Milouins checked back down the road again, one forearm clamped to his nose in a vain effort to obviate the smell that still permeated his clothes. Either Lamia and her St George were long gone, or she was still down there, cash on delivery. What did he have to lose by backing his hunch? He’d either lost them, or he hadn’t. If they came back down the road he would follow them – to hell and back if necessary. If not, he would go back to the Domaine and arrange Lemelle’s secret burial.
Satisfed that he had cleaned up the area and secured Lemelle’s body, Milouins got back inside his car and settled down to wait.
24
Incongruous in his ten-year-old charcoal-grey Le Bon Marche suit, Calque sat in the sand, his knees spread, staring out to sea at the gradually emerging dawn. The woman, covered in a tartan blanket from the back of his car, lay motionless beside him.
The sudden opening of her eyes had proved to be a false alarm – a purely automatic reaction to the change of light. She was still doped out, her mouth partly open, her hands turned back on themselves as if she were trying to fend off the attentions of an overactive pet.
Calque lit a cigarette. Scrunching his eyes against the smoke, he fished the tape recorder out of his pocket and reversed the spool. Then he hit the play button and held the recorder up to his ear.
The recorder was sound-activated – meaning that the moment it identified a sound within a radius of maybe three metres, it would start itself up. The tape would then automatically turn itself over after forty-five minutes, and cut off for good after ninety. Calque noted with satisfaction that the full ninety minutes appeared to have been used.
The first noise Calque heard was that of a vacuum cleaner. The tape switched itself on and off a dozen or more times as the vacuum cleaner moved in and out of focus. Calque reined in a desire to fast-forward the tape. He had time. No one knew he was here. And the sea was calming in its way.
Half an hour in, he picked up his first voices. Calque shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over his head, creating a mini echo chamber. Two men were talking. Calque recognized the voice of the butler, Milouins, and someone whom he assumed to be one of the footmen – for it was clear from Milouins’s tone that he was addressing a subordinate. The two men seemed to be preparing the room for a meeting. As Calque listened, Milouins told the footman to lay on the wax polish with a will. A series of bumps followed.
‘The bastard is cleaning the table,’ Calque said to himself.
More bumps.
‘He’s moving chairs. The bastard is moving chairs.’
Another ten minutes went by and the tape auto-reversed. Still cursing, Calque began to fast-forward. Nothing. Just bumping, banging, and the occasional word between Milouins and the footman he was ordering about.
Calque switched off the tape recorder, replaced it in his jacket, and let the jacket slip down around his shoulders. He threw back his head as if he were about to howl at the moon. Five weeks. Five weeks of waiting and watching, and for what? A ninety-minute tape recording of two men cleaning a room.
He was past it. That was clear now. He had finally lost the plot. The Service had been right to green-light his early retirement. He was nothing but a liability. A dinosaur.
He looked down at the woman.
The dawn was up and her face was clearly visible now. She was watching him, her eyes wide open in shock.
Calque fought the temptation to plunge his hand back inside his jacket pocket and drag out his purloined badge for the second time. Why aggravate the situation? If the woman decided to prosecute him for kidnap, the fact that he had attempted to masquerade as a serving police officer would doubtless secure him a good two-to-three years’ extra prison time. Think what a field day some of his recidivists would have with him inside. They’d tattoo his eyeballs with a screwdriver.
‘You’re free to go, Mademoiselle. I want you to understand that. I’m not coercing you in any way.’
Lamia raised herself up on her elbows. After staring silently at him for what seemed the better part of sixty seconds, she allowed her eyes to drift away from Calque’s face and off towards the horizon. ‘Where am I?’
‘You’re at Pampelonne Beach. Near St Tropez. It’s just after dawn.’
Lamia sat up, shrugging the blanket away. She stretched her hands out in front of her, as if she still expected to find them tied up. ‘What am I doing here?’ She glanced across at Calque. ‘And who are you?’
