Century Rain

by Alastair Reynolds

  “ ‘Some other enquiries,’ ” Belliard repeated, a mocking note in his voice. “That does sound so very professional, when you put it like that. What was Custine supposed to be doing?”

  Floyd shrugged: at this point he saw no need to lie. “There was something about the White case that bothered us. Custine needed to get a better look at the wireless set in her room.”

  “And that was the last time you saw him or heard from him?”

  “I tried calling the Blanchard apartment not long before you arrived. No one picked up.”

  Belliard looked at Floyd with an amused glint in his eye. “That doesn’t quite answer my question.”

  Floyd reminded himself that the last thing he should do was lose his temper with these Quai men, and forced himself to speak calmly and civilly, like a man with nothing to hide. “That was the last contact I had with Custine.”

  “Very well,” Belliard said. “And was there any sign that Custine had been here in your absence? He’s your associate, so I presume he has his own key to your premises.”

  “There’s no sign that he’s been back.”

  “Nothing disturbed, nothing missing, no messages?”

  “Nothing like that,” Floyd said, as wearily as he dared.

  Belliard motioned for the other officer to snap shut his notebook. “We’re done here, I think.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out a business card. “Now it’s my turn. We found one of your business cards on Blanchard’s body, and another turned up with the witness who saw Custine fleeing the scene. By way of reciprocity, here’s my card.”

  Floyd took it. “Any particular reason why I might need this?”

  “Custine may try to contact you. It’s not unusual, especially if someone’s just gone on the run. He may need personal items, he may need funds. He may wish to put his side of the story to a friend.”

  “You’ll be the first person I call if that happens.”

  “Make sure that I am.” Belliard reached for his hat, then stopped himself. “I almost forgot: there’s a small favour I need to ask of you.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “I need to use your telephone. We have a team still sweeping the crime scene and I’d like to call them before I make my next move, just in case they’ve turned something up. There’s a wireless in the car, but it’s a long walk downstairs and I won’t be able to call through to Blanchard’s apartment directly.”

  “Go right ahead,” Floyd said, feeling his blood temperature drop about ten degrees. “I hope that counts as co-operating with your enquiries.”

  Belliard lifted the receiver from its cradle and started dialling. “Very much so. And don’t let me walk out of here without signing you a chit for that horse.”

  The edge of Custine’s letter glared at Floyd, peeking out from underneath the telephone like a flag of surrender. If they found that note, Floyd thought, then he and Custine were both as good as dead. They would take Floyd down into the Quai and make life unpleasant for him until he gave them some lead that would bring them Custine. And if he died before they got it out of him, they’d simply make sure they had enough men on the job to cover all the possibilities. They had scented blood now: the chance to punish Custine for the way he had betrayed them all—in spirit if not in name—before his enforced retirement. It had been a long time coming, and they were not going to be in the most forgiving frame of mind.

  Belliard started speaking, his French almost too rapid and clipped for Floyd to follow. It was French with a heavy seasoning of police jargon: almost another language in its own right. The inspector leaned against the table and began to drag the telephone towards him by fractions of an inch, gradually exposing more and more of the letter.

  He’s going to see it any second now, Floyd thought, and he isn’t going to be able to resist taking a look at it. It’s what anyone would do, in the same circumstances.

  He heard someone try the outer door but find it locked. A voice called out in thick peasant French. Belliard motioned for one of the officers to open the door, while he continued speaking. Floyd picked up snatches of Belliard’s side of the conversation: something about the wireless itself being smashed to pieces on the pavement, along with Blanchard. And it sounded as if it had been a violent death this time, with no attempt to make it look like anything other than murder.

  The second officer reached the outer door and unlocked it. He opened it a crack and Floyd saw another officer standing there, a man who must have been waiting in the car downstairs. Floyd had a moment to register this scene and then the door was wrenched violently from the officer’s hand as another gale suddenly tore through the apartment, snatching into the air the few papers that hadn’t already found their way to the floor. In that squall of flying paper, Floyd saw the note from Custine flutter out from under the telephone, across the room and out through the open window, like a moth on the wing.

  Belliard concluded his call and returned the telephone to Floyd’s desk. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have opened that window after all,” he said, looking down at the carpet of dishevelled papers. “It’ll take you a month of Sundays to tidy up this lot.”

  “That’s all right,” Floyd said, wondering how obvious his relief was. “It was about time they had a good sort.”

  Belliard reached into his jacket and pulled out a book of chits. “How much for the horse?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Floyd said. “I was going to throw it out anyway.”

  After he had locked the door behind the Quai men, Floyd moved to the window, still open to the mid-afternoon city, and peeled aside the dusty slats of the blinds. He watched the black police sedan below grumble into life and move away. He looked up and down rue du Dragon, noting the positions and makes of the other vehicles parked there and paying particular attention to any that he did not recognise or that seemed out of place in the rundown backstreet, with its potholes and waterlogged drains. There, three shops up, was another dark sedan. He couldn’t tell the model from the angle of his view, but it looked similar to the police car he had just seen depart—probably an unmarked police vehicle. Behind the oily gleam of the windshield, he saw a man sitting patiently with his hands folded in his lap.

