Blacklight Blue

by Peter May

  Enzo stared at her in astonishment. She was holding his satchel.

  ‘Is thees your keeler, señor?’ Again he translated for the others, and now they roared with laughter. Enzo flushed with embarrassment, and the maid held up his satchel. She had no idea what the joke was, but smiled anyway.

  Enzo said, ‘I must have left my bag at Señora Bright’s house.’ He almost snatched it from her. ‘Why didn’t you just call after me?’

  His translator interpreted for the crowd, eliciting another roar, and some applause. ‘Señor. She could not. Maria Cristina Sanchez Pradell ees muda. Mute. She has not spoken seengle word her whole life.’ He allowed himself a broad grin. ‘You have very veeveed imagination. Señora Sanchez never harm anyone.’

  The bride stepped forward, her veil drawn back from a beautifully slender latin face, large black eyes viewing him with amusement. She spoke rapidly and the small man looked towards her bride-groom for confirmation. The young man nodded, and the Cadaquès policeman turned back to Enzo.

  ‘She say not often tall, dark stranger fall eento wedding. Maybe lucky. How about you stay for drink and dance?’

  Enzo looked around the assembled faces watching for his reaction, and for the first time he saw a funny side to it all, a release of tension after his chase through the dark streets of the town believing that Rickie Bright was right behind him. He said, ‘If you put a glass in my hand, I’ll be delighted to drink a toast to the happy couple.’ He looked at the gorgeous young woman smiling at him on her wedding night, and thought how lucky was the young man at her side. They had the whole of the rest of their lives together. His time with Pascale had been so short. But he forced a smile. ‘As long as I get to dance with the bride.’

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Enzo sat nursing a glass of red wine in the window of the Café Bonaparte. He watched the faces streaming past in the Place St. Germain de Prés outside. Pale faces on a grey November afternoon breathing dragonfire into polluted winter air. And he wondered if someone out there was watching him. If Bright had any idea where he was, and if so, what he might be planning to do about it.

  Raffin was late, as usual. Just as he had been when they’d met here for the first time more than two years ago. Enzo had flown directly to Paris from Barcelona, and been there for two days, calling in favours, before taking the decision to call Anna. Which was when he’d learned that Raffin had left the Auvergne several days earlier to return to the capital. He immediately called him at his apartment to arrange a rendezvous.

  ‘Do you want another of these?’

  Enzo looked up to find Raffin unravelling a blood-red scarf from around his neck. His long camel coat hung open, its collar turned up. Beneath it he wore a beige crewneck sweater over black jeans. His brown leather boots were polished to a shine. He was pointing at Enzo’s glass.

  ‘No thanks.’

  Raffin shrugged, and as he sat signalled a waiter to order a small, black coffee. ‘So … what news?’

  ‘How much do you know?’

  ‘Only what Kirsty told me on the phone.’ Just the mention of her name was enough to evoke the depression that had dogged Enzo since the night at Simon’s apartment. ‘About the Bright twins, and Rickie Bright stalking you through the London underground. How did you get on in Spain?’

  Enzo told him about his meeting with Señora Bright, her suspicions about the woman by the pool, the blood-stained toy panda.

  ‘Can you do anything with the blood?’

  ‘I’ve got someone working on it right now. We should have a result later this afternoon.’

  Raffin rubbed his hands cheerfully. ‘It’s turning into quite a story, Enzo.’ Whatever enmity there was between the two men, whatever words might have passed between them, Raffin seemed to have banished to some other compartment of his life. The journalist in him smelled a scoop. Enzo had already solved two of the seven murders he had written about in his book. Both of them had generated copy and controversy. Now it looked like they were on the verge of cracking a third.

  ‘Why did you come back to Paris, Roger?’

  Roger flicked him a glance, and Enzo detected a note of caution in it. ‘I was going insane cooped up in that bloody house. Besides, I have a living to earn. I don’t have some university paying my wages while I go around playing Sherlock Holmes.’

  ‘Weren’t you worried?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘That Bright might come after you?’

  Raffin laughed. ‘No. It’s you he’s after, Enzo, not me. I’m probably in more danger when I’m with you than when I’m not.’ He took a sip of his coffee. ‘You said you had a meeting set up for this afternoon. Is that about the blood work?’

