by Manda Scott
Later, alone, Sophie leans back against the wall of the infirmary and tries not to think about the day.
A shadow falls over her.
‘Sophie?’ It’s Laurence. She hasn’t seen him since the trucks came back. In a part of her mind, she thought he might have died in Saint-Cybard except that someone would have told her. He comes down now, from the direction of the radio cave. She feels sick again. It may be she will never feel anything else.
Outside, the others are sitting round the infirmary fire: Patrick, Céline, JJ, Paul Rey – who keeps trying to get her alone to speak to her. She is apart from them, as she always has been.
To them all – to Sophie most – Laurence says, ‘I told the Brigadier that Toni Gaspari was shot by the Boche. If anyone chooses to tell him anything different …’
‘They’ll hang you, too,’ says Paul.
Sophie says, ‘Then you’d better plan a way out because Thierry will have told them different by now.’
‘Thierry is dead. Kramme shot him shortly before he got to the American lines and drove the car in himself. He told his debriefers that he was shot by the Maquis as they escaped.’
‘That’s not true!’
‘I know. And the Brigadier knows it too. He has had someone track down the body and it is clear that he died with a single bullet to the head, fired at close range from the passenger side.’
‘So they’ll hang Kramme?’ The black cloud that envelops her heart parts a little, lets the firelight in.
‘I’m afraid not. Kramme is a prize worth any number of Thierrys. I tell you this not because I believe it is right, or reasonable, but to explain that we do ourselves no favours if we tell the world what we know. In fact, the first one that decides to do so is likely to find himself, or’ – to Céline as much as to Sophie, which is interesting – ‘herself, dead in a ditch. This particular game is played for the highest stakes by men whose priorities are wider than ours and whose sense of morality is weighed on different scales.’
‘So your uncle did know all along?’
‘About the identity of Icarus? He swears not. He was most emphatic.’
‘Do you believe him?’
‘I want to.’ Laurence stands alone on the far side of the fire, looking uncomfortable. As far as Sophie is concerned, he has good reason.
Céline, who knows him better, says, ‘There’s something else.’
‘Yes. I’m sorry.’ From his pocket, he draws a slip of paper and lays it on the log.
They read by firelight.
‘But you have fed us, armed us, led us …’ Sophie stares at it, uncomprehending. ‘How can he do that?’
‘He can’t.’ Paul Rey grabs the slip and crumples it up. ‘The stupid, stupid, jumped-up, pathetic little … fascist. He can’t do this. He can’t!’
Not you. You’re in uniform. You can stay. Patrick’s voice is different, harsher. They all turn to him. He says, So that we are all clear, I am not going home like … this.
Laurence catches his arm. ‘Patrick, you’ll be a war hero. You’ll get a VC, a pension. It won’t be like the last war with boards of retired colonels carving men up on the basis of their injuries: half a pension if you only lost one limb, a third if you lost an eye but the other one still works. It won’t be like that. We won’t allow it. It’ll be done properly this time.’
You think? And then what? How many tongueless doctors do you know?
‘Your family will—’
Despise me. My nearest and dearest are entirely like yours. A man comes home with his shield or on it. Half measures are not worthy. Trust me on this.
With his shield …? Sophie has met the Brigadier only briefly and she doesn’t pretend to understand Céline, but she sees the glance that Laurence shares with his cousin and the understanding that passes between them. Their family, evidently, is not like hers, or any other that she knows.
With finality, Laurence says, ‘We’ll get you a uniform and you can stay.’
That raises a smile, at least. I don’t think it works like that.
Paul Rey has been saving a cigar for an important moment. He lights it now, and blows blue smoke at the sky. ‘Who’s going to know? I mean, really. The whole damned country’s in chaos. Nobody knows from one moment to the next if Patrick Sutherland is alive or dead. Larry’s right. We’ll get you a uniform and a new identity and then …’
And then I go home later? To a court martial for insubordination on top of everything else? I don’t think so.
‘What do you want, then?’ Laurence wrests the slip from Paul Rey’s hand and throws the fragments on the fire, where they spin and turn in the heat. The ink becomes white, the paper a silvery grey. They become dust that rises to the dark. ‘If you tell me you want to die, after all we have done, I shall strike you, honestly. I’m not listening to that ever again.’
