Twenty minutes out of Paris and five minutes shy of the Evry autoroute junction, Sabir’s attention was caught by a road sign – thirty kilometres to Fontainebleau. And Fontainebleau was only ten short kilometres downriver from Samois. The pharmacist had told him so. They’d even had a brief, mildly flirtatious discussion about Henri II, Catherine de Medici and Napoleon who had apparently used the place to bid farewell to his Old Guard before leaving for exile on Elba.
Better to forget the autoroute and head for Samois.
Didn’t they have number-plate recognition on the autoroutes? Hadn’t he heard that somewhere? What if they had already traced him to Tone’s fl at? It wouldn’t be long before they connected him with Tone’s Audi, too. And then they’d have him cold. They’d simply station a few more cop cars at the toll booth exit and reel him in like a finnock.
If he could only get the quatrains from this Chris person, he might at least be able to persuade the police that he was, indeed, a bona fide writer and not a psycho on the prowl. And why should the gypsy’s death have had anything to do with the verses anyway? Such people were always engaging in feuds, weren’t they? It was probably only an argument over money or a woman and he, Sabir, had simply got in the way of it. When you looked at it like that, the whole thing took on a far more benevolent aspect.
Anyway, he had an alibi. The pharmacist would remember him, surely? He’d told her all about the gypsy’s behaviour. It simply didn’t make sense for him to have tortured and killed the gypsy with his hand torn to shreds like that. The police would see that, wouldn’t they? Or would they think he’d followed the gypsy and taken revenge on him after the bar fight?
Sabir shook his head. One thing was for certain. He needed rest. If he carried on like this he would begin to hallucinate.
Forcing himself to stop thinking and to start acting, Sabir slewed the car across the road and down a woodland track, just two kilometres short of the village of Samois itself.