‘Yes.’
Calque leaned across and gave the driver his instructions. He handed Lamia some Euros.
‘I’ll catch you up. Don’t worry. Take a room at my hotel under the name of Mercier. Then lock your door until I come. Have you got that?’
He backed off before she could change her mind. Without looking around, Calque made for his car. He got in, started the engine, and pulled into the traffic fifty metres or so behind the taxi. There were three cars between him and Lamia. None of them was a blue Renault. Calque glanced into his rear-view mirror.
The Renault was five cars behind him.
Calque’s belly tightened with fear. He wasn’t an action man. Never had been. He had always left that to the young – to people like Paul Macron. Which is why Macron was dead, and he was still alive. The thought ate into him like acid.
Now his only priority was to protect the woman. It was clearly his fault that she was in this situation, and he must do his very best to extricate her. He mustn’t fail her the way he’d failed his assistant.
Five kilometres down the road, at the Cogolin Plage roundabout, Calque veered off to the left, onto the La Croix Valmer road. The blue Renault followed him.
Calque made the sign of the cross. He knew that his only chance now was to use his intelligence. Outflank his opponent. Think laterally. If he couldn’t achieve that, the man would simply force him off the road at a suitable spot and do away with him.
He must keep the man guessing. Force him to hold back.
Calque hung a left towards Gassin. That would make the man think. Was Calque heading back towards Pampelonne? Or to the Countess’s house?
Calque accelerated up the steep hill towards the village. The road beyond Gassin was a winding one, and little used at this time of year. If the man was to make his move, he would doubtless make it there.
Calque was counting on the man’s innate curiosity to stay his hand. It was a thin edge to trust your life to, and Calque could feel the anxiety eating away at him. He had no weapon in the car. No possible means of self-defence. His heart was weak, and a lifetime of heavy smoking had ensured that his lungs would be of little use in a crisis.
The blue Renault closed in on him. They were well out of Gassin, now, and heading into the hills towards Ramatuelle. They couldn’t be more than five or six kilometres from the Countess’s house. Surely the man would hold his fire for a little longer?
Calque saw a car ahead of him, and speeded up. There was safety in numbers. People instinctively tried not to shit on their own doorsteps if they could possibly avoid it. And certainly not with witnesses present. The man behind him had already had one body to deal with – two would prove something of a crowd, surely?
The extra company appeared to have put the blue Renault man off his stride. Calque saw the car behind him drop back again. Perhaps he still thought that Calque was unaware of his presence?
Now they were approaching Ramatuelle. Calque sent up a brief prayer that the motorist in front of him was not intending to stop off for a newspaper or for his morning cup of coffee. He felt an overwhelming affection for the anonymous little man he was following – curious how it was possible to love a complete stranger.
The man continued on out through the village with Calque clinging to his tail like a pilot fish. They were barely three kilometres from the Countess’s house now, and Calque began to feel an upwelling of confidence in his own judgement. He had called the thing correctly. The man driving the blue Renault had obviously been in touch with the Countess, and she had told him to hold off and see what Calque intended.
Now it only remained for Calque to keep his head – before inserting it directly inside the tiger’s mouth.
28
With one hand still on the wheel, Calque felt inside his jacket pocket and retrieved the tape recorder. He flipped open the lid of the tape compartment and extricated the cassette. He wedged the tape recorder behind the passenger seat cushion, and placed the cassette on his lap. Then he felt around for his cell phone and placed that beside it. He owed that much to Picaro. It wouldn’t do to have the Corpus scrolling back through his recent calls and identifying who it really was who had snatched Lamia.
The blue Renault was still pulling flotilla duty fifty metres behind him.
Two kilometres to go until they reached the Countess’s house – had he left it too late? Had fear eaten into his brain and frozen his intelligence?
Calque saw an S-bend three hundred metres ahead. That was it. This would be his last chance. The man in the blue Renault would almost certainly close up on him as they neared the Countess’s house.
As he approached the bend, Calque triggered the offside electric window and stepped on the gas. It would take the blue Renault a split second to respond to the move and match his speed. That would be enough to carry Calque into the blind part of the corner, temporarily out of sight of both the car in front and the blue Renault behind him.
As Calque rounded the crest of the corner, he tossed the cassette and the cell phone through the open window, his eyes searching feverishly for landmarks in the underbrush at the side of the road. Then he punched the window button, and used his engine braking, and a rapid downshift through the gears, to slow the car back down – he wanted no tell-tale flashing of red lights to mark what he had done.
The blue Renault was sitting directly on his tail now. Calque recognized the butler, Milouins, in the driving seat. So it must have been one of the two footmen that Picaro had killed. Butlers. Footmen. Calque wondered what century the Countess imagined she was in. Hadn’t she heard of the Revolution? Had the woman no shame?
The entrance to the Domaine de Seyeme was fifty metres ahead on the left. Calque fought back a last-minute impulse to accelerate away from the blue Renault and try to avoid his impending fate – but that would mean overtaking the car in front on a blind corner, and dealing with a vengeful Milouins if he happened to survive the manoeuvre. No. The Countess was a better bet. He might be able to bluff her. Milouins, on the other hand, had always struck him as the sort of man who shot first and asked questions afterwards.
