Page 21 of Under Her Protection

"As you wish."

They did the courtyard. They did the lodge. They did the service lane along the north wall, which was a gap Leo's field brain did not like, and which she told Beaumont, without euphemism, was a gap. Beaumont agreed it was a gap. Neither of them had to pretend about it. Some of her dislike of him eased. He was going to do the job.

They went back inside and up to the first floor. A drawing room that smelled faintly of beeswax. A dining room that had not been used, Beaumont said, in eleven months. A small breakfast room off the kitchen which, he noted, Madame did use. A study with two telephones on the desk. A smaller office that was Madame Guérin's.

Then the staircase to the principal floor.

"The bedroom."

"Yes."

"I need one minute inside."

Beaumont hesitated. "Madame does not permit staff to enter her private floor."

"I am not staff."

"She will want to know."

"Tell her."

He considered this. He took out a small radio, made a very short call in French. A very short reply came back. He returned the radio to his pocket.

"One minute," he said.

Leo went in.

The bedroom was the first room she had seen in the house that admitted, by any detail, that Vivienne Strauss was a person. A bed, wide, grey linen, made with military neatness. A silk robe across a chair in the corner, the only stray object, which Leo did not look at for longer than she needed to. A small book facedown on the nightstand. A photograph in a silver frame on the bureau, black and white, old, an elderly woman Leo guessed was a grandmother. No jewelry out. No scent bottles out. Nothing cluttering the dresser. The whole room was a room a woman came to only to sleep in, and even here the pretense of perfection had been maintained.

Leo crossed to the windows. She checked the sightlines from the rooftops opposite. She checked the lock on the French door to the small balcony. She checked that the interior of the room could not be seen from any roof angle she could identify without climbing, and that the angles she could not identify without climbing were ones Beaumont was going to need to put a camera on by Friday.

She stepped back out.

"Clean," she said.

"Good."

"Friday. I want a camera on the north rooftop corner. We are blind there."

"Understood."

"Staff at sixteen hundred."

"Yes."

They went back down. Leo paused at the library door, which was closed, and did not put her hand to it. She carried on past it, down to the lodge, out into the courtyard, and for a moment stood in the thin Paris afternoon, in the gravel, and allowed herself the small private acknowledgment of where she was and what she had just done.

She had met the client. She had held the line. The client had not liked her and had looked at her anyway, long enough that both of them had felt the look and chosen not to name it.

Avery's voice, low in her ear: "You alive?"

"I'm alive."

"How is she?"

Leo considered the answer for three paces of gravel.

"She's going to be hard work," she said.