by Peter May
He had meant to make love to her slowly, surely. A slow hand, a steady beat. But in the end he had consumed her quickly, devouring her almost in a single bite. Now they lay breathless from the exertion, side by side, damp sheets twisted around spent bodies, cold air on burning skin.
He had no idea how long they stayed like that, limbs cooling in the falling temperature of the bedroom. He was already drifting in some netherworld, when he felt her lips on his face, a soft, fond kiss, and then she reached over to cover them both with the quilt. He thought he heard her whisper, ‘I love making love with you.’ An echo of Strasbourg. But he couldn’t be sure.
It felt as if he had been asleep for hours. But when he woke, it was still pitch dark. The moon had dipped in the sky and was casting its light now on the wall above the bed. As he came to, in the silence he heard her breathing. Not the slow, steady rhythm of sleep. The shallower, more rapid beat of impatient consciousness. He was lying face down, and rolled on to his side to see her lying on her back, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. He reached out a hand to touch her face and she turned towards him.
He said, ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing. I can’t sleep, that’s all.’
‘Why?’
‘Just … everything. You calling out of the blue like that. Arriving with your family and friends in tow. The whole, incredible story. I can’t stop thinking about it.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. It’s not just you. There’re other things in my head, too.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Oh, you know, the sort of things that keep me awake on other nights.’
‘We all have our demons.’
‘Yes, we do.’ She smiled. Then turned away again to gaze at the ceiling.
‘I have no idea what yours are.’
‘That’s because I haven’t told you.’
He looked at her profile caught in the moonlight, and thought how its cold, colourless light aged her, sinking her eyes into shadow. ‘You haven’t told me much of anything.’
Her mouth widened slightly. A small smile. ‘I’m more enigmatic that way. Keeps the mystery alive.’
‘You ski in the winter and scuba dive in the summer. You once represented your country at the Olympics. Your parents live in Strasbourg. That’s about the sum total of my knowledge.’
‘So what else do you want me to tell you?’
‘I don’t know. Is it where you grew up? Strasbourg?’
She shook her head. ‘No. My mother comes from Strasbourg. But they only moved there when my father retired. I was brought up in Lyons.’ She inclined her head to find him watching her. ‘Is that really what you wanted to know?’
‘You told me, that night we met, that you never expected to be forty and alone.’
‘Does anyone?’
‘Why are you alone, Anna? You’re an attractive woman. You have a lot of life still ahead of you.’
She turned her gaze back to the ceiling and pressed her lips together, as if afraid of the words that might spill out if she opened them. She held her silence for a long time. When, finally, she spoke, it was in a very small voice. Little more than a whisper. ‘You look back on your life sometimes, and wish you’d made different decisions. You know, the big decisions. Career over personal life. One man over another. And then the little things that sometimes have even bigger consequences. Like deciding you don’t have time to go to the shops. There’s a laundry needing done, and you say, go on, don’t wait for me. The shops’ll be shut by the time I’m done here. And if you hadn’t, they might still be alive. Or you might be dead with them and it wouldn’t matter.’
Enzo saw a tear trickle from the corner of her eye and catch the light of the moon. ‘Who?’
‘My husband. My little boy.’
His voice was hushed. ‘What happened?’
She brushed the silver tear from her face. ‘Road accident. You know, the sort of thing you read about all the time and never think about the pain of the ones left behind. And how it never really goes away. You can replace almost anything but people.’
Enzo closed his eyes and shared her pain. ‘I know.’
But she was lost in her memories and missed his empathy. ‘I was so determined not to have children until my career was over, it was too late to start again. I only married André because he got me pregnant. But I kind of loved him, in a way. Because I knew he loved me.’ She drew a deep breath and he heard the tremble in it. ‘But none of that matters now. Can’t go back. Can’t undo it. Any of it.’
‘You’re not too old to still have children.’
‘Physically, maybe. But in my head, that time came and went.’ She turned her head towards him and forced a smile. Anyway, I bet you’re wishing you’d never asked. Enigma’s more interesting than tragedy.’