I don’t want to die. I will remain here.
Laurence runs his hands through his hair. With deliberate brutality, he says, ‘Patrick, you can’t. France is liberated. The Maquis will disband by the winter. Everyone will go home and start rebuilding their nation. What will you do then? Is a tongueless doctor more useful in France than in England? I’m sorry, but nobody else is going to say this to you and it always seems to come down to me, but you can’t live here on your own.’
‘He won’t live on his own. I’ll be with him.’ Sophie finds herself speaking the words without any conscious thought. The sentences pile on after, one atop the other as if they have always been there, somewhere, in the back of her mind: whatever Paul may want; whatever I may want, this is my duty, the contour and shape of my life. I have always been coming here.
Sophie doesn’t look at Patrick, and certainly not at Paul Rey, whose gaze is a burning brand in her back. She looks at Laurence. ‘Daniel’s family owns half of the Jura. They’ll sell us some land near his mother’s farmhouse, I’m sure. They’ll help us build a house. We can stay here, among friends.’
‘Sophie, that’s charming, but he’s a British army officer. He can’t just ignore an order. He has to go back. Maybe later, when the army has let him go, he can return, but—’
‘Laurence, think. Paul was right, this whole country’s in chaos. Men are being let out of prisons. Others are being shot for collaboration. So Patrick Sutherland died in the fighting today and someone else is here, François Duval, a French national, or maybe Belgian, returned home from the war to settle. We even have the papers to prove it.’
‘The Firm knows that name. It’s on file.’
‘Files can be lost. You can make that happen.’
He doesn’t deny this, but, nodding, says, ‘You’ll need a back history, bigger than the one we made. Both of you will need this.’
‘JJ can fix it.’ JJ is a fixer. He can make anything happen.
Paul Rey is starting to stand up, and so, to be clear, to show them this is not negotiable, she has to say something more. ‘In time, Patrick and I will be married, if he’ll have me. I will become Madame Amélie Duval. We will build a life here.’ She turns to him. ‘If you will have me?’
This is not as it should be. Whatever she has felt for Patrick Sutherland, or feels now, this is not what he has imagined or wanted. He stares at her, flatly. She thinks he will refuse her. It may be that a part of her hopes he will.
In the end, he takes her hand and lifts it to his lips. That would be very kind, he says, which is almost enough to finish her.
‘You might want this.’ Paul Rey from behind her, thickly. He steps forward and lays by their fire a flat cylinder in a dulled, pale metal. Nobody knows what it is. It may explode, but she doesn’t believe that of him.
With a fixed-tight smile, he says, ‘It’s the film from the ciné camera at the church. Kramme wanted to record his wedding. The photographer swung round. It has the detail, I expect, of Kramme’s escape.’ His pale grey eyes find Sophie’s. He is brave, truly. If the world were different … it would be different. He gives a small salute. ‘There may come a day
when you will find it useful.’
It can’t end like this. Sophie has to give him something. She kneels, and finds she cannot stand again. From beside the fire, she offers him back his gift. ‘It will be safest kept with you,’ she says. ‘We know then, who we can trust to show it to the world if Kramme comes for us.’
It is not a great gift, but it is better than nothing and he, who understands her best, understands this. He takes it, and salutes a second time, and walks away so that neither of them has to speak again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
ORLÉANS
Sunday, 18 March 2018
20.45
IN THE DARK night, the rain has settled to a steady drizzle that picks up the shine of the headlights and sprays it left and right with the windscreen wipers.
Leaving the studio, Martin Gillard offers to drive and Picaut accepts. On the way to the car, he retrieved a SIG Sauer exactly like her own from a locked drawer in the basement, and he currently wears it openly in a shoulder holster over his shirt. She is not armed and hasn’t been since the shootout in the burning cathedral and all that followed it. She has trained again, with Rollo helping, but, thus far, has not carried her gun in a professional context. Tomorrow, she will pick it up again, definitely.
