by Manda Scott
‘Can you send me a picture? Give me the widest angle you can get of the body and the area around.’
‘Sec …’
A click, an electronic bi-tone and an image arrives on her phone. Pierre Fayette’s perfect kitchen is a ruin of blood and brains.
‘No.’ Someone holds a door open for her. She’s through and her car is a dozen paces away, in Elodie’s space. ‘He would never do that. This isn’t suicide. We have a second murder.’ In her mind’s eye is her list, and one name, flashing bold. She spins. Martha is holding the door. ‘Where’s Martin Gillard?’
‘At his desk, last thing I saw.’
‘Tell him if he leaves the building, I’ll have him arrested on suspicion of double murder.’
‘Ah, OK.’
And to Rollo: ‘Is there still a maroon silk scarf on the back of the door?’
‘Yep.’
‘Get it in a bag and send it to forensics. I want to know if Sophie Destivelle ever wore it. Get Petit-Evard there. Leave Sylvie at the airport. Talking to Elodie is still a priority. I’m on my way.’
Pierre Fayette’s driveway has been sealed off, and his neighbours have been persuaded to leave the scene.
Fayette’s body lies as it did in the photograph that Rollo sent: half slumped in the corner between the oven and the fridge, suit jacket flopped open, tie askew. Picaut wants to straighten it, to return him to the order of his life.
The kettle is still warm. She asks, ‘Where’s the coffee?’
Rollo shakes his head. ‘There isn’t any.’
A single blue mug stands on the counter. She pulls on latex gloves and eases open the cupboard immediately beneath. Inside, five mugs stand in a row on the top shelf in careful order: red, blue, blue, red, red. To the right of the last red is space for one mug.
‘So we’re looking for someone who’s either colour blind, or careless. Get fingerprints done on all the mugs. Our shooter will have worn gloves after the event, but he might not have worn them when he first came in. Rollo—’ He’s there, in the doorway. She points back over her shoulder. Above the oven is a crazy paving of cracks round a circular hole. ‘That’s the round that killed him?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘Does it seem like it came from his gun?’
‘Hard to tell. Ballistics can get us an answer inside an hour once we let them take it. You’re thinking it didn’t?’
‘I’m thinking that Sophie Destivelle was shot with a silenced weapon. It would be surprising if Pierre wasn’t, but the neighbour heard a shot.’
Picaut looks out of the window. To left and right are the neighbouring houses. ‘There.’ She points to the corner diagonally opposite the shed. ‘You can’t see that spot from either side. Get someone out there with a metal detector. See if the Colt was shot into the ground, and then brought back and put in his hand. There are blood smears at the edge of the spatter zone. Get someone with UV to see if we can find a bloody footprint. If nothing else, we’ll get the size of a shoe. Check the bell on the front door and the knocker at the back for fingerprints. I want hard data from this one. There has to be something.’
It takes perhaps twenty minutes for the first flush of evidence gathering to pass. At the end of it, with the metal detector team just starting on the garden, Picaut finds Petit-Evard standing in the kitchen.
He asks, ‘What are we looking for?’
‘I have no idea.’ Picaut leads the way through to the living room. ‘Something that links Pierre Fayette and Sophie Destivelle that made someone think it was necessary to kill both of them now.’
‘You think it was the same person?’
‘Not necessarily, but we’re going to work on the basis that they’re linked. Coincidences don’t happen in police work. Whatever it is, we’ll know it when we see it.’ She stops in front of the television. ‘What do you smell?’
‘Nothing.’
‘No lavender?’
He tests the air. ‘Maybe a little, under the blood.’
‘It was there.’ On top of the sideboard is a rectangle of paler veneer. ‘A music box, an old one, with a bowl of dried lavender inside, forty centimetres by thirty by fifteen, made of rosewood or something like it, with paler wood inlaid on top, in the shape of the initials DF MdM. I saw it earlier this morning. We need to find it.’
They are grasping at smoke. The kitchen is a particular oasis of chaos, but once it’s behind them, the rest of the house is as sterile as before. Slipping on a fresh pair of blue latex gloves, Picaut leads the way upstairs where the straight lines and right angles, white paint and dust-free veneer, continue.
