A Clean Pair of Hands

by Oscar Reynard

  “What will happen to Sonia?”

  “She decided to end all speculation by killing herself. She jumped off the same cliff, so I don’t think we will ever know the exact details of Michel’s disappearance now.”

  There was a long silence as Thérèse registered the fact that her nephew was dead and Sonia too. The initial shock was followed by anger, but that was soon replaced by deep sadness as she absorbed the fact that a central character had vanished from her life. She explained to Patrick that for more than ten years the relationship with her nephew had delivered pain and frustration. Before that, for nearly twenty years they had bathed in the glow of a genuine loving relationship.

  She realised that she must be grateful for the good parts and rely on selective memory to obliterate the rest. Another thought came into her mind. “Are you sure he is dead, or was this just part of a disappearance plan?”

  “I can’t answer for sure as without body identification we can’t prove he’s dead, but the way the events have been reported I think that is the more likely conclusion.” Thérèse still hung onto the idea that this was the kind of scenario that Michel could have organised. But if that were the case, why had Sonia killed herself? The reality for her was that the insurance company would not pay her and the property in Haiti was a liability, not an asset. Michel had left Sonia nothing in his will, and he appeared to have abandoned her. It added up to enough reasons why she would feel desperate and choose to end her life.

  “Thank you, Patrick. What, if anything, can we do now?”

  “I don’t think we can do much more and I doubt if there will be any further official investigation. I will write a report and email it to you. It might be useful for informing the family, and of course for reference if there should be any future police enquiries. Sonia had a son, didn’t she?”

  “Yes, there are quite a few people who will want to know what happened and now we can tell them. It will be hard for them all and his parents will be devastated. How do we explain to them that they have lost their only child? Thanks again, Patrick, for your good work, and support, but what a mess!”

  “I’m grateful for the opportunity to clarify what happened, at least to some extent, but I can’t help thinking that from what you say, Michel’s bank account of goodwill needs to be redressed somewhat.”

  “I really don’t know what you mean, Patrick. His bank account of goodwill, as you call it, had been in deficit as far as the family was concerned for a long time. We saw him in recent years as a selfish and insensitive pleasure seeker. Maybe he wasn’t always that way, but that is what he became. I have two boxes of memories of Michel. One contains the happy and good memories and the other contains bad or unhappy memories. I sometimes allow the good memories to influence what’s in the bad box, but I never allow the bad box to invade the good memories. In Michel’s case, though, the contents of the bad box still exceed those of the good box.”

  “If I have understood what you just said correctly, Thérèse, that sounds fair enough, based on the facts as you saw them. Everybody makes their own life choices, but there was another side to Michel. Good people can do bad things, you know. Even great men do bad things.”

  “I don’t know what you know about Michel that I don’t,” Thérèse replied, “but one day I would like to find out more.”

  “Listen, next time I am in your part of the world, I’ll call on you if I may and I’ll tell you what I can. Maybe I can reduce the stuff in your bad box, or at least add to what’s in the good box.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Life Goes On

  Thérèse and George Milton pondered on the report, the accusations it made, and the light it shone on events that had been taking place far from their sight. They concluded that as Michel Bodin had led his life as though the law and any moral constraint did not exist, he had been lucky that the day of reckoning had not come sooner, by the hand of one of his detestable ‘business contacts’ or some other person whom he had debauched or betrayed.

  In the aftermath of Michel’s disappearance, Annick Bodin had time to think back and reflect on her relationship with her father but was left feeling that she didn’t really understand him. As she grew to adulthood she couldn’t fail to notice his increasing appetite for being the centre of attention and playing the role of Godfather within the family and beyond, but she could live with that, and although she had considered him intrusive at times she never felt he was in any way threatening to her. He had been a kind and attentive parent when present, which was not often, but thinking back to her childhood and teenage years, she could identify nothing to suggest that under his sometimes interfering bullish drive and enthusiasm there was a darker, crueller and more secretive side which surfaced later.

  She had an opportunity to search for more historical facts and clues to his character when her mother invited her to look over files in Michel’s and Sonia’s computers to see if she could discover any details of his hidden estate. When she was checking e-mails in her father’s ‘sent’ and ‘draft’ files, she found in the latter file an incomplete email message from Michel to his other daughter Estelle, drafted nearly a year earlier but not sent. Michel Bodin expressed himself thus:

  ‘All my life I have been forced to do things that didn’t suit me and to turn my back on those which appealed to my taste, my talents, and where I had a good chance of success. I think I am a reasonable moralist, because that is an art requiring honesty, a lot of deep thinking and great sincerity with oneself as well as with other people. You have to be self-critical and ignore the art of self-forgiveness…’

  The message stopped.

  “You self-deluding, lying bastard,” muttered Annick.

