by Manda Scott
‘So what, then, did you give?’
How has it come so fast to this? But it has, and Sophie has not the will to evade it. She says, ‘As much as I had to, as little as I could: the false cards in the index files, details of our training, the code words for operations that happened months ago. I did not give anything I was not told I could give. Ask your cousin, this was his idea.’
‘My uncle’s, I think, rather than my cousin’s. This has his touch. Did they say you could give up any people?’
‘Some. The small ones who knew nothing. I tried, but Kramme didn’t want them. He said if he knew someone was a Résistante, he wouldn’t be able to hide it and then they’d know it was me who had told him. He was trying to protect me.’
‘He valued you.’
‘Of course he did! That was the point. Céline, I was to get close enough to kill him. That was the order. I don’t know whether it came from your cousin or your uncle or someone else, but I have orders to kill him on the seventh: today. And now I can’t. I am guilty of failure, but not treachery. I did not give him the Patron, you have to believe that.’
‘It’s not up to me.’ Céline folds the slips of paper back into their hidden place. She crouches down opposite Sophie. Her face is a short arm’s length away. Her hair is gold, her eyes a blistering grey-blue ice. Her voice is soft. ‘You are either an exceptional asset or an exceptional liar and I have no idea which. Fortunately for us both, I don’t need to. The cavalry is on its way, which is to say, my cousin will be here on the next available transport.’
‘Laurence Vaughan-Thomas is coming here?’
Céline laughs, mirthlessly. ‘Don’t get your hopes up too soon. Under current circumstances, the next available transport is unlikely to be today, or even next week.’ Her smile is bright and clear and deadly. ‘Until he arrives, I am the agent on the ground and if you do anything at all to endanger the Maquis de Morez, if I so much as suspect that you are sending messages to Kramme, or aiding him in any way, you will have a fatal accident while cleaning your gun and I will deal with whatever repercussions may fall on my head as a result.’ She reaches out both hands, takes Sophie by the wrists and raises them both to standing. They are close now, face to face, warmth to warmth, brow to brow. ‘Are we clear?’
Céline the stoat and she the rabbit. She nods. She doesn’t say, I could cut your throat in your sleep. It may no longer be true.
‘Good.’ Leaning forward, Céline presses a dry, cool kiss to her brow. ‘We both care about Patrick Sutherland, I believe that much. However he was ruined, let’s do what we can to get him better, shall we? Seeing him on his feet and walking would make up for a lot.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ORLÉANS
Sunday, 18 March 2018
18.20
PICAUT HAS IDENTIFIED those pictured in the three images that emerged from the base of Laurence Vaughan-Thomas’s music box.
The woman in the static black-and-white shot is Sophie Destivelle, circa 1944. The photograph was taken in Scotland when she was partway through her training, and was for her fake ID, to be carried behind enemy lines.
The livelier image – still in black and white; four young people standing in a staid-looking living room – shows Laurence and Céline Vaughan-Thomas with a stunning dark-haired woman who nobody can name, and a tall, possibly red-headed man who Martin Gillard thinks is Patrick Sutherland. Nobody knows where the shot was taken but the furniture in the background is darkly, solidly English.
The dinner party shot in overdone colour was apparently taken in Saint-Cybard: similar images were used to help set up a recent shoot for the film. In the centre of a group of five stands Sophie Destivelle, utterly compelling in a dress of dark red moire silk. To her right are Maximilian Kramme and maybe-Patrick-Sutherland, the former in SS dress uniform. The brunette on her left is thought to be Mademoiselle Luce Moreau. To her left is a white-blond SS officer, Rudi Schäfer.
It is not, however, immediately obvious what use these images are to her current investigation. She goes in search of someone to talk to and finds McKinney alone in his office. Hands flat on his desk, Picaut leans into his space. ‘Where does Elodie Duval live when she is in Orléans?’
His mind is somewhere on the far side of the Atlantic. ‘She has an apartment on the Rue de Bourgogne, near Laurence Vaughan—’
‘It’s uninhabited. Nobody has lived there for months, probably years. There must be somewhere else. Does she have a lover? Is there someone else we need to be looking at?’
