A Murder of Magpies

by Flanders, Judith

  Then the lights came up and I shook myself. What an extraordinary thing—not theater, as I’d expected, just naked consumerism. I said so to Mary-Kay, and she nodded, “You bet. The rest—” she stuck out her chin toward the Hollywood contingent in the front row—“that’s just window dressing. Completely irrelevant, except as advertising.”

  I’d spent so much time thinking about money laundering that I’d forgotten what big business fashion really was.

  I asked Mary-Kay how I should find Loïc. She snorted, which I had quickly discovered was most people’s response to him. “Have another drink,” she said. “There’s no point going backstage for another half an hour at least: It’ll be a zoo. After that the models will have left for the next show. Which,” she added, with a look at her watch, “is what I have to do. It was nice to meet you.”

  I didn’t have another drink, because I needed to be entirely sober for this meeting. So I wandered around, shamelessly eavesdropping. Most of it consisted of people kissing each other, then telling the next person how much they disliked the previous one. After twenty minutes I decided the hell with it, and began to search around for a way backstage. A very disgruntled bouncer finally let me through.

  At best, “backstage” was a polite lie for a corridor. It actually wasn’t quite as nice as that makes it sound—it was a gray, concrete area smelling of dead cigarettes and spilled alcohol. The clothes were gone, as were the models. All that was left was the Vernet office staff, standing around looking as gray as the walls, completely exhausted, while their friends stood beside them, telling them how fabulous it had been.

  Loïc was in a corner making appointments for journalists to view the collection quietly the next day. He saw me, but felt that he couldn’t maintain his status if he acknowledged me right away. He was right. If he’d behaved civilly I would have had to revise my opinion that he was a poisonous little runt. After waiting for ten minutes while he pretended I was invisible I grabbed a chair and pulled out a book. That got him—there is no fun in ignoring someone who is happy to be ignored. He slouched over. “Well,” he demanded.

  “Very well, thank you for asking,” I said. The single glass of champagne that I’d had before the show had given me a headache, and I was cranky and back in fuck-you mode. He’d asked for—begged for—this meeting, not me. He could tell me what he wanted or I was going home. I stared, stony-faced, at him.

  He was a small man—delicately built, and probably only about five foot five without the lifts, with dark skin, dark eyes, and platinum hair, razored in the center like a crop circle. His shirt was open to the waist, which was a deeply unappetizing sight, and his trousers rode low on what in a normal-sized person would have been his hips. You knew he’d spent an hour getting them to hang in the right place. He made me tired just to look at him, and I let my face reflect this. As with the bouncers, it was the right approach, and he suddenly became ingratiating.

  “Monsieur Conway is looking forward to meeting you,” he said, although the words must have pained him. I made sure I showed no surprise, but I was astonished. Patrick Conway was the CEO of Lambert-Lorraine, the conglomerate that owned Vernet, among a huge portfolio of companies. Vernet turned over tens of millions, while Lambert-Lorraine probably saw that daily. What was he bothering with me for?

  I nodded, and said, as though still exhausted, “I want to make some calls first. Is there somewhere quiet?”

  He said, “The car’s waiting, you can call from there.”

  Sure, I was going to make my calls in front of him and the driver. I walked out to the car with him and gestured him ahead of me. Then I said, “I won’t be a moment,” and slammed the door on him.

  It was now raining, but I felt more comfortable calling from the open air. It felt absurdly like a Sherlock Holmes story—take neither the first hansom cab, nor the second, which may present itself—but I wanted to talk to Jake, and I wanted him to know where I was. I just hoped I could reach him.

  He answered his mobile on the first ring. He was intimidatingly like my mother. Didn’t either of them ever have meetings?

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “Yeah, sure.” I realized how bitchy I sounded, and where we’d last seen each other. I backed up and started again. “Sorry, Jake, I didn’t mean it like that, but we’ll have to do that later. I’m standing in a car park in Paris, and they’re about to take me to meet Patrick Conway. One, should I go? Two, is there anything you want me to ask him? Have you spoken to him yourself?”

