by Mark McKay
‘What were you doing before 11am?’
There was a quick exchange of glances between Sylvie and Le Roux before he answered. ‘Nothing. We arrived late on the Monday and had a leisurely breakfast the next morning. Then we checked out and went to Mayfair. You can confirm all this with the hotel.’
‘And your client?’
‘I’ll give you his name and contact details before you leave.’
‘So you had no other business to conduct while in London?’
‘None whatsoever.’
Nick closed his notebook. ‘I’m sorry to have inconvenienced you, but as I said, simply routine.’
They stood. Le Roux stayed standing by the table as Sylvie walked them out. ‘I hope you will see Paris while you’re here, Monsieur,’ she said. ‘Or are you going straight back?’
‘Staying the weekend, thought I’d combine business with pleasure.’
‘Enjoy. The details of our client are in this envelope.’ Nick placed it in his jacket pocket, just as she opened the door and with a gentle smile, ushered them out.
Bonnaire guided the Peugeot back to the Boulevard St. Michel.
‘You were quiet,’ remarked Nick.
‘They are cool, aren’t they,’ replied Bonnaire.
‘What do you mean?’
‘We have an interest in those two. As a matter of potential national security, actually.’
‘What? Why didn’t you say so?’
Bonnaire grinned. ‘I just wanted to see you in action first.’
Nick was irritated. ‘Jesus, no one said anything about national security concerns.’
‘OK, calm down. I’m about to explain. They are both French nationals of course, they both have French mothers. But the fathers are from Iraq. Le Roux’s father was some government official who turned up here in 1962, just prior to the coup that overthrew the Iraqi government. He was granted political asylum, met a French girl and promptly got her pregnant. The result you met just now.’
‘Le Roux doesn’t sound like an Iraqi name.’
‘He changed it.’
‘And Sylvie?’
‘She is thirty-seven, so fifteen years younger than him. Her father was another official, who saw Saddam coming and decided to get out during a trade mission in 1976. He also married a French woman.’
‘And all this makes them a security risk?’
Bonnaire swore in rapid fire French as a Citroen cut in front of him. ‘No, mon ami. We do know that both Le Roux and Dajani were in Baghdad in 2003, when Iraq was, shall we say, liberated. Visiting family, apparently. Some of whom were killed in the bombardment of that city. We think that experience might have engendered some anti-western feeling. To a certain extent, this is conjecture on our part.’
‘So, why are you worried?’
‘They didn’t return to France for a year after that. It is possible that they acted on their anti-western sentiment by visiting a terrorist training camp in Pakistan. They have never been implicated in any terrorist activity, but they are in and out of the Middle East all the time, allegedly buying art works for their discerning European customers.’
‘So you have no proof then?’
‘Just rumours and evidence of contact with known terrorist sympathisers. All under the cover of legitimate business, of course. We think Le Roux is channelling money for a number of unsavoury people. Why, we aren’t sure.’
‘So I wonder how that would tie in with the murder of a historical researcher in London.’
‘The telephone call, you say it came from Montmartre?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sylvie Dajani has an apartment in Montmartre.’
Nick felt a quick stab of excitement, but kept his response low key. ‘That’s interesting.’ He stared at the road for a minute, considering the implications. ‘Co-incidence, maybe. I can’t arrest her for having an apartment in Montmartre.’
‘If anyone is going to arrest her, it will be me,’ said Bonnaire. ‘I suggest that we stay in contact. I can keep an eye on their movements in and out of France, we do that anyway, but I don’t know how much that will help you. There are no resources available to watch them round the clock.’
‘That might be overkill, right now. If they are involved I need a motive. So far there’s nothing to suggest one. What I will do is monitor their arrivals and departures from the UK, going forward. When and if I know something of interest, I’ll call you.’
Bonnaire dropped him back at the hotel. Lauren was still out shopping he assumed, so he called her.
‘Still at the market, come and join me.’
