Faces in the Rain

by Roland Perry

‘So the taxi comes and you go home?’

  ‘I don’t know much about the driver. I think he’s Chinese. He seems a little worried about my demeanour. You know, I’m tired, probably wobbly.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘I think that about covers it, Duncan,’ Cassie said, ‘I’m going to count to ten and then you’ll wake up. You won’t recall any of this.’

  The tape was finished. I punched the air and kissed her full on the mouth. She was pleased too that she wasn’t dealing with a killer.

  That embrace of joy transformed into desire. I kissed her again and she responded. I guess I was testing a few things, particularly how she felt about me and how close she really was to Walters.

  Predictably, he wasn’t out of the conversation long.

  ‘I think we should stop,’ she said as we sat on the bed. I kicked off my shoes.

  ‘I don’t,’ I said.

  ‘Peter might get an early flight back.’

  I removed her shoes. I had found that this often helped an undecided woman to decide. Foot fetishes are non-threatening.

  ‘You’ve got nice feet,’ I said.

  ‘I bet you say that to all the quadrapeds.’

  I caressed her feet. Her toes didn’t curl. Starting from this end had its limitations.

  ‘You remind me of a chiropodist I once went to,’ Cassie said. ‘He put me in a seat, with my feet resting on platforms. He wound something that lifted the seat and my feet. I was wearing a dress. I kept moving my knees together. I was sure he was trying to get a better view.’

  I leant back and laughed.

  ‘Two things are sure to put me off sex,’ I said, ‘humour and politics.’

  ‘Thatcher, Bush, Gorbachev, Gandhi, Suharto . . .’

  We both laughed. I kissed her again and began to undo her blouse. She didn’t resist.

  ‘If Peter comes back early,’ she said, ‘it won’t be nice.’

  ‘And if you were certain he wasn’t coming back?’

  Cassie looked into my eyes.

  ‘Is this all part of the game plan to win me to Benepharm?’ she whispered.

  ‘My desire for Cassie,’ I said, ‘is absolutely exclusive of my corporation’s needs for Dr Morris.’

  She examined every line in my countenance for a hint of duplicity.

  ‘Why have you come to Paris?’ she said.

  I eased away a fraction. She seemed undecided about me. I liked her too much to be pushy.

  ‘I had little choice,’ I said. ‘There was only one place left on an international carrier the morning I had to leave. It happened to be going to Paris.’

  ‘You could have got off in Bangkok.’

  ‘Didn’t have a visa.’

  ‘You surely can’t risk staying in Paris too long.’

  ‘I know. But Freddie May is here. I also know where a suspect in the Martine killing is staying.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Richard Cochard.’

  I explained his connection.

  ‘Claude Michel may be in Paris too for all I know,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps they are linked.’

  ‘I’ve thought about that,’ I said, ‘I’ve thought about a lot of things. I have a suspect list as long as your arm. Each one’s motives and circumstance make them possible candidates.’ I ticked them off with my fingers. ‘There are the Libyans, Richard Cochard and his friend Maniguet, not to mention my deputy, Lloyd Vickers. And Freddie May or Danielle Mernet can’t be ruled out.’

  ‘Danielle?’

  ‘Yes. What did you think of her?’

  ‘Different from Martine. Kept herself to herself. Not a very open person. Polite, yes. But I couldn’t understand her flogging dresses in Toorak Village.’

  ‘Did you know she’s a doctor?’

  ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘True.’

  Cassie frowned.

  ‘Come to think of it,’ she said, ‘she did ask a hell of a lot of questions about the Institute. And she knew what she was talking about too. Drove me and Peter nuts. He didn’t like her.’

  ‘Has Peter any ideas about Martine’s killing?’

  ‘I spoke to him about Claude Michel a couple of times.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘It came up when Martine made the papers the day after her murder. He had treated her too. Peter was shocked by it all.’

  Cassie checked a window overlooking Boulevard Raspail.

