‘If this is really all about you,’ Ben muttered, ‘you’ve got a lot to answer for, pal.’
He gazed at the image a moment longer, knowing he was only procrastinating. This wasn’t what he’d taken his phone out for.
He swallowed and quickly keyed in Brooke’s number. As he waited for her to reply, he anxiously tried to think of how to express what he wanted to say. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. Can’t we just stop? Can’t we just go back to the way things were? Or just I love you. I need you. Let me come home, as soon as this is over.
But there was no simple formula. No backspace key, no erase button. The damage that had been done couldn’t be healed with just a few facile words.
Brooke didn’t even reply. He aborted the call, strangely relieved but dreading when he’d have to try again.
The pain in his body reminded him of the other damage that needed healing, too. Standing up, he painfully unpeeled his jeans far enough down to inspect the large red weal across his left thigh where the Beretta magazine had absorbed the force of the bullet strike earlier that day. Its oblong shape was almost perfectly imprinted on his skin. He touched it and winced. In a day or two it would blossom into a spectacular bruise and a rainbow of colours.
His right side was pretty tender, too, where he’d taken that particularly solid blow from the man now encased several feet deep in concrete. I’m getting too old for this bollocks, he thought as he peeled off his T-shirt to examine his ribs. Another florid, multicolour bruise was on its way there, too, but at least nothing was cracked internally that he could feel.
The bedroom door suddenly opened and he turned to see Roberta standing there.
Chapter Fourteen
She was wrapped in a towel that covered her from chest to mid-thigh and her hair was wet. ‘Sorry,’ she blurted. ‘I was looking for a hairbrush. Forgot to pack mine.’
‘I don’t have one,’ Ben said. It was impossible not to notice the gleam of her well-toned flesh, or the way her hair lay across her bare shoulder.
Her eyes flicked downwards for an instant. ‘You’ve got scars that weren’t there before,’ she said.
‘I suppose I do,’ he said, glancing down. His torso read like a map of his exploits over twenty years.
‘Jesus. I thought you said you were lucky with bullets.’
‘That one wasn’t a bullet,’ he said. ‘It was a knife. Those ones are bullets.’
‘Oh.’
‘The drugstore on the corner will have a hairbrush we can buy,’ he said.
‘I guess,’ she replied. ‘Anyway, shower’s free if you want it.’ After an awkward silence, she slipped away and shut the door.
Ben spent three minutes under the shower, letting the hot water blast away his thoughts as best they could. He emerged from the bathroom in fresh clothes and, feeling suddenly ravenous, headed into the safehouse’s tiny kitchen to prepare some dinner. The worktops were lined with dust, and when he opened the fridge door he discovered that a bottle of milk had solidified into something way beyond cheese. He closed it quickly, opened a cupboard and grabbed two of the stacked tins inside, a pack of ground Lavazza coffee and a bottle of cheap red table wine that he’d forgotten he’d had left over from the old days, and was relieved to find. He hunted a can opener and corkscrew out of a drawer.
‘I see you’re still working your way through the same old store of canned cassoulet,’ Roberta observed as she wandered through into the kitchen, slumped on one of the two plain chairs by the small table and watched him empty the contents of the tins into a saucepan over the gas stove. Her hair was towelled dry and frizzy.
‘Lasts as long as tinned corned beef and tastes a lot better,’ he said, stirring the saucepan.
‘Oh sure, lumpy beans and overcooked sausage stewed in goose lard would be anyone’s idea of a treat, come the apocalypse. But as long as I can wash it down with some of that wine, I don’t give a rat’s ass.’
He uncorked the bottle, poured out two brimming glasses and handed her one of them. She gulped half of it down and gasped. ‘Goddamn, I needed that.’
Once the cassoulet was steaming hot, Ben ladled it unceremoniously onto a couple of plates and they sat down to eat it with more wine. ‘Ah, yes,’ she said, forking up some beans, ‘there’s survival food, then there’s gourmet survival food.’