The wipers are hypnotic. Half asleep, Picaut runs through the moment when Laurence Vaughan-Thomas opens the door of his hotel room and realizes how she has found him. She can see the wry smile, the small shrug, the decision to trust her with all that he knows and—
‘Here. Pull in here!’ Give him credit, Martin’s not a bad driver and his Merc handles neatly in the wet. He angles tight across the road and pulls up at the kerb outside the wine merchant’s, where a big, broad, bald drunk is slumped in the doorway. It was his size that caught her eye, the shine from his head, the style of his shoe as it flopped on the pavement … Christ on a bike, Conrad Lakoff is going to go ballistic …
Picaut is out, running through the rain, kneeling, careful already not to disturb the crime scene, leaning in to feel the carotid to be sure Jean-Jacques Crotteau is dead; not that there’s any doubt when a wartime Colt lies beside him and the neat hole in his right temple is matched by a less neat one on the opposite side of his head.
He is warm. When she nudges his foot with her own, it flicks away and rebounds back, as it would if he were merely unconscious. When she holds a piece of coarse paper edge-on to the blood-and-brain mix on the wall, the liquid fraction soaks into the weave. So death was less than an hour ago, probably less than thirty minutes.
‘Fuck. Fuckfuckfuckfuck fuck.’ The only good thing is that JJ does not have two bullet wounds in his chest and one in his head. Thus far, and thus far only, Ducat has been spared his worst nightmare, but the Americans are going to go mad, particularly Conrad and Edward Lakoff – the future head of the NSA and the former senator with friends who still walk the corridors of power. Countries have gone to war over less than this.
Picaut calls Ducat second, after the ambulance. ‘We’re in the Rue d’Angleterre. We can hold this, but not for long. You need to call Conrad Lakoff.’
Ducat says, ‘He’s giving his paper.’
‘He’ll be finished by now and if he isn’t, one of the guards will get him a message. You need to be here before him.’
‘On my way.’
Rollo says the same thing, as does Sylvie, who volunteers to pick up Petit-Evard in passing.
Martin Gillard tucks himself into the doorway of the pharmacy next door. There, in the relative dry, he rolls himself a cigarette and lights it. ‘Want one?’
‘Not yet.’ She has never smoked. Tonight might be a first, but she’d rather have coffee. The wine merchant’s is closed, which, given Gillard’s earlier confession, is probably a good thing.
‘We’re meant to think it’s suicide,’ he says.
‘Or, given Pierre Fayette’s murder-made-to-look-like-suicide earlier today, we’re meant to think it isn’t.’ She presses her hands to her eyes. ‘Either way, this is Conrad Lakoff’s grandfather. Life is about to get messy.’
‘Not if we’re clever.’ Gillard blows smoke at the sky. ‘We could move the body.’
Picaut laughs aloud. ‘Martin, we’re the police. Just at this moment, you’re my assistant. We can’t move him.’ Interesting thought, though. She tilts her head. ‘Anyway, what use would that be?’
‘I’m not sure. But this isn’t an accident – not the death, not the location, not the way he’s died. He was placed here for a reason. If we move him, that reason might show itself.’
‘You’re speaking from experience?’
‘Let’s say that I know how these people think, and just now they think they are driving the narrative. If we change it, they might panic, and panicked people make mistakes.’
‘They also kill people. Although actually, in terms of our suspects, the field is narrowing fast. The only real question’ – Picaut leans back against the wall – ‘is whether they are fit, young agents of the special forces, who don’t care what we know because they’ve got the protection of the world’s only remaining – and deeply unstable – superpower. Or very, very old agents of long-dead units who don’t care because they don’t have long to live anyway.’
Martin Gillard says, ‘There’s always a third option, which is that whoever they are, their motives outweigh any sense of risk.’
‘In which case, we need to find the motive.’ She stands upright. ‘Stay here. When Rollo turns up, tell him to process as usual and keep it quiet.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To find the very, very old agents.’
He catches her arm. ‘Not alone, you’re not. You’re unarmed.’
‘Yes, alone. Exactly because I’m unarmed.’ She pushes him away. ‘If I’m not back by the time the ambulance comes, tell Rollo to call Patrice. He’ll let you know where I’ve gone.’