He laid his hand on her cheek. ‘I’m sorry, Anna.’
‘Oh, God, can we change the subject? Or neither of us’ll get any sleep tonight.’
‘Sure. What do you want to talk about?’
‘I don’t know.’ She rolled her eyes in an extravagant show of thinking about it. ‘How’d you get in tow with that creep, Raffin?’
Which took Enzo by surprise. ‘You don’t like him?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘You seemed to be getting on very well with him over dinner.’
‘I was being polite. He’s such a phony, and I’m way too long in the tooth to fall for that crap. What on earth does Kirsty see in him?’
Her words echoed almost exactly his own earlier thought. ‘I wish I knew.’
‘At least you’re taking him away with you to Paris.’ She thought for a moment. ‘When do you plan to go?’
‘First thing tomorrow.’
She raised herself on one elbow and looked at him, half of her face caught in full moonshine, the other in deep shadow. ‘You’re kidding. You only just got here.’
‘My life’s on hold, Anna, until I deal with this. When someone is trying to destroy everything that is dear to you, the only way to stop him is by getting him before he gets you.’
She looked at him pensively. ‘I thought I’d have more time with you. When will you be back?’
‘I don’t know.’
She slipped a cool hand beneath the quilt to find the soft warmth between his legs, and he felt himself respond immediately to her touch. ‘Then maybe we’d better just do this again. Give ourselves something to remember, until the next time.’
And this time, he knew, he would make love to her the way he had meant to before. With a long, slow burn to warm the cold night.
PART THREE
Chapter Twenty-Six
You wouldn’t normally expect to find customers sitting out at pavement tables on a cold November day in Paris, even under the protective cover of an awning. But since the smoking ban had come into force earlier in the year, die-hard tobacco addicts had taken to sitting out on the sidewalks, nursing their noisettes and puffing on their Gaulloises huddled over tables in coats and hats. France was changing. The stereotypical chain-smoking Frenchman was a dying breed. Literally.
Enzo and Raffin found the retired commissaire, Jean-Marie Martinot, at his habitual pavement seat outside the Café Maury in the Rue La Fayette, not far from the Gare de l’Est. A handrolled cigarette smouldered in the corner of his mouth. A glass of red wine stood on the table beside him, and his face was buried in an early edition of France Soir. This stereotypical old Frenchman, at least, was still alive and kicking.
He drew his nose out of the newspaper as they pulled up chairs to join him. ‘Ah, Monsieur Raffin.’ He held out his hand. ‘Comment allez-vous?’
‘I’m well, Monsieur Martinot. This is the gentleman I spoke to you about on the phone. Monsieur Macleod.’
Martinot extended his hand to Enzo. ‘Delighted, monsieur. Your reputation goes before you.’
‘Would that be the good one or the bad one?’
The retired policeman chuckled. Then his smile faded
. ‘So you think you’re going to crack the Lambert case?’
‘Only with your help.’
‘I spent ten years sweating it before I finally gave up. Hate to admit defeat, monsieur. But la retraite was beckoning. And it was time for me to call it a day.’ He took a final puff on his cigarette and stubbed it out in the cendrier. ‘Still niggles, though.’ And as the smoke leaked from the corners of his mouth, he drained his glass. ‘You can buy me another, if you like.’
He had a full head of white hair dragged back from a high forehead and unusually blue eyes. He was a big man shrunken by age. A hard man in his day, Enzo guessed. Tough, physical. And yet there was a gentle quality about him, a reflection perhaps of something more cerebral, a sense of humanity that had, against all the odds, survived a lifetime as a cop. He wore a heavy, dark blue overcoat buttoned up almost to the neck, and there was a wide-brimmed felt hat on the seat beside him. Enzo noticed that he wore different patterned socks, and that his shoes had long since lost their shine. There were food stains on the front of his coat, and it occurred to Enzo that Jean-Marie Martinot was either a widower or a confirmed bachelor. Either way, he was certain that the old policeman lived on his own.
