by Scott, Manda
Ducat is being unusually gentle. Picaut feels the touch of his gaze, which is novel enough to make her turn. And so she finds that he is not looking at her, but is, instead, examining her reflection in the wing mirror of the car. Thus, unexpected and unplanned, she sees herself clearly for the first time in … a long time.
She is thinner than she was, paler skinned and darker haired with none of the sun-bleached strands that used to lift the functional shortness of her hair. Too long without sun has made the freckles stand out across her nose, and her eyes are perhaps more hooded than she thought they were, more contemplative.
All of which is fine, but then this is her right side, her good side, the side she has been carefully keeping to the technicians, to Rollo, to Evard. Which is why Ducat is using the mirror. With it, he can see the other side. He is studying it, in fact. Her gaze slides to meet his.
‘What?’ She hasn’t been angry recently. The jolt feels good. ‘You think I’m not ready?’
‘Not at all. Not. At. All.’ Ducat smiles. He smiles. He reaches out haphazardly and pats her on the shoulder, more of a bear-paw batter on her upper arm. ‘Welcome back.’
08.05
‘She was beautiful, wasn’t she?’
Cleaned of blood, Sophie Destivelle’s naked body lies on the steel trolley, while a photograph projected at twice life-size onto one wall of the pathology suite shows her as if alive: radiant and engaging.
In the past, Picaut would have had to wait for the victims’ families to provide pictures of them as they were in life, but Eric Masson is experimenting with software that can take the lifeless face of a subject and warm it, brighten it, open the eyes and give them spark, return the smile to unsmiling lips – and this is the result.
Sophie Destivelle is the epitome of elegance and grace. Her gaze is frank, open, knowing, and she is laughing at something Picaut can neither see nor hear. This is a woman of intelligence and wit.
Picaut walks up to her image so that they are nose to nose, eye to eye. ‘Why do I think I know her?’
‘Half of France will think they know her. The software says her bone structure is a hybrid of Fanny Ardant’s and Audrey Tautou’s. I tweaked the colour of her shirt to match one that Tautou wore for a photo shoot last year; it’s a better fit for your woman’s skin tone. If I took forty years off her, she’d be in Hollywood, earning millions.’
‘Can you make her look sad? Just subtly?’
‘Sure.’ A click of the mouse, a few keys tapped, and a new image appears beside the first one, in which the radiant smile becomes progressively more pensive until, in the tilt at the edge of her eyes, the lines about her mouth, is the grief that Picaut felt in the station car park.
‘Stop.’ It tugs at her gut, this look. ‘That’s her.’
Eric makes a series of images, all almost-but-not-quite-exactly the same. Looking up, he says, ‘You OK if I put you down as investigating officer? If it has your name on it, the press will take a lot more notice.’
This is probably true. She has always been led to believe that the media have the memory span of a goldfish. In the lead-up to the fire, she discovered that where she is concerned, they can be remarkably tenacious. Today, this is not an advantage. She says, ‘The press can’t get near this. The conference needs to stay under the radar. We can’t have the media sniffing round the city.’
Eric cocks his head. ‘There’s a conference?
True to spook-ish form, the briefings are need-to-know and until this moment, Eric didn’t. And now he does.
She says, ‘Je suis Charlie.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The attacks in Paris switched us from being cheese-eating surrender monkeys to the CIA’s favourite new friend in the war on global terror. In demonstration of their undying love, they moved their annual meeting from Bermuda or Panama or whichever tax haven they normally sun themselves in and came to meet here instead.’
Eric whistles. ‘Not a good time to have an assassination on the doorstep. Are they connected?’
Clever Eric. ‘I don’t know. The CIA certainly knows where to buy professional hit men. I don’t want to think about the diplomatic fallout if it turns out they’re involved, mind you.’
‘What does Ducat think?’
‘He thinks it’s a catastrophe in the making and we’ll both lose our jobs if we don’t sew it up fast.’
‘Better get going, then.’ Eric pulls on a white coat that would look geeky on anyone else but makes him look distinguished. ‘Help yourself to some coffee. I won’t be long.’
