A drunk passed by, his body bent in her direction by an invisible wind. She returned to walking. She crossed the bridge, reached the streets of the Ile de la Cité. A young couple, a careless amalgam of loosely draped scarves and shaggy hair, leaned into each other against a tree on the Quai de la Corse. She resisted the urge to stop and stare. She was walking through a coffee-table book of Paris. But she had her final errand of the day to carry out. She kept walking.
A few more moments of moving through the silence and she reached her destination. On her left loomed the monumental Hôtel-Dieu. On her right the massive stone walls of the Préfecture de Police. She’d been here before to process papers. Locals came to the Préfecture to obtain driver’s licenses, and foreigners to become legal. But criminal investigations were also launched within its warren of dim, dusty rooms, as well as projects for municipal public safety. She’d heard as much at a cocktail party. And an office was kept open twenty-four hours to receive criminal complaints.
First she needed to find it. Nothing was ever streamlined in France, least of all bureaucracy. She hesitated in the Préfecture’s shadows, wandering the length of the street until she reached the other bank and Notre-Dame Cathedral. She felt eyes on her, not those of late-night carousers or ambling tourists. Were there guards watching? Normally, she would have sought one out to ask directions, but these guards wouldn’t bob their caps toward her like those she passed every day and had come to know by sight along the Rue de Varenne. She waited until she saw movement around one corner. She followed in its direction. A lone policeman, obscured by the light of night.
“Officer,” she said in the politest French she could muster, “I’m looking for the police station.”
He screwed up his face. “La Préfecture?”
The Préfecture loomed over their shoulders, a huge lacy monument to French bureaucracy. She shook her head. He must think her an idiot.
“No, I mean I wish to speak with someone. About a crime?”
“You have been a victim of crime?”
“No. Not exactly. I want to speak to someone about someone else’s crime.”
“You must go to your central police station if you wish to make a report. In your district.”
“No, but it’s not that kind of a crime. I mean it’s not related to my district.”
He continued to stare patiently at her. “Are you all right, Madame?”
“Yes, yes, I’m fine. It has nothing to do with me.” There wasn’t any point in arguing. Instead, she asked, “Could you tell me please where the closest central police station is?”
After he’d finished explaining, she turned back towards the right bank. The kissing couple was still there; the drunk had moved on. She crossed back over the bridge. A lone taxi waited at the stand by the nightclub. He must have just let someone out. She peered in and saw the driver speaking on his cell phone. She tapped on the window, and he jumped, then scowled with embarrassment. She climbed in.
“Bonsoir, Monsieur. Dix-huit, Rue du Croissant.”
When he drew up by the modern glass-fronted police precinct, the driver betrayed no interest. He put out his hand and accepted her money.
She showed her carte speciale to the policeman at the entry. He lifted the diplomatic identification card between two fingers to examine it, raised an eyebrow.
“Are you here alone, Madame?” he asked in French. And when she nodded, added “Why?”
“Because.”
He looked at her as though to check whether she was insulting him. When he seemed to have decided she wasn’t, he handed her ID card back and pointed to the waiting room. She tried not to look at the others who were waiting also—a young man with an old woman, two middle-aged men—willing herself to become invisible by virtue of not seeing.
Hours seemed to pass rather than minutes. Years, even. The time was late now; the very air felt tired. Finally, the policeman filing complaints motioned to her. To her surprise, when she approached the counter, he smiled.
“Bonjour, Madame.”
“I am here about the murder this afternoon at Versailles,” she said in French. “I have information about the suspect.”
Something almost imperceptible shifted behind the face of the police officer. His smile slackened, and he looked more closely at her. He requested her identification and studied it, glancing back and forth from the photo to her face. “Please take a seat right there,” he responded in French finally, pointing to a nearby chair. “It will be just a few minutes.”
She sat down to wait, his eyes keeping track of her. She felt as though there were eyes in the wall watching her, too, as though she might bolt for a door or evaporate or somehow disintegrate and the building itself wanted to be able to grab hold of her sweater before she might do that. About fifteen minutes later, a plainclothes detective appeared, with as many rings around his eyes as the cross section of a tree.
“Madame Moorhouse?” he said.
“Oui.”
“Suivez-moi, s’il vous plaît.”
He led her down a long, narrow corridor into a tiny linoleum box of an office.
“You are American,” he said in English after she was seated.
“Yes.”
He fingered the forms she’d filled out and the identity card she’d handed over. “But married to the second at the British Embassy here in Paris.”
“Yes.”
“Does your husband know that you are here?”
She shook away his question as though it were a fly buzzing around her. “Monsieur—”
“There is no one here with you?” He looked around as though someone might have suddenly appeared. Finding no one, he looked back at her.
“The man you arrested—I saw him on the street yesterday. The reason I believe it’s the same man is I saw a photograph of him on a television broadcast. It looked just like him, even the clothing was the same as he was wearing.”
The detective nodded, curious but now impatient. She screwed up her courage.
“But I saw him in the center of Paris, miles away from Versailles, about two minutes before the assassination took place. I spoke with him.”
The detective laid his pen down. “You spoke with him.”