  ‘No, it’s about the cassette I sent to my voice expert here in Paris. The recording of the conversation between Bright and Lambert the day before the murder.’

  Raffin cocked an eyebrow. ‘What about it?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. That’s what we’re going to find out.’

  Pierre Gazaigne was project leader of a study in the analysis of spoken French sponsored by the Université Paris-Sud 11, and the Université Pierre et Marie Curie. The project was based in a small suite of offices and sound labs on the top floor of a converted nineteenth century apartment block in the Rue de Lyon in the twelfth arrondissement.

  Enzo and Raffin walked south from the métro stop at the Place de la Bastille. They found the building three hundred metres down, on the west side of the street, and squeezed into a tiny elevator that took them to the sixth floor. They stepped out into a gloomy hallway filled with cigarette smoke and the grey faces of half a dozen nicotine addicts puffing morosely on their cigarettes.

  One of them coughed, phlegm rattling in his throat. ‘Are you looking for someone?’

  ‘Professor Gazaigne.’

  The smoker flicked his head towards the glass door. ‘Go on in. You’ll find him in the lab on the right at the far end of the corridor.’

  Gazaigne was sitting at an enormous console with a bewildering array of sliders and faders beneath a bank of computer screens. Sound graphs flickered in various colours, and a loud screeching noise issued from huge speakers on either side. He turned as the door opened and flicked a switch. The graphs flatlined, and the screeching stopped. He was an elderly shambles of a man in a grubby white labcoat, white hair scraped back over a flat head. He had a pencil stuck behind one ear, half-moon glasses perched on the end of his nose, and a twinkle in dark, brown eyes.

  ‘Ah, c’est l’Ecossais!’ He jumped to his feet and thrust a large hand at Enzo. ‘You look older every time I see you.’

  ‘That’s because you only see me about once every ten years.’

  ‘That would explain it.’

  ‘This is my colleague, Roger Raffin, a journalist.’

  Gazaigne crushed Raffin’s hand ‘Enchanté, monsieur. Pull up a chair.’ He waved a hand towards the console. ‘A few years ago there would have been banks of reel-to-reel machines in here. Nagra, Sony, Revox, Teac. Now it’s all digital. State of the art electronics. Random access. But, you know, it takes a lot to beat good old-fashioned tape running at 76.2 centimetres per second. The treble response you got off those old recorders was unbeatable. Sadly, the people with the purse strings believe the PR of the manufacturers, so now we’ve gone digital. Like it or not. And we’ve lost a lot in the process. Progress at any cost, I say, even if it’s backwards.’

  He looked at the two faces looking back at him and burst out laughing. ‘But you don’t want to hear some old fart going on about things not being what they were in the good old days. You want to know what I found on your crappy little cassette.’

  ‘What did you find, Pierre?’ Enzo said.

  ‘Some shit quality sound, I’ll tell you that.’

  ‘And what else?’

  ‘Well, you were right about the shibboleth, Enzo. Portsmoose. Dead giveaway. You see, I can’t even say it. But this guy pronounced it like a native. Very
interesting. Because he isn’t. He comes from the south of France. More specifically, and almost certainly, the Roussillon.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘Number of factors. I thought it was interesting the way he used tu and the other vous. As you suggested, a very pointed way of establishing a pecking order. The tu, however, tells us more. Not that it’s much in evidence. But if you listen carefully, the pronunciation is telling. He says the tu almost like ti. Listen …’ He swivelled away to tap at a keyboard and pull up a menu on one of his screens. He ran a cursor down a list of files, and selected one. He double clicked and a graph immediately began spiking on an adjoining monitor as Bright’s voice boomed out from the speakers. J’ai pensé que tu te démanderais pourquoi je n’avais pas appelé. ‘Do you hear? I thought you would wonder why I hadn’t called. The tu next to the te seems to emphasise it. He definitely leans towards pronouncing it as ti.’

  It was too subtle for Enzo, but Raffin nodded. ‘I hear it,’ he said. ‘Now that you’ve pointed it out, but I can’t say I’d have noticed.’

