Extraordinary People ef-4

by Peter May

  Both men in the next room were dead. That much was certain. And one of them was Roques.

  Enzo and Raffin had been made to wait in the guest bedroom when the first officers of the Brigade Criminelle arrived. No one had talked to them. No one had asked them anything. But they had heard the shrill, near-hysterical voice of the concierge in another room describing everything that had happened from the moment they had shown up at the gate.

  The door opened, and the plainclothes officer who had arrived at Château Hautvillers in the helicopter with Juge Lelong stood looking at them thoughtfully.

  ‘Who gave you permission to make phone calls?’ he said sharply to Raffin.

  Raffin hung up and slipped the phone into his pocket. ‘I don’t need your permission.’

  ‘Wrong.’ The officer closed the door behind him. ‘From now on you don’t breathe without my permission.’

  Raffin stood his ground. ‘I don’t think you have the right to withhold my air. Are we under arrest?’

  ‘That could be arranged. For the moment you’re helping us with our enquiries into two suspicious deaths.’

  ‘Murders,’ Raffin corrected him.

  ‘That might be one interpretation.’

  ‘And what’s the other?’ Enzo asked.

  ‘A lover’s tiff. Luc Vidal had been living here with Roques for nearly nine months. They had a furious row. Vidal shot Roques in the face and then in a fit of remorse sat down, put the gun in his mouth, and blew the back of his head off.’

  ‘Obviously, that’s what you’re supposed to think,’ Raffin said.

  ‘I don’t think anything.’ The detective slipped his hands into his pockets and leaned against the wall. ‘I’ll wait for the autopsy reports, and the results from the police scientifique before I come to any conclusions. Meantime, I would like you to tell me what you were doing here.’ He waited for a response, and when none was forthcoming, he said, ‘Monsieur Roques was a well-known homosexual. Apparently he and his boyfriend had frequent gentlemen callers.’

  Enzo had no appetite for playing games. ‘I think you know perfectly well why we were here. The names of Philippe Roques and Hugues d’Hautvillers both arose from the clues found with Jacques Gaillard’s body parts.’

  ‘Only, we seem to have figured that out ahead of you,’ Raffin said. ‘As usual.’

  ‘Okay.’ The detective pushed himself off the wall and held out a hand towards Raffin. ‘I’ll take your cell phone now.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I think Juge Lelong made it perfectly clear to both of you this afternoon that he would take a dim view of any further interference in this case. I’m pretty sure we can bring charges of obstruction, and withholding evidence in a criminal investigation.’ He opened the door and shouted down the hall. A uniformed officer appeared. The detective said to him, ‘Take these gentlemen down to the Quai des Orfèvres.’ And he turned to Enzo and Raffin. ‘Accommodation for the night courtesy of the République.’ He held out his hand towards Raffin again. ‘Your phone, please, monsieur.’

  IV

  The police cells at La Crime were on the second top floor at No. 36 Quai des Orfèvres, immediately below the cells kept by the Brigade des Stups — the drug squad. They were blind cells, without windows. One entire wall was made of re-inforced Plexiglas. From the darkness of an observation room on the other side, a prisoner could be kept under constant surveillance.

  Enzo and Raffin were put in separate cells. In the police van Raffin had told Enzo, ‘They can only keep us en garde à vue for twenty-four hours.’ Then he had hesitated. ‘Unless, of course, Juge Lelong decides to sign an extension.’ He looked apologetically at Enzo. ‘In which case they could hold us for forty-eight.’

  Almost two of those hours had already passed. Crawling by in a glare of fluorescent light. Even if he had felt like it, Enzo knew that sleep would have been impossible. Once or twice, shadows had moved around beyond the Plexiglas, but he had been unable to see who had come to take a look at him. He sat on the edge of a hard bunk bed, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. They had taken his belt and his shoes, but left him his bloodied shirt. He had pulled it off and thrown it across the cell, to where it still lay on the floor, and they had let him rinse the blood from his hands and arms. Bare-chested, and in his socks, he felt very vulnerable.