Calque switched on his indicator and prepared to turn. Marvellous. Here he was, naked and out in the open, voluntarily putting himself in the enemy’s hands. How was it possible? If he’d tried to botch the thing on purpose, he couldn’t have contrived a more humiliating ending for himself. All they had to do now was kill him – in as tactful and non-intrusive a way as possible – then plant him in his car, and deposit the car on top of Picaro’s hit-and-run victim. He could just imagine the Countess’s relish at describing what must have taken place to the police.
‘We knew the ex-detective was stalking us. That he somehow blamed our family for the death of his assistant. That it had become an obsession with him. So I sent one of our people out to reason with him – we didn’t want to waste any more police time, you see. But the man must have been mad. He simply drove at my footman in a rage – then, when he saw what he had done, he killed himself.’
That would tie in nicely with his purported breakdown, wouldn’t it? He could imagine the Nice Matin headlines. EMBITTERED EX-COP GOES
BERSERK.
Talk about an own goal…
Calque drew up in front of the Countess’s house. Milouins pulled the blue Renault across the entrance to the courtyard behind him, effectively sealing him in. Calque sighed, and rested his head back against the seat restraint. The Corpus certainly wasn’t beating about the bush.
Calque reached across and checked that the empty tape recorder was sufficiently well concealed behind the passenger seat cushion. Then he climbed slowly out of the car. No point in locking the damned thing. They’d simply bust in the window.
The last time he’d stood in this courtyard had been with Macron, two months before, with the full force of the French judicial system at their backs.
Now here he was again. Alone.
29
Calque sat on a porter’s chair in the hallway, and w
aited. Six feet away stood the Countess’s surviving footman. Calque cracked the man a supercilious smile. The footman drew one finger slowly across his throat, and then pretended to gag, with his tongue dangling out the side of his mouth.
Well. It was communication of sorts.
Twenty more minutes went by.
Calque began to speculate on how the Countess would decide to play it. Would she offer him a cup of coffee first, like she did last time? Play the Grande Dame? Or would she calmly order Milouins to smash in his teeth with a matraque?
Calque cursed himself for having played so cravenly into the Countess’s hands. No one but Lamia knew what he was engaged upon. And there was no one else who could be remotely relied upon to explain to the authorities what he’d been up to these past six weeks. Picaro? Aime Macron? Neither one was the sort of man who easily volunteers information to the police. And what did they have to offer, anyway? Hearsay. Pure hearsay.
Calque sensed that he was about to become a victim of the very loi du silence he had striven against all his working life. He hadn’t even had the nous to bring Adam Sabir back into the loop. No. He had wanted to play it smart, and spring everything on Sabir at once. Prove what a clever man he was. Vainglory. That was what was going to do for him. The fatal hubris of the inadequate soul.
Milouins poked his head out of the salon and indicated to the footman that he should bring Calque inside. He was dangling Calque’s tape recorder like a yoyo from his right hand.
Strike one for the Corpus, thought Calque. I hope to hell they don’t torture me. That would be the final straw. It would never occur to them that I know precisely nothing.
The Countess was sitting in her customary seat, near the fireplace, with Madame Mastigou perched at her right shoulder, dictation pad at the ready.
Milouins positioned the tape recorder on the glass-topped occasional table in front of her as though it were a platter bearing John the Baptist’s severed head. Then, with a toss of his chin, he indicated that Calque should sit down.
‘Are you quite recovered from your previous injuries, Captain Calque? Madame Mastigou reminds me that you had been involved in a car accident when last we met. Alongside your assistant, Lieutenant…’
‘Lieutenant Macron. Yes. The man your son killed.’
The Countess’s eyes flared – the effect was like a dying bonfire receiving a sudden rush of cold air. ‘Please leave my son out of this, Captain Calque – my emotions on the subject are still very raw. It might act to your disadvantage.’
Calque could feel the Countess’s anger burning into him from across the room. He had the sudden, discomfiting conviction that the woman might actually be mad, and that no one in her entourage dared make the first move to have her sectioned. Working for the woman must be akin to being a senior Wehrmacht general in the final years of Adolf Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich.
The Countess drew herself up. It was clear by her attitude that she intended to cut directly to the chase. She pointed to the tape recorder. ‘You, or one of your associates, broke into my house early this morning. I assume that it was not merely to kidnap my daughter?’
Calque stared at her. What was the point of talking?
‘Milouins, where did you find this tape recorder?’
‘In the Captain’s car.’
‘And what sort of tape recorder is it?’
‘A voice-activated tape recorder, Madame.’
‘Which means?’
‘Which means that it will switch itself on and off according to the volume of incoming sound.’
‘Instantly?’
‘It will respond to any sound whatsoever, Madame, yes. And it is designed to overrun. Meaning that once it has been triggered, it will continue to record for a certain period, even if the sound cuts off.’