  Floyd had to give them credit. Less then four hours had passed since the murder, but the efficient boys from the Quai had already assigned a crack team from the Crime Squad to it. Admittedly, they hadn’t had to look very far for a lead—not the way Floyd and Custine had helpfully distributed business cards around the premises. But they had still organised a tail, and maybe more than one. Floyd had an idea of the way the Quai worked: if you thought there was one man putting you under surveillance, then there was probably a second or a third you had no idea about.

  Floyd let the blinds flick back into place. He felt drained, as if he had just staggered to his feet after receiving a stomach punch. Everything had changed since he had walked into the office, laden down with groceries and rather fewer problems than he imagined he had. Why was it never good news that put problems into perspective? Why did it always take another set of problems?

  He sat back down at his desk and tried to compose his thoughts. The basic details of the investigation remained unchanged, but now it was a double-homicide case, and the police had belatedly decided to take an interest. Or—more probably—they had latched on to Blanchard’s death as a pretext for punishing Custine. It still didn’t look as though they had much interest in the first homicide.

  But even though the letter was gone, Custine had still given him a vital clue. The typewriter hadn’t been a typewriter at all, but a sophisticated piece of enciphering equipment. Several things suddenly made a lot more sense—and they all backed up the spy hypothesis.

  Susan White had cooked her wireless to tune into coded transmissions. The dots and dashes had looked a lot like Morse, and maybe they were derived from it, but that was only the beginning of the encryption. Morse, as Floyd knew well from his days sailing out of Galveston, was just a way of sending the writ
ten word over the airwaves. Anyone with a Morse book could crack that kind of message even if they had no prior knowledge of the code, which was fine for parlour games, but nowhere near secure enough for spies. That was where the Enigma machine came in. The signals coming over the wireless set had already been scrambled by whoever sent them. White’s smashed Enigma machine had been her means of unscrambling those messages back into something readable.

  It meant that she was definitely a spy. No doubt about that now. It also meant there wasn’t a hope in hell of ever learning what was in those Morse transmissions.

  Floyd snapped out of his reverie and checked the time: three-thirty in the afternoon. Forcing himself into the role of a man who had had no contact with his partner, he decided that his most likely course of action would be to visit the scene of the crime and get the full story for himself. Floyd splashed some water down his throat, then grabbed his hat and coat. He was about to leave Susan White’s tin of documents where it was on his desk when a thought flashed into his mind: whoever had murdered Blanchard had probably been after the tin. First Susan White had been murdered, and now the landlord. Presumably whoever had committed the second homicide must now know that the tin was elsewhere. And with all those business cards lying around, it wouldn’t take them long to make the connection with Floyd.

  He picked up the tin. From now on, wherever he went, the tin was coming with him.

  Floyd turned the Mathis into rue des Peupliers, slowing as he noticed a trio of police cars gathered near number twenty-three. In his rear-view mirror he saw the dark sedan he had noticed on rue du Dragon glide past him towards the junction with rue de Tolbiac, slowing as the driver noted Floyd’s location. The kid pursuing Floyd was an amateur, and Floyd had made no effort to elude him on the drive across town to Blanchard’s street. There was almost certainly someone more experienced on the same surveillance detail.

  Floyd parked halfway up the street, stopped the engine and observed the scene in silence for a few moments. Although the death had happened at least five hours earlier, and probably more like six, there was still a large crowd of onlookers gathered on the sidewalk beneath the balcony. Their shadows were beginning to lengthen in the afternoon light. For a morbid instant, Floyd wondered if the body was still there, crushed and disfigured by the fall. That seemed unlikely, though, and the more Floyd looked, the more obvious it became that the spectators were only gathered around the entrance to the building because they were hoping to snatch a titbit of forensic gossip from the Quai officials—police and scientists—who were presumably still coming and going from the crime scene.

  Floyd smoothed his hair, slipped his hat on and left the car. He walked up to the gathering of onlookers, recognising none of them. Two uniformed officers were standing guard at the door, bantering with the crowd. Gently, Floyd pushed his way through the people until he was in plain sight of the policemen.

  “Can I help you, monsieur?” asked the older of the two officers.

  Floyd showed the man his identity papers and business card. “I’m a private detective,” he said. “Monsieur Blanchard—the late Monsieur Blanchard—happened to be my client.”

  “Bit late then, aren’t you?” the officer replied, to a chuckle of approval from his colleague.

  Floyd tried to sound as breezily unconcerned as the police officer. “Monsieur Blanchard had me investigating an earlier incident that occurred in this building. Now that something’s happened to him, I can’t help wondering if there’s a connection.”

  “Your client’s dead,” the older officer said. He had bad breath and a shaving problem. “Doesn’t that mean no one’s paying your wages?”

  “He gave me a generous retainer,” Floyd said. “Anyway, I still have a personal involvement with this case. My associate appears to be the prime suspect.”

  “How would you know that?” the officer asked.

