lived in France for several years, Edward wanted to see out his last days in the area where he had spent a good deal of his childhood. In fact, the true Edward Talbot had never been to Devon in his life, so that the possibility of anyone local recognising my name but not Henri’s face and build as quite matching it was remote. Helen also told the chatty postmistress that Michelle’s husband was not with them because it would have meant giving up his job in France — an unnecessary sacrifice when it was known that Edward had so little time to live. We had a stroke of luck in the village doctor. His name was Jacques Egbert, and he was a Frenchman who had settled in Devon after marrying a local girl in the mid 1980s. What brief conversations he had with Henri (whom he knew as Edward Talbot) he was delighted to conduct in French, to the great relief of his patient. My surname happens to be as common in France as it is in England, and Helen had explained to the doctor that her husband had been brought up to speak the other language fluently by French grandparents — which, in my case, was not far from the truth.

Jacques Egbert was a competent doctor who kept his searching enquiries at the medical not the social level. Helen insisted on retaining him privately and not as a National Health Service physician. She explained that she and Michelle were determined to nurse Edward at home for as long as it was possible, which could involve an excessive number of house calls. The house calls didn’t bother Egbert at all, while the private arrangement pleased him a great deal: He had very few fee-paying patients.

On his first visit to the cottage, Egbert took blood samples from Henri for analysis. These confirmed the patient’s condition, also the advanced stage it had reached. The doctor was relieved that the two women were well aware that there was no cure for what ailed Henri, only pills and injections to make his life more bearable. Helen played the part of the shortly-to-be-widowed spouse with great conviction, something made easier by the fact that, in the circumstances, Michelle herself showed almost superhuman stoicism.