  He was still suffering from the shock of finding Roques with half his face missing. Two deaths in a single day. Two names that he had unearthed from the clues left by Gaillard’s killers, and both men were dead. He felt responsible. He felt sick. His reflection in the Plexiglas looked haunted, like a vision of his own ghost staring back at him from the shadows.

  The cell door opened and he thought for a moment that he was hallucinating. A woman in full evening dress stood framed in the doorway. Cream silk, cut straight across the chest to off-the-shoulder sleeves. The contrast with the black hair that tumbled over her shoulders and the black opal which hung on a fine chain around her neck was startling. She looked stunning. Red-painted full lips pursed in a thoughtful pout, a frown gathering between her eyes. ‘You know, I was having a good time tonight, until you spoiled things.’ She let her eyes wander over the silvered black hair that curled across his naked chest. ‘They pulled me out of the party just after midnight.’

  ‘Sorry about that.’ Enzo had difficulty keeping the sarcasm out of his voice.

  She turned and nodded to a uniformed officer lurking in the shadows, and stepped into the cell. The door closed behind her.

  Enzo stood up. ‘Is it usual for prisoners to receive personal visits from the Garde des Sceaux?’

  ‘An old French custom. From the days when the guillotine was still in use.’

  ‘I hope you’re not going to cut my head off.’

  ‘I feel like knocking it off,’ she said with feeling. ‘Good God, Macleod, you’re a stubborn Scottish bastard.’

  ‘It’s a national character trait. We don’t like being told what to do. The English have been trying for centuries.’

  She canted her head to one side and looked at him with something like laughter in her eyes. ‘What are we going to do with you?’

  ‘Well, you could tell them to let me go, for a start.’

  ‘Actually, that’s just what I was planning.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘But I would like something in return.’

  ‘I’ve never been one to turn a lady down.’

  A smile flickered across her face, then faded. ‘I’m sure your experiences today with suicides and murders cannot have been very pleasant for you. More than enough, I would have thought, to convince you of the folly of your ways. But if not, I’d like your word that this business will stop. Right here. Right now.’

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Or…’ She looked at her watch. ‘You can spend another forty-five hours or so kicking your heels in here.’ The good humour slipped from her face like a mask. ‘And believe me, Monsieur Macleod, there are many other ways in which I can make your life more than difficult. When I tell someone to do something I expect it to be done. I have set up an official inquiry into the Gaillard case, and I would like it to proceed without further interference from you. The daily revelations in Raffin’s left-wing rag are both a hindrance to the police investigation and an embarrassment to me. And I want them to stop. Is that clear?’

  The cell door opened, and Marie Aucoin swung towards it in a sudden fury. Her voice was tense with anger. ‘I thought I told you I wasn’t to be interrupted!’

  Raffin stood in the doorway, his jacket draped over his shoulders, smoking a cigarette. He smiled and said languidly, ‘Sorry. Must have missed that.’ And to Enzo, ‘Come on, Macleod, time to go home.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ The Minister’s face had coloured with anger and humiliation.

  ‘The lawyers my “left-wing rag” sent down seem to have convinced Juge Lelong that he has no grounds whatsoever for detaining us. And that the consequences of ignoring their advice on the legalit
y of our detention would be both grave, and very public.’ He slipped the jacket from his shoulders and tossed it to Enzo. ‘For God’s sake cover yourself up, man. You’ll be arrested for indecent exposure.’

  Enzo slipped into Raffin’s jacket and nodded to the Garde des Sceaux. ‘You and the good judge should make sure you’re singing from the same hymn sheet next time. Bonne soirée, madame.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  I

  At the foot of the stairs, Enzo and Raffin stepped out into an inner courtyard. Lights from windows lay in geometric patterns across its cobbles. A police car stood idling, its diesel purr reverberating around the cloistered inner sanctum of the Brigade Criminelle, just one part of this sprawling complex on the ële de la Cité which made up the Palais de Justice. They followed their shadows down a long passageway, footsteps echoing back from scarred walls. Ahead of them, one half of the huge wooden gates stood open. And beyond it they could see across the Seine to the lights of the Left Bank. They passed through it into the Parisian night with an enormous sense of relief. A black, uniformed policewoman watched them without curiosity.

