Vince May - Presumed Dead

He looked at her hands, then at her knees and said, ‘I think you are right. They are healing nicely.’ Letting her hands go, he went back to stirring his saucepan.

‘Thank you for all those things you left out for me,’ she said. ‘It was very kind of you.’

‘I hope the makeup and hair things were all right, it was all they had in the village shop.’

‘You went out specially to get those things for me?’

‘Yes, and to get some fresh bread. You can not eat in France without fresh bread.’

‘That’s true,‘ she said, wandering over to the table and helped herself to a piece of the bread. ‘I love French bread.’

‘I’m glad you found something that fitted you,’ Philippe said, looking at the dress. ‘Tomorrow, I will take you into Nîmes and you can choose some clothes for yourself. I’m sure you would prefer to wear your own things.’

‘No,’ she protested, ‘you’ve done too much for me already. I’ll just wash out my shorts and top and make do with those until I go home.’

Putting his wooden spoon down again, he came and stood in front of her and said, ‘Now look, I know it is important for a woman to have nice clothes and to feel good in what she wears, and I am sure you do not feel comfortable in Louisa’s things. It would give me great pleasure to take you shopping, please don’t deny me that.’

‘You are the most considerate man I have ever met,‘ she said, smiling.

‘Good, it is settled then. Tomorrow after breakfast, we go to Nîmes. Now, Madame, your dinner is ready.’

Alice sat down at the table while Philippe dished up two steaming bowls of spaghetti bolognese. The food and wine were delicious and they were both too busy eating to say very much during the meal. After they had emptied their bowls and loaded the dishwasher, they took their wine outside and sat on the veranda in the cool night air, looking up at the moon and stars. There was perfect silence, except for the occasional sound of a distant car, snaking its way along the road, piercing the darkness with yellow pools of light.

Alice sipped her wine appreciatively, letting warm contentment flood over her. ‘You know Philippe,’ she said softly, ‘you’ve told me hardly anything about yourself. Whenever we’ve spoken, it’s always been about me.’

‘What do you want to know?’ he asked.

‘Everything. I want to know everything about you.’

‘Let’s see,’ he started. ‘I am forty one years old, I am the senior partner in a firm of architects in Nîmes, I live in this house and my hobby is mountain climbing.’

‘Is that it?’ Alice asked.

‘What else do you want to know?’

‘Where you were born, what you were like as a little boy, where you went to school, when you got married… everything.’

They talked long into the night about their lives and the way they felt about things. Alice told him about her early life in the States, how her mother had died shortly after she’d been born, how her father had brought her up with the help of an English nanny, about her university days, her charity work, and sadly, about her father’s recent death.

Philippe told her all about his early childhood in Nîmes, his time at university in Paris, the climbing expeditions he’d been on, his early jobs, about setting up his architect’s practice, about buying and rebuilding the house they were sitting outside, and about his five year marriage to Louisa. He told her how he’d wanted children but Louisa had been against it because it would have meant her giving up climbing. It had been a real disappointment to him.

All the time that Philippe was speaking, Alice listened and asked questions. She found him fascinating. Intelligent yet simple, strong yet gentle, willful yet kind, but above all, she found him considerate and sensitive. He was all she had ever wanted in a man, almost the complete opposite of her husband, whom she’d grown to regard as insensitive, selfish and grasping.

It was after two a.m. before they turned in. Philippe locked up while Alice rinsed the wineglasses, then they walked to the back of the house together, where Philippe wished her goodnight at her bedroom door then went into his own room, closing the door behind him.

She smiled to herself as she got ready for bed. How completely typical of him not to press his advantage, she thought dreamily, which is just as well. After all that wine and the moonlight, I wouldn’t have taken much persuading! With that thought, she climbed into her own bed and turned out the light.

By the time Alice was asleep, the search parties in Chamonix had completed a sweep of the Mer de Glace both up and down from the Montenvers terminus. The weather conditions had been appalling, with visibility down to just a few feet, and the searchers were exhausted. In order to ensure that the entire area was thoroughly searched, two teams of men with dogs were spread across the full width of the glacier, just feet apart, and equipped with lanterns and poles for probing the thick snow and the ice crevasses.

One team had worked their way up the glacier as far as the point where it split into two smaller floes and became too steep to traverse, whilst the other had worked down the ice until it petered out and melted into the river Averyon.

Now they were packing up for the night. Their next job was to work their way up the Charpoua Glacier, but because of the avalanches, that was far too dangerous a job to tackle in the dark, even for ten thousand Euros. They would be back at first light.

David Wiseman left the small hotel in Calais town center in time to catch the eight a.m. ferry to Dover. He’d read in his guidebook that the white cliffs of Dover were well worth seeing, so had decided against using the Channel Tunnel. He checked his hire car in at the rental desk in the ferry terminal, then bought a ticket and joined the boat as a foot passenger.

One of his tails had followed him in and had been standing behind him in the queue at the ticket counter to see what he bought. When his turn came, he bought two tickets for the same ferry: one for a foot passenger and one for a car with driver. He quickly went outside to give his partner the car ticket then hurried back into the terminal, just in time to follow David onto the courtesy bus that took them out to the ferry.

Alice slept late, and the first thing she registered when she woke up was the delicious smell of coffee. Gasping for a cup, she quickly threw on her bathrobe, rinsed her face, dragged a comb through her hair and padded into the kitchen.

There were fresh bread and croissants on the table and a percolator full of dark, steaming coffee on the stove. Philippe had a newspaper spread out on the side and was scanning it intently when Alice came in and wished him a cheery good morning.

Instead of looking up at her and smiling as she’d expected, he looked deeply concerned and said, ‘I think you had better sit down. There is a story about you in the paper.’

Alice sat at the table looking anxious while Philippe folded the paper then handed it to her. The first thing she saw was her own face staring out of the page at her. She recognized it instantly as her passport photograph, she’d always hated it. She wondered how they had got hold of it. Above it, the headline AMERICAN HEIRESS MISSING IN THE ALPS leapt out of the page. Frowning, she started to read aloud in French. ‘A massive search was launched yesterday for Lady Webley, believed to be lost or injured somewhere near the Mer de Glace glacier, south of Chamonix in the French Alps. Alice Webley is the wife of British nobleman Sir Ross Webley, and owner of the massive American Sanderson Corporation, conservatively estimated to be worth five hundred million US dollars.