I pushed open the door. The office lay in darkness, the kind of darkness you can stick a needle in. That suited me. Without a sound I entered, closed the door behind me and drew breath. The air smelled bad. Over-hot. Something festering. But I’d smelled worse. I flicked on the pinpoint beam of my torch and whipped it around the room across the bare floorboards, leaping into corners, checking that the fat bastard who owned this office wasn’t sleeping one off under his desk.
No, no one here. I breathed out.
Shadows were swarming up and down the walls, as though they’d been waiting for me in the darkness. I shot the torch beam at them and they vanished, the way dreams evaporate when you try to grab them by the throat.
I headed over to the coffin-size filing cabinet propped against one wall, but the smell was getting to me. It was coming from the desk. I walked over and inspected its surface. It was a mess with piles of folders and unsteady heaps of paperwork jumbled together, but my torch picked out in the middle of the pale blotter a lacy item of female underwear. It was stained dark red. Whether from wine or blood, I couldn’t tell, but flies had dipped their feet in the stain and trailed it across the blotter. I bundled the underwear inside a sheet of paper from one of the piles, wrapped it up and dropped it into my satchel.
My torch beam flared off the murky tumbler and wine bottle that stood within easy reach of the chair but I moved over to the filing cabinet. The lock on it was child’s play. I heard the pick’s telltale click and slid open each drawer in turn. Where was the heavy-duty security that a photographer – even a shoddy one like this – was meant to have in place?
I heard a noise. A soft tapping. I froze. Listened hard. But it was no more than a sudden squall of rain brushing against the shutters. My fingers skimmed rapidly over the contents of the filing cabinet, and the brown envelope I sought was hiding in the third drawer. I lifted out the whole folder, dropped it into the satchel on my shoulder and quietly closed the drawers once more. I was ready to leave, but first I walked back over to the bottle on the desk. I clipped it smartly with the metal casing of my torch. Glass and wine exploded over his shit-heap of papers.
Why am I here, rifling through an office?
Because this is what I do for a living.
*
I let the large brown envelope drop on the desk of Clarisse Favre and she looked at me with a bright scarlet smile. The desk was as immaculately groomed as its owner, polished and sleek, the kind of desk you only see in magazines. However early I came into the office of ‘The Favre Detective Agency, Private Investigator & Associate’ – the Associate was me – she was always in ahead of me and stayed long after I crawled home at midnight. She could be sharp as a razor or soft as her Dior powder puff, I never knew which Clarisse I would get.
‘Ma chère Eloïse,’ Clarisse beamed at me, ‘you are the Favre Agency’s secret weapon.’
She laughed, a warm sound that always drew me in and made me want to hear it again. Her light-brown hair was swept up in an effortlessly elegant chignon and she was wearing the same dove-grey dress she had on the first time I saw her. She had taken me on in her chic Saint-Germain office exactly a year before when I was fresh out of the Sorbonne and found that neither the French Intelligence service nor the American CIA were remotely interested in making use of my talents.
So how did I end up here? It was one of those strokes of luck that you can never plan for. I was seated at a pavement café with my friend Nicole from university, hunched over a small round table with a metal ashtray spilling out discarded cigarette butts. We were smoking like hardened Parisians and consuming too much coffee, both of us edgy and frustrated by our lack of success in finding jobs we wanted, now that we had finished university. Nicole was a scientist with curly auburn hair and a shining determination to become one of France’s leading physicists.
I was in the opposite camp, a language graduate. Thin, broke and depressed. Being rejected by the CIA despite my fluent Russian and English had knocked me off-balance. I’d been so sure that my future lay alongside my brother’s that I felt as though I’d stepped on a patch of ice, my feet skidding from under me. Nicole and I were moaning to each other as we watched the struggling street artists painting in the hustle of the Place du Tertre and vaguely I was aware of an elegant female who smelled nice taking a seat at the table next to us. After ten minutes she removed her sunglasses, leaned over and tapped my arm with the corner of her business card.