  ‘He thinks Michel is probably dead,’ she said. ‘He says French security would have quietly assassinated him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Bringing him back to France and trying him would have been a huge embarrassment for the French Government, even though it had nothing to do with the experimentation Michel carried out on Polynesian victims of bomb radiation. A trial would have highlighted problems with the French nuclear weapons programs and the fact that underground tests have not proved fool-proof. Radiation leaks have occurred, for example, when a bomb got jammed in a shaft. That has happened more than once.’

  Cassie was interrupted by the phone. It was Peter Walters. He would be delayed until the next morning. When she put down the receiver, I moved close.

  ‘I’m not sorry to hear it,’ I said, holding her.

  ‘I’m not either,’ she said. ‘I just feel a fool for coming to Paris with him.’

  I kissed her, and she responded with passion for the first time.

  ‘I want to end it properly with Peter,’ she said, ‘before any other involvement.’

  ‘I hope I’m in the “any other involvement” category.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said, showing me the door.

  SEVENTEEN

  I RETURNED to my hotel and put a call to Farrar in Melbourne.

  ‘Don’t tell me where you are,’ he said, sounding more uptight than I’d ever heard him, ‘I don’t want to know.’

  ‘I’m in a safe place abroad,’ I said.

  ‘You’re never gonna be safe. Duncan, you’re wanted for questioning over the murder of Maniguet.’

  I felt giddy.

  ‘What?!’

  ‘Just listen and listen good. Police were called to an apartment in South Yarra after shots were fired. Cassie Morris’s Subaru was seen coming and going in the middle of the night. And you were seen going into her apartment earlier that evening.’

  ‘Maniguet died accidentally,’ I said. Farrar was stunned as I told him about the hours after we had dined at ‘The Angry Pheasant’.

  ‘Duncan,’ he said, ‘you’re not covering for someone else, are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You sound so bloody calm!’

  ‘It was self-defence, I tell you. Did they find the body?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The car was seen in the Dandenongs in the early hours. Police searched the area where it had been parked.’

  ‘What do you think I should do?’

  ‘Stay put.’

  ‘Would Benns chase me here?’

  ‘Hard to say. If you were caught by Interpol, he would have you extradited.’

  ‘But he’s unlikely to fly here just to search for me?’

  ‘No, he wouldn’t. It would be a needle in a haystack. They’d wait for a definite lead then get the next flight.’

  The next move was to develop an escape contingency, which didn’t rely on travelling via the normal air and channel ports. I knew an art dealer who split his time between France, Holland and England. He had his own private jet and Benepharm was one of his larger corporate clients. The company would buy or lease art for our offices worldwide. The dealer was a beefy Dutchman, with a heart of gold and a bank account to match. I phoned him and his wife told me he wasn’t in, but he planned to fly to London from Orly airport for an art exhibition at eleven the next morning.

  I stayed at the hotel for the rest of the day and only ventured out at night for a Greek meal in nearby Rue de la Huchette and went to bed early. Continuous sleep was almost imp
ossible and I got up at dawn and went through a yoga routine for an hour.

  At nine a.m. I couldn’t resist ringing Cassie again. She seemed distressed and not her sarcasm-cracking self.

  ‘You sound like you have a cold,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s Peter. He’s here.’

  ‘You’ve been crying.’

  ‘We’ve been arguing. He’s worried about some business deal with the Institute that hasn’t come through.’

  ‘Do you want to have breakfast?’

  Cassie hesitated.

  ‘I was hoping to see you,’ she said. I liked hearing those words.

  ‘Then we’d better meet,’ I said. ‘At Les Fleurs again in a half hour?

  ‘That would be nice. I need a boost.’

  I dressed in the only casual clothes Charlie Morten-Saunders had – blue jeans, sneakers, shirt and dark glasses – and sauntered down the street.

  It was just after ten a.m. as I approached Les Fleurs restaurant on foot from St Michel and then along St Germain. Cars were bumper to bumper and I had an urge to leap from one car top to the other to get across the Boulevard for a paper. That urge vanished when I saw a woman coming out of Les Fleurs.

  She seemed very like Detective-Sergeant O’Dare!

  She was looking my way but not at me. I turned and retraced my steps.

