Extraordinary People ef-4

by Peter May

‘You called me, didn’t you?’

  Sophie’s laugh of contempt sounded more like a bark. ‘Only because they forgot to take my Papa’s portable off him. I was refused access to a doctor after all their manhandling.’

  Simon raised an eyebrow. ‘Were you? One more to add to the list, then. These guys are in deep shit. Roger figures they were trying to keep you under wraps and out of the way for forty-eight hours so they could make some kind of announcement to the press.’

  Enzo nodded, realising now why they had been locked up like this. ‘To claim the credit for finding Gaillard’s remains and revealing his killers.’

  ‘Before we could run the story in Libé.’ Raffin appeared next to Simon. He looked flushed and weary, and he shook all their hands gravely. ‘Your detention order was signed by Juge Lelong. Again.’ He nodded back along the corridor. ‘He’s here, you know. He might try to argue that you damaged public property, or that you were interfering with a police investigation. But it’s not going to wash. Not now.’

  Simon grinned. ‘He’s fucked,’ he said. ‘And you guys are free to go.’

  Enzo put a hand on his arm. ‘Any word of Kirsty?’

  Simon’s grin faded and he shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

  Raffin said, ‘We’ve got a car waiting for you outside. We can be in Paris in a couple of hours.’

  * * *

  At the charge bar, they had all their possessions restored. Bertrand was told that his van was in the yard behind the police station. ‘Take Sophie and Nicole straight back to Cahors,’ Enzo told him. ‘And don’t let either of them out of your sight.’

  ‘No!’ Sophie stood her ground defiantly. ‘We’re going to Paris, too.’

  ‘All of us,’ Nicole said.

  For almost the first time, Sophie and Nicole were in accord. ‘We’ll follow you.’ Sophie thrust her chin out and dared her father to challenge her. But he knew better than that. She was, after all, her father’s daughter. And in many ways he was happier to keep her close. The thought of anything happening to Sophie, too, was almost more than he could bear. He sighed and nodded, and they were led through to the foyer. It was daylight outside, but the rain from the night before had not stopped, and it streaked the windows all along the front of the Hôtel de Police. Through them, Enzo could see the blurred shape of a rain-stained church tower across the street. Traffic sat in long, patient queues, windscreen wipers beating countless paths back and forth through the endless summer downpour.

  The accueil was filled with uniformed officers and men in dark suits. There was some heated debate in progress. As they followed Raffin out through the front door, Enzo caught sight of the pale face of Juge Lelong among the men in suits. Their eyes met for just a moment, and Enzo saw defeat in the set of the other man’s face. Long gone the arrogance which had so characterised their first meeting. He had made a mess of this, and the Garde des Sceaux would be furious. Only scandal and humiliation awaited them both now. But Enzo had other things on his mind.

  ‘What time is it?’ he asked Simon.

  ‘Just gone ten.’

  They had lost nearly twelve hours, and it would be after midday before they got to Paris. God only knew what might have become of Kirsty in that time.

  II

  The seventeenth century wooden staircase was protected by the Beaux Arts, the concierge told them.

  It had taken ten minutes, and a studious examination of Enzo’s Carte de Séjour to convince her that he was Kirsty’s father. Finally, reluctantly, she had given him the key. She would not come up with them, she said. She was no longer able for the climb.

  The staircase ended abruptly on the third floor, and a narrow corridor led to a spiral stairway which took them up another three flights. By the time they reached the top landing, Enzo was breathless. Sophie, too, was breathing hard. But she was impressed. ‘She must be fit, my half-sister. You wouldn’t go out casually for a coffee, though, would you?’

  Enzo waited with Sophie and Bertrand until Raffin, and finally Simon and Nicole, completed the climb. Simon was panting and red-faced. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘She certainly knows how to discourage visitors.’

  Rain battered against a narrow window in the stairwell. It opened on to a fire-escape. Six floors of flimsy steel ladder. It was a long way down. Enzo slipped the key in the lock and opened the door. Immediately he smelled her perfume, the same scent she had been wearing the day he left her shopping bags at the foot of the stairs. Its almost tangible presence seemed only to underline her absence, and it caused a sickening lurch in his stomach. He feared the worst.

