‘Seems like it.’
Claudine did not at first recognize the man who came that afternoon and Joe Hardy had to remind her of their brief meeting at Scott Burrows’ farewell party.
‘He said I had to come personally and give you this.’
The message said: If you’re going to get in on the act you’ll need this. It calms the nerves. The box contained one of the perfumed cigars the man always smoked. Claudine laughed. ‘How is he?’
‘OK. Back at work. But he’s not making any public appearance lectures at police academies. It used to be his thing.’
‘What about Pickering?’
‘Still free.’
With that morning’s visit still fresh in her mind Claudine said: ‘Have the Bureau allocated any protection?’
‘I don’t know. I guess Scott can look after himself.’
‘I hope so.’
‘He called me when he heard what had happened to you. Was as worried as hell.’
‘Tell him thanks. For the cigar, too. I’ll call him when I get out.’
During that third week Claudine’s mother recovered sufficiently to start going down into the restaurant again. They spoke daily by telephone. Always the woman insisted she felt fine. Claudine made daily calls to Andre Foulan, too, and it was during that third week that the man told her he thought the cancer might actually be in remission.
‘How long will it last?’
‘There’s no way of telling. Sometimes weeks, sometimes months. I might even suspend the chemotherapy. It’s a difficult balance. If it is genuine remission I don’t want to trigger it again with unnecessary treatment.’
Rosetti was discharged before Claudine but visited her daily. On the second occasion he said: ‘Why didn’t you tell me about your conversation with the commissioners?’
‘I did.’
‘Not about the protection suggestions.’
‘Who did tell you?’
‘There was a meeting today, to decide if I needed it.’
‘And?’
‘I said I didn’t think it was necessary. My being hurt was an accident. I wasn’t the one being attacked.’
‘I think you’re probably right.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Think about it. Talk to you about it.’
‘You’ve had two weeks to think. And now we are talking about it.’
‘It was an instant revenge attack.’
‘Sanglier told me what you said.’
‘He’s wearing a gun!’
Rosetti didn’t smile back. ‘I think he’s sensible.’
‘You think I should carry one?’
‘Yes. And I think you should agree to all the other suggestions they made. He told me about those, too. And why Burrows was here.’
‘I’m not going to spend the rest of my life with a minder at my side! It would be absurd. I’d go mad.’
‘You could leave Europol.’
She looked at him evenly for several moments. ‘That would mean leaving The Hague. Do you want me to do that?’
‘Of course I do if it means keeping you safe.’
‘You’re over-reacting. Everyone is.’
Rosetti held up his hand, his forefinger narrowed against his thumb. ‘Just that much of a huge mafia has been put out of business. The rest is still operating out there. And you hurt them.’
‘Why don’t …’ began Claudine and then stopped.
‘What?’
‘Why don’t I think more seriously about it?’ she said. She’d intended to say ‘Why don’t you look after me?’ but changed her mind halfway through.
‘I want you to,’ Rosetti insisted.
That evening Joe Hardy came again and made her think very seriously indeed.
She knew at once it was a different visit from before and that there could only be one reason.
‘When?’ she asked.
‘Last night. Bastard was waiting for him, when he got home to Alexandria. Son of a bitch jumped him with a knife.’
‘That wasn’t the pattern in the stuff Scott showed me. Pickering was a torturer. Played with his victims for a long time before killing them.’
Hardy nodded. ‘That’s what he intended to do. The Bureau did cover Scott but the stupid bastards didn’t put it on the house as well, just wherever Scott went. He was ahead of the protection detail: out of the car. Pickering was inside the garage. First thing Scott would have seen when he lifted the door. Had the knife to Scott’s throat before the detail, two of them, had time to get out of their car. They had him nailed, of course. Told him to drop the knife. He laughed at them instead and damned near cut Scott’s head right off. They shot him down. Five bullets. They’re on suspension now for not bringing him in.’
‘What about Miriam?’
‘He’d got to her first. Roughed her up a little but that was all. Had her tied up ready to start and for Scott to watch while he did it. He’d got Scott’s chair ready, too. Had the ropes and the gags all set. Miriam’s going to be all right …’ Hardy hesitated, seeming to think about what he’d said. ‘I mean she isn’t going to die.’
The following day Claudine telephoned Sanglier and said she wanted the television and alarm system in her apartment and that she’d carry a gun. She didn’t want a guard, even for a short time.
‘I’ll do the anticipation for myself.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Monique Carter died a month to the day from Claudine’s leaving hospital. The security precautions had already been installed in her apartment and she felt self-conscious signing for the Beretta, which fitted surprisingly easily into her handbag, although it was heavy. Rosetti offered to go with her to Lyon but it was a weekend: she said she was quite able to make the journey alone, so why didn’t he go to Rome as he normally did. He didn’t argue.
When Claudine queried it with Andre Foulan the oncologist said the apparent pink-cheeked healthiness in her mother’s face was actually caused by the disease and that sometimes it confused patients into thinking they were being cheated. Claudine did have a feeling of being cheated but she didn’t say so.