‘Have you discovered its original place of concealment?’
‘Yes, Madame. Beneath the table in the Council Chamber. The marks of the electrical tape with which it was attached to the table are still clearly visible. They are also visible on the recorder.’
‘And the tape reel itself?’
‘The cassette, Madame? Nowhere to be found.’
The Countess turned to Calque. ‘That was clever of you, Captain Calque. That idea you had to hide the tape recorder in your car, where it would almost certainly be found. A cynic might go so far as to construe that you wished for it to be discovered. Why would that be, I wonder?’
Calque shrugged. His throat felt drier than a grain extractor.
‘Then I’ll tell you. Milouins has explained your machine to me in all its intricacies. As you can see, we know where it was hidden, and also when it was hidden, for logic dictates that you must have concealed it, illegally, during the search your policemen made of my house in May. Given this limited time frame, we have come to certain conclusions.’
Here we go, thought Calque. Bang goes my chance to bluff my way out of this.
‘Milouins cleans the Council Room at least once a month. No one else goes in there. Just him and a footman. So he conducted a little test while you were waiting outside in the hall. Play the tape, Milouins.’
Milouins retrieved a cassette tape from his pocket and placed it in the machine. He turned the volume to high and pressed play. The sound of a vacuum cleaner resonated throughout the room, followed by voices, and the bangs and crashes of moving furniture. Every now and again the tape would cut off and then start again, following a short period of silence. Madame Mastigou continued busily writing on her shorthand pad.
Calque knew what it felt like to be caught red-handed, with your fingers in the till. He must never again underestimate these people. And the Countess was not mad – that would have been too convenient. She was insane, with a hefty leavening of lunacy.
‘There. Interesting, isn’t it? I merely asked Milouins to recreate the exact sounds he would have made last week, whilst preparing the room for use. It is clear from his demonstration that you will have succeeded in recording nothing of any conceivable interest either to yourself or to the police, Captain Calque, on the ninety minutes of magnetic tape that you had at your disposal. If you had, you would have thrown the entire machine out of the window of your car, rather than just the cassette tape inside it.’
Calque decided to attempt a bluff anyhow. ‘I still have Lamia. And you have a murder you need to hush up. Even you can see that two people from the same household dying in violent circumstances within a few months of each other might stretch the bounds of coincidence. We ought to be able to come to some sort of accommodation, surely? I have considerable influence left on the force.’
The Countess glanced across at Madam Mastigou. Madame Mastigou consulted her brooch watch and nodded.
‘You misunderstand the situation, Captain Calque. My daughter, Lamia, will be back with us very shortly. At this exact moment two of my other children are entering your hotel in Cogolin and demanding to see their sister. She will leave with them, because she is a dutiful girl, and does not wish to vex her mother.’
Calque could feel the colour draining away from his face.
‘I own the main taxi service in the St Tropez peninsula, Captain Calque. In fact I own a considerable part of the peninsula itself. I invested a small part of my fortune in the local economy after my marriage – and very profitable it has been. You forget, perhaps, that my husband’s family have been Counts of this area for nine hundred years? Milouins simply called in the cab number and received an instant reply – the police and the tax authorities require each fare to be routinely logged within a central registration system, as you well know, so the process was a simple one. And Cogolin is hardly Siberia. What did you think? That you were dealing with amateurs?’
‘And the body? Out at Pampelonne?’
‘What body is that, Captain? My footman, Philippe Lemelle, has bipolar disorder. He has already absconded without leave three times during his present period of employment. Once he even sold all his possessions, including his car, to the first man he
came across. Milouins came upon him living rough in Mandelieu. We took him back that time. In fact we’ve been very tolerant indeed with him – his family, after all, have been working for us for generations. But he was nevertheless given formal warning that if he absconded again, he would lose his job. That now appears to have happened.’
‘That’s bullshit, and you know it.’
‘Not according to our local doctor. Or to Milouins. Or to Monsieur Flavenot, our company registrar. I can assure you of that.’
‘I have access to the blood-stained car that killed him.’
‘Oh, please, Captain. Whoever drove that car also broke into my house and kidnapped one of its occupants – not to mention killing an innocent man via a hit-and-run. If we wished to pursue this matter, it is you and your associate who would find yourselves caught in the crossfire, not I. I think you will find, upon further reflection, that our interests coincide in this matter.’
Calque’s ears had begun to hum with tension. ‘What are you holding me for, then? You know everything. You control everything. I must be a massive irrelevance to you.’
‘You chose the word “irrelevance”, Captain, not I.’ The Countess stood up. ‘And we certainly aren’t holding you. You came here of your own free will. You may leave here equally freely. We have nothing more to say to one another.’
Calque rose to his feet in automatic echo of the Countess’s movement. What was it about the woman? Was it her impermeable self-belief? Perhaps if you were truly convinced that whatever you undertook was automatically rubber-stamped by God, then you also believed that the rest of the world’s idiots would play along with your fantasy? ‘May I have my tape recorder back?’
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