  In February 2013, a tax inspector arrived unannounced at the offices of what had been the Bodins’ Paris company, now under its new ownership. He asked to see M. Bodin. The new owner, Marcel Picard, explained that he had bought the company in 2009 and he had heard that M. Bodin had died recently in Haiti. The tax inspector withdrew and reported that further enquiries should be addressed to Mme Charlotte Bodin, Monsieur Bodin’s wife and co-director. Charlotte was in for a shock.

  Radio interview:

  “One of the biggest women’s issues that I have taken up is the state of prostitution in France. For decades, going back over several governments, we have signed up to conventions and agreements to ban prostitution, but where are we now? Hundreds of thousands of young women are pouring into France from Africa, Asia, the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Very few are legal, and even fewer have actually volunteered to become sex slaves, though that is what they are. They are in the hands of violent pimps and gangs and the big question is how do we deal with that?”

  French Minister for Women’s Rights, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem

  Six months after their previous conversation, George Milton answered the phone and was warmly greeted by Patrick Mastrolli. There was a multiple murder enquiry involving the French police travelling to England to interview suspects and possible witnesses, and Patrick had been called out of retirement to assist in co-ordination of the combined UK/French police operations. Would it be possible to meet sometime? He was prepared to stay on for a while after his assignment was finished, but for the time being, his availability would be uncertain, so some flexibility might be required.

  George and Thérèse were planning a trip to London on business, so they agreed to have dinner with Patrick at a hotel near Hyde Park and to their relief he arrived on time. He now looked quite elderly compared to the first time George had met him in the garden at Maisons-Lafitte nearly thirty years earlier, but he was tanned and slim and just as quietly self-assured as before. His thinning grey hair reminded them that they were all getting older.

  As dinner progressed, Patrick began to ask questions about Michel and how his behaviour was understood in the family. George referred to the relationship with Johnny Mendes and suggested that it was a contributory factor in Michel’s mid-life obsession with pleasure in whatever form. He menti
oned Johnny’s hotels and the swingers’ clubs the Bodins and Mendeses had attended. It seemed to the Miltons to be a classic case of a man who had everything destroying himself by always wanting more and not caring who he dragged down with him.

  Patrick listened as if noting every word and nuance, then, when the Miltons felt they had put the case in sufficient detail, he asked what they knew about the relationship he had with Michel. George said he thought it was about speeding tickets or driving licence points and probably offering the police special deals at Johnny’s hotel to get them to turn a blind eye to what went on there. As he said this, George watched Patrick for a reaction, feeling that he was being maybe too provocative in his condemnation of the French police.

  To his surprise, Patrick laughed. “I didn’t have anything to do with speeding tickets, but Johnny’s hotel was an important centre of information gathering for the vice squad at the time when I controlled undercover operations linking several departments.” Patrick’s audience was silenced and holding their breath in anticipation of more.

  “Enough time has elapsed for me to give you more information, but none of what I am going to say changes anything with regard to Michel’s behaviour towards his family. He did what he did for reasons that he explained to you, or at least tried to explain, though sometimes even he didn’t know why he did things. He was driven by impulses and passions which were sometimes incompatible with happiness for him and others around him. I think he understood that, but he decided to follow those passions. He preferred excitement over contentment, not like me. When I was younger I got all the excitement I needed in the police and now I’m living a contented and quieter life. But despite everything I have said about his faults, Michel was always a good and generous friend and very useful to me in some of the sensitive cases we handled.”

  “You mean he worked with you officially?” asked George.

  “Not officially in the sense that he was on the payroll. Let me give you an idea of the kind of cases we worked on.

  “At one time, I was concerned with a case that developed from a long-standing awareness of the systematic import into France of large numbers, and I mean thousands, of young girls from the Balkans and former eastern bloc countries, for prostitution. The girls were often lured into a trap with promises of jobs by young men who were paid by gangs to recruit girls by befriending them and becoming romantically involved with them, but only for as long as it took to gain their confidence and take them on a trip abroad, supposedly to find jobs; or alternatively they would be rounded up, loaded into a truck and shipped across the border like farm animals.

  “Once the girls were in Italy or France, the gangs took control, removed the girls’ passports if they had any, and forced them to work as prostitutes to earn their keep. Girls were routinely drugged and as they became dependent, they were easier to manage. In the context of our territory, they were often initially being confined on large construction sites mainly around Paris, like the huge Bercy redevelopment and La Défense, where the size of the project justified a resident workforce housed on site in temporary personnel accommodation blocks, and most of the building labour was imported from Eastern-Europe.