St. Quentin Market was just around the corner in the Boulevard de Magenta, he was there in five minutes. They bought a selection of cheeses and two bottles of claret and then found a little Italian restaurant for a light lunch. Lauren ordered a bean salad and he settled on a shrimp scampi, with lemon and pepper sauce. He asked the waiter for a bottle of Orvieto.
‘Not for me,’ said Lauren, ‘get a half bottle.’
‘Alright. Not thirsty?’
She was still scanning the menu and shook her head without looking up. ‘Mineral water will do.’
The waiter departed. Lauren was still absorbed in a seemingly fascinating study of Italian cuisine.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
She met his eyes. ‘Nothing. How did it go this morning?’
‘Well, nobody confessed to murder.’
‘Is that good or bad?’
‘Good for the rest of our weekend.’
‘I want to go to the Louvre tomorrow, is that OK?’
‘Sure.’
The food arrived. Lauren picked at it distractedly, then after a minute she meticulously arranged her knife and fork on either side of the plate, took a sip of water, and sighed.
‘I’m pregnant.’
He paused in the action of lifting a shrimp from the plate. ‘Ah.’ Then deposited it in his mouth.
‘Is that all you’re going to say?’
He reached for the wine and took a generous mouthful. ‘I wondered when you were going to tell me.’
‘You mean you knew? How could you possibly know?’ Her voice rose on the last word, colour rushing to her cheeks. ‘Of course, you’re the bloody detective aren’t you? Nothing escapes your notice, does it?’
He put down the wine glass a little too firmly and the stem broke. The bowl and its contents met the floor and shattered. Heads turned.
‘Don’t hold me responsible if you can’t remember to take your bloody pills,’ he shot back. ‘And don’t get angry with me, either.’
She glared at him, eyes blazing. ‘Bastard.’ She picked up her fork and plunged it into an unfortunate bean. ‘You broke your glass.’
The waiter was already hurrying across with a replacement, plus a dustpan and brush. There were a few seconds of silence while he removed the debris and while the surrounding diners, realising the show was over, went back to their own conversations.
‘Are we going to discuss this like adults?’ hissed Lauren, while another bean was mercilessly disposed of.
‘Do you want it?’
She was calmer. ‘I don’t know. Do you want it?’
‘How on earth would I fit a child into my life, my job? I work all sorts of hours.’
‘And what about my so called brilliant career?’
He reached across the table and covered her hand with his. She started, but didn’t pull away.
‘It’s a shock for both of us,’ he said. ‘Can we discuss it properly later?’
She nodded, but he knew the issue wasn’t going anywhere. He topped up his new wine glass, while she avoided his gaze and occupied herself by carefully rounding up the remaining beans and assembling them into a neat pile on the side of her plate.
The subject remained closed for the rest of the weekend, but neither the glorious sights in the Louvre nor the glittering splendour of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles were enough to banish it from mind completely. Lauren was plainly irritated b
y the fact he wouldn’t talk about it and became progressively more detached herself. By the time the Eurostar returned to London on the Sunday evening, their conversation was at a virtual standstill.
Nick found it hard to concentrate at work. The case was going nowhere fast, it looked like it might quietly simmer away and lose momentum. His gut told him that Le Roux and Dajani had some connection with Simon’s death, but without any evidence it might just as well be wishful thinking.
There were no more obvious candidates to interview from the Neptune’s guest list for the night preceding the murder. Yvonne reported back to say that Charlotte had just arrived at work at the time of her brother’s killing and had a statement from her boss James Owen to back it up. Not that he thought Charlotte had any involvement, at all. And if Rebecca Slade had killed Simon and then rung him an hour or so later pretending to wonder where he was, then she was certainly a cool customer. Her tears over Simon had seemed real enough. No, the question of motive lay in whatever Simon had been up to in India. London and Paris were currently dead ends.