  The street was jammed with police vehicles, marked and unmarked. Enzo glanced up towards the second top floor and wondered where exactly it was he’d spent the last few hours.

  ‘Hey!’ They turned at the sound of Charlotte’s voice, and she came running along the riverside pavement to meet them, soft curls streaming out behind her. She stopped and looked at them breathlessly. ‘I couldn’t get parked any closer. My car’s on the other side of the river.’

  ‘Was it you who phoned Libé?’ Raffin asked.

  She nodded. ‘After you called I kept phoning the desk at La Crime asking what had happened to you. Eventually I think the duty officer got fed up with me and told me you were being held for questioning. The only thing I could think of was to phone the paper.’

  ‘Good girl.’ Raffin embraced her and kissed her on the cheek. She responded and hugged him back. Enzo watched awkwardly, and was annoyed by the tiny worm of jealousy he felt stirring inside. They broke apart and Raffin said, ‘I’ve got to go to the office and update my story. Two dead now. Three if you include Gaillard.’

  ‘Four, if you include the boyfriend,’ Enzo said.

  ‘Was Roques really murdered?’ Charlotte asked.

  ‘He was murdered all right,’ Raffin told her. ‘If not by his lover, then by someone else.’ He looked at Enzo. ‘Makes you wonder about Hugues. Either someone is prepared to kill again and again to cover up the original murder. Or fate has conspired to take three lives by pure coincidence.’

  ‘I don’t believe in fate or coincidence,’ Enzo said.

  ‘No, neither do I.’ Raffin tugged at Enzo’s lapels to straighten his ill-fitting jacket, and he looked at it ruefully. ‘I’ll get the jacket another time.’ And he kissed Charlotte on the cheek again. ‘Catch you later.’ He went running off towards the Pont St. Michel, waving and shouting at a taxi which had appeared from the Boulevard du Palais.

  Charlotte and Enzo stood looking at each other. ‘You’re a little underdressed,’ she said.

  But Enzo couldn’t even bring himself to smile. ‘Jesus, Charlotte, this is getting scary.’ And he took her in his arms, and held her for a very long time. She moulded herself into all his contours and held him just as tightly, and he felt a huge rush of fatigue and relief and affection.

  ‘Come on,’ she said finally, dark eyes looking intensely into his. ‘Let’s get you home.’

  As they walked along the quay, past the Préfecture de Police, and towards the floodlit Notre Dame, she slipped her hand into his, and he squeezed it, grateful for the comfort. They crossed the Pont St. Michel and turned down past the oldest tree in Paris, a grizzled acacia which stood at the centre of a garden brooding darkly behind spiked railings. Charlotte’s car was parked beyond the Église St. Julien-le-Pauvre. A down-and-out slept opposite the church in the doorway of a tea shop.

  At her car, Charlotte turned and reached up to hold Enzo’s face in both her hands. She gazed at him for a moment, a fleeting infusion of mixed emotions, then reached up on tiptoe to kiss him softly on the lips. He was caught off-guard by her sudden tenderness. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘What for?’

  She shook her head, smiling sadly. ‘Just…everything.’

  II

  Hot water beat down on his head and shoulders, streaming over his chest, and hanging in droplets from a million hairs. He wanted to stand there forever, just letting it wash over him, taking with it the taint of a dead man’s blood, the awful image of his gaping, lifeless face. The shower door opened and Charlotte stood naked before him, a slight, quizzical smile on her lips. She stepped up to share his water, and her dark curls unfurled into long, black ribbons over her shoulders. She stared at him through the steam. ‘I love your eyes,’ she said. And she touched his face and pushed his wet hair back behind his ears. Then she dropped both hands to find and hold the softness of his penis, and he immediately felt the blood rushing to it. Her breasts pressed against his belly, and as his passion flowered, she slid her hands behind him to hold his buttocks and pull him towards her. She turned her head to one side and pushed her face into his chest.

