Ten minutes later, he’d steered her up from the basement and through to the garage where he bundled her into Santarem’s van, pushing back the passenger seat so he could fit her into the footwell, where she wouldn’t roll around or be seen. Thirty minutes later they were back at his place and right now she was in the spare room upstairs, sleeping like a baby, breath burbling gently between her lips.
All he had to do now was make a phone call. Long-distance. Name his price. The Lafour home might have been ex-directory, but he’d had no difficulty obtaining the number for Banque Lafour.
Finishing the omelette, Xavier reached for his cigarettes, lit up, and took a long contemplative drag.
Or maybe not. Maybe he should forget the ransom demand and just sit tight till Maman and Papa reached for their wallets and offered a reward? For information leading to the safe return of their daughter. So much easier to pull it off then. Spin them a good story, play the hero, collect a cheque. Maybe not as much as a ransom demand, but a safer bet. And now that he had the tranqs he could easily handle the girl for another day, maybe even two. And it would give him time to get his story right. How he found her in the street, recognised her from the newspaper . . .
No, he decided. He’d hold on to her.
There’d be a reward.
He just knew it.
And the way his luck was running . . .
54
‘AT KUCHNIA,’ SOLANGE BONNEFOY EXPLAINED, ‘the menu changes every day. One starter, one main, a dessert. Lunch, dinner, the same. No choice.’
The examining magistrate and Jacquot were sitting at the table they’d occupied the last time they’d met at Kuchnia, its rooms just as crowded, the same soft susurrus of whispered talk, the same rolling clatter of cutlery and crockery. The coat-racks were as fat and unmanageable, the lady with the pink swollen forearms manned the counter with her customary efficiency, and the white-jacketed waiters were just as old and thin and stoop-shouldered as Jacquot remembered them.
‘Wednesdays, of course, you know about,’ continued Solange. ‘Mushroom soup and goulash. But if it’s Tuesday, you come for Bigos and Kotlet Schabowy. Or on Thursday it’s pea soup Grochowka and stuffed beef Zrazy. But it doesn’t matter, it’s always good. Today, Saturday, it’s Barszcz, or Borsch, followed by Golonka,’ she said, shaking her head as their waiter approached with a soup tureen, indicating instead that he should serve Jacquot. ‘I just hope you are hungry.’
‘Very hungry,’ he replied as he watched the beetroot soup spill like creamy blood into his white china bowl.
And just a little nervous, too. This was not, he knew, going to be an easy lunch.
It had taken Jacquot a long, painful time to get himself cleaned up and dressed at Marie-Ange’s apartment. Bending down to retrieve his trousers and shirt from the clothes drier had been the first real hurdle; getting into them the second. Then it was into the bathroom, carefully dousing his face at the basin, drying himself on a towel that also smelled of roses, and looking for a spare toothbrush but not finding one. Rather than use hers, standing alone (he noted) in a china mug, he had squeezed the toothpaste on to a finger and gently worked it round his gums, finishing with a sluice of antiseptic mouthwash. Thirty minutes later, after resisting the impulse to snoop around the apartment, he’d taken the car keys and locked up.
And all the way there, he’d wondered how Solange Bonnefoy would react when she heard what he had to tell her.
They had arrived at Kuchnia at almost the same moment, Solange just ahead of him, the two of them hurrying through the rain. He’d caught up with her at the door, seen the advocate’s white cravat as he helped her off with her raincoat.
‘Court on a Saturday?’ he’d asked.
‘Ceremonial. A swearing in for the new Juge des Affaires. A horrible little man called Barreau. He’ll make life a misery for all of us. But there we are . . .’
By the time they were shown to the table, she’d somehow managed to remove the white tie without him noticing, leaving her in an elegantly cut black suit with a now open-necked black shirt.
‘So,’ she said, as Jacquot started in on his soup. ‘Down to business.’ Unzipping her attaché case, she slid out a sheet of paper and passed it across to him.