  “What?”

  “What do you mean, what? They’re taking me—”

  He cut in, clearly furious. “I mean, what the fuck are you doing in Paris, and what the fuck do you think you’re doing interfering in a police investigation?”

  At that volume, he didn’t really need the phone. I don’t respond well to being shouted at. “Interfering in a police investigation? Excuse me, but who sat down with Helena and me and agreed who would check out what?”

  “That was Helena, not you, and she is doing paperwork, not running around like an overgrown Girl Guide trying to get her merit badge in mixing in.”

  It was lucky we were three hundred miles apart, and with the Channel in-between, because if we had been on the same landmass, Jake’s murder would have been the CID’s next investigation. Unfortunately, anger was making me speechless, which in turn infuriated me further.

  Jake made the mistake of continuing. “I want you to leave now. It’s very simple. Just say you’ve had a call from London and have to go back right away.”

  It was very simple, I agreed. The man was toast. “What a pity for you, Inspector,” I said, my voice dripping acid, “that I don’t work for the police. But since I don’t, stuff your orders. I am in Paris doing my job, which is what I will continue to do until I have finished it to my own satisfaction. Why don’t you go and bully some poor little WPC who can’t answer back instead? I’m sure you’d be more comfortable with that. And, in case we don’t speak again, which I very much hope we won’t, go fuck yourself.” I disconnected. All right, not mature—not even witty—but I was boiling.

  I got back in the car and snapped to Loïc: “Let’s go.”

  He started to stay something but I glared at him with a look so filled with venom that he shrank back in his seat. Good. I had enough assholes in my life already.

  We had just left the car park when my phone rang. I stabbed at it. “What?” I snarled.

  Jake had calmed down, and was back to his normal even keel. That made one of us, then.

  “I’m sorry.” He really sounded very contrite.

  “You should be.” Sorry wasn’t going to do it.

  “Sam, please. If you want to have a fight, can we postpone it till you’re home? It’ll be more fun then anyway.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Not for you it won’t. You’ll be dead.” Despite my best efforts I wanted to laugh. His reasonable behavior was turning my fury into a comedy routine.

  He could smell a weakness at twenty paces. “Fine. I’ll give you a list of relatives to invite to the funeral. Now listen, how much do you know about Patrick Conway?”

  I gave up. “Not much. What you read in the papers.” I glanced over at Loïc. “I’m being taken there now by a PR.”

  “Can you talk?”

  “No, of course not. You missed that chance.”

  He ignored the dig. “It doesn’t matter. No one from here has spoken to him. The Fraud Squad has been putting out feelers, but there’s nothing there yet that would warrant more than us talking to the French police. Since you’re not coming home—” he paused. I let him wait. “Fine, all right, I give up. Just go easy, listen, don’t talk, and keep your phone on. I’ll call if there’s anything. What train are you supposed to catch home?”

  “The seven-oh-seven.”

  “Call me once you’re on it. I’ll meet you at St. Pancras. If you need me, call me before, my phone will be on.”

  I had hoped he’d tell me what to do, which I cou
ld then have resented. Now I felt as if a support I’d counted on had been removed without warning.

  I was still peeved. “Don’t trouble yourself. I’ll get the Tube.”

  He wasn’t going to be needled into quarreling again. “I’ll be there.” This time he hung up first.

  I don’t know Paris well—not well enough to be able to tell where I was being driven in the dark, so I decided not to worry about it. After about fifteen minutes, during which Loïc maintained his disgruntled silence, we drew up outside a building on one of the streets that I thought must be near the Avenue Montaigne, and I was escorted through the courtyard of an imposing hôtel particulier, straight up to a sitting room. It would be rude to call it an office—there was a desk in the corner, but it had nothing remotely signifying office work on it. Impressionist paintings hung on the wall, and the ceiling was covered with what looked like an Angelica Kaufmann. I was left to kick my heels for nearly half an hour, so I returned to my book, and looked up only when the door closed and steps approached the sofa I was on, my finger marking the page.

