by Manda Scott
From: Elodie Duval
To: Martin Gillard
Subject: I’m sorry
My love,
Things are running out of control and I must leave. There is too much at stake and too many questions that remain unanswered. Martha has all the data to finish the film. Tell Clinton I’m sorry I can’t be there.
I never expected when we started the project that things would move so fast, or in such dark, dangerous directions. If you are reading this, then this evening’s gamble has failed. Or perhaps it has succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, but I have failed to take enough care. You have to believe me when I say that I am trying to be safe. To do this right, without endangering anyone – without endangering you. Because I know you would be here if you could, and I grieve that I have been distant these last few days. That’s not an indictment of you, or of what is growing between us, but only of my inability to make the world as I want it.
I want it safe. I want it whole. Above all, I want the truth of our past to be laid open for all to see.
Tonight, I hope to find that truth. I may have done so. If you are reading this, I suspect I will have done. What I will not have been able to do is to let you know. Keep watch on JJ and the rest of the MdM. They are active again, and hunting, and may need your help.
Know that, for all the ambiguities of my childhood, I love you, and do not wish you harm.
Take care. Above all else, take care.
‘No.’ Gillard’s face is lost behind his hands. He may be a paid assassin, but if this is acting, it’s good.
When he looks up, he meets Picaut’s gaze. His voice is thick. ‘This doesn’t mean what you think it means. “For all the ambiguities of my childhood …” – I don’t even know what that means. This isn’t meant for me.’
‘Perhaps not all of it.’ Picaut is careful. ‘You think she doesn’t love you?’
‘I really don’t.’
‘Maybe she just hasn’t said so. Women often don’t until it’s too late.’
‘Not Elodie. She wasn’t shy at making her feelings known, and I guarantee you, whatever she felt for me, it was not what you would think reading this. And no’ – he is recovered enough that he can hold Picaut’s gaze squarely now – ‘I have not killed her out of some warped sense of rejection. Or for any other reason. I swear to you, whatever else you might think of me, I have not harmed, nor will I ever harm, Elodie Duval. If she is dead, it is not my doing.’
‘Is she dead?’
‘I don’t know!’ He slams his hand on the table. The noise shocks everyone.
She believes him. She doesn’t need to ask if he loves her; it’s obvious.
Picaut says, ‘If you’re right, then this is another layer of a cipher, and we need to find the key.’ To McKinney: ‘I’m going to need full access to her office, her computer and anything else we can—’ Her phone buzzes: Rollo again. ‘What?’
‘Laurence has gone. I’m at the apartment in Rue Parisie. Door’s open, teapot is warm, radio is on; nobody home.’
‘Signs of violence?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Music box gone?’
‘No. It’s still here. There’s a note underneath it. Hang on.’ She hears the slide of wood on marble. Good, heavy paper unfolds. ‘It’s in English.’ Rollo’s voice becomes formal.
‘“Please pass our apologies to Captain Picaut. We will be safer if our whereabouts are not known and we have the skills to ensure this is so. Neither René nor I killed Sophie and Pierre; indeed, we cherished both of them, but we have no doubt that our actions in the past have led to their deaths in the present. We will endeavour to find the proof of who did this. If we succeed, we shall communicate it to you. Once again, our apologies. Please do not waste time or effort in looking for us: we shall keep ourselves safe. In the meantime, I suggest you find Elodie’s music box and search within it. If you find Elodie herself, tell her that Céline’s poem remains extant. Blythe spirit, LVT.”’
‘What about René?’
‘I’m on my way, but he’s not answering his phone.’
Ducat is going to go wild. Picaut says, ‘“Céline’s poem remains extant.” What does that mean?’
Gillard says, ‘Céline was one of the original Maquis de Morez. She was English.’
‘And Laurence Vaughan-Thomas was SOE and MI6.’ A string of facts knits together. To McKinney and Martin Gillard: ‘The SOE used poem codes. They were famous, remember? “The love that I have is all that I have …” That kind of thing?’
‘Life,’ Gillard says. ‘It was “life”, not “love”.’