  “I had a visit from Inspector Belliard. He filled me in.” Floyd lowered his voice. “Have you talked to these people yet?”

  “These aren’t the residents. Interviews with the residents are taking place inside.”

  “All the same, they might have seen something.”

  “They didn’t. They’d have said so otherwise.”

  Floyd turned to the people around him; by now he was the focus of attention, rather than the ominous dark smear on the pavement. “This is my case as much as theirs,” he said, addressing the gathering, making eye contact with as many of them as possible. “A woman was murdered here three weeks ago and these bright young things from the Quai didn’t bother taking it seriously. Now there’s been another suspicious death.”

  Floyd reached into his jacket and pulled out a sheaf of business cards. “If any of you people care about preventing a third homicide, now’s the chance to do something about it. Think back over the last few days, perhaps the last few weeks, if you like, and try to remember anything that struck you as unusual. Maybe it was someone hanging about that you didn’t recognise. Maybe even a child. My guess is that whoever was responsible for the first killing had something to do with the second.”

  A middle-aged woman in a droopy hat reached out and took one of the cards from his hand. “I saw something,” she said. “I tried to tell these men, but they weren’t interested.”

  “Call me and we’ll talk about it,” Floyd said.

  “I can tell you now. There was a big man, like a wrestler. Very well dressed, but all sweaty and out of breath. He came running out into the street and tried to flag down a taxi. There was an argument: someone else was already waiting for the cab and the big man didn’t like it. They almost came to blows.”

  “You saw this?” Floyd asked.

  “I heard it.”

  “When?”

  The woman looked across the gathering to a male friend. “What time was that commotion?”

  “I looked at my watch,” the other bystander said, taking the burnt-down stub of a cigarette from between his lips. He wore a chequered flat cap and a pencil moustache. “It happened at exactly—”

  “I didn’t ask you, I asked the lady.” Floyd turned back to the woman. “Did you actually see this happen?”

  “I said I heard it,” she repeated. “A commotion in the street, cars honking their horns, voices raised.”

  “But you didn’t actually see the big man yourself?” he persisted.

  “Not with my own eyes, no,” she said, as if this was only a subtle distinction. “But he did”—she pointed at the man again—“and what with the commotion I heard—”

  “This is a street in the middle of Paris,” Floyd said. “You’d be hard pressed to find a single half-hour when there wasn’t some sort of commotion.”

  “I know what I saw,” the spivvy man said, before pushing the exhausted stub of his cigarette back between his lips.

  “That argument over the taxi,” Floyd asked him, “did you notice anything else happening at the same time?”

  The man looked around at his fellow watchers, wary of a trap. “No,” he said, after due deliberation.

  “Well, that’s funny,” Floyd said, “because by rights there should have been a body on the sidewalk.”

  “Well, there was…” the middle-aged woman said, but on a falling note.

  “Before the fight over the taxi? Or just afterwards? Think about it carefully, because rather a lot depends on it.” While he was speaking, Floyd noticed a younger woman looking at him from the back of the crowd. She kept opening her mouth, as if on the point of saying something, but other people kept interrupting.

  A man in a butcher’s apron raised his hand. “Why did you ask about a child just now?”

  “Just covering all the bases.”

  “I did see a child. A little boy. A very nasty-looking one, hanging around here.”

  Before Floyd could pursue that information, a new voice emerged from the doorway leading into Blanchard’s apartment building. “Send him inside. We need to talk to him.”

  Floyd quickly handed
out the rest of his business cards, urging the witnesses to contact him if they remembered anything else. He watched as someone passed a card to the woman at the back of the crowd. Then he slipped past the two policemen into the dark, mildewed hallway of the apartment building.

  “Hello, Floyd. I notice you’ve been scattering cards around like confetti lately,” the newcomer said, still standing in the shadows.

  “The last time I checked, there wasn’t a law against it.”

  “You’re right to phrase it that way,” the man replied. “These days, one can’t be too careful about anything, including the law. Shut the door behind you.”

  Floyd found himself doing as he was told. The man’s voice was simultaneously both commanding and reassuring. It was also a voice Floyd had heard before.

  “Inspector Maillol?”

  “It’s been a while, hasn’t it? How long ago was the Monceau stabbing—five, six years?”

  “At least.”

  “An ugly business all round. I’m still not convinced we caught the right man.”

  Floyd’s involvement with the case had been tangential—one of his then clients had been linked to the victim—but it had still been enough to bring him into contact with the men from the Big House. Politely enough, Maillol had told him to stop treading on their steel-capped toes. Floyd had taken the hint.

  “I assume you’ve already had a nice chat with my colleague Belliard?”

  “He got his point across,” Floyd said.

  “Belliard has his methods; I have mine.” Maillol looked every bit the evil interrogator: he had a thin, drum-tight face through which the bones of his skull seemed about to burst, a cruel little mouth and crueller little eyes behind rimless glasses. The last five or six years had done nothing to soften that countenance. He took off his homburg and scratched at the shaven egg of his scalp.

  “I hope your methods are an improvement,” Floyd replied.