Ghosts from the Past

by Sally Spedding

  I’d been expecting to see a uniform, but told myself not to let this surprise show, rather, get straight to the point once formalities and an overview of the complicated case were over.

  “So when can I see Elisabeth Jourdain?” I asked this very senior cop whose dark ash desk was neatness itself. He glanced at his Rolex watch.

  “Let her sweat a while. They then often tweet the loudest.”

  I couldn’t disagree.

  “Oh, and by the way, we’re examining our anchor and snake man’s little gift to her. The new Browning Grand Puissance. He and Lieutenant Paranza both deserve la Guillotine, and they aren’t the only ones.”

  “… A Police issue Browning, courtesy of yet another friend…”

  “Are you sure it was Rousson?” I said.

  Something akin to anger flickered in his eyes, but that didn’t deter me.

  “I heard that it came from – quote - ‘yet another friend.’”

  Aubouchon moved a few papers about then patted them back together.

  “Who?”

  “I honestly can’t remember. When a name comes to mind, I’ll…”

  “Monsieur, bad apples are everywhere, but this implies all my police are corrupt. Not so.”

  “There has to be a ‘why’ to all this destruction,” I said, brushing away the unsavoury implication of his denial. “Why Elisabeth Jourdain apparently went to the trouble of travelling to west Wales to snatch her young nephew, arrange for her niece’s racehorse to be taken, then shoot Danny Lennox and Alain Deschamps as well as overdosing that unsuspecting priest. Never mind leaving DC McConnell and myself to be eaten alive by wolves at that windmill before shooting that same horse.” I paused for breath. “That’s a lot of revenge.”

  The gaunt, grey-haired senior gendarme turned to his new Dell computer delivered that very morning. I’d already had the third degree from one of his Lieutenants for purloining the wanted woman’s Peugeot. Risking the loss of possible vital forensic evidence. I sensed in him not only defensiveness but a noticeable lack of curiosity. With retirement looming, this was understandable, although my last year’s excursion to the eastern Pyrenees hardly fitted the image of a recently-retired cop.

  “Perhaps the boy himself will enlighten us,” he said, not using his name “And his sister.”

  I knew what was coming next. Steeled myself.

  “We relied upon you to bring her here from Trois Ruisseaux once she’d recovered from the shock of seeing her horse killed. Given how you’d seemed to have formed - how shall I say? - a working relationship.”

  Don’t react.

  “As you know,” I retaliated, “once my hire car arrived, I did my best. But she was determined.to flee. Even Robert Kassel couldn’t catch her.”

  “Let’s hope our search team and sniffer dogs can succeed.”

  “What’s your feeling?” I then ventured.

  During the tricky pause his printer began making strange noises before ejecting a sheet of paper headed with Odette Jourdain’s name and other personal details beneath.

  “Monsieur, with respect, I don’t do ‘feeling.’ I do gros effort - or, as you British say - slog.”

  Right.

  Nottingham’s devious Turner Street gang flashed through my mind yet again. Hadn’t banging them up been pure leg work? Pure grind? With Alison, of course, whom I’d still not yet managed to make contact. I could hardly imagine this guy doing the same.

  “However, without your help, neither our chief suspect or her car wouldn’t be here.” Aubouchon added.

  Something, at least.

  “Merci.”

  He then placed Odette’s sheet in a file on top of others and peered at me over the top of his rimless glasses. “You do know the history, don’t you?”

  “Only what Laure and later her father deigned to reveal under pressure.”

  “Which was?”

  For an alarming moment, it seemed as if the whole of the past forty-eight hours had heaped up next to me like some vast, dark dune, slowly encroaching… I cupped my head in my hands to keep it at bay, until Aubouchon’s voice broke through.

  “Can I fetch you a drink, Monsieur? An Upsas perhaps?”

  A best-selling, fizzy French cure-all pill.

  I shook my head.

  “I’ll be fine, thanks, with the help of a large, black coffee. But there’s something, in hindsight, I still can’t forget.”

  “What?”

  “I may be wrong, and this may sound strange, but Laure Deschamps hardly tried to stop her aunt shooting Vervain.”