  Was it her? Could this be an ambush?

  First thoughts were to return to my hotel. No wonder Cassie was upset. She must have known. I felt foolish for overlooking the ease in which Benns could have tracked her from Australia. Once he had her car registration he had her name and job and finally the fact that she was in Paris.

  I sweated in my hotel room for twenty minutes, unsure of what to do, for I wasn’t certain if it had been O’Dare or not. There was only one way of finding out. I had to ring Cassie. Walters answered the phone. I asked to speak with her.

  ‘She’s not here,’ Walters said coldly, ‘who is it?’

  ‘I’m a friend from Australia, Trevor Edwards,’ I said disguising my accent.

  ‘You’re out of luck. A couple of Australian police have just given her an awful grilling. Accused her of murdering some French agent in her Melbourne apartment.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘With the Australian detectives at the local police station.’

  ‘Is she OK?’

  ‘Bit shaken.’

  ‘The bastards.’

  ‘They’re also after another Australian, a man named Hamilton, who they think is in Paris. Interpol wants to speak with him too. They are going to help set up a Paris dragnet for him.’

  I put down the phone.

  EIGHTEEN

  AFTER THE MORNING’s fright I again stayed mostly in the hotel and only stepped out at night for a meal.

  I dined alone, not a usual French pastime, for the second successive night at a Swedish restaurant called Lakvavit on Rue Dauphine in the Latin Quarter, and enjoyed their herring and sour cream. It was one of the few places I liked in Paris where a person might not be conspicuous alone, and it gave me time to think about my next move, which was to find Freddie May, who, according to Danielle, was staying in Alesia.

  I took a taxi there.

  It was in one of those not-so-well-known parts of Paris south of the river and Left Bank, which was unfashionable, even dull for that city, but nevertheless typical. It didn’t have the pizzazz of St Germain or the style of Avenue Foch, yet nor did it have the sleaze of Place D’ltalia or St Denis or Pigalle. It was bread and flower shops, small cafes, with a sprinkling of brasseries and bars. It was as bourgeois as Paris life could be, set in ancient, crumbling and monotonous streets in which the shutters were slammed tight.

  There wasn’t anywhere a glint of glass or ruffle of curtains, and the facades were so colourless they could have been in mourning. If Freddie had wanted to hide out, I thought, as I paid the taxi driver, this was as good as any place in the city.

  Number seventy-five Rue Tombe Issoire was a twelve-storey apartment block, which featured balconies flooded with greenery to relieve the boredom of the unimaginative modern brick architecture.

  I waited until an elderly man was dragged by a poodle out of the foyer, and then ducked in before the door shut. I wanted to surprise Freddie. I took the lift, which was as small as a coffin and about as forbidding, to his floor.

  Freddie answered the door. He went to shut me out but I was a thought ahead of him. My foot went in and I shouldered the door aside. Freddie stumbled back. It was time for a little shock tactics. I pushed him against a wall and pinned him there by the throat.

  ‘Ask me why I’m here, Freddie,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ he rasped, ‘could I breathe, please . . . my windpipe!’ I relaxed my grip, but kept a knee hard against his leg.

  ‘What do you want?’ he gasped.

  ‘Who killed Martine?!’

  ‘I really don’t know. I swear . . . I thought you had!’

  I let him slide to the floor. The apartment was poky, with two bedrooms and a dining room which ran into a kitchen and a study. The place’s only compensation was a view over Paris’s humpy-backed rooftops, which were slate and sloping. The rear windows overlooked a courtyard, its ivy-covered walls punctuated by the strict geometry of red shutters up the eight stories of the building opposite.

  From this height, white doves looked like mechanical mice with dying batteries as they waddled across the courtyard cobbles. Inside the apartment, empty Fosters beer cans were on a ledge and Freddie’s underwear hung near windows to collect some air. A TV flickered in a corner and there was a video with X-rated cassettes scattered on the floor. Freddie was in hiding for the duration with porn films – bubblegum for a sullied mind. I wondered about the kids he had once taught.

  ‘What do you know about Michel?’ I said, wheeling round and standing over him. He was still crumpled against a wall. ‘Claude Michel.’

