Colin Forbes - The Stone leopard

`Can't you hurry it up?' Lennox asked.

`I am starting work on it now,' the mechanic informed him. `I can hurry it up yes. It will take two hours.'

Lennox ordered a second cognac and two jambon sandwiches, which arrived as large hunks of appetizing French bread sliced apart and with ham inside them. Had the mechanic said three hours he would have been tempted to try and hire another car. He sank his teeth hungrily into the sandwich; two hours shouldn't make all that difference to the state of the world.

Annette Devaud, now spending the evening of her life at Woodcutter's Farm, had held one of the key positions in the Leopard's Resistance group in 1944: she had controlled the network of couriers, mostly girls in their late teens and early twenties, who had carried messages backwards and forwards under the very noses of the enemies. Almost forty years old, slim and wiry, she had been a handsome woman with a proud Roman nose and an air of authority which had rivalled that of the Leopard himself. Of all the men and women who had worked under him, the Leopard had most respected Annette Devaud, possibly because she was an outspoken anti- Communist. 'At least I know where I am with her,' he once said. And Annette Devaud had another distinction-she knew what the Leopard looked like.

Because he found it useful to build up the reputation of an invincible personality, the Leopard kept it a secret when he was shot in the leg during a running battle in the forests. The wound did not take long to heal, but for a short period he was bed-ridden. It was Annette Devaud who shared his solitary convalescence, nursing him swiftly back to health, and it was during these few weeks that she came to know exactly what he looked like.

Annette Devaud heard, but did not see, the celebrations of Liberation Day; she had gone blind overnight. No one was able to diagnose the cause of her affliction, although some thought it was the news of the death of her husband who had fought with General Leclerc's division. Then again it could have been the death of her nineteen-year-old daughter Lucie, who drowned when the Leopard drove his car into the river to avoid Dieter Wohl's ambush. This happened after Annette had nursed the Leopard back to health when he was shot.

At the end of the war, returning to her home, Woodcutter's Farm, she remained there for over thirty years. The onset of blindness was an even greater blow than it might have been for some people; Annette had been a talented amateur artist who drew portraits in charcoal, and this too she put behind her as she adjusted to her new life. But in a folder she kept the collection of portrait sketches she had made during the war from memory. Among the collection were two lifelike portraits of the Leopard.

Annette Devaud had endured another tragedy. Against her will, her daughter Lucie had insisted on becoming one of her couriers, and during her time with the Resistance the nineteen-year-old girl had taken as a lover an ex-accountant called Albert Camors. Out of the liaison a child had been born only six months before the Leopard drove Lucie Devaud into the river. Taking its mother's name, the child was called Lucie. Camors survived the war but quarrelled violently with the strong-willed Annette Devaud and he refused to let her have anything to do with the child. Prospering in peacetime-he became a Paris stockbroker-Camors brought up the child himself and never married.

A solitary but strong-willed child-reproducing in some ways the character of her grandmother, Annette, whom she never saw-Lucie grew up in a bachelor household and developed an obsession about the mother she couldn't remember. From her father she heard about the Leopard, about how her mother had died. Then, when she was almost thirty, Camors expired in the arms of his latest mistress and Lucie inherited his fortune and an apartment in the Place des Vosges. And for the first time she visited her blind grandmother.

The two women took to each other immediately and one day Annette, talking about the war, showed her grand-daughter the folder of sketches, including the two of the Leopard. Lucie instantly recognized the portraits, but in her secretive way she said nothing to the blind woman. Using the names of people who had belonged to the Resistance group-which Annette had mentioned-she began checking. With her father's money to finance the investigation, she employed a shrewd lawyer called Max Rosenthal to dig into the Leopard's background. And without saying anything to Annette, she removed the two portrait sketches from the folder and took them back to her Paris apartment.

It was Max Rosenthal who traced Gaston Martin, the Leopard's wartime deputy, to Guiana where he was on the verge of being released from prison. Lucie Devaud wrote a careful letter to the man Annette had mentioned, hinting to Martin that the Leopard had become an important political figure in France, and then waited for a reply. The letter reached Martin shortly after he had been released from prison and he took his time about replying to her.

It was during the opening of a Paris fashion show that Lucie played the macabre trick which finally convinced her she had uncovered the real identity of the Leopard. She had seen the animal in a rue de Rivoli shop which specialized in exotic presents costing a great deal of money. Purchasing the animal, she kept it in her apartment and then obtained a ticket for the fashion show in the rue Cambon. In a newspaper she had read that President Florian would be attending the show with his wife, Lise.

When Guy Florian arrived escorting Lise-he was attending the show to dispel rumours that they were no longer on speaking terms-the show had already started, models were parading, and Lucie Devaud was sitting in a front-row seat with her draped overcoat concealing the underneath of her chair. Florian and his wife sat down almost opposite her. The show was almost over when Lucie tugged at the chain she held in her hand and which led underneath her draped chair. A model had just walked past when the leopard cub emerged from under the chair, stood on the carpet with its legs braced and bared its teeth.

It was over in a moment. An armed plain-clothes security man, one of several sent to the show by Marc Grelle, caught the expression on the president's face, grabbed the chain out of Lucie's hand, tugged the animal and led it out of the salon, followed by its owner with her coat draped over her arm. Florian recovered quickly, made an off-hand gesture and cracked a joke. 'I have had nothing to drink and yet there are spots in front of my eyes!'

Outside in the foyer Lucie took the chain from the detective without a word and left the building. The salon owner had been amused when she arrived with a leopard cub. 'How chic,' he had remarked to his directrice. 'We should have one of the models parading with that animal…' Getting into her car, parking the leopard cub on the front seat beside her, Lucie drove back to the Place des Vosges. On the following day she returned the animal to the shop, which accepted it back at a much-reduced price.

So often a woman takes a decision on feminine instinct; so often she is right. Lucie Devaud was now certain Guy Florian was the Leopard. She had seen a certain expression in his eyes before he recovered, a sudden wariness and alarm as he stared back at her-as though when he saw the look in her own eyes he had understood. 'Who the hell are you? You have found me out…' She knew there was no way she could be traced: she had paid for the leopard cub in cash and had applied for the salon ticket in a false name. It was while she was driving back to her apartment that she decided she would kill Guy Florian. The following morning the letter from Gaston Martin arrived.

Martin replied to her letter with an equally guarded communication. He said that he was interested in her theory and told her that he was returning soon by ship from Guiana. Could they meet when he arrived in Paris? Lucie Devaud wrote back immediately, suggesting that they met at a small Left Bank hotel called Cecile in the rue de Bac. Presumably she was not too keen on inviting an ex-convict to her luxurious apartment in the Place des Vosges-or possibly she was still displaying the secretiveness which was so much a part of her life.