“He gave me a piece of paper that has his handwriting on it.”
“Where?”
“On the paper. It was a map.”
“No, I mean where were you when he gave you this paper?”
“On the Rue Chomel in the septième arrondissement. Outside a flower shop. I had been ordering flowers.”
He sucked the spaces between his teeth. He examined her face, seemed to be considering every last line and angle to it. His jacket was a worn gray herringbone weave; he wore no tie. Finally he asked, “What are you doing out alone at this hour, Madame Moorhouse?”
“Lieutenant, s’il vous plaît.”
“You understand that there is enormous interest in this case, yes? It is very high profile?”
She nodded.
“You are sure?”
“Yes.”
The detective said nothing, made no motion.
She repeated herself. “Yes.”
He waved a hand in the air. “Alors. You are ready to identify him? If it is the same man, you will sign an affidavit?”
She nodded.
“Very well.” He picked up the desk phone and began punching in numbers. “This is not the average crime, Madame Moorhouse, you understand. You understand this, Madame Moorhouse?” He addressed his attention to the phone. “Oui, c’est tard.” He continued in a low rumble for a few minutes. After he’d hung up again, he stood.
“Very well,” he said again. “We need to go to the Direction centrale de la police judiciaire at Rue des Saussaies.”
She followed him out of his office. She stopped to search the street before climbing into the backseat of his car. Was there someone walking towards them? Was there anyone there, a guard, to bear witness to her departure? She was used to climbing into backseats of car
s, used to being driven, but this man was a stranger, and no one, not even Edward, knew she was with him. All around them night glistened; the dark lapped at the old stone buildings across the street from them and at the detective’s and her faces. No one at the French Ministry of the Interior would be happy if she discredited the arrest, no one in the French police force. No one at the British Embassy. The news would be on every television station in every city around the world. It would be in every newspaper. The wife of a prominent British diplomat frees a known terrorist and discredits the French police.
But the guy I spoke to on the street is innocent, she thought to herself. He didn’t do it. Not this crime, anyhow. Not if he is the same man they have in custody.
Another detective joined them from within the police station. He mumbled his name, nodded at her rather than offered his hand to shake. She ducked her head and clambered into the car. The front passenger seat was pushed back too far; there wasn’t room for her long legs. She turned them sideways.
The first detective drove. They raced along the Rue de Rivoli, and for the second time in twenty-four hours she felt herself drawn towards the centrifuge of the Place de la Concorde. He turned his car up the Champs Elysées. The two men sat up front while she sat in the back, like a criminal. Their heads from the back looked worn, as though they’d rubbed and rubbed against car headrests. The car smelled of stale cigarettes and fear. There was junk in the backseat: mail, newspapers, empty Vittel water bottles.
She looked at her watch. 2:00 a.m. She was tired, but she had no desire to sleep. On the streets, there were still people walking. She pulled herself to the edge of the car seat and stared out the window. Normal people going home from a night of revelry.
She sat in darkness on the edge of the hotel bed and waited for morning to come to Dublin. With the first light, she stood and went to the window. She tugged on a strand of her hair, pulling it out of the disheveled braid that crossed her shoulder. There was a man weaving his way down the street, a woman sweeping a doorway. The air felt damp, cold, in the hotel room. She drew her arms around herself. She couldn’t imagine that anyone could do what she had just done. She didn’t know how people like Niall, and now her, existed. He’d said bringing the money over would help people, but what had he meant? Help people do what? Was this money really going to help someone buy a First Communion dress for his daughter? Or was it to stain someone else’s dress with blood? She wished Niall had never shown her the contents of that duffel. She wished she had never seen the bills piled up so tightly within it. She wished they were back still combing the sands of the Atlantic while she pretended they were on their honeymoon. And still she wanted Niall with her. Her longing for him was so visceral that she had to sit back down on the bed. She wrapped her arms around herself.
The first time she saw him he was standing on a stone wall. Forever after, she would have the impression he was taller. He was wearing corduroy pants so threadbare she could see the white knobs of his kneecaps through them. He…
Clare’s head knocked against the car window. She sat back and tightened her seat belt as the detective swerved around a double-parked car. They were approaching the Arc de Triomphe. Clare tried to return to her memory, but the image of Niall’s face slipped from her, there but out of reach, like a fish in lake water.
Instead, she saw Jamie’s flushed cheeks, his lips swollen with sleep, her sweater wrapped close around him. She saw his face earlier in the evening as he sat on her bed while she dressed for dinner.
“Madame. Why didn’t you wait to come in the morning?” the detective behind the steering wheel asked her. He was viewing her through the rearview mirror.
In the morning, after the sun had risen, she would be en route to London with Jamie, to speak with the headmaster of Barrow before the weekend was upon them, if the police allowed her to leave Paris. Jamie was within his rights to dissent, but the method had been all wrong, and, just as he’d said, it wasn’t right one person take all the blame. Evasion wasn’t the same thing as absolution. She’d needed twenty-five years of silence and a fifteen-year-old son to make her see this, and she wasn’t going to allow Jamie to make the same mistakes. She would not let this episode become a dark package shoved to the back of his dresser. And she wasn’t going to leave him to return right back to it. If he believed what he had done was justified in some way, he needed to argue his side before facing his punishment. And then he needed to move on.