On the Thursday of that first week Monique announced she didn’t think she would go down to the restaurant that evening and she never did again. Until the second week, she and Claudine took short, slow walks together in the mornings but on the second Saturday she said she didn’t feel like it and she never went out again, either. She demanded to hear over and again of the knife attack, on each occasion insisting upon examining the arm: the wound had healed to leave a wide scar and Claudine promised to have the recommended plastic surgery. She thought Claudine should have accepted an armed guard and was unimpressed by the Beretta, which she also frequently examined, doubting it was powerful enough to stop a determined assassin.
It had been arranged before she left The Hague that Claudine should start learning to use the gun at the Lyon police firing range and she chose to do so in the afternoons. She always delayed her return, too, taking tea at a cafe overlooking the Rhône so that Gerard and her mother could be alone.
At no time was there any pain. Andre Foulan came twice every day, morning and evening.
Claudine went down to the restaurant when it closed every night to carry the takings and the pencil-noted reservations ledger upstairs. Into the official reservations book her mother transferred, in ink, the names and amounts paid by customers who settled their bills by cheque or credit card. She then added, again in ink, approximately half those who paid by cash.
‘And the rest is mine,’ she said, every night. In the second week she changed the announcement and declared the rest was Claudine’s. And then her mother led a slow ascent up a narrow flight of stairs to a dust-laden loft that Claudine had never entered, which was dominated by a safe at least four times as large as the one in the apartment below. It contained only money, stacked from bottom to top in elastic-secured bundles.
‘Half a million,’ declared her mother. ‘With my love and blessing.’
/> Claudine was speechless. Finally she managed: ‘But I can’t … it’s—’
Monique brusquely cut her off. ‘Who else is to have it, then? No one has been cheated except the tax and they’re unimportant. This is mine. What I’ve worked for for forty years. I can do with it what I like. And that’s the end of it.’
She took the telephone during one of Claudine’s conversations with Rosetti and said she would like to see him again and he came on the third weekend. Gerard cooked in the apartment and she played the grande dame again and Rosetti dutifully played up to her. They laughed a lot. Claudine tensed for some remark when Rosetti prepared to leave for his hotel but her mother said nothing. After he’d left and before Claudine made her nightly descent for the takings, Monique said: ‘Will his wife ever get better?’
‘She could.’
‘Do you love him?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s not a good situation.’
‘No.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know.’
Monique died three days later. She did so in her own bed, pink-cheeked and clear-skinned, with Claudine and Gerard either side, each holding her hand. She said she’d been a very lucky woman and that she was sorry if she’d hurt either of them with her tongue. She loved them both. She liked Rosetti. He would be a good man, however they managed it. Gerard shouldn’t close the restaurant out of respect when she died. That would be stupid. Gerard cried but Claudine didn’t, although she wanted to and felt she should have done.
Over two hundred people, including the mayor and all the dignitaries who had attended the wedding, came to Monique Carter’s funeral. Rosetti flew down from The Hague. Monique’s plot was three rows away from William Carter’s grave, in which Monique’s will had stipulated she should not be buried. Afterwards they all ate at the restaurant and Gerard made a stumbling speech in which he said keeping it open and serving them all was his mark of respect for a woman he had loved very much. It was then that Claudine cried.
As he was leaving Claudine remarked to Andre Foulan it had been fortunate the cancer had remained painlessly in her mother’s liver. He gazed at her for several moments and said that during the previous two weeks it had become active again in the pancreas and would soon have become unbearable.
‘You have to return to The Hague soon, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘So she died peacefully, before that had to happen.’
Then it was Claudine who looked steadily for several moments. She said: ‘Thank you. So very much.’
Gerard protested and said if it had been Monique’s wish she wouldn’t have made the will so shortly before her death, and Claudine demanded if instead the man preferred her to sell the restaurant to a stranger. The same pedantic Pierre Forge didn’t know of a precedent for such a valuable property’s being made over to a new owner as a gift and Claudine became as irritated as her mother had during their visit and on the spur of the moment insisted instead that the lawyer draw up a bill of sale for ten francs. On their way back to the rue Grenette Gerard insisted the gesture was an even better memorial to her mother than the funeral feast had been. He went directly to the kitchen, to prepare that day’s lunch. Claudine climbed the narrow stairs to the loft.
She did not know what to do with the money. She’d carried up with her the largest case she could find in her mother’s bedroom, with no clear intention even of what to do when it was packed, and she only managed to fit in about a quarter of what was in the safe. She had to use two hands to lift it, so she unpacked it all again and put it back. There was no reason to take it anywhere, she supposed. It must be how Latin American drug barons felt, with more money than they knew what to do with. She was glad when the door was closed and she couldn’t see it any more.
