by AD Davies
“I’m going to be around the Opera district, probably the Latin or Gothic Quarters too, might have to ask a few questions. I wanted to let you know in case the gendarmes thought me … suspicious.” As long as I wasn’t planning on running around like Liam Neeson displaying my “specific set of skills” on swarthy locals, I guessed this was the right way to go about things.
He stopped by a lift and pressed the call button. “Forgive my brusque manner. Madame Bertrand understood my hours when poor Henrietta was our case, but now…” He shrugged in a way I can only describe as “Gallic.”
“Well, I won’t keep you,” I said.
The lift arrived and we got on, and he pressed for the ground floor.
Bertrand said, “It is a tragedy when girls are missing. More so even than boys. Vulnerable, exposed. Don’t you think? It must be difficult for her family to accept she may be happily bouncing, as we speak, on a young man’s bed. You understand?”
“It’s actually what I’m hoping for.” But wasn’t expecting. “Certainly better than the alternative.”
“Ah.” He stopped in the foyer, signed his name in a book. “So you are a realist. As well as an optimist.”
I smiled, unsure exactly what he meant. Suspected a little was lost in translation. I said, “Something like that.”
I followed Pierre Bertrand out of the building to the parking lot. Each row contained twenty cars. I struggled to keep up as he hobbled with that odd gait.
He said, “This girl, what is her name?”
“Sarah Stiles. I think she’s travelling with a Gareth Delingpole, but their passports may be in the names of Gallway.”
“I will look out for her in the police reports. You have a description?”
I passed him copies of the photos of Sarah and Gareth. “Their last known location was L’Hostel Centrale. Low budget, backpacker place.”
“I know of it. On the edge of the nice area for tourists, on the edge of the less nice area too … even for Parisians. Our home city gangs operate here. Prostitution, drugs. And Asians are close to moving in, I believe. You should be careful.” He studied Sarah’s picture, then stopped beside a Renault and placed his briefcase on it, popped the locks. He put the photo inside and handed me a business card. “These are my numbers. If I can help, please call me.”
“Asians?”
“South East Asia. Many migrants. Like the Arabs and Africans, most are okay, but there are always criminals in any people. As far as I am aware, they do not yet have a solid hold in a particular district. But then I am not as connected to the street as I used to be.”
“Thank you,” I said, and shook his hand.
“You are welcome,” he said, climbing into his car.
“One more thing.” He wound down the window and I asked, “Do you know anything about a guy called Vila Fanuco?”
The friendly perma-smile faded beneath his beard. “Why do you wish to know about such a man?”
“Curiosity.”
“Get in,” he said.
And Gardien Bertrand proceeded to scare me half to death with his driving.
Chapter Thirteen
Gardien Bertrand pulled into traffic at a pace I thought unsafe even on clear roads. He zipped in and out of cars and mopeds, my foot pressing an imaginary brake pedal in the passenger foot-well.
“You are staying in the Opera district?” Bertrand said.
“No,” I said, gripping the seat. “The Grecian, in the Gothic Quarter.”
“I will take you there. But you must tell me: how do you know Vila Fanuco?”
“I don’t know him.”
He looked so pissed off at this that I think he genuinely tried to knock a young couple from their moped as he cut them up. “Then why ask of him?”
“I heard his name.”
“In associate… Apologies. In association with your missing girl?”
“Not exactly. Overheard a conversation.”
“I do not believe you.”
He yanked the wheel to the right. We pulled off the main road and onto a dirt path. The car slowed a little but we continued to skid until the driveway opened up into a car park with a dozen spaces. Gravel crunched under the wheels and he finally came to a halt beside a small manmade lake, facing the south side of the water.
Bertrand killed the engine. It ticked slowly and the policeman’s breathing grew longer and quieter. His eyes settled on the lake. I watched in silence. He focused on the water, the setting sun rippling gently across its surface. Geese swam. A mum and dad and two toddlers threw bread into the water on the opposite side, and the geese took flight, chased away the approaching ducks, wings batting at them, hoarding the bread for themselves. Night would soon fall, but the family carried on, widening the spread of their throws, allowing more birds to feed.
“This lake,” Bertrand said, “was donated to the city by Jaques Poulet. A businessman with holdings here and eight other European countries. His wife was kidnapped one day, but there was no ransom. We found her here, face down, shot three times through the back.”
Hard to imagine such a scene in this pretty corner of Paris, a corner I’d never seen before. It seemed doubtful many tourists would have either. A garden, private; exclusive to Paris’s own citizens.
“After the funeral,” Bertrand said, “a man contacted Monsieur Poulet to say that his shipping corporation was perfect for moving goods between countries, and this man was going into business with him. Monsieur Poulet refused, but the threat was implicit: ‘You do not want your children to end up like your wife, do you?’ A proud man, a father of three teenagers, he called us in.”
“You were involved?”
With a pained expression, he said, “I was not always a little press monkey.” He looked ahead. “We traced the interest back to Vila Fanuco, a smuggler with a growing reputation among our informants, and we gathered much evidence.”