‘Two registration numbers. Two names,’ she began. ‘The Spanish plates belong to a Guillermo Ribero, born Gerona 1962. According to his work permit he runs a maritime agency on Chamant, and has an address in Vauban. An apartment block. Not too smart, not too shabby. No record. Clean. Spain and here. The other plates – the French ones – belong to a Christophe Petitjean who does have a record. Small-time stuff – a domestic, handling stolen goods, and two counts of possession – but none of it big enough to put him away. The last address we have for him is out in Montredon. It’s all there,’ she said, tapping the sheet of paper with a finger ‘So tell me – what do Señor Ribero and Monsieur Petitjean have to do with Elodie?’
Briefly, Jacquot explained once again how he’d visited Ribero’s office and just . . . felt something. A whisper of suspicion, nothing more. (Marie-Ange would have been proud of him, he thought.) Taking the car registration had simply been an instinct, he told her. Something to follow up. ‘Just a hunch at this stage. Maybe a lead, maybe not.’
‘And Petitjean?’ asked Solange. ‘What about him? Where does he fit in?’
Jacquot tipped his bowl and took the last spoonful of soup. This was where it was going to get tricky.
‘He’s a drug dealer. And we think he may be involved in trafficking,’ replied Jacquot, laying down his spoon.
‘We?’
There was a moment’s pause as the waiter appeared with another tureen. As with the goulash on Wednesday, the red-stained soup bowl was used for the stew, ladled out in steaming chunks. Jacquot leaned over the bowl, breathed it in. Whatever Golonka was – a rich stew of pork belly by the look of it – it smelled delicious.
‘It’ll be hot. Take care,’ warned Solange, as their waiter withdrew and Jacquot reached for his spoon. ‘So who’s this “we”?’
‘There is someone I want you to meet,’ he replied, blowing on his first spoonful before tasting it. It was, just as she’d said, scaldingly hot. But Jacquot got enough of a mouthful without burning his lips or his tongue – a rich meaty taste that filled his cheeks – to know that he was going to enjoy Golonka very much indeed. Even if he wasn’t going to enjoy the conversation that would now accompany it. ‘Her name is Marie-Ange Buhl,’ he continued, reaching for the pichet of rouge to refill their glasses. ‘She works in a flower shop on rue Francis. Which is why she couldn’t make lunch. But she said she would drop by later, for coffee.’
‘She’s a flower girl?’ Solange looked confused. ‘And how exactly . . .?’
Jacquot took a swig of wine, cleared his mouth. ‘I met her in the summer. In the Luberon; a case I was working on,’ he said, trying to put off the moment, but knowing there was no avoiding it. ‘She . . . she has certain talents.’
Solange raised an eyebrow. ‘Talents?’
‘I’m afraid there’s no easy way to say this. And I know . . .’
‘Out with it, Daniel, for goodness’ sake. You’re making me nervous.’
‘She’s . . . a psychic.’
Solange sat back, frowning, as though she hadn’t heard him properly, didn’t quite understand. ‘A psychic? Is that what you said?’
‘She has these . . . powers. She . . .’
Solange began to shake her head, eyes narrowing, lips thinning, as though Jacquot had tried to swing some lame alibi past her. ‘Please tell me you are joking, Daniel. Please don’t tell me that we’ve got so little chance of finding Elodie alive that we’re resorting to shams and charlatans. That’s why I called you. To make a difference. And . . . and you bring me a . . . soothsayer, for Christ’s sake?’
The rebuke was swift, and stung more than he’d imagined. He’d known, of course, that she wouldn’t like it but he’d underestimated the depth and force of her desperation.
<
br /> ‘I promise you, Solange, this girl is no sham, no charlatan, no soothsayer. I have seen her at work, and I . . . well, I trust her. And where I am right now, having her around means a considerable amount to me.’
Solange let out a low, mournful sigh, lifting her napkin to wipe at her mouth though not a morsel of food had passed her lips, using the move to dab at her eyes as well. ‘I’m sorry, Daniel. It’s just . . .’ She took a deep breath and steadied herself.
‘I know. And I understand. But I want you to meet her all the same. There is something . . .’ Jacquot looked up, smiled. ‘But I will let you find out yourself. Elle arrive maintenant.’
And there she was, Marie-Ange, being led to their table, slim enough to glide between the diners, smiling brightly when she saw Jacquot, but looking hesitant too. When he had called her that morning and told her to meet them there, she’d sounded nervous.