He is a man happy in his work. Part of the negotiations that lured him to Orléans involved a re-tooling of his suite and now the white tiles and stainless steel that mark post-mortem rooms the world over also bristle with new technology, the use of which only Eric fully understands.
He starts with the photographic phase of his examination. A rail-mounted camera automatically takes serial images of Sophie Destivelle from top to toe, left side and right. From this combination of multiple still shots a life-sized collage is built, then projected onto the wall alongside the life-like variation created by Eric’s software and the crime scene pictures sent in by the techs. Joining them are various angles showing the gunshot wounds in her clothed, and then naked, torso. The entry and exit wounds are both small and neat.
Looking at their magnified images, Picaut says, ‘Glock with suppressor?’
‘Common things are common, so yes, that seems likely. Certainly it was a nine-mil of some sort. Ballistics sent an email just before you got here to say they’ve got the rounds out of the car. They’ll give us something definite in an hour or two.’
‘Is there any chance she was dead before the shooting?’
‘Wouldn’t have said so. You think it’s possible?’
‘Something doesn’t feel right. She doesn’t look the kind of woman to die without a fight.’
‘I can run some bloods in case she was drugged?’
‘Thanks.’ They fall back into silence. Picaut heads to the table where the victim’s clothes and personal effects are laid out in an order that becomes progressively more personal: suit, shoes, shirt, bra, stockings, underwear. It’s all very clean. She pulls on some gloves and begins to check the labels.
After a while: ‘What kind of Frenchwoman buys all her clothes in America?’
‘A wealthy one?’
‘Even the underwear?’ This is not good. If she turns out to be American, Ducat will— ‘Hello …’
Eric knows her well by now. His head comes up. ‘What?’
‘There’s a business card sewn into the lining of her jacket. Have you got scissors?’
‘Scalpel?’
‘That’ll do.’
‘Wait. Let me take some pictures.’
Eric has a lens that magnifies by three orders of magnitude. Picaut holds up the lining of the suit, where she has felt the edges of a business card hard against the silk. Images of the suit lining appear on the screen. The silk is a deep, dove grey, the linen paler. The thread between them changes colour and count at the lower corner. ‘Re-sewn,’ Eric says. ‘Good find.’
He wields his scalpel with natural dexterity, slips the thread into a specimen bag for analysis, eases out the card with tweezers and lays it on a tray. ‘Don’t touch.’
‘I wasn’t planning to.’
Together, they lean over to look.
ELODIE DUVAL
CREATIVE DIRECTOR
RADICAL MIND
[email protected]
Eric photographs the card with his macro lens and posts the image onto the screen beside the serial images of Sophie Destivelle’s body.
Picaut says, ‘See if you can get some fingerprints from that. I want to know if Sophie put it there, or someone else.’ The skin along her jaw itches like it did in the car park. Unthinking, she lifts her hand to rub at it.
‘Inès!’
‘Sorry.’ She jams her fists in the pockets of her jeans. Her jaw line is the surgery that
keeps coming unstuck. Her arm, her shoulder, her neck – all of these healed after the second set of procedures. Her face is another matter. Her face is why she took six months to persuade various men – and a couple of women – in suits that she was fit to come back to work and didn’t need, thank you very much, the oh-so-generous invalidity pension they were offering her. Real work, if you please. Actual casework, not spreadsheet hell in an office.
Her face still itches, though.
Eric raises one brow. ‘Ingrid said to remind you that you have an appointment at noon.’
Ingrid – her surgeon, his most recent lover – has the power to send Picaut back to the spreadsheets, or the indefinite hell of gardening leave. Simply to stand in her company is terrifying, which is why, obviously, Picaut has a habit of forgetting her appointments. She spreads her hands wide. ‘Eric, I’ve got a case.’
‘Nothing’s going to happen that’s so important you can’t leave it to the team. Rollo’s cool. He won’t fuck up.’
Cool? Rollo? She is taking a breath to argue when a buzzer sounds and a screen lights up on the wall, showing the feed from the camera at the entrance. And here is the man himself, darkly disheveled, grinning up into the CCTV lens.