‘Here,’ she said and dropped the card on our table. ‘I couldn’t help overhearing. If you’re serious about looking for a job, ring my office. Make an appointment. I have a position that might interest a bright kid like you.’
Surprised, I inspected my benefactress. A perfect heart-shaped face, flawless make-up, a wide mouth curved into a warm smile, and green eyes as intense as emeralds.
I nodded, trying to disguise my enthusiasm. I picked up the card. ‘Why me?’ I asked.
‘Because you’re a prickly young arsehole who sounds ready for a bit of excitement.’
I laughed. She had me with the words arsehole and excitement.
‘Why study Russian?’ she had asked when I came knocking on her door that first rainy morning.
‘I thought it might come in useful,’ I’d said.
I didn’t tell her that the Cyrillic alphabet was to me an irresistible code to unlock Russian words. But she must have spotted something that made her think I had the makings of a private investigator because she took me on and sent me on a two-week course in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Running around learning about foot surveillance techniques or handling different cameras for photographic surveillance set me up with the skills for the job, it seems. And I was good at it. When I told André about it, I was all puffed up with pride and he’d laughed and cracked open a bottle of champagne to celebrate.
Now Clarisse slipped a finely buffed nail under the flap of the envelope I’d presented her with and slid the contents on to her desk in front of her. A clutch of photographs. Five of them, glossy black-and-white, eight by ten. Plus – more importantly – the strip of film negative that I had ‘liberated’. Her face pulled a moue of distaste and, after briefly studying the pictures, she tucked them back out of sight in their envelope. Her face was expressive, always mobile and interested, with strong features and eyes that could lead you to believe you knew what she was thinking. But you would be wrong. No one knew what Clarisse was thinking. Sometimes I caught her looking at me. I had no idea why.
She held the strip of negative film up to the light and squinted at it. ‘Where did you get this piece of filth?’
‘In the bastard’s office.’
She nodded approval. No questions about how I got in.
The bastard was the photographer. A nasty creep who made a habit of taking compromising snaps of the sixteen-year-old daughters of wealthy public figures, daughters who had gone off the rails and were running head-first down black holes. This was the 1950s. Every one of us believed that the bad times were behind us. We were all desperate for the good times to come rolling in, but drugs and drink and the nuclear threat of instant extinction kept black-eyed sharks circling. The country was on edge and Clarisse’s services were much in demand.
We worked for an hour discussing two new clients who had brought her their problems to solve – one a blackmail case, the other a suspected fraud – and I was taking down details in my notebook when I became aware of her silence. I glanced up. Clarisse was sitting very still, studying me. For no obvious reason I felt a twitch of fear.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
She leaned her elbows on the desk. ‘Tell me, Eloïse, have you heard anything?’
Her tone was soft, so soft it scared me. We both knew what anything meant.
‘No.’
‘No news of your brother?’
‘No.’
Her gaze flicked to the scar on my face. Clarisse had been good to me after the crash, allowing me time off to recover and breezing into my cramped apartment every f
ew days with a box of glossy patisseries or a racy book or the latest Vogue. I valued her friendship, she’d make me feel almost human again, but now her eyes had narrowed to green slits, as bright and as hard as the king-size emerald nestled on her finger.
‘You have to let it go, Eloïse.’
‘Let what go?’
‘The guilt.’
‘What guilt?’
I stared right back at her, refusing to let her feel sorry for me, but she stretched out an arm and peeled back my fingers from their grip on the curved edge of her desk. Her hand was gentle. Silence crept into the room and all I could hear was our breathing in the quiet office with its Eames chair and modern colourful coat stand. My head hummed with darkness.
‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘What is it that you’re not saying?’
Clarisse sat back in her chair, tapped her nails on her desk, then opened a drawer and withdrew a piece of paper from inside it. She placed it in front of me.
‘For you,’ she announced.
A telegram. I saw it had been opened though it was addressed to me. From my father. I felt a pain at the back of my eyeballs so sharp I couldn’t read. There was only one reason my father would send me a telegram.
