Century Rain

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Guess,” Floyd mouthed back.

  “And these leads?” persisted Blanchard.

  “Bit too soon to say how they’ll pan out.” Floyd hesitated, then decided to try his luck. “Actually, I’ve already got a specialist working on the documents in the tin.”

  “A specialist? You mean someone who can read German?”

  “Yes,” Floyd admitted feebly. He sipped at the viciously strong coffee and willed Blanchard—and the world in general—to leave him alone until later in the day. Custine sat down on the edge of Floyd’s fold-out bed, hands in his lap, his flowered apron still around his waist.

  “Very well,” said Blanchard. “I suppose it would be naïve to expect concrete progress so soon in the investigation.”

  “Unwise, certainly,” Floyd said.

  “I’ll be in touch later, then. I shall be most interested to hear what your specialist has to say about Mademoiselle White’s papers.”

  “I’m waiting with bated breath myself.”

  “Good day to you, then.”

  Floyd heard the gratifying click as Blanchard terminated the connection. He looked at Custine. “I hope you turned up something useful last night after I left.”

  “Probably less than you’re hoping for. How did it go with Greta?”

  “Less well than I was hoping.”

  Custine looked sympathetic. “I guess from that conversation with Blanchard that you’ll be seeing her again?”

  “Later today.”

  “At least one more chance, then.” Custine stood up and began untying his apron. “I’m going downstairs to buy some bread. Smarten yourself up and we can discuss our respective experiences over breakfast.”

  “I thought you said you hadn’t turned anything up.”

  “I’m not sure that I have. At least, nothing I’d stake money on. But there was something—an observation made by Mademoiselle White’s neighbour.”

  “What sort of observation?” Floyd asked.

  “I’ll tell you over breakfast. And you can tell me how you got on with Greta.”

  Floyd leafed through the morning newspaper while Custine fetched the bread. He skimmed the headlines—something about a murder on the first page—until a familiar name jumped out at him on the third page. There was a reference to Maillol, the same inspector who had given Blanchard Floyd’s name. Maillol was a good apple in an increasingly rotten barrel who had chosen to be sidelined rather than pursue the political agenda that Chatelier was forcing upon the police. Once a rising star of the Crime Squad—which was how Floyd had met him—Maillol’s days of high-profile cases and headline arrests were long over. Now he was working scraps from the table, unglamorous assignments like anti-bootlegging operations. According to the article, Maillol had uncovered an illegal record-pressing scam in the Montrouge quartier. The article described the investigation as “ongoing,” with the police following up a number of additional leads concerning other criminal activities taking place in the same complex of abandoned buildings. The news depressed Floyd. As glad as he was that he might now be able to scour the record markets without worrying that some apparently priceless piece of jazz history—say, a Gennett recording of Louis Armstrong from 1923—might actually have been pressed about a week ago, it was dispiriting to think of a good man like Maillol reduced to such meagre fare when suspicious deaths were going uninvestigated.

  He went into the bathroom and showered in lukewarm water stained with rust from the apartment’s ancient plumbing. There was a bad taste in his mouth and it wasn’t the shower water or the memory of the orange brandy he had shared with Greta. Drying himself, he heard Custine coming back into the apartment. Floyd put on a vest and braces and a clean white shirt, leaving the choice of tie until he had to face the outside world. He padded into the tiny little kitchen in his socks. A warm-bread smell filled the room and Custine was already spreading butter and jelly on to a slice.

  “Here,” the Frenchman said, “eat this and stop looking so miserable.”

  “I could do without him ringing us at eight in the morning.” Floyd scraped back a seat and slumped down opposite Custine. “I’m in two minds about this whole business, André. I’m beginning to think we should call it off before it goes much further.”

  Custine poured some more coffee for them both. His jacket was dark with rain, but otherwise he looked impeccably bright-eyed and well presented: cheeks and chin clean-shaven, his moustache neatly trimmed and oiled. “There was a time yesterday when I would have agreed with you.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I have my suspicions that there might be something to this after all. It’s what that neighbour told me. Something was going on, that’s for sure.”

  Floyd started on his bread. “So what did the neighbour have to say?”

  Custine tucked a napkin into his collar. “I spoke to all the tenants who were present last night. Blanchard thought they would all be home, but two were absent, or had at least left the building by the time we began our investigations. We can catch up with them later; at the very least it’ll give us another reason to drag things out.”

  “The neighbour,” Floyd persisted.

  “A young man, law student.” Custine bit into his jellied bread and dabbed delicately around his mouth with the napkin. “Helpful enough chap. In fact they were all helpful once they realised that they weren’t dealing with the Quai. And a murder—well…” He waved the bread for emphasis. “You can’t shut ’em up once they get it into their heads that they might be material witnesses in a murder case.”

  “What did the law student have to say for himself?”

  “He didn’t really know her at all, said he kept very odd hours as well and that their paths didn’t cross very often. Nodding acquaintances, that sort of thing.”

  “Did he fancy her?”

  “Fellow already has a fiancée, from what I gathered.”

  “It sounds as if he barely knew Susan White. What did he have on her?”