‘Did the pathologist recover the bullet?’ he asked Yvonne. ‘He should have by now.’
‘Yes sir, it’s a 7.62mm bullet.’
‘Good, now all we need is the gun that fired it.’
‘It must have been very well silenced, if no one in the coffee bar heard anything.’
He gave her an appraising look. ‘Yes, good point. Speaking of coffee,’ he continued, as he extracted a ten pound note from his wallet. ‘Would you mind? Get yourself one, too.’
‘Don’t you like the office coffee then, sir?’ Yvonne took the money. ‘With all due respect, I’m not the gopher around here.’
‘I won’t make a habit of it. And I’m buying, does that help?’
Yvonne raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips, then walked off. Great, he thought, my bad mood is contagious. ‘Did you find Simon’s SIM card from India?’ he called after her.
‘With Jamie,’ she said, without turning around.
Jamie hadn’t found time to examine the SIM card, nor had he succeeded in cracking Simon’s elusive password. The list of Simon’s friends and acquaintances had come from Charlotte, who had warned Yvonne that it was almost certainly incomplete.
‘Sorry Nick, I’m up to my eyes,’ said Jamie, who looked slightly worn. ‘I’ll see if the service provider can give me an unlock code.’
‘Soon as you can please.’ Why didn’t he just do that in the first place? When he went back upstairs, he had a message to call a DCI in Cambridge. He sat quietly at his desk for a minute and tried to concentrate on curbing his unwarranted irritation with everyone around him today. After several long breaths he thought he might have partially succeeded, so he picked up his desk phone and returned the call.
Five minutes later his mood had darkened considerably. The Cambridge DCI had told him that in the course of his own murder enquiry, the name Rebecca Slade had come up on the police database as a cross reference to Nick’s case. Apparently the victim had sent Ms Slade some old manuscripts about two months before he was killed. Did Nick think there was any connection between the two murders?
‘When was he killed?’ asked Nick.
‘Friday morning,’ replied DCI Matthews.
When I was in Paris talking to Dajani and Le Roux, thought Nick. ‘How?’
‘Shot at close range, with a 7.62mm bullet.’
‘Do you have any leads? Witnesses?’
‘Nothing. He was out early morning in the countryside, walking the dog. A jogger found the bodies.’
‘Bodies?’
‘Whoever it was shot the dog too.’
‘And you have no suspect?’
‘No suspect and no motive either.’
Nick thought for a moment. ‘Yes, I think there may well be a connection. But I don’t think it’s Rebecca Slade.’
He promised to share what he had and asked DCI Matthews to do the same. On that note, their conversation ended.
In the meantime, Yvonne had returned with the coffee. He told her what Matthews had just told him.
‘There must be a connection,’ she said, her irritation at being sent out on a trivial errand vanishing.
‘I agree. I need to speak to Rebecca Slade again. Can you raise her for me?’
Yvonne nodded and left to do just that. He wondered what the connection could be. The common denominator was the manuscript, but why shoot the man when he’d already sent it? There had to be another reason, maybe Rebecca could shed some light on it. He stared into space for the next five minutes seeking inspiration, but none was forthcoming. Then Yvonne was back.
‘She’s gone, sir.’
He straightened up in his chair. ‘What do you mean, gone?’
‘I got no answer on the mobile number, so I called the SOAS switchboard and they put me through to someone in the research department. Rebecca took a flight to India on Saturday morning. He thinks it was Kolkata she was going to.’
‘Was that all he could tell you? Was it part of her research remit, or what?’
‘Apparently not. She just announced she was taking some time off and left. He has no idea why.’
But I do, thought Nick. With the body count mounting, he could only wonder if she would be any safer looking for long lost tombs in India than she would be digging through arcane manuscripts in Russell Square. Somehow he doubted it.