  *

  The sweet, strong caffeine did indeed help, and having waited in the ensuing silence for a response to that last observation, I recounted what I and Alison had so far been told. Odette’s contribution too, was useful and, at the end, with that same sense of déja vu I’d experienced with Karen Fürst in France last year, said, “I’m convinced the Deschamps’ late Head Lad is key to of all this.”

  A nod, then a twitch of an acknowledgement. How different the reaction would have been in Nottingham; raised voices, a slap on the table. Confrontation, yes, but at least signs of beating hearts…

  I told myself to stop thinking about my old job. Living in the past.

  “Haven’t you seen any English newspapers yet?” Said Aubouchon.

  As if…

  “Well, let’s just say that here, the media in general are more discreet. Hungry, yes, like Le Figaro, but…”

  His ringing desk phone cut in. He picked it up, a frown slicing into his high forehead. “Non. It’s not possible.” He listened, scribbling something down at the same time. The names Sion Evans and Eduard Gallas repeated in shocked surprise.

  “I’ll see our armed response unit comes over immediately. Is the UK team on its way yet?”

  There came a pause in which I heard with some relief they’d be arriving around midnight. Perhaps I needed them more than the other way round.

  “Good,” said Aubouchon. “Then we make an early start.” He threw me a meaningful glance. “Stay in touch, and no more media. Understood? And keep this Sion Evans alive at all costs. I also want a round-the-clock guard on Alain Deschamps in hospital. Now.”

  He slapped the receiver down in its cradle and immediately picked it up again, pressing a re-dial button. “Anything yet on Paranza and Rousson? Mathieu Deschamps? I meant to ask.”

  “Non.”

  “Hopefully, Mademoiselle Jourdain can help us there.”

  *

  He stood up to survey the wall-sized map of France, lit from above by a strip-light. Various red-topped pins stood scattered over the Poitou-Charentes region on names such as Mignonville, Soulebec and Villedieu… He added a second pin just north-east of Soulebec.

  “Where’s that?” I asked. “Les Tourels?”

  Another tiny smile. “Could be, even though both men had been seen at the abattoir fighting each other with meat cleavers.”

  “A falling-out among thieves?” I suggested.

  “Who knows?”

  Then, together, we tracked in more detail the other events so far and saw how near Odette had been to that same Berthigny windmill. How she’d still have to explain being a passenger in that dead priest’s white van and how, most likely from fear, had left him for dead.

  “Quite a vicious circle,” added Aubuchon wrily.

  “The ninth circle of Hell,” I said, eliciting a sharp, puzzled look. “According to her niece, Elisabeth Jourdain has an image from The Divine Comedy tattooed in a very private place. It’s her thing. Her obsession.”

  “I don’t understand.” Yet his eyes had registered obvious interest.

  “Dante’s purgatory especially,” I said. “Something else Laure admitted, and if her aunt is strip-searched, it’ll be seen. And by the way, despite what I’ve observed of Laure, I’m quite worried about her mental state now her precious horse is dead.”

  “I’ll order a snack for us both,” Aubuchon said as if, like that Renaissance poet himself, his own
mind had been wandering. You’ll be glad of it. We’re in for a long haul. Then we can collate everything so far, ready for when your fellow countrymen arrive”

  “I’m not familiar with any of them,” I said as brightly as I could. “But I’ve heard Detective Sergeant George Hopper’s good. Came to Nottingham from the Met not long ago.” I couldn’t repeat what Alison had said about him and hoped my listener hadn’t picked up too much gossip about us. Hoped too, he wouldn’t try and humiliatingly squeeze me out.

  “We need more than good, Monsieur Lyon, if both brother and sister are to be found, plus the pilot and that Hervieux gendarmerie pair, Paranza and Rousson. Also, our two thugs from Mignonville. Especially them. To discover how loyal they really are.”

  *

  Aubuchon’s phone rang again and I overheard every word coming from the Forensic Research Centre in Rosny-sur-Bois.

  Two stray bullets found in the gravel at Les Saules Pleureurs match the one removed from Alain Deschamps’ groin, and those with which Elisabeth Jourdain also killed that grey thoroughbred he’d rescued it as a yearling from the Gallas abattoir. A rather different story to Laure’s. As for that syringe she’d mentioned, there was still no sign.

