Century Rain

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Skipping on her rent?”

  “Except she had already paid in advance up to the end of the month. Guilty over my suspicions, I vowed to catch up with her and help her with the suitcase. But I am an elderly man and I could not make up the distance quickly enough. Ashamed that I could not be of assistance to her, I watched her vanish into the Métro station.” Blanchard picked up a carved pipe from a selection on a side table and began examining it absently. “I thought that was the end of it, but no sooner had she vanished than she reappeared. No more than a minute or two had passed since she entered, and she still had the suitcase. This time, however, it looked much lighter than before. It was a windy day and now the suitcase kept bumping against her hip.”

  “You told all this to the police?” Floyd asked.

  “I did, but they dismissed it. They told me that I had imagined the whole incident, or imagined that the first suitcase was heavier than the second.”

  Floyd made a careful note, certain—without quite being able to say why—that this was an important observation. “And is this the ‘evidence’ of foul play you mentioned on the telephone?”

  “No,” Blanchard said. “That is something else entirely. Two or three weeks before her death, Mademoiselle White’s manner changed. She stopped coming to the races, stopped visiting these rooms, and spent more and more time away from her own apartment. On the few occasions when we passed each other on the stairs, she seemed distracted.”

  “Did you check out her rooms?”

  Blanchard hesitated a moment before nodding in answer to Floyd’s question. “She had stopped acquiring books and magazines. A great many remained in the apartment, but I saw no sign that they were being added to or relocated elsewhere.”

  Floyd glanced at Custine. “All right. Something must have been on her mind. I have a theory. You want to hear it?”

  “Am I paying for this? We haven’t discussed terms.”

  “We’ll come to that if we come to it. I think Mademoiselle White had a lover. She must have met someone in the last three weeks before she died.” Floyd observed Blanchard, wondering how much of this he really wanted to know. “She’d been spending time with you—innocently, I know—but suddenly her new boyfriend wanted her all to himself. No more trips to the races, no more cosy chats up here.”

  Blanchard seemed to weigh the matter. “And the matter of the books?”

  “Just a guess, but maybe she suddenly had other things to do than hang around bookstores and newsagents. She lost interest in stocking her library, so there was no need to keep on shipping trunks back to Dakota.”

  “That’s a lot of supposition,” Blanchard said, “based on a rather striking absence of evidence.”

  “I said it was a theory, not a watertight case.” Floyd took out a toothpick and started chewing on it. “All I’m saying is, there might be less to this than meets the eye.”

  “And the matter of her death?”

  “The fall might still have been an accident.”

  “I am convinced she was pushed.” Blanchard reached under his chair and produced a tin box printed all over with a scratched tartan pattern, a photograph of a Highland terrier on the lid. “This, perhaps, will convince you.”

  Floyd took the tin. “I really need to watch my figure.”

  “Open it, please.”

  Floyd prised the lid off with his fingernails. Inside was a bundle of assorted documents and papers, held together with a single rubber band.

  “You’d better explain the significance of this,” Floyd said, nonplussed.

  “Less than a week before she died, Mademoiselle White knocked on my door. She died on the twentieth; this would have been around the fifteenth or sixteenth. I let her in. She was still flustered, still distracted, but now at least she was ready to talk to me. The first thing she did was apologise for her rudeness during the preceding fortnight, and tell me how much she missed the horses. She also gave me that box.”

  Floyd slipped free the elastic band surrounding the papers and let them spill into his lap. “What else did she tell you?”

  “Only that she might have to leave Paris in a hurry, and that I was to look after the box if she did not return for it.”

  Floyd glanced through the papers. There were travel documents, receipts, maps, newspaper clippings. There was a pencil sketch, carefully annotated, of something circular that he didn’t recognise. There was a postcard: a sun-faded photograph of Notre Dame. Floyd flipped it over and saw that the card had been written and stamped, but never sent. The handwriting was neat and girlish, with exaggerated loops and curlicues. It was addressed to someone called Mr. Caliskan, who lived in Tanglewood, Dakota.

  “You mind if I read this?”

  “Go ahead, Monsieur Floyd.”

  The first part of the message talked about how the woman was planning to spend the afternoon shopping, looking for some silver jewellery, but that she might have to change her plans if the weather turned to rain. The words “silver” and “rain” had been neatly underlined. This struck Floyd momentarily as odd, before he remembered an elderly aunt who had been in the habit of underlining key words in the letters she sent him. The postcard was signed “from Susan’: Floyd speculated that it had been intended for an uncle or grandfather rather than a lover or close friend.

  He opened one of the maps, spreading it wide. He had expected a tourist map of Paris, or at the very least of France, but this was a small-scale map of the whole of Western Europe, from Kaliningrad in the north to Bucharest in the south, from Paris in the west to Odessa in the east. A circle had been inked around Paris and another around Berlin, and the two circles were linked by a perfectly straight line in the same ink. Another circle enclosed Milan, which was in turn connected back to Paris by another line. The effect was the creation of an approximate “L” shape, with Paris at the corner of the “L” and Berlin at the end of the longest side. Marked in neat lettering above the lines were two figures: “875” above the Paris-Berlin axis and “625” along that between Paris and Milan. Floyd speculated that these were the distances between the cities, in kilometres rather than miles.