‘Ah,’ said Calque. ‘You want to know who I am?’ once again he found himself on the cusp of declaring that he was Captain Joris Calque, Police Nationale, 2eme Arrondissement, Paris. Instead, he muttered, ‘If you will forgive me, Mademoiselle, I will withhold my name until the situation we are in establishes itself a little clearer.’
Lamia began to laugh. ‘Are we really in a situation?’
Calque shrugged. He felt like digging a hole in the sand, laying himself face down in it, and inviting the woman to fill it in. ‘In a manner of speaking. Yes.’
The smile stayed on Lamia’s face. ‘Have you kidnapped me? Or have you saved me? Make up your mind, please.’
Calque unslung his jacket from about his shoulders and replaced it carefully over Lamia’s. ‘It’s cold, Mademoiselle. This is the time of day when the body is at its most fragile.’
Lamia reached across herself and touched the flap of the jacket. ‘If you’re a kidnapper, you’re not a very good one. You’ve left your gun in your jacket pocket.’
Calque gave a small bow. It was clear that the woman was inviting him, for the second and last time, to lay his cards on the table. ‘It’s not a gun but a tape recorder, Mademoiselle. A tape recorder that I secreted illegally in your mother’s house some months ago, whilst I was still a serving police officer.’
Lamia pinched the jacket closer around her shoulders. ‘Ah, yes. The intellectual policeman. I’ve heard all about you. You’re the man my mother says harassed my brother into an early grave.’
Calque could feel himself bridling. An early grave? A psychopath like Achor Bale? Best place for him. He stopped marginally short of expressing his feelings in words, however, for he was still trying to second guess the woman’s intentions – just as she was attempting to gauge his.
He cleared his throat, measuring the level of his tone against the distant sound of the sea. ‘You were tied up and doped when my associate found you. Am I right in assuming that my admission about bugging your mother and your siblings has not distressed you quite as much as it might have done under other circumstances? That you might even…’ and here Calque felt perversely tempted to burst out laughing ‘…be alienated in some way from the rest of your family?’
Lamia gave Calque his jacket back. ‘Could we discuss this someplace else, do you think? Over a coffee and a croissant perhaps? I haven’t eaten anything in fifteen hours.’
Calque shrugged on his jacket. He could smell the woman’s scent on his collar, and it disturbed him. ‘Of course.’
‘And my name is Lamia.’
The sudden volte-face wrong-footed Calque. ‘Lamia? That is certainly an uncommon name.’ He vainly tried to conjure up who or what Lamia had represented in Classical mythology. Had she been the one whose tongue Jupiter had torn out in a fit of pique to prevent her giving the game away to Hera about one of his many affairs? No, that had been Lara. Or was that Laodice? So it was true, then. His brain was definitely going. ‘My name is Calque. Joris Calque. Ex-Captain in the Police Nationale.’
‘Well, Ex-Captain Calque, do you have any aspirin on you? I have a splitting headache. And your associate – for you mentioned an associate, didn’t you? – appears to have overlooked my handbag in his headlong rush to kidnap me.’
25
Lamia emerged from the unisex washroom at the back of the fisherman’s cafe near the Pointe de la Pinede. She had scrubbed her face and fluffed out her hair with her fingers, but the corrugations in her slacks were more terminal. She bent down, yanked at the slacks one final time, and then gave
up.
Calque saw some of the early morning regulars watching her. Despite the catastrophic blemish on the side of her face, she was still a self-evidently handsome young woman.
Calque stood up as she approached his table. ‘I thought you might have run away. Or gone to call the police. You would have been perfectly within your rights to do so.’
‘I know that.’
‘So why didn’t you?’
Lamia sat down. She stared at Calque, her eyes unwavering. ‘Because you offered me your jacket when you thought I might be cold.’
The waiter interrupted to bring them their cafe-cremes and a metal basket of croissants.
Lamia looked up at him. ‘Do you have any aspirin?’
‘Yes, Madame.’
She pinched two of her fingers together. ‘Two? With a glass of water? I’d be eternally grateful.’
