At first he had been minded not to take the job at all. It went against the grain to deal with ex-flics. Shit sticks – and old shit sticks the worst. But the man came recommended by Aimé Macron. And Macron had saved Picaro’s life in Djibouti when he’d fallen foul of an Afar brigade leader in a convoluted deal involving drugs, women, and a consignment of FAMAS assault rifles which had somehow gone missing from the Legion warehouse.
The flic had further undermined his objections by coming straight out and offering him 1,500 Euros on the nail, and a further 1,500 down the line, to liberate a personal item belonging to him from inside a house on the Cap. The deal didn’t even involve a break-in. The flic, as flics do, had secretly palmed and wax-pressed a backdoor key while conducting an investigation inside the house two months before. Picaro had even been given a detailed map of the layout, showing the position of the library and of the concealed doorway leading to the room containing the object. A piece of cake, surely. But something was still bothering him.
He played his torch over the map. He’d been watching the back of the house for over an hour now, and everything seemed quiet. No dogs. No automatic lighting sensors this side of the property. The flic had even explained to him where the alarm system and circuit breakers were, and how best to de-activate them. The whole thing was a fucking dream. But in Picaro’s experience, dreams had a nasty habit of jolting you awake when you least expected it.
He flicked some imaginary skin from the collar of his jacket.
Right. Either you do it or you don’t, Legionnaire.
Picaro rose to his feet and padded down towards the buanderie.
17
Picaro stood inside the back door and sniffed. He didn’t know how or why, but sometimes you could smell the presence of people, even rooms away from you. It was some atavistic instinct, he reckoned, from mankind’s earliest times as a cave dweller. Enter an empty cave which you meant to occupy yourself, and before you settled down in front of the fire it was a smart idea to make sure that no one else, man or beast, felt they had a prior claim.
Satisfied, Picaro padded up the concrete stairway that led to the back of the hallway. After neutralizing the alarm system within the stipulated two minutes, he cracked his torch and checked his map one final time. A left, a right, and then another right, and he should be in the library. Then a few steps across the room to the bound set of La Vie Parisienne – the flic had even set down the exact number of volumes there were in that particular run – and hey presto, open sesame.
Picaro cast a quick glance up the stairs as he passed through the hall. Despite the multitude of houses he had broken into during the course of his life, Picaro still couldn’t stop himself fantasizing about his own particular nightmare – that of an Alsatian – it was always an Alsatian – bounding noiselessly down the stairs, dewlaps flapping, saliva jetting into its mouth at the prospect of a piece of Jean Picaro’s thighbone.
Giving a little jump to settle his gooseflesh, Picaro eased himself through the doorway of the library. Jesus. He was getting too old for this. What did he need 3,000 euros for, anyway? His bank account was heaving. He owned his house outright. His son was apprenticed to the best electrical engineer in the business, and he had vowed to die rather than ever to go back to prison again. So what the hell was he doing it for? Habit? Addiction to the kicks? Or just because it was one of the few things he could still do well?
He bent down and felt around for the catch that the flic had told him was hidden under Volume Three of the collected periodicals.
A door, hidden in the bookcase, flicked open. With a cautious glance over one shoulder, Picaro stepped inside the concealed room.
‘Putain de merde!’ he mouthed to himself, his eyes widening in horror.
The unconscious figure of a woman was tied to a chair in the very centre of the assembly table. Her head had fallen at an angle, and as Picaro played his torch across her, he saw that one whole side of her face was covered in what appeared to be a thin sheet of congealed blood.
18
Ever the professional – and ever mindful of his 3,000 euros – Picaro felt around under the table for the flic’s precious tape recorder. Exactly two metres to the right of the master chair, taped up inside the skirt, at the exact angle of the joist and the cross-brace. Yes. There it was. Picaro pocketed it.
He hesitated, and then made briskly for the door. What business was the woman of his? He’d done what he came here to do. He was already running late because of his previous caution. Why complicate matters? This way, he could get out of the house before daybreak with no one the wiser.