  He scratched at the ink with his fingernail, satisfying himself that it was not part of the original printed design. He had no idea what the markings meant, but he speculated that Susan White might have been planning the next leg of her journey, and had been measuring the respective distances between Paris and the two other cities before deciding which to opt for. But what kind of tourist needed to know such distances so precisely? Trains and even aeroplanes did not follow straight-line routes, given the real and political geography of Europe. But perhaps that detail had escaped her.

  Floyd folded the map, and then leafed through the rest of the paperwork. There was a typed letter in German from someone called Altfeld, on thick letterhead paper printed with a company insignia for a heavy-manufacturing concern named Kaspar Metals. The address was somewhere in Berlin, and the letter appeared to be in reply to an earlier query Susan White had sent. Beyond that, Floyd’s faltering German wasn’t up to the task of translation.

  “These don’t look much like love letters,” Floyd said.

  “She gave me one other instruction,” Blanchard said, “in the event that she did not return. She said that her sister might come looking for her. If she did, I was to pass on the box to her.”

  “She was worried about something,” Floyd said. “That much we can agree on.”

  “You’re still not convinced that she might have been killed deliberately? Shouldn’t you be keen to take on a murder case? I will pay you for your time. If you find no evidence that she was murdered, then I will accept your judgement.”

  “I don’t want to waste your money or my time,” Floyd said. Custine cast him a sidelong glance, as if questioning his sanity.

  “I am authorising you to waste it.”

  Floyd stuffed the documents back into the tin. “Why don’t you just hold on to this and see if the sister shows up?”

  �
�Because every day that passes is a day longer since she died.”

  “All due respect, monsieur, but this really isn’t something you need concern yourself with.”

  “I think it is very much my concern.”

  “What did the police make of the box?” Custine asked.

  “I showed it to them, but of course they weren’t interested. As I said, entirely too unimaginative.”

  “You think she might have been a spy,” Floyd guessed.

  “The thought had crossed my mind. Please do not pretend it has not crossed yours.”

  “I don’t know what to make of any of this,” Floyd said. “What I do know is that it never hurts to keep an open mind.”

  “Then keep an open mind about the possibility that she was murdered. I owe it to the memory of that lovely young girl not to let her death go unpunished. I know in my heart that someone was responsible, Monsieur Floyd. I also know that Claudette is watching me now, and she would be very disappointed if I did not do my duty to Mademoiselle White.”

  “That’s very decent of you—” Floyd began.

  “It’s not just decency,” Blanchard interrupted sharply. “There is a selfish component as well. Until her killer is found, there will always be doubts in my other tenants’ minds that perhaps she did fall accidentally.”

  “But the police have never made any such suggestion.”

  “A suggestion does not have to be voiced,” Blanchard said. “Please—take the box and see where it takes you. Talk to the other tenants—discreetly, of course. She may have spoken to some of them as well. What shall we say, in terms of a retainer?”

  Floyd reached into his jacket and took out one of his dog-eared business cards. “Those are my usual terms. Since this is a homicide investigation, my associate will also be assisting me. That means the rates are doubled.”

  “I thought you wanted to save me money.”

  “It’s your call. But if we’re going to investigate Mademoiselle White’s death, there’s no point in half-measures. Custine and I can cover twice as much ground in half the time it would take me on my own.”

  Blanchard took the card and pocketed it without a glance. “I accept your terms. For my money, however, I will expect a swift resolution.”

  “You’ll get it, one way or the other.”

  “That suits me fine.”

  “I need to know what she told you about her sister.”

  “That’s the funny thing. Until that last conversation, the one when she gave me the box, she never mentioned any family at all.”

  “Did she give you a description of her sister?”

  “Yes. Her name is Verity. She has blonde hair, not red—Mademoiselle White was particular about that detail—but she’s otherwise about the same height and build.” Blanchard pushed himself to his feet. “In that respect you are fortunate. I took a picture of her at Longchamp.” Blanchard pulled out a pair of photographs from beneath one of the owls on the mantelpiece. “You may keep both of them.”

  “Are these your only copies?”

  “No. I had a number of duplicate prints made when I was expecting the police to take an interest in matters. I assumed they would want them for their inquiries.”

  Floyd examined one of the pictures of Susan White. It was a full-length shot of her standing up against a backdrop of railings, with the elongated blur of a horse passing behind. She was holding on to her pillbox hat as if the wind had been about to snatch it away. She was laughing, startled and happy. She did not look like someone who would be dead in a few weeks.

  “She was an attractive young woman,” Blanchard said, settling back into his seat. “But I hardly need tell you that. She had the most beautiful red hair: it’s a shame that you can’t really see it, bundled up under that hat. She usually wore green. I always think redheads look good in green, don’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Floyd said.

  Custine examined the picture. “Quite a looker. Are they all like that in America?”