Bertrand fished in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He stepped outside the car and I followed him. He took his time to light-up, and when it got going he limped to the water’s edge. I matched his pace, but his expression suggested I wasn’t even there.
“When he realizes we are coming for him, one of the policemen on the task force is beaten up in his home. His wife and mother are killed, his children … threatened. And a videotape of the whole thing is sent to the Ministère. Everyone on the case watched this video. Some of us were … angry. We wanted to catch him even more badly. We smashed every door, used every lead, and finally we brought him in. But some in the Ministère… some were scared. Others were contacted directly. Phone calls, notes in their children’s schoolbags, that sort of thing. His reach was far bigger than we first guessed.”
“A regular Keyser Söze,” I said.
“Who?”
“A … fictional villain. Famous in Britain. And America.”
“Oh, a film,” Bertrand said.
“He got off?” I asked.
“A scapegoat was needed, someone to mess up the operation.”
“You?”
“Me. I used excessive force, I failed to read his rights, I did many things.”
“Were they true?”
“Partly. But I had done those things before. Excessive force is what keeps us on top.” He lowered himself to the floor, his straight leg a hindrance, but I got the idea an offer of help would be insulting to this man. “There are bad people out there who keep the streets stable. Some of them, they have trouble, they call our criminal investigation division and we take care of it. The bad people who keep their business to themselves and to others like them, the public does not care what they do. Even the Asians … when we investigated Henrietta’s disappearance, even they were cooperative to a point, although they probably did not want us poking deeper into their business. But Fanuco does not respect the police. He does not care how we keep the peace. He only craves power. And now he has achieved that power, he will do whatever it takes to hold onto it.”
Bertrand finished his cigaret
te and crushed it out on the grass. Pocketed the butt. He turned to me, as serious as I’d ever seen another human being. He said, “Vila Fanuco … he does not fear us. He does not fear anything.”
Chapter Fourteen
It was almost nine, but I was not yet willing to turn in. There was still one lead I could follow-up at this time of night: the hotel with the internet café, where someone bought items on one of the fake credit cards. I didn’t fully understand why their spending was mostly on credit, though. Perhaps they knew the card only had a limited shelf-life and were saving the stolen cash until they needed it. If the hotel didn’t pan out, tomorrow I would hit the shops and restaurants in which they’d also used the card, and then start flashing their photos at the bus stations and travel agents. This work takes a toll on the feet, but it’s how these things start. Slowly.
L’Hostel Centrale’s Formica-clad lobby was painted magnolia, with cheap printed artwork in cheaper frames, like something from a council office, and a man in an off-white shirt slouched behind a reception desk that might have been new around the same time as the Eiffel Tower. The “internet café” from which Sarah sent her final email more than three weeks earlier was actually an espresso machine beside a bank of four computers that ate two euros per minute. Next to that was a reading area equipped with a book exchange where backpackers and other budget travelers swap their done-with novels for one on the shelves. In theory, this meant a lasting supply of decent literature. You get these in most hostels and budget hotels, and I used to take advantage of them wherever I went. It’s not about the expense, either. It’s being able to obtain English language novels whilst on the road. But in the age of the Kindle and other e-readers, many folk on lengthy jaunts simply no longer possess the literature to swap. A shame, but hey, convenience and progress always trump romantic notions and nostalgia.
The man behind the desk didn’t speak fluent English but between his basic knowledge and my high school GCSE we managed to ascertain that I was a private investigator looking for the girl and man in the photos I showed him, and that no, sorry, he could not remember either. He ran through the register and found nothing under their real names or under Gallway. If they were ever here, they definitely weren’t now. I did manage to establish, however, that I could pay in cash and a little bonus would mean my ID would not be retained.
At first, he was reluctant to allow me to ask around, but when I offered him a hundred euros, he set me a boundary of the public space, the internet station, and reading area. He sold me a nice coffee and a stale croissant, and I logged onto a computer to kill some time. In a budget place like this, people would stay for a month or more, so it was conceivable, albeit not very likely, that someone could have been here at the same time as Sarah.
I read about the weather for the next few days—rain was due tomorrow evening and all day Monday—and I logged onto the PAI network. Or, rather, I tried to. An aggressively red-colored box flashed up to inform me my sign-on was suspended and suggested I contact the system administrator. I called Jessica Denvers.
“They’ve locked you out,” she said. “From what I can see it happened in the last hour.”
“How can they do that? There’s been no court order, no notice.”
“They don’t have to. They just need reasonable suspicion of wrong-doing, and you accessing the database using company equipment via a foreign server … it kind of gave them enough.”
I was on an official PAI case, and I agreed to abide by PAI’s operational rules. There were procedures to follow if I wanted to use company equipment abroad. And since I had instigated those rules myself to prevent Roger Gorman and his dodgy subcontractors from operating in vulnerable areas, I could hardly complain. I should have known they’d be monitoring my activity.
I asked, “Can you get me a backdoor in?”
“It’ll take time. I’ll need to do it via a backdoor myself, so they don’t know it’s me.”
“Thanks, Jess.”