  ‘Ti as or ti es for tu as or tu es, is originally derived from a working-class Marseilles accent, but has gained a certain caché among the young over the last couple of decades. Particularly in the South where the accent is broadly similar anyway.’

  ‘But you said this guy was from the Roussillon?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘How can you be so sure of that?’

  ‘Vocabulary.’ The old man grinned. ‘You live in the Midi-Pyrénées, Enzo. If you went into a boulangerie you’d probably ask for a chocolatine, while the rest of France would ask for a pain au chocolat – and they’d know where you came from. But the Midi-Pyrénées is a big area with lots of different dialects, so they wouldn’t know exactly where. The Roussillon, on the other hand, is a smaller area, formerly known as Northern Catalonia, and corresponding almost exactly to the present-day département of the Pyrénées-Orientales. And that’s where it gets interesting.’

  He turned back to the computer and selected another file and hit the return key. Bright’s voice boomed out again. Ecoute-moi. Il faut que nous parlions. And Gazaigne turned to Enzo. ‘Tell me what you think he said.’

  ‘He said, listen, we need to talk.’

  ‘Specifically listen to me? Ecoute-moi?’

  ‘Yes.’

  But the old professor shook his head. ‘Sounds like it, doesn’t it? I wasn’t sure at first. But I’ve listened to it a dozen times, slowed it down, run it backwards, you name it. There’s a lot of noise on the tape, and I had to try and filter that out. So listen again.’

  This time he selected another file, and Bright’s voice sounded sharper, clearer, and slowed down perhaps fifteen to twenty percent.

  ‘What do you think now?

  Raffin said, ‘It sounds like écoute-noi. But that doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘It does if you come from the Roussillon. There’s a lot of Catalan still spoken down there. After all, historically, it’s not that long since it was still a part of Catalonia. A lot of Catalan words have come into common French usage there, particularly slang words.’ Gazaigne turned to Enzo. ‘Just like in Scotland. You use a lot of Gaelic words without realising what they are. Even French words, absorbed into the language when the French and Scots were allies against the English. You talk about a bonny lassie. But actually, bonny derives directly from the French word bonne, meaning good. Except that you’ve made it mean pretty.’

  He hit the return key and played the line again. Écoute-noi. Enzo heard it this time, quite distinctly.

  ‘Noi is the Catalan word for friend, or pal. Equivalent of the French word mec or gars. So your killer was actually saying, listen friend, or listen pal, which was a lot more threatening, even if his victim didn’t understand it.’ He grinned again. ‘Not a huge amount to go on, and I’m not a gambling man. But if you asked me to put money on it, I’d say your man comes from the Roussillon.’

  Enzo gazed thoughtfully off into some middle distance. The Roussillon was at the western end of the French Mediterranean, forming the border with Spain at the southeast extreme of the Pyrenean mountain range. Not much more than an hour’s drive from Cadaquès. Whoever had taken little Rickie Bright hadn’t taken him very far.

  ‘What do you think?’ Raffin turned up his collar and swept the trailing end of his scarf back over his shoulder as they stepped out into the Rue de Lyon.

  The roar of rush hour traffic was almost deafening. Enzo had to raise his voice. ‘I think that there are an awful lot of people in the Roussillon.’

  ‘So where do we begin?’

  ‘With an Englishwoman who arrived in the Pyrénées-Orientales with a twenty-month-old son in July 1972. There may have been a father, but more likely than not, she’d have been on her own.’

  ‘How can you be sure it was an Englishwoman?’

  ‘I can’t. But the woman Angela Bright met poolside at the hotel was English. Posh, with a Home Counties accent, she said. And I can’t escape the fact that Rickie Bright pronounced Portsmouth like a native. If he grew up in the Roussillon, then that’s how he’d speak his French. But if his mother was English, and spoke only English to him in the house, then he’d speak it as an Englishman would. Just as Sophie speaks English with my Scottish accent, even although she’s never been to Scotland.’ He looked at Raffin. ‘So Rickie Bright would be able to pass himself off as French or English.’