The hotel is set back from the street, behind spear-topped wrought-iron railings. The concierge is white-haired and charming and yes, it is possible for her to visit room nine, if Madame will wait while he makes a phone call?
Madame reveals herself to be Captain and it transpires that, this being the case, the phone call can be dispensed with.
Room nine is on the second floor. She runs up a curving staircase in pre-Revolutionary style beneath the light of an understated chandelier. Left at the top and third on the right and she doesn’t knock.
‘Laurence. René. JJ Crotteau has been—’ The room is empty, neatly cleared. It smells of cigarette smoke and coffee and action. A footstep falls behind her and the concierge is there, with the whine of an elevator in the background.
‘If the Captain would allow me?’ He carries a message, left by the elderly gentleman with the white hair and the British accent who said she might call in for it. ‘He also left a mobile phone, for your safekeeping.’
The message is written in English on the hotel’s headed notepaper.
To the best of her knowledge, the message is plain text without any kind of code, but she trusts nothing any more, least of all Laurence Vaughan-Thomas. She photographs the page, sends it to Patrice and folds it into an inner pocket. We did not kill JJ. She might believe him. She’s not sure. What matters, anyway, is why. Why JJ Crotteau? Why now? Why Sophie, Pierre – and John Lakoff in Virginia? Why … and then who?
Back at the crime scene, Rollo and Sylvie are struggling to retain control in the face of gathering crowds, a steaming Ducat – and Conrad Lakoff, newly arrived. He has not brought his father, but four of his big, muscled guards stand behind him. More and more, Orléans is beginning to feel like an extension of Washington DC.
‘I told you he was in danger. I told you …’ Lakoff’s grief fills the street around his grandfather’s body. He grasps Picaut by the shoulders. ‘You said you’d put your best people on it.’
Behind, she feels Rollo and Martin Gillard each take half a step forward and then stop.
‘We did put our best on it,’ Picaut says. ‘
And you said you’d let me know if he used his mobile phone. Did he?’ Her face itches again, which is interesting given the long gap since the last time she noticed it.
She steps away from his grasp, slides her hands into her pockets and hitches her heel up a wall. She could not be less of a threat. In the background, the four guards lift the body of JJ Crotteau into the ambulance. He really was remarkably large. Death has not diminished him.
Conrad Lakoff and his men stand by the doors as the body is hefted in. ‘I can’t believe …’
She says, ‘I am genuinely sorry for your loss, but we did everything we possibly could. You know what your grandfather was, and what skills he had. If he didn’t want to be found, we stood no chance of finding him. What we need to do now is to find out why he died.’
‘You need to find out who killed him.’
She catches his eye. He shifts away first. She says, ‘It looks like suicide. It’s possible that’s exactly what it is.’
‘You can’t believe that? After Pierre Fayette …’ The silence stretches thin and tense.
Eventually, she says, ‘If you have any new information about Fayette’s death that might help our enquiries, now would be a good time to tell me.’
‘I don’t.’ Flushed, he says, ‘If you need me, I’ll be at the conference—’
‘If we find anything, I’ll let you know. Give your father my apologies and my condolences for his loss.’
‘Thank you, Captain. In spite of everything, you have my full confidence.’ He passes his hands over his eyes. ‘Please—’ That grip on Picaut’s shoulder again. ‘Let me know the moment you have anything.’
He leaves in a black BMW, flanked by a security detail of men who very nearly match him in size. Ducat stands in a puddle of light beneath a street lamp, watching the tail lights depart. ‘Well, that could have gone worse.’ He turns to her, hands deep in the pockets of a gabardine coat. ‘Does he know who did it?’
‘I’m not ruling it out. This is either a murder that we’re meant to think is a suicide because this morning’s so clearly wasn’t – in which case he’s in the frame for that one. Or it’s a suicide that we’re meant to think is a murder, for exactly the same reason. In which case we have to ask ourselves why JJ Crotteau, a man with no scruples, and no conscience that anyone has ever detected, might choose to shoot himself in a public place while his grandson is live on a stage in front of fifty of the world’s highest classified intelligence professionals, if it wasn’t to give him a cast-iron alibi?’