‘A lover?’ His gaze snaps to her face. ‘I thought Martin …’
‘Is she living with Martin?’
‘No! That is, not that I know of. He’d have said something, surely?’
‘Then where—’
‘Yes, I’m with you.’ McKinney pulls a face that is intended to show how hard he is thinking. It may be true. At length, he says, ‘She inherited another apartment, I think. From one of the old Maquisards. Céline, I think?’
That matches what René said about her having inherited everything of Céline’s when she passed twenty-one. Picaut asks, ‘Where?’
‘In the same block as the other one, but one floor up.’
Dear God. Picaut leans so far across the desk that McKinney pushes his chair away. It’s a big desk. ‘Why did nobody tell me about this before?’
‘You didn’t ask?’
‘Mr McKinney, I am this close’ – thumb and forefinger millimetres apart – ‘to arresting you. We are in France, where our anti-terrorism laws give me powers of detention you would not believe. So think very carefully. What else might I need to know that I haven’t asked you about yet?’
Nervously: ‘Do you know about her other car?’
‘What?’
‘Besides the MX-5, Elodie had an electric Golf, a silver one. She was given it in the US and had it brought over here? It’s in the garage in the basement under her apartment?’
Sweet sliding Jesus … ‘Rollo! Petit-Evard! Sylvie!’
She is expecting another death. Watching Rollo prise open the garage door, every part of her is braced for the sweet-sick smell of decay, with its underlay of blood and urine. Even as the door groans up and the ceiling lights flicker on the hood of the silver e-Golf, Picaut holds her breath.
And then not, because this place is clean and smells of nothing, not even the fuel-oil smells of a normal garage. It’s not quite as clean as Pierre Fayette would have left it, but in all respects this is an ordinary garage with an ordinary car inside, and nobody has died in it or on it or under it any time in the recent past.
The forensic team has come along just in case. The white-haired car-breaking tech does his work but there is nothing in particular inside this vehicle, either.
He looks at Picaut. They have developed something of a rapport in the past hours. ‘We could take it away?’ he offers. ‘Just in case?’
‘Do. I want to know if an elderly woman wearing a wig sat in the passenger seat in the recent past. Anything else you find is a bonus.’
‘Do we break into the flat?’ asks Petit-Evard. He’s enjoying the breaking-in part.
‘Bet there’s a key,’ Sylvie says.
And she’s right. In a locked toolbox on a bench – Rollo opens it without effort – is a Yale key which, twenty minutes later, unlocks the front door to the third-floor apartment on the Rue de Bourgogne, and yes – yes! – this one has been lived in. This one is eclectic, intriguing. This has Elodie written all over it. Elodie, in fact, has been here since her flight from the US landed.
On the surface, she shares some common habits with her brother. They both have on display the now-ubiquitous image of the Maquis de Morez jumping a wall, but everywhere else, where Pierre was OCD-tidy, Elodie is charmingly chaotic. On this wall is a hand-woven rug in cerulean blue and gold that smells faintly of raw wool; on that, a patchwork of old prints, maps from forgotten centuries of lands long renamed: Persia, Siam, Rhodesia. Half-read books lie open on the sofa. Mugs stan
d on three surfaces. The scent of incense lies, peppery, over a sweeter smell that is a meal, made and not eaten: two plates of spaghetti with a rich wine sauce.
Two. Picaut says, ‘Sophie was here with her. They must have come after they got off the flight.’
‘They left in a hurry,’ adds Sylvie.
Picaut says, ‘Check the numbers on the landline: who has called her, who did she call? Check her mobile again. I want to know every single call that came in from the moment her plane landed. Actually, from before that. Get me everyone who called her in the past week.’
‘On it.’
‘But it might not have been a call. Someone might have turned up in person. The killer, maybe?’ To Petit-Evard: ‘Call in the forensic team. Make sure we fingerprint everything.’ And then, because she is thinking of it: ‘Rollo, where are we with the prints from Pierre Fayette’s?’
‘The partial print on the mug wasn’t Martin Gillard’s or McKinney’s. We’re still trying to get prints from Conrad Lakoff and his men. It’s not trivial. As we are all too aware, they take very badly to having their prints on anyone’s files. Even their own.’