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Paris, November 1986

  Fontenay-sous-Bois was only three stops out from the Gare de Lyons on the RER red Line A. Richard barely saw the grey Paris suburbs that smeared past the rain-streaked windows of the train. It was all just a blur, like every one of the eighteen years of his life to date. Only the future lay in sharp, clear focus. A decision taken. A determination to carry it out. All he had in the world was contained now in the suitcase he had stolen from his brother. The suitcase he had lived out of for the last six weeks. A procession of cheap hotels in Pigalle, spending his brother’s money, eking it out while he made his plans.

  Now he had butterflies colliding in his stomach. This was no short-term commitment. There would be no turning back, no second chance. This was who he was going to be. A man of his own making. A future determined by no one but himself. But, still, it scared him.

  It was drizzling when he got off on to the station platform at Fontenay, pushing through huddled crowds to the street outside. It was raw cold here, and he pulled up the collar of his jacket, feeling the chill of it creeping into his bones. He walked the length of the Rue Clos d’Orléans before turning north into the Route de Stalingrad. At Rue Vauban he turned right, and took only a few minutes more to reach the deep stone arch built into the wall of the fort. It was dry in the tunnel, and beyond it he could see another, and the red blaize parade ground beyond that. Below the legend, Fort de Nogent, carved in stone around the arch were the letters that spelled his destiny. Légion Etrangère.

  A soldier on guard duty stopped him at the entrance. ‘What’s your business?’

  Richard straightened his shoulders and took courage from his own voice. He spoke boldly in English. ‘I am an Englishman. My name is William Bright, and I have come to join the Legion.’

  Chapter Forty

  Paris, November 2008

  The café on the Avenue de l’Opéra was full to bursting. Condensation fogged the windows, and waiters squeezed between crowded tables balancing drinks on trays above their heads. It was a popular haunt for students, the breath-filled screech of Raphaël’s Caravane, surpassed only by the demented conversation of young people fresh from a day’s study.

  Maude had kept them seats in an alcove, well-worn leather bench seats on either side of a beer-stained table. It afforded them at least a little privacy.

  ‘Darling, you’re late.’ She kissed Enzo twice on each cheek when he slid in beside her, and then with pouting lips planted a wet kiss on his mouth. ‘But I forgive you. For you’ve brought such a pre
tty young man to see me.’ She turned come-to-bed eyes towards Raffin across the table, and he blushed to the roots of his hair.

  Maude laughed uproariously, delighted by her small, mischievous pleasures. She was somewhere in her late sixties. She wore a voluminous cape, and her long silver hair was piled untidily on top of her head. There was too much rouge on her cheeks and too much red on her lips. But you could see that she had once been a very attractive woman. A smouldering sexuality still lurked somewhere not far beneath the surface.

  Enzo took pleasure in Raffin’s discomfort. ‘Maude and I go back a long way,’ he said. ‘She taught me the meaning of the word allumeuse.’

  Raffin seemed puzzled. ‘Prick teaser?’

  ‘That’s me, darling. As Enzo said, we go back a long way. But we never went quite far enough, where I’m concerned.’ She raised an eyebrow and gave Raffin an appraising look. ‘You’d do, though.’ And she turned to Enzo. ‘Is he free?’

  ‘He’s dating my daughter.’

  ‘Ah. The young. Yes.’ She turned her focus back on Raffin. ‘They might look good on your arm in a restaurant, or going to the theatre. But I’ll give you a better time in bed, darling.’ She grinned. ‘I’ll order a bottle, shall I?’ She waved her hand in the air and somehow caught the attention of a waiter. ‘A bottle of Pouilly Fuisse, and three glasses.’ She smiled sweetly at Enzo. ‘And, of course, you’ll be paying.’

  ‘Of course. Do you have the results?’

  ‘Bien sûr, mon cher.’ The array of silver and gold bracelets dangling from her wrists rattled as she delved into an enormous sack of a bag on the seat beside her. She pulled out a large, beige envelope which she slapped on the table, long red fingernails polished and gleaming. ‘Everything you always wanted to know about blood but were afraid to ask.’

  ‘Were you able to recover DNA?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Not very interesting though. There’s so much more you can learn about a person from their blood.’