His gaze travelled inexorably back to the woman. What the hell had they done to her? Maybe she was dead, even? But no. He could see her breathing by the light of the torch.
As he played the light across her body, a memory came back to Picaro from his time at La Santé prison. A young lad, mixed race, not more than nineteen years old, who had fallen foul of one of the methamphetamine gangs. One day the gang had waited for him in the showers – for sooner or later, as Picaro had tried to explain to the boy, the bad guys always get you. What the hell else did they have to do with their time? But the boy had been too young and too cocksure to listen to him.
This one they’d condemned to a tournante – a gang rape. When Picaro found the boy, they’d left him tied to a chair, with his head through the seat, his belly over the backrest, and his hands and feet strapped to the legs – that way he would be available for anyone else to use who happened along.
At first Picaro hadn’t understood what he was looking at. It was like when his son had emerged, balls first, from his mother’s womb. Picaro had fallen back, his face ashen, shouting, ‘Christ, what’s that?’
‘It’s his testicles, Monsieur,’ the midwife had told him. ‘They swell up in a breech birth, because the legs are stretched back over the head.’
When he’d seen the state of the young man’s anus, Picaro had vomited. Then he’d untied the boy, straightened him out as best he could on the cold floor of the shower room, and gone to fetch the toubibs.
They’d stitched him up good, but the boy had never been right again after the attack. One day, about six months later, he’d cut off his own balls with a piece of broken glass.
Sighing, Picaro moved back to the table. Taking out his Opinel, he cut the cords binding the young woman to her chair, eased her towards him, and let her fall across his right shoulder.
With a hitch of his arms, he settled her weight more squarely. Then, feeling all kinds of a fool, he started back across the hall.
No point closing the door behind me now, he thought to himself. I might as well leave a fucking paper trail.
19
Picaro laid the woman gently on the rear seat of his car. He stood back and looked down at her in the cold glow of the interior lights. What he had imagined in the darkness of the sealed room to be blood, now proved to be nothing more than a strawberry birthmark. Poor bitch. She’d have been pretty without that. Sometimes you wondered what God was thinking of.
Picaro sprung back her eyelids and checked her pupils. She was doped – that much was obvious. He was briefly tempted to tie his chamois leather duster around her eyes so that she couldn’t identify him if she woke up – but with his present run of luck, she’d probably panic on awaking and cause a car wreck. Best to leave things be for the time being.
He’d arranged to meet the flic at the old parking place behind Pampelonne beach. A twenty-minute drive at the outside. He’d simply dump the female and the tape recorder on him, get the rest of his money, and then scram. The flic could sort her out. That’s what flics did, wasn’t it? Sort things out?
Three times on the drive to Pampelonne Picaro wondered whether he wouldn’t do better just leaving her on the side of the road. She hadn’t seen him yet. She hadn’t seen the flic. Why complicate life when you didn’t need to?
But the image of the girl tied to the chair in the centre of the table haunted him. What had that b
oy’s name been? The one in the prison? Chico? Chiclette? Something like that.
Stupid to put the chair on the table. What if the girl had woken up and thrown herself to one side in a panic? She could have broken her neck and paralysed herself. People could be dumb sometimes.
He saw the flic waiting for him in the curve of the headlights. Well. Here goes. What a man will do for three thousand smackers.
Picaro pulled up beside Calque. He got out of the car and looked around. Well. No unexpected reception committee. That was a good first sign.
‘Did you get it?’
‘Of course I got it.’ Picaro eased the tape recorder from his pocket and handed it to Calque.
Calque palmed him the remaining fifteen hundred.
Picaro jerked his thumb back towards the car. ‘I’ve got something else for you, too. No extra charge.’
Calque flinched, as if someone had fired a dried pea at the back of his neck. ‘What do you mean?’
Picaro opened the back door of his car and stood waiting for Calque to join him. They both stared down at the girl.