Don’t worry, she won’t eat you, Jacquot had told her. But now, as he introduced the two women, he wasn’t so sure. The examining magistrate stiffened her back and gave Marie-Ange just the shortest of smiles.
‘Mademoiselle,’ was all she said.
And as she settled in her chair, Marie-Ange shot Jacquot a look.
‘Some coffee, young lady?’ Solange asked, politely. ‘Something to eat? Maybe a slice of Makoweic? It’s a poppy-seed cake.’ Her smile was almost a wince of good manners, and wafer-thin patience.
Marie-Ange shook her head. ‘No cake, thank you. But coffee would be wonderful. Very black, very strong, please.’
Solange nodded to the waiter, who’d been listening, and he withdrew.
‘So, Mademoiselle Buhl. According to my friend, Daniel, you have something to tell me.’ Her voice was brittle as a brandy snap. It was a tone she used in court. Jacquot had heard it many times.
‘En effet, something to show you, madame,’ replied Marie-Ange, opening her tote bag and bringing out a small wrapped object. Putting aside her bag, she unwound some tissue paper and held out her hand.
The blue enamelled hairclip.
The moment she saw what it was Solange gasped, then gulped in air and sat back in her chair, eyes wide, as though she had just been punched. The next moment she darted forward like a magpie after something shiny, and snatched the hairclip from Marie-Ange’s hand. She turned it over, held the underside to the light to check its provenance, that it wasn’t some other serpent hairclip.
‘Where did you get this?’ she demanded, as though Marie-Ange might have stolen it.
‘Here,’ replied Jacquot. ‘In Marseilles.’
55
WHILE JACQUOT SCOOPED UP THE last of his Golonka, Alain Gastal felt his appetite drain away. At this particular lunch, on Quai du Port, taken alone at a heavily-draped corner table in Le Mirador’s main dining room, Gastal had ordered escargots. La douzaine. Provence’s very own petit gris, the ‘little grey’, raised on thyme and myrtle leaves before purging. A glistening pile of shells stuffed and served, à la provencale, in a pock-hollowed porcelain dish that swam with hot butter, fragments of garlic and speckled green shreds of parsley. On any menu, snails were Gastal’s plat du choix. And always he would start with the dozen, before moving on to meat or fish, though it wasn’t uncommon for him to stay with snails and order a dozen more. Even a third serving was not unknown.
At Le Mirador that lunchtime, the first eight petits gris he’d seen off with cheery despatch, one a minute, dabbing up the juices with a piece of bread, ignoring the silver spring clamp in favour of his own thumb and middle finger. It was an old trick of his, and there was nothing that put him in a better mood. After puncturing the base of each shell with the nail of his index finger, he’d place shell to red lips and suck loudly – the flesh, the sauce, le tout, bursting into his mouth.
But the ninth escargot was not as accommodating as its predecessors, its shell thicker, tougher, more stubborn. In the end he had to reach for the tiny fork and dig around for the flesh inside. It was as he pulled the snail clear, dangling from the fork’s tip like a piece of dripping black snot, that Gastal’s appetite suddenly vanished. Putting down fork and snail, pushing away the porcelain dish, he reached instead for a dusty bottle of ten-year old Cornas from the slopes of the upper Rhône to drown his sorrows.
In just two days he had lost Valentine, Lévy and the two Arab kids – though they didn’t amount to much. Which left him with nothing. Not a single snout to hit on, not a single lead to follow up beyond an English limo and a woman driver in a part of town where English limos were thin on the ground. If he didn’t get his act together tout de suite, he could kiss goodbye to Paul Bocuse and long lunches in La Tour Rose.
Worse still had been the news in that morning’s newspaper. Arsène Cabrille dead. A stroke at home, followed by a heart attack at the Druot Clinic. A three-paragraph story at the bottom of the front page, with a longer, follow-up piece on the obituary page that noted his birth in Ajaccio, his upbringing in Marseilles, the tragic loss of his wife, Léonie (‘never replaced in his affections’), before going on to list the man’s achievements: his shipping interests, his trading empire, his hospices and health-care clinics, and his longstanding patronage of the Opéra – without once approaching the meat of the matter: the drugs, the prostitution, the racketeering, the extortion that had contributed to his business success. The closest the piece came to a raised eyebrow or pointing finger were adjectives like ‘colourful’, ‘energetic’, ‘respected’ – which easily translated for those in the know, like Gastal, into ‘cruel’, ‘lethal’ and ‘feared’. Now that the man was dead, Gastal would have expected the obituarist to have been braver. But the last line explained any reticence. ‘Arsène Cabrille is survived by a daughter.’ Gastal sighed, poured the last of the Cornas and signalled for l’addition with an impatient click of greasy fingers and a cursory wipe of his chin.