‘Coming from an American,’ he muttered. ‘Get it down you. We’re going to be busy later.’ He ate in silence for a while, then looked up, aware that she was watching him. ‘What?’
‘I hate to say it, but this kind of environment suits you a whole lot better than the vicarage did,’ she said.
‘That’s probably just as well, isn’t it?’ he replied tersely.
‘Sorry. It was just an observation. Maybe it didn’t come out quite right.’
‘So tell me,’ he said, keen to change the subject, ‘How’s life been for you? Apart from getting entangled in God knows what kind of trouble neither of us needed?’
‘Life?’
‘It’s been a long time,’ Ben said. ‘We haven’t been in touch. You must have had some kind of life.’
‘Are you asking about guys?’
He shrugged. ‘Not specifically.’
‘Sure, I had a life. I put my old one behind me, I worked hard at my job, I did some travelling around Canada and the northern states. Then there was Dan. You remember him, I guess? Dan Wright? You saw him, when you came over that one time.’
‘He was your colleague at the university in Ottawa,’ Ben said. ‘You and he were giving a lecture on “effects of weak electromagnetic fields on cell respiration”. I didn’t know what the hell that meant then, either.’
She raised an eyebrow, forkful of food poised in mid-air. ‘My, what a remarkable memory you have, Ben Hope. So you must also recall with perfect clarity what you told me afterwards?’
‘I told you I thought a bloke like that could be good for you,’ Ben said. ‘He seemed like a decent sort. Steady. Dependable. The opposite of me. And I could tell he liked you.’
‘Yeah,’ she said sourly. ‘A few weeks after I last saw you, Dan asked me on a date. I said no. I hadn’t …’ Roberta almost spoke the words that were on the tip of her tongue, ‘hadn’t got over what happened between you and me’, but she managed to cover it up. ‘I hadn’t any interest in relationships at that point. But months passed, he kept asking, and eventually I said yes and we started dating. It lasted about a year. We talked about moving in together.’ She gave a little snort and knocked back the last of her wine. ‘Well, you and I both made the same mistake, Ben. The great, decent, dependable Dr Wright turned out to be Dr Wrong. Dead wrong. One evening I went back to the lab to pick up some notes, and I found the sonofabitch giving an extra-curricular one-to-one Biology class to Xandra Mills, one of his more alluring final-year students. Right there on the desk.’
‘Oh,’ Ben said. ‘What did they do, fire him?’
‘You’re kidding. That would have drawn far too much scandal for the university. He got a speedy transfer to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Or else I don’t know how I could have gone on working with the jerk.’
Ben poured the last of the bottle into their empty glasses. ‘I’m sorry to hear about all that.’
‘Are you?’ she asked, cocking her head to one side.
‘So hasn’t there been anyone else?’ he asked.
‘You seem very inquisitive about my love life.’
‘I’ve always liked to think that you were happy, that’s all.’
She smiled with one corner of her mouth. ‘There wasn’t anybody after Dan. But I wasn’t unhappy. Being alone doesn’t have to be a sad thing.’
Ben said nothing, and went back to toying disinterestedly with the last of his food.
‘So what about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘When did you meet her?’
‘Brooke?’
‘Who else? Was it love at first sight, or what?’
He paused. ‘I’ve known B
rooke a long time,’ he said quietly and with great reluctance. This wasn’t something he wanted to discuss, least of all with Roberta.
‘Ah, an old flame.’ Roberta couldn’t quite hide the acidity in her tone.
‘It’s not like that. She was a friend, that’s all. I knew her back in regiment days. Then she came to work for me at Le Val.’
‘She was in the army?’
He shook his head. ‘She lectures on hostage psychology.’
‘A head shrinker,’ Roberta said, and was about to add acerbically, ‘She sure shrunk yours,’ but held it back.
‘You’d like her if you knew her,’ Ben said, catching the tone.
‘I’m sure we’d get on like a house on fire.’