Calque saw the waiter’s eyes hovering anywhere but on the woman’s strawberry birthmark. He felt an unexpected rush of pity for her – almost as if she were his daughter, instead of the pathetic, alienated girl who truly fulfilled that role, and who, terminally brainwashed by her termagant of a mother, hadn’t been able to bring herself to speak to him for the past fifteen years.
Lamia pecked at her coffee. ‘I suppose you’ve got everything on that tape machine of yours? The full record of what took place in the Corpus chamber? Or did you hide your recorder in the kitchen by mistake?’
Calque thrust his sentimental nature resolutely to the back of his mind, where it belonged. He took a preparatory breath – something he always did when he was about to tell an untruth to someone he was questioning. ‘To answer your questions in reverse order, Mademoiselle – no I did not leave my recorder in the kitchen. And yes I do have a full record of what went on.’ The lie sat uneasily with him for some reason, and he could feel the strain telling on the muscles below his eyes.
For Joris Calque had always been susceptible to women – it was a fact that he had been obliged to live with during his thirty years as a police officer. But he was not so naive that he didn’t realize that women, at their worst, could be just as lethal as men. Look at the Countess. And here he was, calmly chatting away to the woman’s daughter as if she were a work colleague – or his next-door neighbour.
He forced himself to remember that he was still dealing with a potential accessory before the fact. A woman who might even be a joint principal in the actus reus committed by Achor Bale against his subordinate, Paul Macron.
‘So I’ve no need to explain anything to you, Captain?’
‘No.’
Lamia prodded at her croissant, but didn’t make any further stab at eating it. ‘So what are you planning to do about it?’
Calque dipped his croissant in his coffee and transported it to his mouth, one hand automatically protecting his shirt from drips. ‘What do you suggest?’
Lamia took the glass of water and the two aspirin from the saucer the waiter was offering her. Still watching Calque, she tossed back the pills and swallowed the water. ‘You could alert the police, for a start.’
The waiter flinched, then backed away, as if he had inadvertently wandered too close to an open fire. Lamia gave him an absent-minded smile of thanks.
‘The police?’ Calque laughed. ‘I’m something of a persona non grata with my ex-colleagues at the moment. And you must know that tape recordings do not constitute evidence. They can be doctored too easily.’
Lamia massaged her temples, as if she felt that this might serve to speed up the aspirin’s effects. ‘But you knew that before you started, Captain Calque. You must have made some contingency plans?’
Calque sat up straighter in his chair. ‘Contingency plans? How could I make contingency plans when I didn’t know what I was about to hear?’
Lamia stared at him quizzically. ‘And Adam Sabir? What are you going to do about him?’
Calque could feel his fragile house of cards beginning to topple. ‘I’m going to phone him up, of course, and bring him up to date.’
‘Phone him up? Bring him up to date? Are you quite mad? Bring him up to date about what?’
Calque tipped back his head and closed his eyes.
Lamia sighed. ‘You don’t know anything, do you, Captain? You’re merely grasping at straws. Was there anything on that tape of yours at all?’
Calque allowed his head to snap forward. ‘Oh yes. I have a good hour-and-a-half’s worth of material.’
‘Material? What sort of material?’
‘Your meeting. Two days ago.’
‘Then you know what I was doing in the room where your mystery associate found me? Why I was doped and tied up?’
Calque felt as if he were sucking on a lemon and trying to blow through a trumpet at the same time. ‘Of course.’
Lamia stood up. ‘Then you don’t need anything from me, do you, Captain? I thank you for your frankness. Would you kindly do me a further favour and call me a taxi? And I would appreciate the loan of a few sous until my bank opens and I am able to inform them about the loss of my cards. I will write you an IOU if you so desire.’
26
Calque followed Lamia out onto the street. The early morning rush hour had started, and the buzz and swish of passing traffic merely added to his sense of frustration. ‘What are you going to do, Mademoiselle? Where are you going to go?’
‘What possible concern can that be of yours?’