Enzo settled in his seat and glanced a little anxiously along the sidewalk. He knew there was no way the killer could know where he was. But he felt exposed here on the streets of Paris. Vulnerable. Raffin ordered three glasses of wine and raised his voice above the roar of the traffic. ‘So do you think you can help?’
‘Of course. What else have I got to do with my time? I’ve got so much of the damned stuff I can’t give it away. People say it passes more quickly when you get older. But since Paulette died, every day feels like a year. And the nights even longer, especially when you can’t sleep. Santé.’ He raised his glass and took a sip of wine. ‘Besides, I’d like to see you get the bastard. He still haunts me, you know. Poor little Pierre Lambert. It’s funny, I spent twenty years working homicide, and I always felt a kind of responsibility for the victims. Like I was the only one who could represent their interests in the world they had just departed. They had no voice in it, no way of seeking justice. That was my job, and if I failed, I felt I’d let them down.’
He took out a plastic tobacco pouch and a pack of Rizla cigarette papers and began rolling a fresh smoke. ‘He’d have been forty this year. Maybe that’s why time drags. I’ve got all his lost years to live out, too. Along with all the others.’ He shook his head, pulling pinches of tobacco from each end of his cigarette. ‘There were a few, sadly.’
Enzo lifted his glass and took a sip. The wine was cold and bitter on the tongue. Cheap red wine. La piquette, as the French called it. ‘So why does Lambert haunt you more than the others?’
‘I suppose it wasn’t him so much as his mother.’ Martinot looked from one to the other. ‘It’s always the hardest bit. Talking to the loved ones. Breaking the news. She was a poor soul. Widowed when she was just a young woman, left to bring up two children with only her sister-in-law to help. Worked her whole life, with nothing to show for it in the end. Her sister-in-law found herself a man finally and left. Her daughter got MS and ended up in a wheelchair. And then I arrive. A messenger from hell to tell her that her son’s been murdered. Her boy. The only one in the whole world who cared. And since she’d had to give up her job to look after her daughter, he was her only means of support.
‘Lambert was keeping them both, his mother and his sister. He’d told them he was going to move them into a nice apartment in town. It’s a pity he didn’t do it before he died. Because the authorities couldn’t have taken it away from them. As it was, his family didn’t get a penny from his offshore account. That was sequestered for the case. Money of dubious origin.’
Enzo said, ‘Did she know where his money came from?’
Martinot smiled sadly and shook his head. ‘Didn’t have a clue. She thought her precious boy had a part share in a successful restaurant. She had no idea that he was gay, never mind a male prostitute. In a way, perhaps, it was better for her that the case never did come to court. She would have learned things about her boy she would never have wanted to hear. And I certainly wasn’t going to tell her.’
‘Did you come to any conclusions at all about who might have murdered him or why?’
The old man shook his head. ‘No. There was precious little evidence, and what there was proved frustratingly contradictory. I’ve thought about it a lot since, though. And I suppose if I was to make a guess, I’d probably say that Lambert had been blackmailing someone and pushed them too far. But whoever he was blackmailing, I don’t think that was who killed him.’
‘Why not?’
‘It was a messy crime scene, monsieur. And for that I have no explanation. But Lambert’s killer came prepared, left no prints, and killed him in a way you or I wouldn’t know how. My best guess would be that he was killed by a professional. Someone paid to do it.’
Enzo and Raffin exchanged glances.
‘But the best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley, as your countryman once wrote, and something went wrong that afternoon. None of it went quite as planned.’ He looked at Enzo. ‘I checked you out, monsieur, after Raffin called. You know your stuff.’
Enzo inclined his head in acknowledgement. ‘Crime scene analysis used to be my speciality.’
‘Then maybe you can throw some light on what it was that went wrong for our killer. And if you can, then maybe we’ll have a key to unlock the case.’
