Page 102 of A Death in Cornwall

“It’s possible that I picked a few pockets in the casino. I also had a nice score at the Hôtel de Paris.”

“Room safe?”

She nodded.

“How did you open it?”

“Magic word.”

“What was inside?”

“A diamond necklace and a hundred thousand euros in cash.”

“How much did you get for the necklace?”

“Two fifty.”

“Antwerp?”

“Actually, I returned it to Harry Winston on the Avenue Montaigne in Paris. They kindly gave me a full refund despite the fact that I couldn’t find my receipt.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Monjean. On the opposite side of the boulevard, a well-dressed man was approaching the entrance of Number 41. “Looks like a British lawyer to me.”

“How can you tell?”

“Could be the stick up his ass.”

Ingrid nodded toward the attractive young woman approaching the building from the opposite direction. “And here comes Mademoiselle Dubois.”

The well-dressed man arrived first. He inserted his cardkey into the reader and held the door open for the secretary—and for the man who emerged from the back of a Mercedes sedan. It was Ian Harris, founding partner of the dirty law firm that bore his name.

“I think I’m going to enjoy this,” said Monjean. “I only wish we could steal something from him other than those files.”

“They’re worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”

“Not to me. But it is rather ironic, don’t you think?”

“Thieves stealing from thieves?”

“Exactly.”

“Poetic justice, I’d say.” Ingrid’s phone shivered with an incoming message.

“Something wrong?” asked Monjean.

She glanced at the man with gray-blond hair and a square jaw coming along the pavement. “Does he look like a murderer to you?”

“The good ones never do.”

Trevor Robinson jammed his cardkey into the reader and went into the building.

“Seen enough?” asked Ingrid.

“Oui.” Monjean swallowed the rest of his coffee. “Let’s get out of here.”

***

At a computer shop on the boulevard d’Italie, Ingrid purchased two palm-sized external hard drives with a combined storage space of sixteen terabytes, more than enough to handle Harris Weber’s sensitive attorney-client files. Then she marched René Monjean over to an American clothing retailer near the yacht club and supervised the purchase of a blazer, a pair of gabardine trousers, leather oxfords, a blue button-down dress shirt, and an attaché case.

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