  The studio apartment was tiny, built into the slope of the roof. There were two windows on the east side, and one facing west over a wet Paris roofscape of tall chimneys and television aerials, towards the twin towers of Notre Dame. It was a stunning view, almost unreal, like a set from a fifties Hollywood movie. The sun, Enzo realised, would go down behind the cathedral. His daughter must have had one of the most privileged sunset views in Paris.

  Kirsty’s personality filled the room, even though she had not been there for days. Her clothes were draped over a chair. A bed settee, pushed up beneath one of the east-facing windows, was folded down, unmade since the last time she had slept in it. The shape of her head was still pressed into the pillow. With a jolt he recognised the soft toys lined up along the top of the settee. A threadbare panda with one of its eyes missing, a large cartoon pussy cat with its head tipped to one side, an old-fashioned dolly in a faded blue ruffled dress. One of its red shoes had been lost. These were things he had bought her when she was barely old enough to walk. Much-loved toys which had gone with her everywhere. Overnights at her grandparents, weekends at the home of her best friend, midge-infested camping holidays in the Highlands. Panda, pussy and dolly always went, too. Even here, to Paris, apparently. Even after all these years.

  But wherever she was now, for once she had left them behind.

  Sophie followed his gaze. ‘Pretty crappy toys.’ Enzo heard the jealousy in her voice.

  ‘No one touch anything,’ he said. And with difficulty added, ‘We might be looking at a crime scene.’

  He cast his eyes quickly around the room. The walls were painted a pale yellow. There were some cheap pictures on the gable, bought from street artists in Montmarte. Clichéd views of the old square. A huge movie poster of Gone With The Wind, the lurid flames of Atlanta glowing red behind Clark Gable, the prostrate figure of Vivien Leigh draped in his arms. There were shelves of books and CDs. A laptop computer open on a small table below the west-facing window. A stout wooden beam followed the slope of the roof, creating a semi-partition between the living area and a minuscule kitchen flooded with light from the window on the east side. A small, cluttered dining table was pushed in below the beam.

  Enzo saw, lying on a kitchen worktop, a hand-written card with a thumb tack pushed through its centre. Kirsty, elle est chez-elle. A note, left perhaps for friends downstairs, so that they knew whether or not she was at home before embarking on a long, fruitless climb to the sixth floor. Today her father had made the climb because he knew that she was not at home, and he wondered why the note was here. Surely she would keep it with her when she was out, so that she could pin it up at the foot of the stairs when she returned?

  ‘Monsieur Macleod….’ He turned, and Nicole nodded towards the dining table. ‘Look.’

  He looked, and at first saw nothing unusual. An untidy pile of books, an open box of sponge cakes, a medal of some kind. ‘What?’

  ‘The cakes,’ she said insistently.

  And he realised with a shock that drew the skin tight all across his scalp, that it was a box of Madeleine cakes. A message. He knew it instantly. This casual arrangement on the kitchen table was a carefully constructed note, just for him, the box of Madeleine cakes a signature.

  Raffin stepped forward to look at the table. ‘What is it?’ He saw only what anyone else would have seen. Innocent clutter in a young woman’s apartment. Had the police made a search of th
e place they would certainly have missed it, probably disturbed it, destroying it in the process.

  Enzo was having trouble controlling his breathing. ‘I’d say it was probably a ransom note.’

  Simon frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Madeleine. She’s telling me she’s got Kirsty.’ He carefully lifted the box of cakes and laid it to one side. He had run out of latex gloves, but he did not believe that the woman called Madeleine would have been foolish enough to leave fingerprints. He pulled up a chair and sat down to examine the remaining items on the table. The others crowded around. ‘I’ve already been inside her head. She knows that I know how she thinks. But, in any case, she won’t have made this too difficult.’

  There were three books. An unabridged version of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. A book called Les Artistes Font le Mur, which appeared to be a largely photographic record of a fresco sixty meters long created by a group of school children. And the prosaically titled Computers, an Illustrated History. The only other thing on the table was a metal cross with four flared arms of equal length, attached to a piece of ribbon. It was black, with the letter W in the centre, the date 1914 on the lower arm, and a faded silver trim around its edges. It was about four centimeters across.