‘Don’t worry. She’s not dead. Someone drugged her and tied her to a chair. They left the chair on the table in that secret room of yours. I thought at first that it might have been one of those sex things – you know, a bondage thing, when they pop amyl nitrate and then half suffocate themselves in an effort to increase their kicks. But one look at her face told me otherwise. I thought about leaving her there, but I just couldn’t do it. She hasn’t seen me and she hasn’t seen you. My advice would be to abandon her here. But she’s your problem from here on in. Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’ Calque had total control of himself again. He was already busy working out the possible ramifications of this new development.
‘Want me to move her, or will you?’
‘You’d better move her. I’m not in the best of health.’
Calque watched as Picaro eased the girl across the back seat towards him.
‘What’s that on her face? Is she injured?’
Picaro held the girl’s head up towards the light as if he were exhibiting a vase to a potential buyer at an auction house. ‘No. Birthmark. It’s a fucking shame, isn’t it?’
Calque recognized the girl’s facial disfigurement at once. She had been one of the members of the first party to arrive at the house – the party which had preceded the arrival of the two men. She had to be one of the Countess’s daughters, therefore – one of the Devil’s dozen. But what could she possibly have done to turn the Countess against her? Either way, he desperately needed to talk to her.
At that exact moment, Lamia opened her eyes.
Picaro raised his hand, ready to rabbit-punch her before she could catch a glimpse of his face.
‘No. No. Wait!’ Calque hurried forward. He scrabbled in his pocket and held out his badge. ‘Police, Mademoiselle. For your own good, do not look around. I’m going to ease you out of the car.’ He took her face in his hands. ‘Keep looking at me. Don’t look around. Trust me.’
Lamia was still dopey. She stumbled forwards and fell against Calque’s chest, her knees buckling.
Calque nodded at Picaro.
Picaro jumped into his car and slewed away. The back door slammed shut of its own accord as he revved up through the gears.
20
Philippe Lemelle had been one of the Countess de Bale’s footmen for eighteen months now. It was the single longest period in his life that he had ever held down a job, and he was beginning to get itchy feet. Something good needed to happen, or the old cow wouldn’t see his trail for dust.
Lemelle’s father and his grandfather had both worked for the old Count, and it was this fact, and this fact alone, which had secured the slow-witted and low IQ’d Lemelle the job. As a result, Lemelle was fully conversant – or so he fondly thought – with all the Corpus’s aims and aspirations. If it wasn’t for the butler, Milouins, who was clearly jealous of his good looks and his success with women, Lemelle was firmly convinced that he would have risen far more rapidly in the Corpus hierarchy, with the Countess using him for something just a little more onerous than the cleaning of people’s rooms and the mounting of guard duty on her disfigured bitch of a daughter.
Lemelle felt personally humiliated by Lamia’s escape during his watch, and his sense of humiliation was further compounded by Milouins’s triumphant recapture of the stuck-up bint just a few seconds after she’d touched down in the courtyard. He derived belated comfort from the fact that it was to him, and not to Milouins, that the Countess had reassigned Lamia after the escape fiasco. Madame la Comtesse had clearly marked him out from the herd, and intended him for higher things.
From the very first moment that he had seen her, fourteen months before, during a brief visit on the occasion of her mother’s birthday, Lemelle had found Lamia sexually attractive – despite, or perhaps even because of, the strawberry birthmark that marred her face. After all, as his father used to say, you don’t stare at the mantelpiece while you’re poking the fire.
As a result he had taken an unusually keen pleasure in knotting her to her chair, and forcibly dosing her with twice the regulation measure of tranquillizers. He was beginning to regret his final sadistic flourish, however, which had seen him balancing the now unconscious woman on top of the council room table for reasons which, in retrospect, eluded even him. In fact the memory of his stupidity had positively begun to haunt him. What if she woke up in a panic, fell off the table, and broke her stupid neck? That would complete Milouins’s triumph over him, wouldn’t it? The Countess would have every reason to bury him alive.