But she couldn’t leave Paris until she had finished with the police. Not without being sure the man they’d detained was guilty. What if she had not only refused to help Niall but had set herself to stopping him? She couldn’t let another man’s life be wasted because of her cowardice.
She shook her head. “Morning would be too late.”
The detective looked at her again through the rearview mirror. He raised an eyebrow. “Why did you not come earlier?”
She shrugged. She didn’t need to explain to him.
The two men conferred. The one in the passenger seat craned his head around to look at her. He wrinkled his brow and scratched his head. “Vous ne voulez pas téléphoner à quelqu’un à l’Ambassade?”
She shook her head. No, she did not wish to call anyone at the embassy. They’d know all about this soon enough.
The men exchanged glances.
They wove through barren side streets, empty of life or sound, warrens of shadow. They stopped for traffic lights, or didn’t. They pulled up by a stolid fortresslike stone building with none of the glamour or grandeur of the central police station on the Ile de la Cité, though at least as many French flags flew before it. A no-nonsense, double-jointed metal door guarded the entrance. What the gates to Hell would really look like, she thought to herself. No Thinker, no Adam and Eve. No embellishment. She knew of this place. During the German occupation of Paris, it was used by the Gestapo for questioning prisoners. The Ministry of the Interior now had offices on this block.
The second detective slunk out of the car and opened the gate. She and the detective behind the steering wheel drove over cobblestones and through a shadowy archway. He pulled up in front of a group of buildings, got out, and stood there in the night, waiting.
She slid from the backseat.
The second detective joined them on the cobblestones. “Par ici,” he said, gesturing towards a door. There was a strange moment while they hesitated in the night, all unsure of the protocol. She was a female, a well-dressed and blond one at that, and a diplomat’s wife. A person of a certain importance. But she was a troublemaker. She stepped forward, leading them, leading herself. Now they followed her. The first detective reached out and opened the door for her. She passed through. They registered her with a clerk, who nodded his head to her but then took her cell phone, led her into an empty room, and asked her to wait. They left her alone with a long solid-wood desk, several folding chairs, not much else. Dustlets floated through the air around her like a clock with no sense of time. She didn’t bother to check her watch again. Eventually the detectives returned, led by a third man, more erect in bearing than the first two but with the air of having recently been awoken.
“Madame,” he said. He stretched out a hand to shake hers.
“Commandant,” she said, accepting it.
“Merci d’être venue.”
He spread a rack of photographs of different men in front of her. She felt a wave of exhaustion buffet her body. This day had been too long. She hesitated, one image swimming before her. Her Turk no longer wore the cheap leather jacket, and his face appeared bruised, or maybe it was just the photo’s lighting. Gone was that gentle expression when he told her about his wife’s homemade yogurt. Still, the photo seemed to be him. She brushed it lightly. The commandant asked her to consider again.
“C’est difficile avec une photo,” she said.
“Il faut être sûr.”
She nodded and thought for a moment. The newscaster had said the suspect had been photo-identified by the witness to the
assassination. “Je veux le voir. Le prisonnier. En personne.”
The commandant considered her. He turned and spoke sharply to one of the detectives. “Reveillez-le.”
They would rouse the prisoner. He was in a holding cell within the bowels of the building, awaiting the morning for further interrogation. Which they would want to avoid if they had the wrong man. Again—what a terrible embarrassment this would be for the French police services if the material proof she’d promised proved this to be the case. Even worse if in the meantime they’d mistreated the man they’d picked up. They’d been proud of the speed and efficacy of their forces; this man, the commandant, would have to step forth and admit to their error. His face, like hers, would be all over the newspapers.
She considered the moons on her fingernails, the shine of her engagement diamond, the blank space on the stretch of her hand where the emerald had sparkled and shone such a short while ago. They’d both walked away bearing their own responsibilities—no, she couldn’t go backwards. She couldn’t make what she’d done disappear. That would always be with her. But she could go forward. She no longer blamed Niall for anything.
“S’il vous plaît,” the commandant said.
A part of her hoped against hope that their Turk would be another Turk that looked just like hers. Perhaps the news stations had mixed up her Turk and the police’s Turk’s photos? The man in this photo looked so faded, so crumpled, it was impossible to focus on him. Or maybe it was her exhaustion. She would peek at the real living body and shake her head. She would go home and slide into bed beside Edward and close her eyes against this whole day. She would not sign an affidavit; they would not file her report. No one would be the wiser for it. The British Embassy, the permanent under-secretary would never hear of it.
She shook her head. She and Edward would move to Dublin or not; it made no difference. And whether Niall was alive, whether he would return to the island he loved so much that he was willing to risk all for it, whether he would be forgiven his debt or not and, if he was lucky, meld back into the crowd, another fair-skinned freckled man nearing fifty, scraping by with whatever he could pull together—all of this made no difference to right now. She’d made her decision. And she was sure it was the correct one.
An Unexpected Guest Page 24