Chapter 4
Kolkata
By the time the plane touched down, Rebecca was having doubts about her sanity. Perhaps she could put it down to a lack of sleep during the first eight hours of the flight. She’d never been good at sleeping on planes and the enormity of the decision she’d made to drop everything and come to India had only added to her inability to relax enough to drift off. She had managed two hours of blissful unconsciousness in the transit lounge in Mumbai, before boarding the internal flight to Kolkata. She might still have been there if a fellow traveller hadn’t shaken her awake as the boarding was announced.
Had she taken leave of her senses? Possibly. She knew that Simon’s death and his trip to India must be connected and that following in his footsteps would at best be rash, and at worst dangerous. But after DCI Severance’s visit she had felt the stirring of some at first unidentifiable emotion, which over the ensuing days grew in intensity until she realised what it was - sheer rage. Rage that a friend and colleague had been murdered, for no other reason than he might have uncovered some anomaly in the existing version of the history of the Mauryan Empire. What could be so important about a long dead King’s hitherto unknown child and his burial place that meant Simon had to be silenced?
What she hadn’t revealed to Nick Severance was the full content of Simon’s last email to her, when he said he was “onto something.” As the plane taxied to the terminal, she closed her eyes and replayed that story one more time.
On his third week in Kolkata, Simon hired a four wheel drive and did the nine hour drive up to Patna, where he set up base in a small hotel. From there he began exploring the area six miles south, looking for existing stupas and any land formations that might conceivably be covering one as yet undiscovered. If the tomb did exist, his money was on it being somewhere directly south of Patna, so he restricted the search area to a two mile radius of a village named Chipra. As the landscape of Bihar is predominantly flat there were no obvious hilly protuberances that might cover a stupa, at least none visible from the road. And he knew that in the last two thousand years the topography might have shifted a bit and what would have once been visible for miles, could now be buried. The roads around Chipra were more like pathways, so he left the jeep in the village and started wandering across the land on foot. He figured he could certainly cover all of the two mile radius that way in a few days.
He did the area to the east of Chipra in two days and found nothing remarkable. It consisted mainly of fields, planted with rice and wheat. The local people in this small village must have thought him remarkable though, or just plain eccentric. It
was surely unusual to see a Westerner traipsing around their fields with no apparent purpose. He was subjected to a few curious stares and the occasional smile, but that was all. Until the afternoon of that second day, when he wandered into a store looking for bottled water.
The man behind the counter, who was thin, dark and elderly with a deeply lined face and piercing dark eyes, took one look at Simon and called to someone out of sight at the rear of the shop. A moment later a younger and plumper version of the shopkeeper emerged, smiled and then addressed Simon in a Northern English accent.
‘You’re a bit off the beaten track. What can we do for you?’
Simon couldn’t hide his surprise. ‘You sound like you’re off the beaten track, yourself. I’d like some water, if you have any.’
‘Two litre bottles, in a pack of six. Over there.’
Simon followed his gaze. ‘Oh yes, thanks.’ It was the only pack of water in sight, perhaps they didn’t sell much locally. He wondered how long it had been there.
‘My grandfather’s shop,’ said the man, by way of explanation. ‘I come over from Newcastle once a year, to check on him. But what are you doing here? There’s nothing for tourists in Chipra.’
Simon fetched the water and placed it on the counter. ‘I was told there were some ruins down here that were worth looking at.’
‘Not that I know about. Wait a moment.’ He turned to his grandfather and they spoke for a while in what Simon assumed was either Hindi or Urdu. When they finished, the old man wore a stern expression.
‘He says all you English want to do is find buried treasure. There’s some debris you might call ruins, about a mile in that direction.’ He pointed westward.
‘Can your grandfather give me directions?’
The two Indians resumed their dialogue and then the younger man produced a sheet of paper and a pencil from under the counter and sketched out a map.
‘You can’t drive it and it takes about half an hour to walk. And there’s nothing there, according to him,’ he said, nodding at his grandfather. ‘No treasure, just broken statues.’