André was dead.
My eyes blurred. The world turned a smoky grey.
‘I opened it,’ Clarisse said quietly. ‘You’d given the agency address to him and so I opened it. Read it.’
I blinked, forcing my eyes to focus. There were only two words. Come Now.
CHAPTER SIX
I drove. South. Straight south.
I drove my flimsy 2CV so hard and so fast that it moaned and rattled and expelled fumes in my face that smelled of overheated wiring, but I did not take my foot off the pedal for a second except to refuel. I cursed the grey tin-can’s lack of pace a thousand times. It may have been fine for around the city, but a top speed of 65kpm was not exactly greased lightning with a journey of 750 kilometres to drive.
The South was pulling at me. I could feel it. Drawing me to it like a magnet, as though there was something hard and metallic lodged inside me that was powerless to resist and yet I felt a softening of my sinews, a loosening of my bones as the hours crawled past. The sun played hide-and-seek with the ladybird-shaped shadow of my car on the N6 and I passed the towns of Auxerre and Avallon, barely aware of them. The tedium of the pancake-flat landscape lulled me into a false sense of passivity where too many memories from the past could sneak in, such as André’s arm tight around me when he told me goodbye and to be strong, as he departed for Paris. I was twelve years old, he was eighteen. Losing him was like having my right arm ripped off.
My father’s face had turned a strange shade of grey that wasn’t grey because it was also purple. I knew then it was the colour of an anger so deep it burned away the words I’m sorry. Their words were hurled at each other like grenades.
‘He’ll be back,’ Papa had growled into his beard, as André strode off down the gravelled track to the road with no more than a small pack on his back.
Papa’s hand lay heavy on my bony shoulder, holding me there in a grip of iron. I longed for André to turn and wave but he kept his sandy eyes fixed on the road to freedom.
‘He’ll come back,’ Papa reiterated, ‘because this farm is in his blood.’ His fingers dug deeper. ‘I tell you, Eloïse, Mas Caussade is in that boy’s soul whether he wants it there or not.’
But he didn’t. He never came back.
*
The trees told me I was nearly home. They were the first. Instead of shady avenues of the pale trunks of plane trees peeling like lepers at the roadside and the silvery shimmering poplars, there were bold stands of dark cypress trees and pines stretching tall to the sky. Vineyards with a haze of green shoots started to spill around me on both sides of the road, worker-bees humming, as I rubbed shoulders with the mighty Rhône. All I had to do was hurry down its broad valley and I’d be in Arles. I had grown up with the Rhône river, it flowed in my blood. I’d learned to swim in it before I could walk, dived for catfish in it, paddled a homemade raft on it. Almost drowned in it more than once, and I still heard the sound of its dark waters coursing through my dreams at night.
*
The heat hit me. I had grown soft. Four years in Paris and I had forgotten what a humid August in the Camargue felt like and how monster mosquitoes set your bare skin on fire.
I pulled over and climbed out of the car, stretching my limbs, and drew great lungfuls of the breeze that smelled like nowhere else on earth. It carried in it the salty earth of the Camargue, the wide delta of the Rhône, the rustle of the tall reeds and the warm musky scent of the hides of the wild bulls and horses that roamed the landscape here. I gazed out across the flat marshy fields and watched a pair of white egrets rise into the crystal-clear air, weightless as ghosts, as they drifted south towards the salt lagoons. I felt my heartbeat slow. It knew it had come home, even while my mind insisted I was now a hardened Parisian, here for one purpose only: to find my brother and the person who tried to kill him, and to put my family back together again.
I heard a noisy snort and a sturdy white stallion emerged from the shade of a cluster of tamarisk trees, while his harem of eight mares hung back in the shadows. He tossed his cream mane at me, pawing the ground with his wide front hoof, designed to thrive on marshland.