His low spirits stayed with him all the way back to headquarters on rue de l’Evêché, in the lift to the third floor, and down the corridor to the squad room and his office beyond.
Where everything changed.
‘Boss?’ called Peluze, as Gastal passed between the desks.
He turned, lifted his chin in Peluze’s direction to indicate he was listening.
‘You’ve got a visitor. I put her in your office to wait.’
Gastal frowned. ‘Visitor?’
‘Mademoiselle Carinthe Cousteaux. She said it was important.’
56
CARINTHE COUSTEAUX WAS DARK ENOUGH for her scarlet lipstick to look more luscious than it might have done on a woman with a lighter complexion. This was the first thing that struck Gastal as he pushed open his office door and the woman sitting at his desk turned to look at him. Between the door and his desk he took in the rest: late forties, maybe sliding into her fifties, dark almond eyes expertly mascaraed and shadowed, a lustrous sweep of black hair that would have reached past her shoulders if it hadn’t been secured in a neatly netted chignon, long crossed legs, black stockings, black high-heeled shoes, and a black satin topcoat and skirt that suggested a busty, voluptuous figure beneath. She looked as though she was on her way to a funeral, or fresh back from one. When she held up a hand for him to take in greeting, the movement was accompanied by the heavy oily links of a gold bracelet clunking down her wrist to disappear into her sleeve. The sound – expensive, alluring – and the scent from the glove, and the faintest returning pressure from her fingers, were enough to secure Gastal’s attention.
‘So, mademoiselle, what is it I can do for you?’ he asked, releasing her fingers and going round his desk, pulling in his stomach as he did so and squaring his shoulders, aware that she was scrutinising him keenly, as though considering a purchase.
‘Mais non, monsieur. It is what I can do for you,’ she replied. Her voice was pitched low, exotically accented, a playful murmur that came from the back of her throat, ladened with promise and intrigue. There was also a smile to accompany this offer, and a glimpse of pink tongue and glistening white teeth, and they d
rew from Gastal a sudden and unexpected lurch of desire, as though Carinthe Cousteaux was suggesting something that had nothing to do with police matters. She may not have been in the first dew of youth, but her presence was electrifying.
Gastal spread his hands, as though to suggest he couldn’t possibly imagine what she might be referring to, but as he settled back in his chair he hoped he made it quite clear that he was in no hurry to have her state her business and leave. On the contrary . . . Her next words hit him like a thunderbolt.
‘I am a close friend of Monsieur Arsène Cabrille. You may know of him?’
‘Mais bien sûr,’ Gastal managed, clearing his throat, tasting garlic from his escargots. ‘And I was so sorry to read . . .’
But she waved aside the condolence, revealing between the buttoned edge of her glove and jacket cuff a warm brown wrist. ‘And so was I, monsieur, but not so sorry that I feel any sense of disloyalty in coming to see you now. It is not Monsieur Arsène who brings me here. Pas du tout. Rather,’ she continued, shifting her shoulders with a shivering distaste, as though trying to dislodge something from between her shoulder blades, ‘it is his daughter, Virginie.’
If that name had tasted of something bad, foul, dead, Gastal couldn’t imagine seeing a more pained expression on the lady’s face. He nodded, though he could think of no reason to do so, a small flicker of interest starting up in his gut. ‘And how is that?’ he asked when Mademoiselle Cousteaux showed no sign of continuing.
‘You must understand, cher monsieur,’ she began, ‘that Arsène and I were very close. We have shared a great deal together. Indeed, it was in my house, our home, that he suffered that dreadful attaque. And it is from that house that she has now sent me. His daughter. And her father not two days dead. Out, with all my belongings, my memories, helped along by her thugs.’
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