Picaut leans over to the microphone. ‘Got anything?’
‘Nothing useful.’ Rollo looks up into the lens. ‘Nobody’s acknowledging any hits for hire in the vicinity. And I checked the tapes. There’s nothing on the station CCTV, nothing on the surrounding roads. Whoever did this knew how not to be seen.’
Picaut says, ‘They put a head shot through a six-centimetre gap on an angle of thirty degrees to the vertical. It was expecting a lot to think they’d let themselves be caught on camera.’
She buzzes him in and listens to his feet, light on the stairs. As hers was, his attention is caught by the screen on the back wall and whistles, softly.
‘We’re going with “striking”,’ says Picaut.
‘Right.’ As she did, he walks up to the wall and stands nose to nose with the dead woman for a moment before he passes to the images of the gunshot wounds. He says, ‘The Americans …’
‘Ducat is doing what he can to placate them.’
‘I know. I’ve just had a conversation. They’re feeling magnanimous, apparently. They’re not going to pull out. I was asked to let you know.’
This is … novel. ‘I hope you passed my thanks back up the line?’
‘They got the message.’
To the best of her knowledge, Rollo has never actually been a member of any of the security services, but there’s a reasonable chance that he could join if he wanted. Certainly he has more contacts among the acronym-suits than any normal human being.
‘We’ll have to be seen to be taking this seriously, though,’ he says. ‘And it might be politically astute to ask for their help.’
‘They want in on the investigation?’ There’s always a catch.
‘They won’t throw their weight around, but they want to be kept in the loop, yes.’
Picaut winces. ‘If that’s going to happen, it goes through Ducat. We can’t bring them in by the back door. Clear?’
‘Clear.’ Rollo takes one last look at the shots and heads for the coffee pot. In the new collegiate style that has emerged in Picaut’s absence, he pours for Sylvie and Petit-Evard, both of whom follow him in, the latter with details of the car in which the victim died.
‘It was reported stolen at eleven fifteen last night from Rue des Auberges, one of the residential streets south of the river. The owner is Monsieur Pierre Fayette, son of Daniel and Lisette Fayette—’
Rollo stares at him. ‘The Daniel and Lisette Fayette? Croix de Guerre, Médaille de la Résistance and Légion d’Honneur. That Daniel and Lisette Fayette?’
Petit-Evard glows in the light of reflected fame. ‘The late Daniel and Lisette Fayette who each have streets named after them in Paris, Saint-Cybard, Lyon and Chinon – yes. Daniel died in 2002, Lisette ten years later. Pierre doesn’t talk much about his parents. In fact, as far as I can tell, he doesn’t talk much to, or about, anyone. He wasn’t in when I went round, but I spoke to the neighbours on either side, who say he’s a widower: his wife passed away a decade ago. He has a sister, Elodie, but she’s not been around since their parents died. They fell out and—’
‘Elodie?’ Picaut lifts Eric’s laser pointer and makes the red dot dance round the image of the business card. ‘If Elodie Fayette married and took the name Duval, then Sophie Destivelle was carrying her card.’
Sylvie is already on her phone, fingers flashing. ‘Elodie Duval, née Fayette, is a film director. She has pages on IMDb and Wikipedia.’
Picaut picks up a screen pen and draws lines joining the images on the wall. ‘So Sophie Destivelle dies in Pierre Fayette’s car with his sister’s business card sewn into the lining of her jacket. We have a link.’
From links grow pictures and from pictures emerge suspects and cases. She writes Pierre Fayette? on the wall above Elodie’s card. ‘What else did you get on Pierre?’
‘Not much. He used to work as an accountant for Rothschild in Berne, but recently retired and lives alone.’
Sylvie snorts. ‘What kind of accountant drives a Citroën BX? That car went out of production in 1993.’
Petit-Evard is swift in defence of his contact. ‘One who is, according to his neighbours, “very careful with his money”. The car is a practical necessity, not a luxury. His father, the famous Resistance fighter, taught him that luxuries were the curse of the capitalist bourgeoisie.’