  “Not in Galveston,” Floyd replied.

  Two further flights of stairs led up to the rooms that the American woman had occupied during her last three months of life. Blanchard informed Floyd that the apartment had not been occupied since her fall. “It’s barely been touched,” he added. “The room has been aired out, but other than that it’s exactly as she left it. Even the bed was made. She was a very tidy young woman, unlike some of my tenants.”

  “I see what you mean about the books,” Floyd said, the floorboards creaking as he moved to examine the collection Susan White had accumulated. Books, magazines and newspapers occupied every horizontal surface, including a significant acreage of the floor space. But they were neatly stacked and segregated, hinting at a strictly methodical process of acquisition and storage prior to shipment. He remembered Blanchard’s sighting of her making her way to the Métro station with a loaded suitcase, and guessed that she must have made dozens of such journeys every week, if the collection had been changed as often as Blanchard claimed.

  “Perhaps you will see some rhyme or reason to it that escapes me,” Blanchard said, hesitating at the threshold.

  Floyd bent down to get a better look at a stack of phonograph records. “Were these part of the stuff she was collecting and shipping as well?”

  “Yes. Examine them at your leisure.”

  Floyd leafed through the mint-condition recordings, hoping for some insight into the woman’s thought processes, but the records were as varied in content as the rest of the material. There were jazz recordings, some of which Floyd owned himself, and a handful of classical recordings, but the rest of the collection appeared to have been compiled at random, with no consideration for genre or intrinsic merit.

  “So she liked music,” he commented.

  “Except she never played any of those records,” Blanchard said.

  Floyd looked at one of the records more closely, studying the sleeve and then the groove of the platter itself with a narrowed, critical eye. Lately, a great many low-quality bootlegs had begun to turn up on the record market. They sounded acceptable to the untrained ear, but to anyone who really cared about music, they were an insult. Rumour had it that the bootleggers were operating somewhere in the Paris area, stamping out the cheap copies in an underground pressing plant. Having been stung by one or two of these poor copies himself, Floyd had learned to sniff them out. It seemed likely that more than a few of the dead woman’s records were bootlegs, but if she didn’t even listen to them in the first place, she had only herself to blame.

  Returning the record to its sleeve and standing up, Floyd noticed an old clockwork phonograph tucked away in one corner of the room, next to a more modern valve wireless. “Was that phonograph hers?” he asked.

  “No. It came with the room. It must have been there for thirty years.”

  “And she never played any of these records on it?”

  “I never heard her play any music at all. On the few occasions when I happened to be passing this room or visiting the one below it, I only heard noises from the radio.”

  “What sort of noises?”

  “I couldn’t hear them properly. She always had the radio turned down very low.”

  Floyd rubbed his finger through the dust on the top of the wireless. “Have you used this thing since she died?”

  “As I said, the room has been aired, but that is all.”

  “You mind if I find out what she was listening to?”

  “You are in my employment now, Monsieur Floyd. I authorise you to do as you see fit.”

  “I’ll check the balcony,” Custine said, “see how easy it would have been to fall from it.”

  Floyd knelt down next to the wireless set, having first smoothed out the scuffed and rucked-up carpet in front of it. It was a twenty-year-old Phillips set in a walnut-veneered cabinet; Floyd had owned one much like it during his first five years in Paris. He turned the wireless on, hearing the hum of warming valves and a crackle from the speaker grille. It
still worked.

  He felt a breeze on the back of his neck as Custine opened the double doors that led to the balcony. The distant sound of traffic pushed itself into the room, disturbing the silence like a disrespectful guest. Floyd’s hand moved instinctively to the tuning dial, preparing to make the little arrow slide along the illuminated band displaying printed wavelengths and transmitting stations. He knew all the stations that still broadcast the kind of music he and Custine liked to listen to and play. There were fewer of them each year. Fewer each month, it seemed lately.

  With the dial where Susan White had left it, Floyd turned up the volume. All he heard was static.

  “It’s off-station,” Floyd commented. “Either that or whoever was sending on this wavelength isn’t sending any more.” He took out his notebook, flipped to the first clean page and made a note of the position of the dial. Then he turned it, sliding the arrow from one end of the tuning band to the other. The wireless hissed and crackled, but at no point did Floyd tune in to a recognisable signal.

  “Well?” Blanchard asked.

  “There must be something wrong with the radio. I should have tuned into something by now.”

  “The wireless set was working perfectly before Mademoiselle White occupied the room.”

  “And maybe it was working when she was here as well. But it’s dead now, unless every station in France has just gone off the air.” Floyd returned the dial to the approximate position it had been in when he entered the room, then switched off the wireless. “It doesn’t matter. I just thought there might be a clue to her state of mind, if we knew what she had been listening to.”

  Custine came back in from the balcony, shutting the double doors behind him. “It’s secure,” he said. He touched his midriff. “The railings come up to here. How tall was she, monsieur?”

  “About your height.”

  “Then I suppose she might have tripped and gone over, if she was unlucky,” Custine observed. “But there’s no way she could have fallen just by leaning against them.”