In the spare bedroom, Petit-Evard stops her. ‘It feels bad, doesn’t it?’
‘That he’s dead, or that we’re here?’
‘Both. We’re intruders. This isn’t a place where other people come.’
‘And yet,’ Picaut says, ‘someone else has stayed here recently.’
He looks as she has looked – at the perfectly made bed: flat sheets, ironed and folded at forty-five degree angles on the creases, duvet cover square on the bed. ‘How do you know that?’
‘The wardrobe.’
The furniture is flat-pack and uninspiring. The wardrobe door hangs ajar. Petit-Evard frowns into the white interior. No clothes hang ready. It could have been empty since it was first taken out of the box. ‘I don’t see anything.’
‘The coat hangers.’
‘Right.’ And then: ‘Right!’ And then: ‘What does it mean?’
‘I have absolutely no idea.’ In a row of twelve hangers, the third along is facing the wrong way on the rail. Or the ninth, depending on whether you count from the right end or the left.
Picaut assumes Pierre Fayette would count from left to right. What Sophie Destivelle might do is anyone’s guess. Aloud, she says, ‘Three out of twelve or nine out of twelve.’
‘Or it points to something.’ Petit-Evard pokes around in the base of the wardrobe.
‘Or it’s one quarter or three quarters.’
‘Or it’s out in the room.’
‘Or it’s time. Fifteen minutes or forty-five out of an hour.’ And so, finally, Picaut looks at the alarm clock on the bedside table. It’s old fashioned, almost fifties retro, might conceivably be an original; big, round-faced with bells on either side of a central ring on the top. The hands are fixed at twelve forty-five. It sits in the centre of the bedside table, facing the wardrobe, and thus is not quite square.
She wants to smash it open on the floor, but propriety will not allow such chaos in Pierre Fayette’s house. She has to take it down to the shed to find a screwdriver in his toolbox. Which means she has to go through the kitchen to get the key. Which means she has to pass first through the living room, where Rollo is back from the garden and is studying the magazine rack. ‘Find anything?’
‘Point four five Colt shell in the far corner of the garden.’ He grins. ‘I told them you were the best.’
She nods, looks past him to the rack. ‘Who reads National Geographic any more? Either Pierre Fayette was the most boring man on the planet, or we’re being fed a line.’
Rollo raises a brow, waits until she looks at him. ‘You’re good,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t hurt to hear it.’
She walks past him to the kitchen, where the shed key is not on its hook. ‘Who opened the shed?’ A uniformed police team has control of the site. Two of them guard the door, one on either side, checking their Twitter feeds. The one on the left, an Asian woman with a pleasing smile, says, ‘Nobody. It was already open.’
‘Show me.’
The shed door hangs ajar by the width of one hand. The padlock hangs on the hasp, open. The key hangs from the lock and inside, the toolbox is open and the chisel has been used to prise up the floorboard. The cash box is still there, but the gun, of course, is gone.
‘Rollo—’ He has come in behind her. ‘The lump hammer …’ She nods to the row of tools.
‘The one that’s out of line?’
The only tool besides the ch
isel that’s out of line. ‘Have it checked for prints. And the chisel, the toolbox and the padlock. Whoever did this knows the combination.’
‘Consider it done.’ He taps her elbow. For Rollo, this is an astonishing intimacy. ‘Were you planning to stab the clock to death?’
She had forgotten the alarm clock. She finds a smaller chisel from the set and – yes, sacrilege – uses it as a screwdriver to open the back plate. And is rewarded: inside is a slip of paper folded in half and taped shut. Fragments of dried lavender fall as she eases it out.
Written on the outside is a single word: Martin.
She stares at it, long and hard. To Rollo, thoughtfully: ‘Does Martin Gillard work for the CIA?’
Before he answers, he checks over both shoulders in a way that would have been funny yesterday. ‘I think we shouldn’t talk about this in a place we can be overheard.’
‘Rollo? We’re in a shed. You think it’s bugged?’