  ‘Michel,’ he said with a frown as if he was teasing a mighty mind pit. The cunning rodent was a poor actor. I took a step towards him.

  ‘He’s . . . he’s that doctor,’ he said. Freddie may have thought I had killed Martine, and I didn’t have second thoughts about playing on that, especially as Freddie’s lies had put the pressure on me from the beginning.

  ‘Yes, he’s “that doctor”,’ I said leaning my face down towards him, ‘what do you know about him?’

  ‘I don’t know anything, I swear!’

  ‘Who told you about him?’

  ‘Martine.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘That he was after her . . . that’s all.’ I turned my back on Freddie. He slid on to the couch.

  ‘I’m desperate,’ I said, facing him again.

  ‘Dunc . . . Duncan, all I know is that Michel got out of France years ago. He had an ID change.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘You know. He had cosmetic surgery. Changed his face.’

  ‘Where did he have that done?’

  ‘Well, it couldn’t have been here. He was on the run.’

  ‘Then where?’

  ‘Mar . . . Mar . . . Martine was sure it was Australia. In the last six years.’

  That was useful, if true.

  ‘Why did you leave Australia?’

  ‘Because I was being set-up for her murder.’

  ‘No one told you to get out?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘I’m told the police found an empty bottle of Serophrine at your apartment.’

  ‘They planted it there!’ Freddie said. ‘Or somebody did.’

  Assuming Freddie wasn’t lying, someone had put the two empty labelled bottles of Serophrine in the Rolls and Freddie’s apartment. The police could have done it, but why? Anyway, it sounded too clumsy.

  Whoever was responsible had had access to Martine’s place. He or she had left the unlabelled bottle of the capsules there, not realising that the dose that Martine had taken, or
had been forced to take, had come from it.

  The killer, Danielle and the police, in that order, were known to have been in the apartment after Freddie and I had left it by four a.m.

  My eyes fell on a couple of Freddie’s business cards sitting on a mantelpiece.

  ‘Tell me about this “Vital” you worked for,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a small French company.

  ‘Making perfume.’

  ‘And a few cosmetic lines.’

  ‘What are Cochard and Maniguet doing for them?’

  ‘I don’t know them,’ he said, ‘they work in local sales and distribution.’

  ‘Where do you work?’

  ‘I handle the company’s distribution throughout the Pacific.’

  ‘And you never met them?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘I thought they might haved advised you to leave Australia.’

  Freddie shook his head and examined the carpet. It was a guilty mannerism I recalled from schooldays when he had been caught breaking rules. I rubbed the back of my neck and rolled my head round. There was tension right through my body.

  ‘Do you know anything about a hospital at Meudon?’ I asked, recalling the address in Cochard’s notes.

  ‘Meudon?’ Freddie said scratching his head. ‘No, why?’

  ‘You know Meudon?’

  ‘I do, yes.’

  ‘How come, Freddie?’

  ‘Vital has its offices on the edge of the Meudon Forest.’

  ‘You’ve been there?’

  ‘It’s company HQ. Seeing I was here I paid them a visit.’

  ‘You’re going to take me there,’ I said, ‘tomorrow.’

  Freddie seemed more uncomfortable. ‘Why do you want to go there?’ he asked.

  ‘I love forest,’ I said, ‘I like to breathe the open air. You don’t get that much in Paris.’

  ‘I’m a bit busy tomorrow, mate,’ he said, invoking the Aussie salutation as if I had just bought him a six-pack of Fosters. ‘Could we make it Wednesday?’

  ‘No,’ I said getting to my feet, ‘I’ll be here at nine a.m.’

  I headed for the door. ‘And perhaps you’d better give me your phone number.’

  A taxi took me round the block and I had the driver wait a hundred metres away. Within five minutes Freddie came flying out of the apartment building and hailed a taxi. We followed him for about five kilometres to Boulevard du Montparnasse. The traffic limped along so that my driver didn’t have to make any fancy moves to keep up with Freddie, even when we failed to get through lights that his driver squeezed through.