  ‘What is it?’ Bertrand asked.

  ‘An Eiserne Kreuz,’ Enzo said. ‘A German Iron Cross, a medal given out during the First World War.’

  ‘So what’s the message?’ Simon said.

  Enzo raised his hand in irritation. ‘I don’t know. I’m going to have to work it out.’ Somehow the urgency of it was making his mind go blank. It was Nicole who kick-started his thought processes.

  ‘Victor Hugo’s hero in Les Misérables was called Jean Valjean,’ she said. ‘But he had another persona, didn’t he?’

  ‘Monsieur Madeleine,’ Bertrand said suddenly, as it came back to him from some long-ago reading.

  Enzo’s mind was racing. ‘Yes.’ But there was something else significant, something just beyond his reach. Then all at once he grasped it. ‘There’s a long sequence in the book where Valjean rescues a man by taking him through the sewers of Paris.’

  Simon pulled a face. ‘You mean you think she’s taken Kirsty down into the sewers?’

  ‘No, not the sewers. Below that. The catacombes. After all, that’s where the first body part was found. It would kind of be like coming full circle.’

  He picked up the book about the children’s fresco and flipped through its colourful pages of naively painted tropical fish and underwater seascapes. He could not, for the life of him, see the relevance of it. A mural painted on a wall sixty meters long. And a book about the history of the computer. He picked up the Iron Cross and held it between thumb and forefinger. If she was making this easy for him, why was he finding it so hard? And, in his mind, he answered his own question. Because he was looking for difficult answers.

  He dropped the cross and picked up the computer book. Computers, an Illustrated History. Why couldn’t he see it? And then suddenly he did. ‘Goddamn!’ he said, angry with himself for trying to make it so complicated. He stood up, pushing past the others, and crossed the studio to Kirsty’s laptop on the desk below the west-facing window. He checked the cables. It was connected to the mains, and to the telephone line via an ADSL modem, which meant she had a high-speed connection to the internet.

  ‘What is it, Papa?’ Sophie asked.

  ‘It’s in here,’ he said, and he switched on the computer. It would take a minute or so to boot up.

  ‘What is?’ Raffin stood behind him as Enzo pulled a chair up to Kirsty’s desk and sat down in front of her laptop.

  ‘When you’re on-line,’ Enzo said, ‘you leave a trail of the sites you’ve visited. They get stored under History, in the browser.’

  ‘Of course,’ Nicole said. ‘Computers, an Illustrated History.’

  They watched and waited in silence while the computer took what seemed like a lifetime to load its desktop screen. And when, finally, it did, Enzo stared in shocked disbelief at the picture Kirsty had chosen for its background. It was an old photograph, taken more than twenty years ago, in the back garden of their red sandstone terraced home on the south side of Glasgow. Kirsty was maybe five years old. She had been almost blond at that age, a head full of big, soft curls. She was wearing a pale lemon sleeveless dress and a wide-brimmed straw hat with a blue ribbon which she had pushed back on her head. Her eyes were sparkling, and an impossibly wide grin revealed one missing front tooth. Crouched beside her, an arm around her waist pulling her towards him, a young Enzo smiled self-consciously at the camera. His hair was shorter then, darker, his white streak more pronounced. Kirsty had one arm dangled around his neck. Father and daughter as Kirsty remembered them. As she wanted to remember them. The father she had loved. The father who had loved her. A moment shared. And not all the years which had passed since could take that away from her. Enzo bit his lip and fought to hold back his tears. How could he have been so careless with his daughter’s love?

  ‘I thought she hated you.’ It was Sophie’s voice that broke the spell, and again he heard an edge of jealousy in it.

  ‘I thought she did,’ he heard himself say, almost in a whisper.

  ‘You don’t put a picture of someone you hate up on your computer screen,’ Sophie said. ‘Not when you have to look at it every day.’

  ‘She never hated you,’ Simon said. ‘Just…just never forgave you.’

  Enzo took a deep breath and dragged his eyes away from the photograph. There was no time to be distracted.