Very clever. ‘But we’re on the same page. Does Elodie know it too?’ McKinney looks blank. Gillard shrugs. It is Martha Lakoff, the intern, who says, ‘Sophie and Laurence are her godparents. When she was a child, they taught her ciphers, invisible ink, all the old wartime strategies: they said it was a life skill every child should have. She told me on the way down to interview Sophie.’
‘So Elodie’s note could be the key to a cipher embedded in the email? That would make more sense.’ To Rollo, who is still on the end of the phone: ‘Does Laurence’s note smell of anything?’
‘Besides lavender? Not that I can tell. What am I looking for?’
‘Lemon juice.’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘Never mind, bring them in: the note and the music box both. We’re going to check out Elodie’s apartment. I’ll call you if we find anything.’
16.45
‘This is just like Sophie Destivelle’s place was,’ Sylvie says. ‘Nobody has lived here for years.’
Elodie Duval is missing. She is not in the US, nor on any transatlantic flight, at least under her own name. In a flurry of activity, McKinney has provided several contemporary images and Picaut has sent them out to the Europe-wide mispers database. Her car is a powder-blue MX-5. The search for this is given the highest possible priority Ducat can command.
Picaut herself, meanwhile, is presently at Elodie’s second-floor apartment on the Rue de Bourgogne and, yes, if it has been inhabited at all, it was a long time ago. Walking through the door, the smell is of new paint left to age with no windows open, of light dust and of carpets.
Picaut sets the forensic technicians to check it out in case there are things hidden beneath the surface, but she doesn’t hold out much hope. The only good thing is that it’s a fast drive back to the studio, where she can work on Elodie’s note.
If Elodie’s disappearance is bad news, the good news is that nobody has yet found a body and the first thing that greets Picaut at the studio is the CCTV footage from the Charles de Gaulle airport car park, which caught a frame or two of her car pulling out around 21.30 on Saturday – not long, in fact, after she called McKinney to tell him she was still in the US. It is definitely her car, but she might not be the occupant. The MX-5 hangs very low to the road and the cameras were not set for that kind of angle. The images are blurry, dark and of poor quality.
Sylvie leans over and zooms in on the faces behind the windscreen. ‘If someone can lend me some software, I can try to make these sharper.’
‘This is a film studio,’ says Picaut. ‘They’ll have software better than anything we’ve ever seen. Ask Martha.’
Petit-Evard calls in from the incident room with news of his own. ‘The red scarf you found on the back of Pierre Fayette’s kitchen door hasn’t got any of Sophie Destivelle’s DNA on it, but it has been worn by a red-headed woman.’
‘Elodie?’
‘Could be. Which means that Pierre Fayette was comprehensively lying: his sister has been there, and probably Sophie, too.’
Which means, in turn, that working out what Elodie Duval was trying to say in her note is at the very top of Picaut’s to-do list. In the context of which, she has yet to find an iron.
‘A smoothing iron,’ she says, for the third or fourth time. ‘You know, for making clothes flat.’
‘What do you want it for?’ McKinney asks.
‘To iron Elodie’s note.’
‘Yes, but why? It’s two lines long.’
‘Smell.’ Picaut thrusts the slip of paper at McKinney, who takes a sniff, shrugs and passes it round. Martin Gillard, predictably, is sharper. ‘Lemon juice?’
Once they have been told, they can all smell it: a delicate under-note, overlaid by the lavender. ‘She used the lavender flowers to cover the scent,’ Picaut says, ‘like in the old days. We need to iron this and see what it says.’
‘They didn’t do things like this in the old days.’ Martin Gillard is still angry with her for not letting him take part in the search for Elodie. Half the forces of Europe are on this, but he thinks he can do it better. ‘Even in the war, nobody used a child’s trick like this. Kramme would have been onto it in moments.’
‘Elodie was in a hurry. And Kramme isn’t hunting her.’
‘Are you sure about that?’ McKinney is pacing the room, twitching.
Picaut says, ‘If he was a German officer in the war, he’d be over a hundred, so let’s assume for the sake of argument he isn’t.’
‘But somebody …’ He feels the threat in the air, stops and restarts. ‘So, just send an intern out for an iron? Not Martha, obviously, but one of the others?’ He reaches for a button on his phone.