  Patrick Conway stood before me without any expression on his face; his assistant was a few steps behind, horrified by my lèse-majesté. Between Jake, Loïc, the wait, and my champagne-induced headache, I was now in a complete snit. I nodded coolly and waited for him to speak.

  “Miss Clair?”

  “Ms.” I might as well stick with bad-tempered. It had worked so far.

  “Sure, and of course,” he said, in an accent that you could cut out and keep.

  I sniffed. “That’s a fairly impressive accent for someone who left Ireland at the age of three.”

  The assistant actually took a step back at this. Conway swelled up. He was going to explode. Then he laughed, and said in a completely neutral accent, “It works. It makes the English feel superior, and Europeans are comfortable with it.”

  I held out my hand and smiled. “How do you do?”

  He sat down. “A drink?”

  “Coffee, please. Black, no sugar.”

  Conway nodded at the assistant without turning around, and she scuttled out before I could tell her that the Emperor wore no clothes. She didn’t want to hear about it.

  He looked at me closely. “We need to talk, don’t we?”

  “Go ahead,” I said, although less aggressively than I would have two minutes before.

  “We’ve got a problem, and you’ve got a problem. Two problems. If we merge them together, we might have only one.”

  I waited for him to continue.

  “We have been trying to reach Kit Lovell for the last week, to discuss this book with him. He doesn’t return calls. What’s-his-name—Vernet’s PR, the boy who brought you here—says he wasn’t at the show this afternoon, and thinks he hasn’t been at any of the others.”

  This was the one thing I was not prepared for. Did Conway really not know Kit had disappeared? We hadn’t put ads in the newspapers—LOST, ONE FASHION JOURNALIST, RETURN TO PUBLISHER FOR REWARD—but it had never crossed my mind that the news wasn’t everywhere. I thought about it. Who knew? Kit’s family, his solicitor, the police. And if, as Jake said, the police gave low priority to missing people without signs of criminality around the disappearance, maybe they hadn’t spoken to anyone at his office. Atwood after all had appeared to have no idea when I’d seen him at the Tate. I pressed my lips together in fury at the thought, then pushed it back, concentrating on what was in front of me: that there actually was no reason why anyone connected with Alemán should know. That is, they wouldn’t know unless they had arranged his disappearance in the first place. It was a big “unless.” I contemplated Conway, who was fiddling with his coffee cup. Was this some sort of sophisticated double bluff? Had Lambert-Lorraine “disappeared” him, as they say in South America, and was this recent desire to talk to us just an act they were staging for our benefit? I couldn’t see why they would bother. With the underworld connections that went with drugs and arms dealing, Kit would never reappear, and that was that. On the other hand, if they truly didn’t know Kit was gone, then this meeting began to make more sense.

  Conway seemed to think I was being inscrutable, rather than just thinking, and he went on. “As we can’t get hold of Lovell, I thought I ought to have the conversation with you that I would otherwise have had with him.”

  I waited again. Silence had worked so far, so I stuck with it.

  Conway continued, staring down at the coffee table. “The rumor mill is in overdrive that Lovell has come up with evidence of malfeasance.” He paused. When nothing came back he said, “This is not something we like to hear, but we are concerned that if there is any truth in these rumors, that the people involved are dealt with by the police, and not tipped off by a book, or rumors of a book, so that they can cover up their activities and continue them in a different time and a different place.” He looked up at me from under his eyelashes. “I know you are not in a position to respond, but I would be grateful if you would carry this message back.”

  That was that then. I stood up. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Conway. If there is anything I can do, I’ll come back to you.”

  He stood as well. “I’d like to see the manuscript.”