Calque was briefly tempted to come clean and admit that his tape recording was useless. To follow his hunch that the woman was genuine. Perhaps she really had rebelled against her mother and all that she stood for? But thirty years of ingrained caution, in which Calque had lived by the rule that you never, ever, offer information to your opponent that he might one day use against you, overrode his better instincts. ‘Please let me drop you off somewhere. It’s the least I can do in the circumstances.’
Lamia shook her head distractedly. She was on the look-out for a taxi, and already seemed to have blanked Calque out from her consciousness.
Calque’s cell phone rang. He received a call so rarely that at first he only looked around vacantly, as if the call belonged to someone else. Then he slapped his jacket, and began to rummage in his pockets.
Lamia had seen a taxi, and was beckoning it towards her.
Calque pressed the receive button and raised the cell phone gingerly to his ear, as if he feared that it might be about to explode. ‘Yes? Calque here.’
‘It’s Picaro.’
Calque flinched. What the hell was Picaro doing, calling him up in a public place? Their business was over. The whole sorry fiasco had cost him 3,000 Euros that he could ill afford, and had provided him with precisely zero information, and a resentful woman eager to wipe his dust off her shoes as fast as humanly possible.
‘Listen, Captain. Don’t ask me why I’m doing this. But I can’t let you walk into a shit storm with a leaking umbrella.’
Calque was concentrating all his attention on Lamia. A taxi had stopped directly in front of her. She caught Calque’s eye and made a money movement with her fingers. ‘What? What are you talking about, Picaro? What shit storm?’ Calque raised a placatory hand and started across the road towards Lamia, the phone still clamped to his ear.
‘You’ve heard of a shamal, Captain? That’s what the desert Arabs call a five-day, three-thousand-foot-deep sandstorm. The type that’s so fucking powerful it can strip the skin right off your face. Well this is a shamal of a shit storm.’
‘Picaro…’
‘Listen. On the way out to the main road. After I’d delivered the woman and the tape recorder. A man was waiting for me. An armed man.’
‘A what?’
‘You heard me, Captain. I’m not going to repeat myself. This man I’m speaking about. He must have gone to check on the woman, realized she was gone, and followed me from the house. He came at me with a pump-action shotgun. So I had to kill him.’
‘You killed him?’ Without realizing it, Calque had switc
hed back into police mode. He patted at his jacket in a vain search for his notebook.
‘Look, Captain. I don’t want this coming back at me in any way. I’ve a wife and son to think of. I’ve thought about it, and I think you owe me that much.’
‘How did you kill him, Picaro?’ Calque had abandoned the search for his notebook. What was the point?
‘I smashed into him with my car. He was going to put out my lights. I had no choice in the matter.’
‘And the shotgun?’
‘Already disposed of.’
‘Where did you leave him?’ The taxi driver was shrugging his shoulders at Lamia, and pointing to his meter.
‘In the brush. By the side of the road. Did you see a parked Land Rover when you drove away from the beach?’
‘Yes. Yes, I did. And another car. An empty blue Renault. Parked close up nearby.’
Picaro froze. ‘Captain. There was no blue Renault parked when I left there. The area was clean. I’m getting off the phone right now. And you. You’d better look to your own arse.’
27
Calque reached Lamia in three strides. He held up a placatory hand to the taxi driver, and drew her to one side.
‘We have a problem. The man who got you out of the house has just telephoned me. He ran into one of your mother’s people on the way back from the beach. The man came at him with a shotgun, and he was forced to kill him. As a result, we were almost certainly followed here.’
‘But that’s impossible…’
‘We don’t have time for this, Lamia. I’ll explain later. You know your mother better than I do. You know what she and her people are capable of. Will you do as I ask?’
Lamia allowed her eyes to search across Calque’s face. She nodded.
‘Get into the taxi. Now. I’m going to give the driver the address of my hotel in Cogolin. You must go there. I shall follow along behind in my car. At some point you’ll see me turn off the road. Don’t change the driver’s instructions. I must know where to find you. My hunch is that we are dealing with only one man. He will follow me, because I present the greatest threat to him. And if he doesn’t follow me and follows you instead, I will know where to come to find him. Do you understand what I am saying?’
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