‘Ask Ducat if one of the techs can dust his desk. Lakoff was leaning on it at lunchtime. And see if his heavies touched anything: a door handle, a toilet lever: anything. What about the footprint?’
‘It’s definitely a woman’s. I’ll take one of Elodie’s shoes and see if we can rule her out.’
‘Or in. Take her hairbrush, too. I want to know if she was wearing the scarf that was hanging on the back of Pierre Fayette’s door.’
‘Right.’ Rollo heads off to hunt down shoes, leaving Picaut to search the apartment. The bookcase contains, yet again, English classics and the now-familiar selection of poetry. Unlike those in Elodie’s office and Laurence Vaughan-Thomas’s living room, they are ordered alphabetically. Except for one – Mary Oliver’s Dream Work is lodged at the wrong end, between Jean Atkin and W. H. Auden.
That’s enough of an anomaly for Picaut to pick it out and flick forward to the fourth poem, ‘Trilliums’:
Every spring
among
the ambiguities
of childhood
In Elodie’s note: … for all the ambiguities of my childhood, I love you.
Her heart turns a cartwheel. She spreads the book flat, photographs the poem and sends it to Patrice.
– Holiday snaps. Thought you’d enjoy …
She is about to set the book back in its place when she sees, in the faintest of pencil marks on the preceding page, a mobile phone number with the initials LVT beside it.
Rollo, looking over her shoulder, whistles. ‘Solid gold.’
Three digits in, Picaut stops dialling. First rule of mobile phones … She writes the number on the heel of her hand instead and, clenching it shut, heads into the bedroom.
The bedstead is wrought iron in modern lines, the sheets cotton, printed with patterns of tigers. The drawers are tidy, but not obsessively so. A laptop is inside the pillowcase, on the underside of the pillow, where a casual visitor would miss it, but a professional would find it in seconds. Picaut is a professional. She also finds the missing music box hidden in the base of the wardrobe under a pile of old laundry.
She carries her trophies out to the table in the living room. The laptop, of course, is password protected and Carpe Diem does not work; nor does Wild Card, Accidental Gods, Maquis de Morez or any of the names she can think of. Not if she changes the case, not if she runs the words together. She calls Martin Gillard and he has no better ideas, so she leaves it on the coffee table and moves on to the music box.
As Gillard said, this box is the exact inverse of Laurence’s. Where his has a dark-wood base with silver-grey inlay, this one is made of ash, with walnut or ebony inlaid in the same cursive script: CVT MdM. Picaut lifts the lid but all is silence: this mechanism has not been recently wound.
Rollo comes to join her. ‘Techs say they’ve found a spare set of prints on Ducat’s desk. Looks like we’ve got Conrad Lakoff and at least one of his grunts.’ And then: ‘Neat box. Can you open that one, too?’
‘I can try.’ Picaut clears a place on the coffee table and lifts out the lavender bowl, and – with some effort – the brass mechanism beneath. Underneath is the same script: AND THUS BY ACCIDENT WE BECAME AS GODS …
She tries pressing the same letters as she did before: IOUASCOTCH. Nothing. She presses each letter of the verse in turn. Still nothing. She has to let her gaze drift to the books, the CDs, the black-and-white prints on the wall, until her mind has slipped free of the need to succeed.
Now, unthinking, the fingers of her burned hand slide across and across and pick up the fractional hair’s breadth indentation in the silken finish. This one, and then when it is fully down, this one … and this.
The letters lay themselves out in her mind: BE STRONG BRAVE HEART. The drawer opens freely, smoothly. Inside is another envelope, with the same handwriting on the front as in Laurence’s box.
In the envelope are three thin slips of paper, old, yellowed, thinly lined.
Picaut unfolds the first:
Underneath, in a neat hand, is written:
Underneath, in another, blunter, bolder hand:
19.00
Three slips of aged paper. One question.
Picaut takes it back from the glorious chaos of Elodie Duval’s apartment to the studio. The interns have been sent home. The lower floor is a graveyard of unlit computers and dimmed fish tanks.