I started to cry. Silent relentless tears because of what I’d done and what I’d not done. In this familiar landscape my failure lay all around me, because in every tree, every velvety stretch of grassland and in every splash of sunlight on the glassy surface of the cool ponds I saw the pale ghosts of us children. Flitting in and out of sight. I caught glimpses of my brothers everywhere. When the crying was over I climbed back into the car and drove to the Mas Caussade.
Nothing had changed while I’d been gone. I’d turned my back on the Camargue and it hadn’t even noticed.
*
The house hadn’t changed. It stared back at me. Square, solid, part of the landscape. It stood in the middle of nowhere, flanked by my father’s fields that stretched out of sight in every direction.
I drove up the long dirt drive in a cloud of dust, chest tight, heart racing, terrified of what news awaited me. It was a traditional Camarguais mas or farmhouse, built of local stone, two storeys, facing south. Its back was squarely facing north to offer protection from the cold ferocious blasts of the mistral wind that could rip your roof off if it put its mind to it. No windows on that side of the house, just a blank wall to keep out the danger.
Was I a danger?
Did the house need a blank wall between its occupants and me?
The Mas Caussade farm was arranged as three sides of a rectangle around a central cobbled yard. One side was formed by the farmhouse itself and the other two by the thatched stables and long sleepy barns where the hens liked to annoy the farm cat dozing in the straw. All around, as far as the eye could see, lay the wide-open pastureland owned by my father, green and glossy, except where the bright emerald carpet of glasswort had adopted its scarlet summer colours, soaking up the sun. The constantly high level of the underlying water-table made the plant-life rich and vibrant. A thousand different greens tumbled over each other and shimmered with papery butterflies and gaudy tree frogs.
I never tired of this landscape. It stirred things in me that got lost and trampled in the city’s daily hustle and bustle, but which I could feel coming alive again. Squeezing their way into my heart once more.
With a roar, a fighter aircraft streaked low overhead, shattering the peace as I skewed my car to a halt in front of the bull-yard and raced to the house, but someone was there before me. Outside the front door stood a car, its chrome gleaming in the bright sunlight, its black wings bulbous and glossy. My heart tripped over itself. We all knew who used black Citroën Traction Avants.
The police.
*
I knocked. I could have lifted the latch and walked in, but I didn’t. I knocked. I heard one of the dogs barkin
g in the yard at the back – it sounded like old Lyonette – and I felt childhood memories brush against me, making my skin prickle, like walking into cobwebs.
The door swung open and my father filled the doorway. It was hard not to reach out a hand to him, but I kept it tight at my side. He was not that kind of father. Aristide Caussade was not a tall man but he was built of solid muscle like his bulls. His hair and beard had turned white years ago but his bushy eyebrows and his deep-set eyes were still as dark as old oak.
‘Hello, Papa.’
He nodded and his stern gaze fixed on my cheek. He showed no flicker of emotion. ‘Come in, Eloïse.’
As he moved back to allow me entry, I didn’t let the moment slip by, and before he could stride away down the hallway and vanish into one of the rooms, I seized his arm. It was like seizing a tree trunk. He looked at me, surprised.
‘Is he here, Papa, is he? Tell me quickly. Is he alive? Have you heard from him? How is he? Where is he? I’ve been sick with not knowing or hearing.’
‘André is alive, if that’s what you mean.’
A low gut-wrenching sob broke loose from me and relief coursed through me with such force that my knees buckled and only my grip on my father kept me upright. I clamped my other hand over my mouth to stop the sounds that threatened to come out of it. I didn’t realise that the pain inside me had to come out somewhere and it flooded out in my hold on my father’s arm. My fingers sank deep into his muscles, digging in between his tendons, gripping with all my strength until our Caussade flesh for that brief moment merged together again.
‘Eloïse,’ Papa said and I could hear an odd hitch in his deep voice.
I forced my fingers to release him. Somehow I stayed on my feet. ‘Is he here?’ I asked.
‘He is.’
I pushed past my father in the hallway, running for the stairs, but he halted me with an abrupt, ‘André is not in his room.’
‘Where then?’
The Guardian of Lies Page 3