  “I’m sure you would. While it was a publishing matter, I wouldn’t have shown the book to you on principle. Now that it’s a police matter, I can’t.”

  He had known I would say that. It was more a matter of putting the request on the table. He didn’t expect a return immediately. Conway was someone who played for long-term advantage, and he was looking several moves ahead.

  He scribbled down a number on the back of a card. “That’s my assistant’s direct line. He’ll find me.”

  On the whole I believed what he had said. I wasn’t sure if that was smart or not, but he seemed on the level. I didn’t for a moment think he was acting from altruism, or from notions of upright citizenship, or even from the goodness of his heart, but I did believe he wanted his company to be run for his benefit, not for the benefit of unknown and unnamed others.

  I was taken back to the Gare du Nord in the car that had brought me from the Palais des Sports, but Loïc had vanished. I was pleased on a personal level, and because it gave me time to think, but I felt badly that I couldn’t pass on the good news that his boss didn’t know his name. Big business is big business, but it’s important not to lose sight of the small pleasures of life.

  9

  When I got on the train I texted Jake to say I’d get home on my own, but he was waiting for me on the platform all the same. He must have used his police credentials to get past the barrier. I wondered whether that meant I was police business, or if it was just a perk of the job.

  I kissed him decorously on the cheek. It was the kind of kiss that in publishing you give someone you’ve never met before. When he jerked his head back as if he’d been burned, I deduced that the CID didn’t have the same social customs.

  I curled my lip. “Yeah, you don’t want to get caught kissing strange women in public, do you?” I might not be angry anymore, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to give him a hard time.

  He put his hand on the back of my neck, then quickly took it away again and instead held me by the elbow, like a felon. “I always kiss my colleagues when I start a shift,” he said through gritted teeth. “I’m only worried about being seen kissing you because you are so strange.”

  I looked away. Bored. “So leave. I told you I’d take the Tube.”

  He snapped me around and held me by both shoulders. I thought he was going to shout at me again, but instead he reached out and with careful concentration buttoned my coat. “It’s cold out,” was all he said. He put his hand in my pocket together with mine, and, fingers enlaced, we walked out to his car.

  We didn’t speak again until we were in the car and had navigated the one-way system outside the station. Then he took a deep breath and said, “How did it go?”

  I repeated the message from Conway very precisely. I had jotted down an
outline of the meeting as soon as I’d left, and I put the notes on the dashboard.

  He didn’t comment, just reached out and picked them up, putting them in his jacket pocket. Then he said, “I called Nell after I spoke to you. She’d already started to look into Vernet, and she’s got some interesting stuff. She thinks Conway is straight. It may be useful to talk to him again. If he liked you—?”

  I bit back a remark about Girl Guides and merit badges. Instead I shrugged. “Who knows? He was extremely charming, but that’s second nature. It didn’t have anything to do with me. For what it’s worth, I think he genuinely does not know Kit is missing. And if he doesn’t know that, then surely the rest of the structure we’ve been building falls to the ground. Which means we’re back to where we started, and no closer to knowing what’s happened to Kit.” I stared blankly out the window. It was raining again, that dank, depressing rain that you can’t see, but which covers everything with a fine, dismal mist.

  The car went through the underpass behind the station. In its sodium glare Jake was visibly not at all depressed. “We’re not back where we were. Not remotely. If we believe Conway, then we’re quite substantially further on. He didn’t have Kit abducted, and that’s a help, because with his resources that would mean Kit could be anywhere. If we believe that Conway equally didn’t know about the money laundering, we’re looking for someone lower down the ladder, and that’s a help, too, because it focuses our search. Even better, Conway will let his people help us, and we can’t begin to match his resources, or his knowledge of the territory.” Us. Apparently now I was back in London, and under his eye, I was allowed to be part of the investigation again. There was no mileage in pointing this out. Jake drummed a cheerful tattoo against the steering wheel. “Today may not have seemed like much, but the picture is radically altered—and in our favor.”