Upstairs on the first floor, Clinton McKinney and Martin Gillard are still holding calls with backers, or, by now, with the backers’ legal representatives, as previously enthusiastic money scents panic and a herd mentality sets in. The air smells of mass-produced coffee. McKinney has given up on the green tea. Picaut walks over to his desk and leans her hands on it.
‘Who is Diem?’
His gaze skates left and right. ‘It’s been a long day, Captain. I literally have no idea what that question means.’
Literally? Dear God. The ghost of her father scrapes its fingernails down a blackboard. She had almost forgotten him, her father; one more way in which today is unique. He used to be the bedrock of her life.
From her left, Martin Gillard says, ‘Carpe Diem. Seize the day. Just before she got on the plane, Elodie said she wanted to change the name of the film.’ To McKinney: ‘You did know that.’
‘Sorry. Yes. I’d forgotten?’ McKinney is becoming fractious. His smile is thin and tight. ‘That’s not a name, though, it’s a Latin aphorism, and there’s nothing like that in the shooting script. You can do a word search on the hard drives if you want. It’s got nothing to do with us.’
‘It became a name.’ She spreads the three slips across the big, pale table. ‘Kramme had an informer inside the Maquis.’
‘An informer? A Nazi agent? In the Maquis de Morez? You’re sure?’ Four questions in one breath. How does Martha handle this without killing him?
‘Yes,’ says Picaut. ‘I am sure.’
‘Right.’ With exaggerated care, McKinney lifts his iPhone from his desk. ‘May I?’ He takes three pictures, one of each cipher slip. After the last, he leans across, grasps Picaut’s shoulders with both hands and plants a kiss on the better side of her face. ‘You may just have saved the project. I’ll put you in the credits. Fuck, I’ll give you the top line.’
He picks up his landline handset and swivels his chair to face the wall. The dial tone ripples past and becomes the purr of a ring and the click of an answer. Then: ‘Frank? I know what time it is in every single fucking time zone. Listen, I have something new …’
Picaut catches Martin Gillard’s eye and, together, they walk across the hallway to Elodie’s office. She settles into the thousand-euro chair behind the desk. ‘Carpe Diem. Tell me all you know.’
‘There’s nothing to tell beyond what you just heard.’ Gillard hitches one hip onto the corner of the desk again. He’s becoming altogether too comfortable there. ‘Elodie came t
o me after her interview with Sophie Destivelle and said she thought we should change the name. I said good luck getting that past Clinton – he’s sold Wild Card to the Americans and they won’t budge. She left it at that, but I knew she’d come back at some point. She was like a terrier: once she had hold of an idea, she wouldn’t let it go.’
‘Had she found these?’ Picaut indicates the slips of paper.
‘She didn’t say.’ He lifts one, sniffs it, reads it half a dozen times. ‘You found her music box?’
‘Yes.’
He catches her eye and there’s an offer somewhere in the drift of his gaze. ‘At a time like this, it would be very useful, wouldn’t it, to be able to talk to Laurence Vaughan-Thomas?’
The number from Elodie’s apartment is still written on Picaut’s hand. She folds her fist closed over it. ‘Exceptionally so.’
Gillard reaches into his pocket and produces his own slip of paper. ‘The old Maquisards … they lived in a world of semi-paranoia where it was always safer to stay off the grid, but we wanted to talk to them. Elodie bought them each a pay-as-you-go mobile phone. They were registered to the studio, so in theory, nobody else knows about them.’
Four phone numbers, each marked with the relevant initials: LVT. SD. RV. JJC. The first is identical to the one written on her hand.
A fuse blows behind Picaut’s eyes. ‘You didn’t think to give me these sooner?’
‘I didn’t know they existed. Martha had them. She’s—’ He waves his hand, tugs at his ear lobe.
‘Pregnant?’ Picaut offers, archly.
‘Well, obviously, but I don’t think I’m allowed to comment on that. I’m probably not allowed to say this, either – but what the fuck, eh?’ He shrugs, thinks, dives. ‘She’s lovely, charming, effusive, beautiful, and quite competent, but she’s not the sharpest knife in the block; just the one who can handle Clinton without wanting to stab him between the eyes. Elodie told her not to share the numbers, and so she didn’t.’