Enzo said, ‘Obviously the crime scene is long gone. But I take it the police still have the evidence?’
‘Locked up safe and sound in the greffe.’ Martinot looked at his watch and realised he hadn’t lit his cigarette. He leaned over a burning match and smoke rose in wreaths around his head. He looked up. ‘I still have some influence at the Quai des Orfevres. In half an hour, you’ll get to see everything we had.’ He finished his wine. ‘Which gives us just enough time for another glass.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Palais de Justice lay at the west end of the Île de la Cité, between the Quai des Orfèvres and the Quai de l’Horloge. Le greffe, the evidence depository, was situated deep in its bowels. Enzo had been here once before, when he found clues that led him to the missing Jacques Gaillard in a trunkful of apparently unrelated items recovered from the Paris catacombs.
In a vast, high-ceilinged room, row upon row of cardboard boxes were squeezed onto metal shelves that ranged from floor to ceiling. Every box told a story. Of murder, rape, theft, assault. The detritus of decades of crime. Evidence that either cleared or condemned, quashed or convicted. Or sometimes, simply baffled.
Martinot pushed open the door of a small room at the end of the main hall, and Enzo placed the box marked Production No. 73982/M on a plain metal table against the far wall. The retired commissaire looked at the label and recognised his own signature. He chuckled. ‘It’s been a while since I signed one of these.’
He took off his overcoat and hat and hung them on a coatstand by the door. His shirt was buttoned up to the collar, but he wore no tie. His jacket was held closed by a single button. The other two were missing. He opened the box. ‘Et voilà!’
Enzo looked into it and felt a strange, breathless sense of anticipation. This was what the killer had been trying so very hard to stop him from ever doing. People had died and lives been ruined in the process. There was something in here, Enzo knew, that would shine a light into a place which had languished in darkness for nearly seventeen years. It was up to him to find the switch.
One by one he lifted out all the bagged evidence from the crime scene that had been Lambert’s apartment. The antihistamines, now back in their bottle. Shards of glass from the tumbler smashed in the sink. The broken coffee cup and saucers. The shattered sugar bowl and lumps of sugar. The victim’s clothes and underwear, wrapped in brown paper. His shirt, a woollen sweater, jeans, sneakers. From all of which it was apparent that Lambert had been a slight-built man of less than aver
age height.
Enzo examined the cassette from the telephone answering machine in its ziplock bag. ‘Could I have a copy made of this?’
Martinot shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not.’
Enzo turned back to the treasure trove of evidence. There was a box of paperwork. The original police reports. Martinot’s tattered black notebook. The old cop picked it up and flipped through it with nostalgic fingers. A scrawling script written by another man in another time. Observations on life and death.
Pictures of the crime scene taken by the police photographer were slipped into plastic sleeves in a clip folder. Enzo glanced through them. Coarse colour under bright lights. A dead man lying among the debris of the struggle, his head turned at an impossible angle, a look of surprise frozen on his face.
Enzo was shocked by how slight he was. There was something fragile about him. An attractive young man whose life, and death, had been defined by his sexuality. He had a fine-featured face with full, almost sensuous lips. Dark, slightly curly hair fell untidily across his forehead. The bruises and scratching around his neck were plainly visible.
His appearance was dated already. Although less than seventeen years had passed, it seemed as if he had come from a different era. In seventeen years, Enzo had not changed so very much. He’d had his ponytail back then. Wore baggy, loose-fitting shirts, cargo pants. Sneakers. Timeless, unfashionable. But Lambert reflected the fashion of his time. Today, even at the same age, he would have looked quite different.
Enzo examined the chaos around the boy. The shattered coffee table, an upturned chair, an occasional table that had been sent flying, ornaments strewn across a luridly patterned carpet. That there had been quite a struggle was evident. He looked up to find Martinot smiling at him.
‘I know what you’re thinking. If the killer was a professional, like we figure he might have been, how on earth was Lambert able to put up such a fight? Look at him. You could have blown him over.’