‘It doesn’t have to be. We’re each carrying a phone and by now they’re both probably feeding a continuous sound stream into the NSA databases. If we want to go offline, we have to take the batteries out and put them in a safe container. Refrigerators work well, I’m told.’
Picaut shakes her head. ‘If Conrad Lakoff wants to listen to us, he’ll do it whether we like it or not. And I’m sure he already knows more about Martin Gillard than the best of your contacts. So am I right that he’s a CIA hit man?’
‘Nothing so clean and neat, although some of his funding may come down their back channels. Gillard’s beyond black, which is to say, nobody will ever find actual details, but there’s a kind of ghost-media, rumours of rumours of unsubstantiated action: deniable things that happen when he’s definitely not nearby.’
‘But he is the kind of guy who could put two to the chest and one to the head through a nearly closed car window.’
‘He could do that without pausing to think. But here’s the thing: it isn’t his style. Apart from anything else, there’s usually a tonne of unassailable proof that he wasn’t in the country when it happened.’
‘Great. So why is Sophie Destivelle, a former DB assassin, leaving him messages?’
‘Read it and see?’
It’s tempting, but the tape would be hard to remove without it being obvious that she’d done so. ‘We’ll let him open it.’ Picaut folds the note into an evidence bag and slides it into her pocket. ‘But I want to be there when he does.’
As she turns to leave, Rollo catches her arm. ‘I know you think I’m paranoid, but there are some dots to be joined. Elodie Duval was in the US meeting an ex-CIA exec. Martin Gillard’s handlers take their orders from Langley, and Conrad Lakoff, grandson of Sophie Destivelle’s former employer, is on track to be the next head of the NSA.’
‘Your point would be?’
‘If the dots join up, this stops being local and becomes international very quickly. Ducat needs to know.’
‘I’m going there now. I’ll tell him. I’ll meet you back at the incident room in twenty minutes.’
Her phone squawks as she is reversing out of the parking space: a text from Eric.
– Appointment. Ingrid’s waiting. If you need, I’ll come and collect you!
She deletes it.
A second text arrives. She is about to delete that, too, but it’s from Conrad Lakoff.
– Where are you? We need to talk.
She writes back.
– Heading to Prosecutor Ducat. Where are you?
– Already there.
14.10
Ducat’s famously discreet office is not currently discreet. Two of Conrad Lakoff’s big, athletic men stand one on either side of the door.
They recognize Picaut and let her through. Inside, dominating the prosecutor’s office – an experience as interesting as it is unusual – is Conrad Lakoff, leaning forward with both hands on the desk. He feels bigger here: the Château d’Alençon warped the sense of scale. His nose is more like a beak, its awkward angle more aggressive.
Ducat is as angry as she has ever seen him. In frosted English, he says, ‘Captain Picaut, this is Strategic Operations Director Conrad Lakoff of the Joint Tactical Analysis Research Group. He’s here to—’
Lakoff has already taken her hand in his own. ‘Captain Picaut, thank God.’
Her guts lurch. ‘What’s happened?’
‘He’s gone.’
‘Who’s gone?’
‘My grandfather. JJ. He’s vanished.’
‘Vanished, as in left home? Walked out? Gone to visit friends? Or are we talking abduction?’
‘The latter.’ Lakoff lets go of her hand. ‘My father left not long after you did to take Martha back to the studio, then came on to the conference to go over my speech with me. Last seen, JJ was sitting in his chair smoking a cigar, reading the paper. Then we heard the news about Pierre Fayette—’ He pulls a face. ‘I’m sorry if it was supposed to be secret, but members of your Internal Affairs department are at the conference.’
Great. Picaut watches the last colour leach out of Ducat’s cheeks.
‘Your grandfather,’ she says, ‘when did you realize he wasn’t there?’
Lakoff checks his watch. ‘Seventeen minutes ago. That’s when we were sure.’
Which was around the time Picaut was standing in Pierre Fayette’s shed, looking at a lump hammer. ‘You’ve been to the apartment?’