‘I’ve had enough to eat,’ he said abruptly after a long silence, pushing away his plate and looking at his watch. The evening was pressing on and he was suddenly feeling restless. ‘I want to look at those figures from Claudine’s letter. See if we can make any sense of all this.’ He stood up, grabbed their plates and dumped them in the sink.
‘I could use some of that coffee, if you were planning on making any,’ she said. ‘The wine’s hitting me a little.’
‘It’ll have to be black. The milk’s gone a bit—’
‘I can imagine,’ she said. ‘Black’s just fine. No sugar.’
The old espresso pot bubbled and burbled on the stove, then Ben filled two small cups with a thick, scalding brew that was potent enough to blast away any effects of the wine on their tired minds. He took out his Gauloises and Zippo. ‘You mind?’
‘If I said I did, would it make a difference?’
‘Not really.’
‘Those aren’t good for you.’
‘There are worse things in the world,’ Ben said. He lit up, drew the smoke in deeply and felt the quiet, comforting little hit of nicotine take the worst of the edge off his ragged emotions. The two of them sat hunched over the table with the sheet of paper lying between their coffees so they could study those three cryptic lines of code which Roberta had carefully copied from the original.
‘You still think that top line is a GPS location?’ she asked, tapping it with her finger.
‘Let me show you,’ he said. He laid the smoking cigarette in the ashtray and slid it to one side. Using a stubby pencil and a fresh sheet of paper from the desk drawer, he copied out the line, ‘4920N1570E’, as it had appeared in Claudine Pommier’s letter. He wrote it out again underneath, this time converted into a clearer form:
49º 2' 0" N 1º 57' 0" E
‘Okay,’ Roberta said, nodding thoughtfully. ‘Looks like you have something there. But this navigational stuff is more your kind of science than mine. I’m at a loss. What does it tell us?’
‘Let’s find out,’ he said, reaching for his phone. He activated the GPS application, punched in the coordinates and the screen instantly flashed up with a little green map of the location.
‘Out in the countryside,’ he said, showing her. ‘Forty kilometres northwest of Paris. The nearest towns are Condécourt and Tessancourt-sur-Aubette. Nothing much within three kilometres except farmland and forest, so we’re looking at a fairly remote spot.’
‘There’s nothing there. It’s got to be right, though,’ Roberta said, frowning at the onscreen map. ‘Claudine definitely meant for me to see this.’
‘Any idea why she’d point you in that direction?’
‘None. Unless … wait a minute. Yes, it could be. Can we get more detail on that?’
Ben switched from the default map view to a satellite image, then zoomed in as close as he could get. The screen pixellated out into a blur, sharpened up again, and he saw that it was centred on what looked from the aerial view like a large country estate, at its heart a huge sprawling property that could have been a manor house, even a château.
‘That’s it,’ Roberta said, grabbing the phone from him, her eyes fixed to the screen.
‘That’s what?’
‘Fabien’s place. She described it to me once.’
Ben stubbed out his cigarette and reached for another. ‘The ex-boyfriend? You told me he was a bum.’
‘Sure. A very, very rich bum. I guess he’s what you call dissolute aristocracy. Only child of Gaston and Nicolette De Bourg, and something of a disappointment to his family, to put it mildly. Claudine said they had all kinds of plans for him, but he was half burned out on booze and pills before the age of thirty and pretty much incapable of holding down any kind of responsible job.’
‘Sounds a strange match for a respectable physics professor.’
‘I never understood what she saw in him,’ Roberta said, shaking her head. ‘Never met him, either. But while they were together, she insisted he was a real charmer. A little too much of a charmer, as it turned out, if you know what I mean. Join the club.’
‘So our philandering Prince Charming was living on Mummy and Daddy’s estate?’
‘It was all his, if you can believe it. The parents quit the place and went off to live in South Africa years ago, for the climate and lower taxes. Claudine told me that Fabien lived at the old family home pretty much alone – when he wasn’t running blotto around the Riviera with his drinking and gambling cronies, that is.’