Lemelle threw on a few clothes and padded furtively downstairs. The stillness of the sleeping house was oddly comforting to him, for ever since childhood Lemelle had been prone to passages of voyeurism, and night time – with its secrets, and its recondite laws, and its infinite promises of concealment – held deeply stimulating associations for him.
The in-built connection between darkness and sexual promise now provided Lemelle with his next brainwave – with Lamia dosed up to the eyeballs on tranquillizers, what possible harm could there be in paying her something more than just a fleeting visit? If he was caught, he could always claim that he’d simply gone downstairs to check on her welfare.
For the fact remained that when Lemelle wasn’t working, sleeping, or eating, he was busy constructing elaborate sexual fantasies about any real-life women he happened to encounter. And ever since he had first heard of people using roofies to drug women so that they would neither resist nor remember anything that occurred, Lemelle had dreamed of getting hold of the stuff and using it as a means of self-empowerment. And if he couldn’t get his hands on the date rape drug Rohypnol, surely a double dose of Temazepam was the next best thing?
Even a cursory glance at Lemelle’s computer would have thrown up thousands of images from rape, BDSM, and sleep-attack websites. Here was his chance to turn fantasy into reality. If Lamia was still out cold, he could do whatever he wanted to her. The thought turned his legs weak with anticipation. He patted the digital camera in his jacket pocket. It would serve the bitch right if she found out in a month or so’s time that she was unexpectedly pregnant by her mother’s footman – and that if she decided to cut up rough he could take his revenge by plastering pornographic pictures of her all over the internet. She’d have to notice him then, wouldn’t she? She’d have to come to terms with him then. And Christ, how he’d make her suffer.
Lemelle’s first hint that his future plans weren’t going to run quite as smoothly as he expected came at the library door. It was wide open. And the Countess’s standing orders were that every unused door in the house be kept tightly sealed unless the room was actually in use. In fact the bastard Milouins set such store on pleasing the Countess on this subject that it would have been more than Lemelle’s job was worth not to double-shut the damned thing after he’d trussed the woman up and stuck her on the table like Quasimodo. Shutting doors had become an automatic pa
rt of his make-up – rather like a man who runs around the house switching off unnecessary lights.
The Corpus chamber door was wide open too. A wave of nausea leached through Lemelle’s body. If the woman was gone a second time, he’d get the blame for that too. That was as clear as day. He’d lose his job. Even his mother wouldn’t be able to protect him this time.
Lemelle eased himself around the open door. Lamia was nowhere to be seen. Her chair lay upside down on the floor, next to the council table. Lemelle picked up one of the discarded ropes and thumbed its end. It had been cut – clearly cut. So the bitch had got someone in to help her. Lemelle could already hear the triumph in Milouins’s voice when this new disaster came to light.
‘Twice? You let her go twice? We told you to tie her up and dope her, for Christ’s sake. What did you do, Lemelle? Give her a double espresso?’
Lemelle hurried through the empty house, his eyes searching for anything remotely out of place. Yes. Here was another door left wide open. Lemelle descended towards the buanderie. He could already feel a current of colder air playing against his forehead. Should he call Milouins and tell him what had occurred? Of course. That would be the smart thing to do.
Lemelle took out his cell phone and glared at it. He was near the back of the house now, looking out over the fields. As he watched, some car headlights cut a circular swathe across the vineyard.
Lemelle thrust the cell phone back in his pocket and hurried around to the servant’s garage. In the fantasy world Lemelle had constructed for himself, heroes didn’t fritter away their second chances. As he passed the gunroom he helped himself to Milouins’s precious Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun and a box of twelve-gauge cartridges.
Whatever route they intended to take, Lamia and her white knight would have to pass within half a kilometre of the front of the property. This meant that Lemelle would have ample time to get the estate Land Rover out, douse the headlights, and follow on behind.
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