As I hung up, a woman of about thirty with curly blonde hair struggled down the spiral staircase with a backpack twice her size. I figured her for the type of traveler who jams every home comfort into her pack, then slowly loses all that vanity when kit such as waterproofs and food become more important than curling tongs and hairdryers. Unless she was only here for the weekend.
“Here for the weekend?” I asked, helping her with the rucksack.
She laughed. “No. The opposite.” She had a Geordie accent. “Hittin’ the road.” She pronounced it “roord.” “Five years in a call center—need a break.”
The pack weighed more than me, but I managed to get it into the lobby without fracturing my spine. Somehow, she lifted the enormous rucksack onto her back and tied the straps at the front.
“Ta,” she said. “You stayin’?”
“No. I’m looking for someone.” I showed her the photo of Sarah. “Might have been here a couple of weeks ago.”
“Sorry,” the girl said. “Was only here three days. On me way to Gare de l’Est. Zurich next.” Gare de l’Est in a Geordie accent … I could talk to her all day.
“Zurich’s expensive,” I said. “Take care.”
She waved goodbye and struggled through the door and out into the street. I’d give the hairdryer a week.
Already planning what time to set my alarm for the morning, I promised myself another ten minutes, and took a seat in the reading corner, Sarah Stiles’ face looking back at me from my phone. This wasn’t a girl to run off and keep going without any contact. She was troubled, sure, but she was also easily influenced. She followed her feelings, her instincts. Unlike me.
For me, teen angst had been a delayed reaction. Between the ages of twelve and fifteen, I suffered bullying. Not the physical kind, nothing I could fight back against, but the relentless, psychological warfare at which teenagers seem to excel. My shirts were not the trendiest, my trainers had no swoosh or other branded symbol, and I often wore the same pair of trousers two days in a row. My hair would grow to unmanageable lengths, drawing taunts of “hippie” and “tramp.” Home was sanctuary for me. Home was safe. Until Dad died, and my mother fell through the depths of clinical depression and into the life of Stuart Fitzpatrick, dragging me with her. When I objected, she repeated her new mantra yet again: “No more compromises.”
I took that advice to heart and—some time later—spent the night of my nineteenth birthday on a Moroccan beach in a fog of hashish with a bunch of people who spoke no English.
That was me, though. That was my vanishing act. Not—
“Sarah?” said a female voice.
A young woman in her early twenties stared at the photo of Sarah on the table before me.
“You know her?” I asked.
“Yes, she was here.” Light Midlands accent, British.
I sat up sharply. “Have a seat.”
“I’m meeting some people.” She headed for the door. “It’s my night off.”
I said, “Sarah might be in trouble.”
The girl stopped, let her head drop. Turned. “Damn. I knew there was something off about that guy.”
Patricia Norman was a receptionist here at L’ Hostel Centrale, preparing to start her first year in the Paris College of Art. Sarah supposedly checked in alone. She asked Patricia one thing straight away: how to locate the Shakespeare Bookshop. I hadn’t known Sarah was interested in books, but it made sense. She liked to concentrate, she liked order, so that was the sort of place she’d gravitate toward. And find it she did, with Patricia happy to have met someone who shared her passion. She had originally hoped to stay in one of the rooms that the proprietor offers to travelers in exchange for chores around the shop, but, alas, they were full, as they were when I tried over a decade earlier.
The two girls continued to hit it off that night when they toured the Latin Quarter, sinking a bottle of wine between them over dinner and then allowing a couple of Irishmen to throw a few cocktails their way. Neither girl “pulled,” but it was fun.
Patricia tightened her mouth and shrugged her shoulders, sighed and said, “Fine, I might have snogged one of them, but Sarah wasn’t interested. She was almost too drunk to talk, but she knew how to say ‘no’.”
Still no mention of Gareth.
Patricia said, “That was a Friday night about two or three weeks ago. Saturday, she was still hung-over. Said she’d have an early night. Sunday morning, I didn’t see her, but in the evening, there’s some guy taking her bags. He’s got this uniform on, and my boss, the owner—that guy—lets him do it.”
We both looked over at the surly receptionist. He didn’t care.
“What was it?” I asked. “A police uniform?”
“No. One of those posh hotel things. Red, with frilly shoulder pads.”
I jotted that down. “Anything else about him?”
“Just that he was Chinese. Or Japanese. Heck, I sound like such a racist. I don’t know.”
“Humans are a tribal race,” I said. “We recognize members of our own tribe far more easily than those from elsewhere. Westerners sometimes do have trouble identifying different racial groups from linked parts of the world. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, or China, Japan and Korea. It isn’t racist. It’s just the way we take in faces.”
While I reassured her, Pierre Bertrand’s words came back to me, his assertion that South East Asian gangs were stepping up their game. I asked Patricia to elaborate on the guy’s appearance, but beyond saying he was about six inches shorter than me and broad-shouldered, he was just “average.”
I said, “Did you ask the manager what was happening?”
“He said that Sarah had met a friend—he said it in that saucy way, you know, nudge-nudge, wink-wink—he said she was moving hotels and the concierge was shifting her things. He’d had a phone call from Sarah, so it was all above board. There was a fella waiting down here for this Chinesey guy too. I think I’d seen him around here. Older, like about your age.”