‘I have. When we called him and got no answer, I sent someone round. When they couldn’t find him, my father and I went to look. His car is in his parking space on the road outside. His computer is switched on. His coat is on the hook by the door. It’s conceivable that he might have walked, hatless, coatless, to see either René Vivier or Laurence Vaughan-Thomas, but he hasn’t; I rang them both from my grandfather’s apartment and they deny having seen him. I don’t know where he is. You have to understand, this is entirely outside our experience of him.’
Picaut asks, ‘Does he carry a mobile phone?’
‘He has an iPhone. We are endeavouring to track the signal. If he’s still carrying it, I’ll be relieved, but also surprised. Whoever we’re up against knows what they’re doing.’
We are endeavouring to track the signal. On French sovereign territory.
Ducat is staring at his shoes. Picaut takes care not to catch his eye. To Lakoff, she says, ‘Let us know what you get. We’ll put our best team onto this.’
‘I thought you would lead it yourself?’
‘I’m flattered, but as of half an hour ago, I have two murders to investigate. I can’t deal with a missing person as well.’
He frowns at her. ‘I thought … that is, I heard that Pierre Fayette had killed himself.’
‘You heard wrong. I’ll keep oversight on the search for your grandfather, but other people need to take this on. Trust us. We have good people.’
‘As long as he doesn’t end up like Sophie Destivelle.’
‘Is that likely to happen?’
He clasps her shoulders, firmly. ‘We’ll make sure it doesn’t, eh?’
The door shuts. After a short time, during which Picaut stares out of the window and Ducat stares silently at the floor, Ducat says, ‘We have to find his grandfather.’
‘Good luck with that,’ Picaut says. ‘JJ Crotteau was DB and then External Affairs. He headed up their black ops unit when they blew the Rainbow Warrior out of the water in New Zealand. He’s as hard as they come, and his experience goes back to the war. If he doesn’t want to be found, we won’t find him.’
Ducat’s face is a study. It’s not that he doesn’t know all this, it’s that he doesn’t expect her to know it.
By way of explanation, she says, ‘I met him once,’ and then, because he is still frowning at her, ‘I took a close protection course years ago: rolling over car bonnets, crouching shots, that kind of thing. He was one of the tutors. He’d left the Department by then, but his notoriety sailed ahead of him. Really, anyone who knows anything knows what he’s done. Even Rollo.
Particularly Rollo.’
‘Rollo spends his life surfing hidden espionage blogs: he’s supposed to know things like this. You, however … Did you pass the course?’
‘I am offended that you even have to ask. The point is, if JJ Crotteau is still in possession of any faculties at all, he can drop off the map at will. One of his wartime comrades and the son of another have been shot dead in the space of less than twelve hours. If I were him, I’d be running for the hills.’
‘If he’s absconded, I don’t care. He can hide in dustbins and live off road-kill for the rest of his life if he feels like it. What I don’t want is for someone to find him dead on the floor with two to the chest and one to the head. I like my job. Given how hard you fought to get yours back, I believe you like yours, too. SOD Lakoff may be all smiles now, but he’s not a man to cross lightly. If you make phone calls, he can monitor them. If you write emails, he can delete them before they ever hit the networks. He can erase your entire existence and rebuild you as someone entirely different. You do not want him to decide you’re worth the effort. So I’ll harass the search team, and you’ll find the shootist and between us, we’ll make sure bad things don’t happen. Agreed?’
Conrad Lakoff is waiting for her as she leaves Ducat’s office, leaning against the bonnet of her car, arms folded across his chest. Seeing her, he spreads his hands, palms out. ‘I’m sorry. I thought perhaps I ought to leave before Prosecutor Ducat blew a cerebral aneurysm.’
‘We’ll do everything we can to look for your grandfather, I guarantee it.’ If he’s absconded, I don’t care … She wonders if this man was listening to that conversation, to any of her conversations, and what difference it would make if he were.
He says, ‘I trust you. Genuinely. But if you’re right that Pierre Fayette’s death wasn’t suicide, we have two people connected to the Maquis de Morez who are dead and one who is missing. In my world, three is a series and we take those seriously.’
‘As do we.’
He wants something more of her and she does not know what. He chews his lip. She waits. She has no problem with long silences.
In the end, he says, ‘We were wondering if we could see the bodies.’