She’d only looked at the safe and what was inside when her mother had brought her up. Now she stared around, realizing how vast the loft was, spanning not just the entire length and width of the restaurant building but the adjoining apartment block that she remembered, belatedly, she also owned. There were three oval fanlight windows, cobwebbed and dust-streaked but still with a breathtaking view of the city. From the central one she had the impression of almost being level with the Notre-Dame de Fourvière. At the end she judged to be over the apartment block there was a jumble of matching furniture, which she guessed to have been discarded years ago from the restaurant. There were several wardrobes. The first two contained dresses which must have belonged to her mother, far more elegant than any Claudine could remember her wearing, cut in a long-ago style but from superb material, mostly silk. The next two closets astonished her even more. They contained men’s clothes, suits and sports jackets and even laundered shirts, neatly hung on hangers. All, she supposed, would have belonged to her father. She was incredulous that her mother had so carefully preserved everything that had belonged to a man she so vehemently despised.
At last Claudine moved away, towards the other end. It was much more jumbled than where she’d first looked, dust-jewelled cobwebs hanging from rafters like curtains and more abandoned furniture. She felt the dust in her throat, tightening her breathing.
The hidden desk was beneath a fourth fanlight she hadn’t seen, with a round button-backed chair pushed into the knee recess as it would have been in an office. Claudine waded the trailing cobwebs with the arm-spreading motion of a swimmer breasting water, realizing the overhead light could have made it an office and then deciding that was exactly what it must have been and that there was only one man who could have used it as such.
There was even a pen pedestal, empty, and a long-dried-up ink bottle beside it. The biggest drawer, at the top, slid easily open. Inside there was an unmarked leather blotter and several pens and some blank Interpol letterheaded paper. There was still ink in the bottle here. There were photographs to the left, unmounted. The top one was of her mother and father, on a beach somewhere, arms around each other’s shoulders. They were both in bathing costumes and laughing. Each succeeding print was of the couple together and they were laughing or smiling in all of them. The last three were of their wedding, her mother demure and beautiful in a layered lace dress with a tight cowled headdress holding a bouquet of trailing lilies. Her father was in army uniform, an officer resplendent in Sam Browne webbing, his lieutenant’s hat clamped beneath his arm. There were decoration ribbons on his left breast. Claudine blinked against the wetness fogging her eyes, first bewildered and then angry at never having known that at some time - certainly, obviously, on their wedding day - her father had actually been a serving soldier. Not just a serving soldier: a soldier who had done something brave enough to earn him a military decoration.
The drawer below was locked. She searched through the one she had opened for keys but couldn’t find any. She looked around but couldn’t see anything to force the drawers. She half turned, to go back to the other end of the loft, and her foot jarred against a box which rattled metallically. It contained a rusted collection of every type of cutlery. The first knife snapped, stinging her fingers, when she tried to lever open the locked drawer. With a thicker carving knife she created a gap between the drawer top and its surround into which she slid the thick sharpening steel. The wood split, loudly, around the lock when she thrust down and the drawer almost fell out completely.
There were several ledgers and thick-backed notebooks at the top, with loose document paper beneath. The year of the diary at the very top registered instantly. She scrambled through to the month and felt her eyes mist again at her father’s neatly scripted entries for the tribunal hearing. All the entries were brief. The three words on the opening day - Hostile. Unimpressed Chairman unresponsive – were frequently repeated. There were other entries: sometimes almost sentences. Disliked by chairman. Not a cheat. Managing to confuse. The last entry was the fullest, on the day of the tribunal findings. Her father had written I am surprised at the verdict. Lighter than expected. Achieved everything.
What did
it mean? Having gone so quickly through she returned to the beginning, isolating for the first time not just the words but numerals - 6, 43, 106, 303-4-91 - against some of the days. The last - 391 - provided the answer. Before it was scribbled p. Page numbers then. But page numbers to what? Official documents was the obvious guess. But what sort of official documents? Obviously those that were the subject of the inquiry. Or which featured in it. The dust was troubling her again but there was an excitement, too. She began to hear herself breathing, wheezily.
Putting the diary face down to preserve the opening at the tribunal dates Claudine went to the other contents. Next was a scribble-filled ledger which Claudine again didn’t understand until she isolated names and then read Day One and decided it was the notebook in which her father had made his own notes of the inquiry. At once, because she had read the printed copy in the Paris archives and had perfect recall, Claudine was able to decipher most of what was written, quickly dismissing it as his own record, with nothing additional.
The third book yielded something new, although not completely and certainly not quickly. The numerals from the diary were in it, with notes attached, and initially she was totally bewildered. There seemed no correlation between numbers and words: what was written, in fact, appeared to be philosophical musing and abruptly Claudine decided that’s precisely what it was: her father’s commentary about whatever the numerals referred to.
Most confusing of all was that the tract that began the entries, longer than those that followed, was not against an accompanying number. Has it been brave? Why was it necessary? It was not my duty, as a soldier, when medals came for the valour of others. No one should have known. Wouldn’t have known. A hero should not become a coward. A confession would have destroyed a brave man who wanted to be braver. For what purpose? None. A test for myself. A silly game, a pointless gesture. But it is done. My fate would be the same. So let them keep their hero. Against it, inexplicably, her father had signed his name, as if it were a testimony.
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