  *

  Our ‘snack’ which materialised as a substantial supper of veal cutlets on a bed of rice accompanied by a salade verte, was interrupted by various incoming and ougoing phone calls. Philippe Aubouchon, still slightly detached even under pressure, sipped at his glass of Vittel while gobbets of other news ebbed and flowed down the wires. One in particular, brought a look of concern. Made him turn away from his plate.

  The Welsh butcher, showing little grief for his partner’s death, was still keen to pocket Elisabeth Jourdain’s promised two thousand pounds sterling, while Eduard Gallas wanted out altogether. Neither admitted knowing the whereabouts of the two bent flics Rousson and Paraza, or indeed Mathieu Deschamps and the other occupants of that police helicopter. As for Laure, in even greater danger from self-harm or worse, not a whisper.

  Yes, I’d just been disloyal to her, and Alison would have put me straight on that one. But would she, after the puzzling discrepancies about the horse and her age? How she’d stood by as Elisabeth had shot him?

  Yet that wasn’t all. I’d learned from Robert Kassel how well Laure had known his eleven-year-old daughter. Gone riding with her and been, it seemed, her best friend when others had mocked her learning difficulties including dyslexia. Laure hadn’t mentioned any of this to either me or Alison, but had at the time, been questioned closely by Aubuchon’s team. Her interview reports lay tantalisingly beneath her grandmother’s file, but when I asked to see them, the phone rang yet again. The moment gone.

  And then, with my mouth full of the last of the rice, I realised where she might be.

  Aubuchon’s call ended.

  “Where’s Alain Deschamps’s hospital?” I queried, ejecting a few grains as I did so and embarrassed, picked them up.

  “City centre. Why?”

  “She may have gone there to see him.”

  “Who?”

  “Laure of course.”

  The man was human after all. Probably knackered, like me. He shook his head.

  “I doubt it. No love lost between them. You said so yourself that she’d wished him dead. Odette’s confirmed that too. Their relationship worsened after her mother hanged herself. Terrible business, that…”

  “Laure lied about Vervain’s origins.”

  “Pardon?”

  “She told me his dam died giving birth to him. How she’d brought him up on the bottle. Another inconsistency.”

  The senior cop punched in yet another number on his phone. “I’ll check your theory about her with her father’s surgeon. He’s on a late shift tonight. Nothing to lose…”

  *

  We soon learnt that neither Laure Deschamps nor anyone resembling her had so far visited the shot racehorse trainer in the University Hospital’s High Dependency Unit. The armed guard was still in place outside the unit’s door, and the patient, still heavily sedated, had just regained consciousness.

  “What interests me,” said Aubouchon once the surgeon had finished speaking, “is why he was at the former family home in the first place. A busy man with schedules to keep and since re-locating, even more successful?”

  “Elisabeth asked him to be there. She told me herself. Wanting him more involved in finding his kids. But why shoot his genitals? In revenge, maybe?”

  “And I could ask, why the horse? Why Daniel Lennox?”

  “Something’s not adding up, and yet…” I said, suddenly in need of a large glass of Sancerre. “My ex-colleague from Nottingham and Laure met up with her father just outside Wales on our trek to find the transporter. Having admitted becoming close to Elisabeth after his wife’s first miscarriage, Laure accused him of sniffing after her like an old fox, waiting for her after she’d finished work at her school. Apparently, she’d chased him even when he and Christine had first met.”

  Aubouchon pushed back his chair. An unequivocal full-stop.

  “Perhaps when he’s ready, Monsieur Deschamps will enlighten us.”

  *

  The Chef d’Escadron got to his feet, pulled the cloth napkin from under his chin and gathered up our plates, cutlery and glasses on to a tray. A bachelor, like me, clearly used to self-service. When I offered to help, he gestured for me to stay seated and pointed to Odette Jourdain’s file.

  “Take a look.,” he said. “A brave woman. Loyal to her country and family - but for how long? She feels - in her own words like a reed blown every which way by ‘forces of darkness.’ And with her excellent record in the Resistance, she’s not someone given to flights of fancy. My aim is to install her in a safe house, which even you, Monsieur, can’t know of. I’m sorry, but hope you understand.”