  ‘Here, let me in.’ Nicole nudged Enzo aside and her fingers rattled across the keyboard. He blinked away his tears and watched as she opened up the browser, then clicked on the History tab on the left-hand side of the screen. The History drawer slid open. It was empty, except for a single link:

  http://14e.kta.free.fr/visite/AssasObservatoire/index.html.

  Nicole clicked on it. Immediately, they were connected to a page under the heading, LE QUARTIER ASSAS — OBSERVATOIRE. Down the left side of the screen were twenty or thirty links to streets and boulevards and other quartiers in the fourteenth arrondissement. In the top right corner was a tiny map labelled VILLE DE PARIS. An area of it was patched in blue. Most of the rest of the screen was filled with an enlarged plan of the blue area. It was a shaky, confusing, hand-drawn map, with streets represented by single, often broken lines, and names squeezed into spaces that were sometimes too small for them. It was, Enzo thought, how you might represent a rabbit warren. It certainly looked liked one.

  ‘What is it?’ Bertrand asked.

  It was Raffin who replied. ‘It’s a map of the Grand Reseau Souterrain. The catacombes. Or, at least, a part of them.’ He leaned forward to peer at the screen, and then he traced a line with his finger. ‘There’s the Rue d’Assas.’

  And Enzo realised he was looking at a map of the tunnels immediately below ENA’s international building in the Avenue de l’Observatoire, where only two days ago he had been given the photograph and video tape of the Schoelcher Promotion. He remembered the helpful Madame Henry telling him how monks had established the Order of Chartreux there in 1257, digging the stone to build it out of the ground below, creating a network of tunnels and chambers in the process. Somewhere right below where we’re standing now, she’d said. And there it was, immediately south of the Luxembourg Gardens. Above a mess of squiggles and loops and dead-ends, the author of the map had written Fontaine des Chartreux, and drawn an arrow pointing down into the muddle.

  ‘What’s that?’ Enzo guided Nicole’s mouse hand slightly to the left so that the arrow was pointing at two words.

  They all squinted at them. They were far from clear. ‘It looks like Abris Allemand,’ Nicole said.

  Enzo frowned. ‘German shelters? What does that mean?’

  ‘Aren’t we looking for something with a German connection?’ Bertrand said. ‘The Iron Cross.’

  ‘Yes…’ Still Enzo could make no sense of
it. Nicole moved the mouse fractionally to her left and the arrow turned into a tiny hand, which meant there was an invisible link there on the map. She clicked on it, and a new page wiped across the screen. It was headlined, LE BUNKER, and beneath it was a detailed map of something called the BUNKER ALLEMAND DU LYCéE MONTAIGNE.

  ‘It’s the plan of an old German bunker,’ Raffin said. ‘Right below the Lycée Montaigne. They must have built it during the occupation. It looks like some kind of communications and command centre.’

  It was huge, a labyrinth of rooms and corridors, each carefully delineated and notated. Arrows indicated old entrances which had long since been bricked up. There were warnings about obstacles and pitfalls.

  ‘There!’ Bertrand stabbed a triumphant finger at the map. Enzo peered at where he was pointing. Three tiny, blurred words. Salle avec fresques.

  Suddenly they had made sense both of the Iron Cross and the book about the children’s fresco. Deep in the bowels of the city, in the triangle between the Avenue de l’Observatoire and the Rue d’Assas, there was an old German wartime bunker with a room full of frescoes.

  Nicole scrolled down the page, then, to discover a series of photographic images of the tunnels and rooms in the bunker, walls covered with graffiti. And beneath them was a link directly to the Salle des Fresques. She clicked on it, to download thirteen different images of graffiti art plastered over the walls of a single room in the bunker. An Aztec warrior facing down a dragon. An astronaut on the moon with an American flag. A skeleton in dinner jacket and bow-tie holding up a notice about AIDS.

  ‘That’s where I’ve to meet her,’ Enzo said.

  Simon scratched his beard. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because that’s where the clues have led us. That’s her message. Go to the Salle des Fresques.’

  Raffin looked at the screen thoughtfully. ‘When?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When have you to meet her? You might know the where, but not the when.’