Page 1 of The Paris Trip

PROLOGUE

If he’d been prancing through Château Rémy in scarlet heels, sporting a devil’s tail and a flashy red cape, Leo could have understood why everybody he passed was turning to stare at him, apparently amazed by his long-overdue return to the family home.

As it was, he was dressed sombrely in dark clothes, as befitted the occasion, and making his way quietly and respectfully through these dimly lit corridors thronging with grieving friends and relatives.

There really was nothing remarkable about him today. He’d shaved off his trademark beard and moustache, ignoring the severe pangs this cost him, and even tied back his long hair with a black ribbon, to look less ‘wild’. Yes, that was the word his grandmother had used to describe him last time he was home. You look like a wild beast, Leo. Conscious of not wanting to upset her, he had taken steps to tame his appearance before getting on the train first thing that morning.

Yet still, at every corner, these friends, relatives and hangers-on ogled him, wide-eyed and prurient, whispering among themselves like snakes hissing in the darkness.

‘Ah, c’est Leo… Leo Rémy.’

At last, he reached the room where his brother lay in state, like a dead king.

The door stood open, waiting for him.

Leo halted and swallowed. His hand went to the knot of his unfamiliar tie, wishing he could loosen it. Tear it off it, in fact. But some things were simply impossible. They could only be faced and endured.

Like the body of his older brother.

He squared his shoulders, accepted a handshake from old Alfonse on the door, who doubtless had been standing there for hours like a guardsman, and stepped into the room.

Francis had been laid out on the dining room table, its length now draped in black velvet. Like Leo, he had been dressed in his best suit. Though Francis’s was an austere three-piece with black waistcoat and tie. No doubt he was untroubled by the knot held firm against his throat. His brother’s shoes completed this picture of urbane professionalism. Expensive black leather, highly polished, not a speck of dirt to be seen.

It didn’t look like Francis. At least, his face was the same. Noble, patrician, his hair thick and black and parted in the usual way. But the rest of him…

No, this didn’t look like Francis at all.

His brother would have hated that formal suit, which no doubt their weeping grandmother had picked out for his funeral. He had preferred jeans and tee-shirts in the summer, and jeans with hoodies in the winter. And always trainers on his feet. Even when he had worn a suit, for weddings and funerals, he’d paired it with trainers. Whomever those shoes had belonged to, he doubted it had been Francis. Perhaps they had been bought specially for the occasion.

The last shoes Francis would ever wear. And he would have hated them.

His throat choked with sudden, inappropriate laughter, and he wished he could make a joke about it.

To Francis.

‘Hey, nice shoes… You up in court, bro?’

But he couldn’t.

Francis was dead and Leo would never get to mock him again. Never argue with him again. Never have a brother again.

‘I’m very sorry for your loss,’ a voice said at his elbow. Some distant relative from Bordeaux, a man he barely knew, put a hand on his shoulder. ‘So tragic. To be taken so young… How old was he, Leo? Thirty-three? Thirty-four?’

‘He was thirty-six,’ Leo replied thickly, dismayed by the emotion clogging up his throat.

‘Do they know how it happened?’

This was the last thing he wanted to talk about. But they expected him to crack, didn’t they? To rip off his tie and head for the nearest bar…

‘They may never know,’ he managed to say, though with difficulty. It was a miracle he could speak at all. His tongue had suddenly become several sizes too large for his mouth. At any moment, it might flop out over his lower lip, like a dog’s tongue, and he would start drooling… ‘Pilot error seems to be what they’re going with. It should have been a routine flight. He was flying solo back from Bordeaux when –’

Leo stopped, unable to go on, and bowed his head.

‘I’ll leave you alone with him.’ The relative, whose name still escaped him, discreetly slipped away.

He struggled to remember exactly what he’d said to Francis the last time they’d met, four summers ago. It would have been a few days after his half-sister’s birthday in mid-June, most likely. He liked Bernadette, despite her abrupt, slightly brittle ways, and had come to Paris to wish her a happy birthday in person…

But he’d also been hoping to borrow a little money from Francis.

---