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

Of course, it had been urgently necessary to deal with Michelle. In the new circumstances, I didn’t believe she would have the nerve to persist with Boulanger’s blackmail plan on her own, but I had to be sure. Happily, I was right. I confronted her with his admitted perfidy as soon as she and Helen came to the hospital. Helen was profoundly shocked, and Michelle broke down in tears of shame and embarrassment — which to outside observers passed for tears of joy at her “husband’s” survival. Even so, it was as well for our general credibility that this scene took place in a small four-bedded hospital ward, in which I was the only patient that day. Michelle showed surprisingly little grief over Boulanger’s death. It seemed that there had not been much true affection between them — he had simply been using her as he had used us. She more or less threw herself on our mercy, saying that he’d forced her to go along with his disloyal plan against her will. Then she begged us still to give her the second hundred thousand and to let her go back to her birthplace near Lyons. It was significant that, according to her, Boulanger had only declared his love for her, and proposed marriage, the week after he had engineered the Rabuts’ involvement in the insurance scam.

The unhappy woman now planned to buy a farm to work with her brother and his family. She volunteered that she would still cooperate willingly over the divorce, putting proceedings in hand in France immediately. We had already discovered that a “quickee” divorce was as simple there as it was in England or America. Since, by this time, the money we had agreed to pay Michelle would be in her bank account next day, the simplest and smartest thing to do was to pack her off to France straightaway. Indeed, for her to go back by herself, leaving her putative husband-to-be cared for by another woman, would provide useful grounds for the divorce.

So poor misguided Boulanger got his deserts, and a happy ending seemed to be in store for the rest of us.

It was at the end of my third week in hospital that the police came to see me again. At first I assumed the visit was to clarify points in my first statement about the accident, until I realised that these were a different type of police — plainclothes officers, not uniformed, three of them in all, and one of them French. Helen was with them, looking miserable.

My mistake had been in interrupting Boulanger in the car when he was saying it would not be in my interests if he dropped dead — which, of course, is exactly what the wretched man did a split second later. He had pretty certainly been about to inform me that he’d left a letter with a Bordeaux lawyer to be handed to the police if he died suddenly in suspicious circumstances — showing that he trusted me a good deal less than I had always trusted him.

It had been ten days before the lawyer, hearing of Boulanger’s demise, and the manner of it, had decided to take what, on lawyerly consideration, seemed to him the proper action. After that, things had moved fast, with the French and British police and the insurance company working in friendly cooperation.

I was right about one thing. After getting all their money back, the British insurance company decided not to press charges. They didn’t want the case advertised because it would have made them look stupid or careless, or both. After investigation, the police also dropped the idea that I could somehow have been responsible for taking Boulanger’s life — which I clearly couldn’t have been, not without putting my own life in equal danger. Even so, the Crown Prosecutor put me on trial for impersonating a dead person, with criminal intent. Helen and Michelle were charged with complicity.

The hearing took place in England. Michelle was acquitted because her lawyer claimed she had been a grieving widow callously led astray. She’d had to return the second hundred thousand pounds to the insurance company, of course, but she had kept the first one, and there was no legal way of making her give that back to us. We’d hoped she might have shared it with us at least, but it had already been invested in that family farm, or her brother swore it had been, and he was a hard and unsympathetic man who overruled her as easily as Boulanger had done.

Helen was convicted and fined £20,000 — which cleared us out. She has returned to her old bookshop job in London, and glad of the chance.

The judge gave me eighteen months. Thanks to good behaviour, I shall be released next week after serving only half the term.

Except for what Helen brings in, we’re penniless. This is why I hope your production company will consider making a film of our true story, which has yet to be told publicly in the detail I have set down in this letter.

I anxiously look forward to hearing from you.

The Bones by Peter Turnbull