  He’d balled his right hand into a fist and brought it down on the file. “All yours, then we go below.”

  “Below?”

  “To see the daughter she wishes she’d never had.”

  *

  Having read the day’s date and preliminary notes at the top of Odette’s first sheet, I kept Elisabeth’s name in my head.

  Interview recorded on 14/3/87 at 12.58 p.m. The witness’s voice slightly breathless but resolute.

  According to the seventy-two -year-old, everything had begun to go wrong in the summer of 1976, a year after Danny Lennox had arrived as Head Lad at Les Saules Pleureurs. Christine, her younger daughter, had been concerned about her husband whom she deeply loved, seeing too much of Elisabeth who’d finished working at the abattoir and just completed a post-graduate teacher training. She’d then been made Head of the La Coeur de la Sainte-Marie in Boisvilliers. A surprise appointment to the area’s most prestigious single-sex church school.

  So worried was Christine, that she’d asked Laure to spy on them both and report back. At first Laure hated being asked, then seeing what they did together and where. But gradually - and this is what Christine confessed to me just before she died - the girl seemed to need it like a drug. Only too late, did Christine have to bribe her to stop.”

  “Too late?” I asked Aubouchon, showing him that puzzling sentence as a knock on the door preceded a young gendarme who silently took away the loaded, lunch tray without making eye contact.

  “Because one evening, while Christine was clearing the dinner table, from which her husband had been absent yet again, she’d caught Laure watching them in the barn called La Cathédrale. There was a fight. A serious set-to, during which Alain Deschamps slunk away, his trousers still around his knees.”

  Good God…

  “Was that how Elisabeth got her bruise?”

  “That came later.”

  Aubouchon checked his watch while I pushed away thoughts I shouldn’t be having. Both women, one middle-aged, the other, grown to half her age, with motive enough for revenge. But for what exactly? Whatever the theories, I was still convinced of Danny Lennox being a major player in the hideous p
uzzle.

  “When?”

  “It’s all down there, Monsieur,” was said with some impatience and the jangling of keys. “But please be quick. We have an appointment to keep.”

  I duly skimmed the rest of Odette’s story with the growing sense of incompleteness. Perhaps she was fearful of revealing too much. Perhaps as a mother, there were things even she’d been unable to say to a very senior officer. Whether a friend or not.

  “Best be off,” said Aubouchon, retrieving the file and its contents before secreting it with the others in a well-disguised wall safe fronted by shelving. “Or our latest catch will be getting ready for her beauty sleep.”

  *

  Ten holding cells lay sandwiched between the Headquarter’s main administrative floor and the subterranean staff car park. An armed gendarme who also seemed close to retirement, saluted us then dutifully unlocked the unit’s main grille. Concentrated smells of cooking, drink and drains made my recent meal shift in my gut. But this alone didn’t make me feel as if something was badly wrong. Everything was too quiet.

  Suddenly, Aubouchon’s ringing phone broke the silence. Reception not good. He looked at me as news came through second-hand from the ballistics department and forensics.

  “Our Mademoiselle Jourdin is up to her armpits in trouble,” he muttered once the call had ended. “She’d better have some damned good answers for us then the Judge tomorrow.”

  “Has she talked so far?”

  “Non.”

  “Have any of her belongings been searched?”

  An impatient nod. “Just her purse containing two hundred francs and a finished tube of blemish concealer in a coat pocket. No passport or bank card. By the way, she threatened suicide even though I’d offered a female officer to guard her cell.”

  *

  “Numéro quatre,” Aubouchon said to the guard once he’d shared another important item of news from the Forensic Research centre in Rosny-sur-Bois. Traces of the Noctran sleeping drug found in Elisabeth Jourdain’s car’s boot, matched what had killed the priest and been used on Vervain in the transporter. There’d also been several youthful hairs which matched well enough those found at Les Saules Pleureurs. Thirdly, the red Peugeot had been stolen a month ago from a used car dealer near Vierzon, giving her time to arrange false documents.”