Gillard says, ‘No, wait. Let me try something else.’ In the smart little kitchen beside Elodie’s office, he boils a kettle and wraps the paper round the belly as the steam churns out. His hands are red raw when he takes them away, but Elodie’s message is clear. The time on the note is ringed thickly in brown: 04.27.
‘Is that it?’ McKinney lifts it to the light, as if there might be something else hidden within the weave of the paper. ‘A number we already had?’
Martin Gillard snatches it back. ‘Fuck’s sake, Clinton. She’s a clever woman and she’s left it to us and we found it. What more do you want?’
‘To have it make sense, perhaps?’ This is the first time Picaut’s seen a hint of steel in Clinton McKinney. Perhaps Martin Gillard wasn’t the only one in love with Elodie. At least both men are speaking of her in the present tense.
‘If this is a key to the email’ – Picaut lifts the note – ‘which would seem the most likely, we need a cryptologist to work out how to use it.’ To Sylvie, she says, ‘Can you do that?’
‘Sorry.’ Sylvie bites her lip. ‘You’re going to need outside help.’
Rollo isn’t back yet, but all the same she can hear him say, I told you so.
Fine. ‘I’ll be in Elodie’s office.’
Elodie Duval’s office is a mirror image of McKinney’s, except that her long picture window looks south over what was once a derelict brownfield site and has become, in the past eight months, a replica of Saint-Cybard’s town centre, down to the dry fountain in the town square. A factory is set off to one side, and a railway station with its many sidings to the other.
Inside, the colours are different. McKinney’s office is an exercise in minimalism, all blonde wood, steel and glass; the paint is white. Elodie’s walls are painted robin’s egg blue and the rest is pleasantly cluttered with books, scripts, pieces of technology. An oak bookcase lines the wall from door to window: eight metres or more. Six shelves reach from floor to ceiling. Picaut walks their length. The books are precisely the same, in the same order, as the ones on the bookshelf in Laurence’s living room: English literature and poetry: Auden, Rilke, Emerson, Hilda Doolittle, Stevie Smith, Mary Oliver, Jean Atkin. If the cipher’s a book code, they’ll never work it out.
She draws out her mobile phone as she looks at the shelves. Her thumb hits keys. Somewhere in Belgium a number rings.
‘Hey!’ Patrice sounds upbeat, exhilarated, surprised to hear her. ‘Sup?’ He speaks fluent cyber-English: the lingua franca of international hacking. It may be he’s forgotten how to speak French.
She says, ‘I’m working again.’
‘Cool! Anything exciting?’
‘We have two murders, a missing film maker and three old-age pensioners missing, all linked to the Maquis de Morez. I think that qualifies.’
‘They don’t let you in gently, do they? Wasn’t someone making a TV series about the Maquis? Elodie Duval?’
She forgets how closely he follows media culture. ‘She’s the one that’s missing. Her twin brother is one of the murder victims: shot with an old wartime gun and made to look like suicide. The other’s a woman who was in the Maquis: professional hit – two to the chest, one to the head, and then some knife work, the detail of which you don’t want to know.’
‘Who’d she upset enough that they’d pay for a hit on a woman in her nineties?’
‘They may not have had to pay anything if it was ordered by a state security service. What can you tell me about Conrad Lakoff?’
The silence on the line has a dead quality, a lack of echo, as if he’s put his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Patrice?’
‘Don’t mess with him, Inès.’ The laughter has gone from his voice.
‘That’s what Rollo said. And Ducat, more or less. He’s been thoroughly decent to me.’
‘Don’t depend on it lasting. Lakoff could erase your existence and still make you wish you’d never been born.’
That, too, is an echo of Rollo. She says, ‘I can’t ignore him. His grandfather’s gone missing.’
‘From a graveyard? Seriously?’
‘Patrice!’
‘Sorry, but Lakoff’s grandfather died a year ago last August. The Russians held a celebration party that went on for a week. You could smell the vodka halfway round the globe.’
‘That’ll have to be on his father’s side.’ Picaut grabs a piece of paper and starts to sketch out a family tree. ‘Name?’