  “It’s what he heard,” Custine said. “You know what these buildings are like—walls like rice paper. He would always know if she was home: she couldn’t move around without the floorboards creaking.”

  “That’s all?”

  “No. He heard noises, strange sounds,” Custine said, “like someone playing the same note very quietly on a flute or recorder, over and over again.”

  Floyd scratched his scalp. “Blanchard said he never heard her playing any music at all, not on the radio or on that old phonograph. But he did mention noises.”

  “Agreed. And you think he’d have noticed if she kept an instrument in her room, wouldn’t you?”

  “So it wasn’t an instrument. What else could it have been?” Floyd mused.

  “Whatever it was must have been coming through the wireless. The way the student described it, the notes sounded rather like code. He heard long notes and short notes, and sometimes he was aware of repetition, as if a particular message was being repeated.”

  For the first time that morning, Floyd felt the onset of something approaching alertness. “Like Morse code, you mean?”

  “Draw your own conclusions. Of course, the student didn’t have the presence of mind actually to record any of these sounds as he heard them. It wasn’t until she died that he thought anything of it, and even then he didn’t attach any particular importance to it.”

  “No?”

  “He’s been studying for three years, renting almost a dozen different rooms in the process. He says he’d be hard pressed to think of a single neighbour who didn’t have at least one strange habit. After a while, he said, you learn to stop dwelling on such things. He admitted to me that he was fond of gargling mouthwash, and that at least one of his fellow tenants had commented that this was rather an odd thing to do at two in the morning.”

  Floyd finished off his bread and coffee. “We’ll need to get back into her room, examine it thoroughly this time.”

  “I’m sure Blanchard will be happy to oblige if he feels
it’s in the interests of the case.”

  “Maybe.” Floyd stood up, scratching his chin and making a mental note to shave before leaving the building. “But I’d prefer to keep a lid on this for now. I don’t want him getting all excited over the possibility that she might have been a spy.”

  Custine looked at him with a knowing twinkle in his eye. “But you’re considering it, aren’t you? You’re at least toying with the possibility?”

  “Let’s stick to concrete evidence, meaning eyewitnesses. What about the other tenants? Get anything from them?”

  “Nothing useful. One fellow reported seeing an odd little girl hanging around the place on the day of the accident.”

  “Odd in what way?”

  “Said the child looked rather sickly.”

  “Well, then,” Floyd said with a flourish of one hand, “round up the usual sickly children. Case closed.” But nagging at the back of his mind was the memory of the girl who had been coming out of Blanchard’s building when they had arrived the evening before. “There couldn’t really be a connection, could there?”

  “The fellow was just trying to be helpful,” Custine said defensively. “At least the tenants all have your card now, and everyone I spoke to promised to get in touch if anything jogs their memories. No one knew anything about a sister.” He set about buttering himself another slice of bread. “Well, that’s my news. Your turn.”

  The Mathis slid through thick Thursday-morning traffic, ankle-deep water hissing around the wheels where the overloaded drains had backed up and overflowed on to the street. The rain had finally eased and the sun was glinting fitfully off wet stonework and the fluted iron columns of street lamps; gleaming off statues and the Art Nouveau signs guarding the entrances to the Métro. Floyd loved Paris like this. Through his blurred and slitted eyes the city looked like an oil painting that needed a few more days to dry.

  “So about Greta,” Custine said, from the passenger seat. “You can’t put it off for ever, Floyd. We had a deal.”

  “What deal?”

  “That I’d tell you about my interviews, and you’d tell me about Greta.”

  Floyd’s knuckles tightened on the wheel. “She isn’t back for good. She won’t be rejoining the band.”

  “And there’s no hope of talking her into it?”

  “None at all.”

  “Then why is she back, if it isn’t to torment you with what might have been? She’s cruel, our imperious little Fräulein, but she isn’t that cruel.”

  “Her aunt’s dying,” Floyd said. “She wants to be with her until the end. That’s part of it, anyway.”

  “And the rest?”

  Floyd hesitated, on the verge of telling Custine to mind his own business. But Custine deserved better than that—his future was at stake here just as much as Floyd’s. He just didn’t realise it yet. “She’s not going back to the touring band either.”

  “Fell out with them?”

  “Seems not, just didn’t feel they were going anywhere, and that she wouldn’t be either if she stayed with them. So she got an idea into her head.”

  “She’s going solo?”

  Floyd shook his head. “More ambitious than that. Television.” He said the word like an obscenity. “She wants to be part of it.”

  “Can’t blame the girl,” Custine replied, shrugging. “She’s got the talent, and she’s definitely got the looks. Good for her, I say. Why aren’t you cheering her on?”

  Floyd steered the car past a hole in the road where some overall-clad workmen were swapping jokes but showing no other sign of activity. “Because she’s talking about television in America,” he said. “In Los Angeles, of course.”

  Custine said nothing for a few blocks. Floyd drove on in silence, half-imagining that he could hear the grinding of his partner’s mental gears as he worked out the implications. Finally they slowed for a set of traffic lights.

