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

“I never said she was unfaithful to him. Only that we were in love. We planned to marry after his death. But then, with my sick mother still alive and needing to go into a private nursing home soon, it was a question of finding enough money for everything. Your... your gift was providential.”

“And generous enough as first agreed. So why are you now being so damned greedy? It won’t work, you know,” I pressed, but aware already that we were his hostages.

It was clear now that we had played into Boulanger’s hands by exposing our scam to him in the first place. It must have offered the perfect fulfillment to his wildest dream. And if he shopped us to the insurance company, it was Helen and I who’d go to gaol, not him. He was clean, and we’d never be able to prove differently.

“We are all greedy, monsieur,” he replied in the tone of a sage philosopher.

“But Michelle—” He seemed to have forgotten her — and her complicity.

“Is greedier than anyone,” he broke in primly, as if he regretted her weakness.

“But she’s involved in the insurance fraud, too.”

He outwardly winced at the word fraud, the hypocrite, before he responded. “Only because you took advantage of her simplicity, monsieur, and the plight of her poor sick husband, now dead. Any court, in England or France, would sympathise with her position. Especially if she confessed to everything and appeared as a witness for the prosecution.”

So he had it all figured. “Except, if you shop me and my wife, you’ll lose the money. All of it. The lot.” I said, increasingly convinced that he wasn’t really expecting to get ninety percent of it, that his demand was just an opening gambit. He had to be ready to negotiate. The question was, should I play ball with him, or simply call his bluff? “If I shop you, monsieur, you’ll go to prison,” he uttered flatly, but, as I knew, accurately.

“Nonsense. We’d just be fined and made to give the money back.” Only I wished I could believe my own words. “Tell you what, Pierre,” I continued, “disappointed as I am in you, and my wife will be more so, I’m ready to offer you another... hundred thousand pounds. But that’s absolutely as far as I’ll go. So you can take it or leave it. It’s that or nothing. And remember, if you report us to the authorities, and even if Michelle does witness against us, she’ll even have to give back the money she’s already got from us.” I was not absolutely sure of my ground on that either. Since the first hundred thousand had been paid before we had the insurance payout, it was technically nothing to do with the scam. Even so, it seemed a telling threat.

Boulanger shrugged his shoulders prior, possibly, to challenging the supposition. Except that was the very moment when he’d suddenly had to brake the car hard. He had been travelling too fast again on the approach to a traffic roundabout, and the braking counted for nothing in view of what he did next. Briefly disorientated, he’d followed habit and swung the car right, instead of left. The road had seemed empty, but not once we were driving on it in the wrong direction.

The driver of the articulated truck did his best, but he still hit us broadside. Boulanger was killed outright.

I was still in hospital at the end of two weeks, but mending fast by then. My injuries had been multiple, but not permanent or disabling. I had also been fully conscious when they pulled me from the wreckage, and capable soon afterwards of concocting a story explaining who I was and why I was in England. I identified myself as Henri Rabut, and explained that I had come over from France to collect my wife, Michelle, who was staying in a rented cottage close to Boddlestone with her friend, Mrs. Helen Talbot, whose husband they had both been nursing up to the time of his recent death. Since Mrs. Talbot had not been in any state to be left alone so soon after her bereavement, and since the cottage was small and I hadn’t wished to intrude on a widow’s grief, I had been staying at a local hotel. About my presence in Boulanger’s car, I said he was an old friend on holiday in England and that we had arranged to lunch together.