‘John Lakoff. If he had other names I don’t know them. He was old-time CIA. He pretty much ran the Soviet desk through the worst years of the Cold War. The Russians hated him.’
She says, ‘OK, so spookery runs in the family, which may be scary, but just now, it’s the other one that matters, the mother’s father. He was definitely alive this morning because I spoke to him. JJ Crotteau.’
‘DGSE? Organized the hit on the Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand?’
God, why did he leave? ‘That’s the one. He was here in Orléans. And now he isn’t.’
There’s another pause, the click of a keyboard, as if Patrice’s attention has wandered, or perhaps focused for the first time. ‘Inès, why are you telling me this?’
‘Elodie Duval hid a cipher in her brother’s house before she went missing. Or at least, we think she did. A set of numbers and an—’
‘No!’ Harsh. Retracted as soon as it’s out. ‘Sorry. Not on this line.’ A pause, and then, ‘Can you find the IP address of the computer nearest you?’
‘Yes, it’s—’
‘Don’t say it yet. Your father had a favourite date, d’you remember it?’
The sixth of May 1429: the day Jeanne d’Arc relieved the siege of Orléans. This is the advantage of their having been close. She says, ‘How could I forget?’
‘Express it as eight digits and add it to the IP number.’
‘European or American date format?’
‘Ours.’
‘OK.’ She’s standing in front of Elodie’s iMac. Brushing the trackpad, she brings the screen to life. ‘Hang on.’ She puts a hand over the mouthpiece and shouts across the corridor. ‘What’s the password for Elodie’s computer?’
Martin appears at the doorway. ‘Carpe Diem. It means—’
‘I know. Thanks.’
She does the arithmetic and reads the adjusted IP address to Patrice.
‘Well done.’ He’s laughing at her again. Or with her, maybe. ‘Don’t go away.’
A click and she is left hanging on an empty line. She drums her fingers on the desk, picks up a pen, puts it down again.
‘Inès?’ The screen flares to white and then colour and Patrice is there. Alive. Real. He looks tired. ‘Can you hear me?’
&nb
sp; ‘Yes.’ She reaches for the screen – he is that close, and that far away.
‘Cool.’ His smile is just as she remembers it. ‘First rule of mobile phones says that you don’t say anything you don’t want the Americans to hear. Particularly not if Conrad Lakoff’s involved. This isn’t totally secure, but it’s better. We’ve got about three minutes before someone starts to get curious and a minute after that before they work out how to find us. Write the cipher and key on a sheet of paper; hold them up to the screen so I can grab them.’
She already has both the email and the initial note in front of her. She holds them to the screen and hears the crisp crunch of a screenshot, twice.
‘We think the numbers are the key,’ she says, ‘but we don’t know how they’re used. It’ll most probably be some ancient coding system from the war. It might involve a poem, or a book. Probably one of these.’ She angles the screen so the webcam takes in Elodie’s bookshelves.
‘Inès?’ His laugh is ragged at the edges; how long has he been awake? In the old days, he could do three days without sleep and you’d never be able to tell. The wild look in his eyes now, the way he drags his fingers through his hair … this is like a week without enough Red Bull. ‘You know this is impossible, right?’
‘Yes, except that Elodie Duval was trained by the old Maquis: she did nothing by accident. She left the note, and the numbers. She meant us to find them and she wouldn’t have left us something completely impossible. There’s something called “Céline’s Poem” which might help if we could find it. I’ve drawn a blank on Google, but not looked much deeper than that.’
‘God … OK. I’ll work on it. If you turn up anything that might be useful, let me know.’
‘Thanks.’ Three minutes must be nearly up. Patrice is reaching forward to cut the link. She says, ‘Give me a ring sometime when you’re not too busy.’
He looks surprised. ‘I thought … Never mind. I’ll call when I can. Soon. Bye.’
The screen flashes briefly, and he is gone. Picaut’s chest is hollow, but she feels more solid than she had expected, and more hopeful than is probably reasonable. ‘Elodie Duval. Whatever you’re playing at, we’re going to find what this means, and work out what’s happening. And we’re going to do it while you’re still alive.’