  They stood like that for a long time, under the running water, before stepping out to towel each other dry, skin glowing pink, wet hair hanging in damp ropes. She peppered him with kisses, and ran her fingers gently through the wiry hair on his chest, then took his hand and led him back through to the bedroom. Beyond the walls of glass which looked down on the garden courtyard below, the dark seemed very intense. Enzo felt strangely exposed. Anyone out there on the gallery opposite could see right in, just as he had the previous evening. Now he was lying among the lilac sheets that he had seen earlier, Charlotte on top of him, something frantic in the ferocity with which she bit his lip and pushed her tongue in his mouth. She reached down to find his erection and guide him inside her and thrust her hips at him with an energy he found hard to match.

  He came quickly, almost overcome by fatigue and a strange melancholy, and she immediately lay down beside him to curl into his hip. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. His turn to apologise.

  ‘Why?’ She seemed surprised. ‘You were lovely.’ She reached over and turned out the light, and they lay in the dark for ten or fifteen minutes without stirring. Moonlight spilling across the rooftops washed down through the angled glass roof of the warehouse, into the garden below, and through the tall windows of the bedroom. Enzo lay with his eyes open, and they adjusted to the light, so that he could follow every shape and contour. His brain refused to stop. He caught the slightest movement in his peripheral vision and turned his head to find himself looking into two luminous, saucer-like green eyes. Zeke sat on the bedside cabinet staring at him, and Enzo wondered if the cat had watched them making love. Wondered if it was jealous.

  His thoughts were broken by Charlotte’s voice, small and hoarse in the dark. ‘You know, I bought this place ten years ago from an old couple who’d lived here in the war. They were just newly married when the city was occupied by the Nazis. They ran a coal merchant’s business, and the Germans forced them to supply them with coal. They told me that the street was known as Little Italy, because of the number of Italian soldiers billeted here. They had been made to provide food and lodgings for two of them.’ She reached across his chest to twirl the long strands of his hair idly in her fingers. ‘Then after the allies landed, and the liberation of Paris was close, Parisians all over the city rose up against the occupiers. The couple who owned the coal merchant’s shot and killed their two Italian lodgers. They told me this, because when I was buying the property, I asked them why the cellar below the warehouse had been bricked up and cemented over. And they said that’s where they had buried the Italians. They were in their seventies by then, and they said I was the first person they had ever told.’

  ‘And did you believe them?’

  She laughed a little. ‘I don’t know. But I’d like to
. I’ve come to think of the bodies in the cellar as my Italians. Buried for eternity. And that I’ll always have their ghosts for company on cold winter nights.’

  Enzo thought about the sense he’d had earlier of vulnerability, of exposure to anyone who might have been watching from out there in the dark. And he thought about the ghosts of the two Italian soldiers who had never, after all, made it back to the olive groves in the southern sun. ‘I hope you’re not thinking of adding a third Italian to the collection,’ he said.

  He heard the rustling of sheets, and then her lips, soft and cool, on his cheek. ‘I’d like to think that maybe my real-life Italian would stay voluntarily.’

  He closed his eyes and felt himself drift off into confusion. She had a powerful effect on him. There was no doubting that. And yet the signals she gave him were mixed and conflicting. She didn’t want a relationship, she said. And yet she was happy to make love to him. Her relationship with Raffin was over, but she didn’t want to make him jealous. And now she wanted her real-life Italian to stay voluntarily. What did she mean? I love your eyes, she had told him. Had she changed her mind about not wanting a relationship? He was nearly fifty years old, and he still had no greater understanding of women than when he was fifteen.

  He began drifting backwards in space, falling softly through the dark, as tiredness overwhelmed him and sleep started wrapping him in its embrace. And then her voice drew him back to the surface, coming, it seemed, from a very long way off.

  ‘Do you really think Jacques Gaillard was killed by a group of his own students at ENA?’