  “She’s asked you to go with her, hasn’t she?” Custine guessed.

  “Not exactly asked,” Floyd said. “More like delivered an ultimatum. If I go with her, there’s a chance for us to be together. She said we could see how it works out. If I don’t, she walks out of my life and I’ll never hear from her again.”

  They moved off again as the traffic light changed. “That’s quite an ultimatum,” Custine said. “Understandable from her point of view, though—it would be useful to have a burly American boyfriend around to fend off the sharks.”

  “I’m French.”

  “You’re French when it suits you. You pass as American just as easily when that suits you.”

  “I can’t go. I have a life here. I have a business. I have a business partner who depends on me for his livelihood.”

  “You sound like someone trying very hard to convince himself of something. Would you care for my opinion?”

  “Something tells me I’m going to get it anyway.”

  “You should go with her. Take the boat or plane or whatever to America. Look after her in Hollywood, or wherever it is that these television people have their empire. Give it two years. If it hasn’t worked out, Greta will still be able to make a good living back here.”

  “And me?”

  “If she makes a good living, maybe you won’t have to worry about earning one.”

  “I don’t know, André.”

  Custine thumped the dashboard in frustration. “What have you got to lose? We may have a case at this moment, but most of the time we barely have two centimes to rub together. It’s all excitement now, but if this murder investigation doesn’t pan out, we’ll be back exactly where we were this time yesterday: knocking on a lot of doors in the Marais. Except we won’t have a double bass.”

  “We’ll always find detective work.”

  “Undoubtedly. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in your employment, Floyd, it’s that there’s only so much money to be made from tracking down mistresses and missing cats.”

  “What would you do?” Floyd asked.

  “What I have always done,” Custine replied. “Follow my instincts and my conscience.”

  “I’ll hand the business over to you, of course, if it comes to it.”

  “Then you’ve at least thought things through that far. I’m glad, Floyd. It shows that you are thinking clearly, for once in your life.”

  “I’m considering the options. That’s all.” Floyd steered the car on to the street where Blanchard lived. “Nothing will happen until we solve this case.”

  “An unexpected breakthrough?” Blanchard asked when he opened the door to his rooms and let them inside. So little outside light made its way into the stairwells and corridors that the atmosphere of the building had barely changed from the previous evening. “Clearly a lot can change in an hour.”

  “I told you we had some leads,” Floyd corrected him. “In the meantime, my partner and I need to have another look in Mademoiselle White’s room.”

  “Do you think you missed something significant the first time?”

  “That was a glance, not an investigation.” Floyd nodded at the little briefcase Custine had brought with him. “This time we’re here to do a proper job.”

  “I’ll show you up to the room, in that case.”

  They waited a moment for the landlord to button on a cardigan and fetch his keys. Politely, Floyd and Custine followed him as he ascended the stairs to Susan White’s room on the fifth floor.

  “Just to confirm—no one but you has touched this room until we saw it yesterday?” Floyd asked.

  “No one at all.”

  “Could anyone else have found their way in without you knowing about it?”

  “They would need a key,” Blanchard said. “I have Mademoiselle White’s key. It was on her person when she died—the police returned it.”

  “Could someone have copied that key?” Floyd persisted.

  “Conceivably, but it’s numbered for an apartment. No reputable locksmith would duplicate it without consent from a landlord.”

&nb
sp; Blanchard let them into the room. In daylight it looked larger and dustier but otherwise was as Floyd remembered it from the evening before, crammed with books, newspapers, magazines and records. The balcony doors had been latched open an inch to air out the place, and the filmy white drapes drawn across them were moving in the breeze.

  “We’ll need some time alone up here,” Floyd said. “Please don’t take offence, but we tend to work best without an audience.”

  Blanchard hovered at the door, and for a moment Floyd wondered if they were ever going to get rid of him.

  “Very well, then,” Blanchard said eventually. “I shall give you some privacy. Please, leave everything as you found it.”

  “We’ll do just that,” Custine assured him. He waited until the door had closed behind the landlord before asking, “Floyd—what exactly are we looking for?”

  “I want to know what she was listening to on the wireless. Go and check that the old man isn’t still snooping around outside, will you?”

  Custine went to the door, opened it a crack and checked the hallway. “No, I can hear him moving down the stairs. You want me to check on the neighbours as well?”

  “No need. They’re probably at work.” Floyd knelt down and started fiddling with the huge old wireless set. He had brought his notebook and made sure that the dial was still tuned to the same wavelength as when they had last examined it. Once again, the tuning band’s pale illumination glimmered to life as the valves heated up, and there was crackling as he turned the dial and slid the arrow along the band from station to station. But there was still no music, no voices, no codelike noises.

  “Perhaps the neighbour was imagining it,” Custine said.

  “Blanchard also mentioned hearing noises. I don’t think the two of them were imagining the same thing independently.”

  “There must be something wrong with the wireless, in that case.”

  “Maybe there is. Look at this.”

  Custine knelt down next to Floyd and followed his partner’s gaze. “It’s a carpet, Floyd. They’re a surprisingly common feature in houses.”