  “In 1984, when the building programme was at its peak, we estimated that there were over a thousand girls at any time held in on-site brothels. The girls never saw the light of day. Eventually they might be released into the secondary trade, either as street prostitutes, or into clubs where they would continue to serve until they were past their prime or got sick. Then they would disappear or, at best, be shipped back to where they came from. We had a good idea of what was going on, but my department’s role was not to make raids to make life uncomfortable for a few perpetrators. If you do that you are just pruning the weeds, but never eliminating them. The local police act in that area if they can, to satisfy public opinion, but our job was to cut the heads off the organisations, and that is hard to do when you have several jurisdictions, some of which see no reason why they should step in, and others are actually making money out of it. We needed a lot of information leading to names and locations and an absolutely clear understanding of the business structures that held it all together. We had to map the processes and the cash flows. These guys operate very professionally and often have legal businesses to provide legitimate transport and warehousing facilities. You can understand that witnesses are reluctant to expose themselves to an uncertain judicial system and risk the revenge of the gangs, especially if the case gets bogged down by legal technicalities, red tape or government interference that lets the perpetrators go free.

  “Now, at the swingers’ clubs we had opportunities to covertly interview some girls by hiring them for private sessions. That’s what Johnny and Michel did. It didn’t work very well because the girls didn’t speak much French and we didn’t speak their languages. You can’t invite an interpreter to your hot session with a prostitute without arousing suspicion. We were moving very slowly and the government was not of a mind to increase resource funding, partly because they were themselves being paid huge sums by the large building contractors in the Paris region and they didn’t want anything to rock that boat. Those building companies said afterwards that they had not offered bribes to the government. It was the government who demanded their cut. Whatever the truth, those building companies are now respectable global businesses with fingers in many other pies. Only a few journalists were on the case and they were mainly digging into the issues of fraudulent conversion of public money, bribery, manipulation of contract tendering, and other forms of corruption, which were rife in the administration during the Mitterrand and Chirac eras.

  “Then we had a massively publicised case which had to be cleared up fast. It literally put a rocket under our investigations. Suddenly more resources became available, and the politicians and judiciary were prepared to listen where they had turned a deaf ear before.”

  There was complete silence around the table. Muffled voices and a clatter of plates came from the kitchen, but the other tables were now empty. Patrick continued.

  “A French journalist named Clara Rémy was working for a national newspaper that had linked up with a radio programme to run a series on street prostitutes. Although she expected it to be very difficult to gather information, she found that although initially distrustful, the girls, some as young as sixteen, were very keen to tell their stories in graphic detail. They talked about their history and where they came from, and were able give examples of the levels of violence applied to them and their families, of which the public remained largely unaware. For example, when a group of girls assembled for transport stood shivering near the edge of a village in Kosovo, one girl refused to be loaded into the truck. A trafficker walked slowly towards her with a gun, shot her in the head and ordered the rest, ‘Now get in the truck.’ They drove away leaving the body on the village road.

  “From what she heard and recorded, Clara mapped out the connections between recruitment, mainly in Eastern Europe and China, the forced induction centres around Paris, and the eventual conversion into street prostitutes. She got some names, documents and photos and pieced together what looked like a good case to report on apparent police apathy, and government and judicial corruption too. Clara brought a draft of the article to the police and told them that she intended to publish, but was prepared to hold back if they would commit to a full investigation, in which case she would turn over copies of her files in exchange for an exclusive on whatever action was taken. Our head of department went straight to the Editor in Chief of the newspaper to have her shut up fast.”

  “Why?” interjected George.

  “What she was going to say would stir up the wasp’s nest and would not only be dangerous for the journalist; it could also disrupt our ongoing investigations. Anyway, the newspaper people declined to co-operate on various grounds and we could not get an agreement with them. Our position was that although the article stated correct facts, it delivered no proof that we could use to secure convictions
at the right level. Telling the world that it was going on would achieve nothing useful where we were concerned; on the contrary, it would only serve to tighten security among the gangs.

  “The press ignored us and published the first part of the story a few weeks later, promising to name names and print photos in further issues. It turned out to be more useful than we anticipated because we immediately detected unusual communications and movements of individuals who were previously in the background. After a few days that all stopped, and nothing more happened until the husband of the journalist reported that she hadn’t returned home. After a week of enquiry there was absolutely no progress. The papers were associating her disappearance with the article and we saw headlines like:

  ‘Investigative journalist disappears in Paris. Police clueless’ and, ‘Paris just like Moscow. Who kidnapped our Clara?’

  “The press closed ranks to make sure that the authorities could not forget that the victim was one of their colleagues. My department had a pretty good idea where she could be, though we couldn’t prove it yet, so we needed a daring and trusted informant to help confirm our assumptions and prepare the ground for us to act decisively. Johnny Mendes was top of the list for that job. After all, he was one of their outlets for sales items. Just like a retail store manager, he put in his requests to one of the mid-dlemen, based on his customers’ fantasies, and the human goods would be delivered to the hotel within a week or so. It was trafficking to order.

  “By working with us, Johnny was risking his life. Anyway, he fed in the idea to the suppliers that he could be interested in a more mature woman. This journalist was a very attractive lady for those who appreciate more rounded female forms. He didn’t expect to get what he wanted and he was afraid that they would guess he might be fishing. If there had been any suspicion of that, he would have been in big trouble and we would have had to bail him out quickly. However, a few days later Clara Rémy was part of a new consignment to the hotel.