The team laughs, except for Picaut, who has caught, at last, the fugitive memory she has been chasing since the car park.
Something must show on her face. Rollo glances across. ‘You OK?’
She says, ‘The Maquis de Morez,’ and then crisply, because they’re all staring at her now, ‘Daniel and Lisette Fayette were in the Maquis de Morez. Elodie Duval’s film company, Radical Mind, is making a TV series based on them, billing it as the French version of Band of Brothers. They were all over the papers in the back end of last year: it’s the highest funded French series ever.’
‘So, was Sophie Destivelle in the Maquis?’ Evard asks. ‘Is she in the show.’
Sylvie shakes her head. ‘If she is, she’s kept it off the net. She’s kept everything off the net. As far as Google is concerned, she’s the original invisible woman. She has a bank account registered in Lyon with five hundred thousand euros sitting in it – round figure, not a cent more or less. The passport and the driving licence were used to set up the account, and the two credit cards were issued from there, but we knew that already. Other than that, there is not a single record of her existence in any of the databases. She has no birth certificate; she hasn’t paid taxes. She isn’t registered as having married. She hasn’t been in hospital or been to the dentist or the doctor. By any usual measures, Sophie Destivelle doesn’t exist.’
Petit-Evard frowns. ‘That’s not possible.’
‘Oh, but it is,’ Rollo says, and there’s a lift to his voice that Picaut recognizes.
Petit-Evard doesn’t. ‘How?’ he asks.
‘It’s a cover name.’ Rollo is as happy as she’s seen him: his hair, his smile, his eyes, they shine. ‘The Americans are going to hate this. Ducat is going to hate this. We may end up hating it, too. But if Sylvie is right, then Sophie Destivelle is the cover name for a very old, very elegant lady spy.’
February 1944: Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force established in Britain. Plans for Operation Overlord – the Allied invasion of mainland Europe – begin.
SOE, F-Section: René Dumont-Guillemet and Henri Diacono dropped into Touraine to set up the Spiritualist network. Trainee operative Miriam Beaufort killed in a training accident at Ringwood airfield. No next of kin.
CHAPTER TWO
ARISAIG, SCOTLAND
28 February 1944
‘CAN YOU TILT your head to the left? Good. And if you could take off your scarf? No? If you could jus
t push it down a bit? A little more … Perfect. They shouldn’t send you back. You’ve done your bit. I told them, but they never listen.’
The photographer chatters on in the whisky-soft burr of the true West Highlander. His room is small and lacks windows, dense with shadows from two arc lights. The camera is pre-war and smells of mildew and something else sharper – photographic chemicals, maybe – that overwhelms the scents of sea and heather. The shutter makes a distinctive dual sound: snap-click.
‘Look straight ahead. Has anyone told you that you have beautiful eyes?’
‘Several. Thank you. And they are not sending me. I go back because I choose it.’
She is sharp: too sharp. He takes a step back. ‘I wasn’t trying to pick you up.’
Of course you weren’t. André, maybe, or Gregor, but not me. She shrugs, a lift of two bony shoulders. ‘I’m sorry. Too many—’
Stop. Unsafe. Too many hours standing near-naked under hot lights with English officers in SS uniform shouting in simulated interrogation, but she can’t say that, obviously.
She is tired or she wouldn’t even have started. Tired people make mistakes; it’s why they kept the lights on, kept her cold and hungry, kept shouting questions, hoping for a mistake, and a reason to fail her.
They stripped her down to her shift, which was surprising: she had thought the English more restrained. They were trying to frighten her, and instead, she lost her temper. They weren’t ready for that.
She bit her tongue and spat blood at them, and told them she had TB and they had it, too, now. For a moment, the older one believed her, the one with the guardsman’s moustache, but the younger one laughed and hurled a bucket of iced water over her: the blond one who never took his gloves off. He looked thoroughly German even without the fake SS uniform. She hated him. Nonetheless, she didn’t talk.
That was nearly a week ago, in a suburb of Glasgow. The whole exercise lasted three days. She is still tired.