Ben gazed pensively at the satellite image. ‘The question is why Claudine wanted to show you this, now.’
‘I can only think of a single reason. It’s a message. If something happened to her, and she believed something might, she needed me to go there.’
‘Why? To talk to Fabien?’
‘I doubt she’d have involved him in this,’ Roberta replied. ‘They split up quite a while ago, and I’d be pretty surprised if she’d have let him back in her life anytime soon. No, I think Claudine sent this message because there’s something else there for me to find. That is, for us to find. Something she hid there, something important. I mean, it’s a big place. She could easily have … What’s the matter? You’re pulling a face.’
‘I don’t much like the idea of walking into this place without any clue what we’re looking for. Sounds like a wild goose chase waiting to happen.’
‘Then you tell me why the location is in the letter.’
‘We don’t even know what the rest of the figures mean,’ he said. ‘I can’t make any sense of them either.’
‘We’ll figure it out as we go. This is something, isn’t it? And it’s all we have right now.’
He considered. ‘Fine. We’ll head over to Montmartre and check her place over. From there we drive out to the château. But first, I’m going to brew up another pot of black coffee. Something tells me it’s going to be a long night.’
Chapter Fifteen
Whoever was holding the party on the second floor of the apartment building in Rue des Trois Frères obviously wasn’t put off by the recent murder that had taken place above. It was a warm, sultry night, and light and music and laughter spilled out of the open balcony windows to mingle with the carefree noise of the crowded café-bar down below.
At the building’s entrance, Roberta stared as Ben punched the buttons on the door buzzer system one after another. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Crashing a party,’ he said. Moments later, there was a click and Ben pushed open the little inset door, stepping through into the echoey stone passage that led into the central courtyard. To one side was the concierge’s apartment, to the other a set of stairs.
Up and up the bare spiralling steps. The second floor was alive with the clamour of the party, couples drinking and smoking and necking on the stairs and on the landing. Ben and Roberta threaded their way past and climbed upwards, leaving the noisy chatter and music behind them. By the time they reached the top floor, it was quiet and dark.
The L-shaped landing was dimly lit by a pair of iron-barred windows. One overlooked the streets and rooftops of Montmartre and the Sacré Coeur basilica in the distance, glowing like a golden idol from the highest point of the city. The other smaller window less picturesquely opened up on
to a side alley and pulsated with the red neon sign of a neighbouring hotel.
There were just two black-painted doors on the top floor, one at each end of the landing. Roberta silently pointed out Claudine’s, nearest the neon-lit window. There was no sign of life from behind the other door. Ben imagined that the old woman who had been Claudine’s neighbour, and the one who had found her body, was either fast asleep in her bed or else staying with friends or family in the aftermath of the traumatic incident. But still, he didn’t want to risk drawing attention.
He unslung his bag, took out his mini-Maglite and discreetly shone it at Claudine’s door. The entrance was barricaded with bilingual police tape, as if the citizens of Paris needed to be told in both French and English not to cross the line into a crime scene.
‘Maybe this wasn’t such a useful idea after all,’ Roberta said in a low voice. ‘No way we can get in there without a key, and we can’t exactly ask the concierge to open the place up for us.’
‘But someone did get in there,’ Ben said. He reached past the tape and nudged the old door. There was no sign of forced entry. The wood felt thick and solid, and if the many Parisian apartments he’d seen were anything to go by, the inside of the door was festooned from top to bottom with heavy iron deadlocks and bolts – the kind of low-tech security that was almost impossible to crack without using violent force. It still perplexed him that Claudine’s killer could have got inside without a crowbar or sledgehammer, especially when his victim was already frightened about her safety and must have had every lock and bolt tightly shut.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ Roberta said. ‘Maybe he was someone she knew. Or maybe he was pretending to be someone, like a cop. He could have tricked her into opening the door to him.’
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