Mind/Reader

by Brian Freemantle

  What Claudine failed to understand was the strained effort to introduce into a social conversation France’s most famous wartime hero through the tenuous coincidence of her father, a reminder of whom she didn’t welcome. Not, of course, that either Françoise or her husband would have known that, nor the reason for her reluctant attitude. That merely concentrated Claudine’s mind upon the anomaly more quickly and positively than it might otherwise have done. To no effect.

  It didn’t make a pattern.

  Claudine hadn’t promised a time, unsure when she’d postponed the previous day if there would be space on the early morning flight, so her arrival at the rue Grenette was unexpected. It was not, she supposed, possible to be devastated and glad at the same time but she was. Devastated at catching as she did her totally unprepared, disarrayed, vacant-eyed mother, beshawled and bird-limbed: glad at the same time - although for herself, not for her mother - that it was precisely how she’d caught her, unwarned and unable to attempt any artifice. Not that any artifice could have disguised the fact that her mother was dying.

  Because of which - despite the honesty that was their bond - Claudine cheated, by default. She feigned not to notice the frailty, busily too occupied tidying the apartment to notice the difficulty her mother had reaching the bathroom unaided but as quickly as she could from the specially positioned chair at the window overlooking her beloved Lyon, efficiently rearranging the disordered drug bottles on the bedside cabinet as if she was accustomed to them, guessing from the labels that she would find morphine injections in the kitchen refrigerator. Maybe it would have progressed to pure heroin.

  From the transformation when her mother reappeared Claudine recognized determined practice, although the rouge was too hastily applied and too red upon a face that had never known artificial colouring. Oddly it was now, when her mother had made an effort, that Claudine felt the asthma pull, not before when she’d realized how ill the older woman was.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done this,’ complained her mother openly, returning to her window seat.

  ‘I wasn’t sure of the flight.’

  ‘There are airport phones. Don’t lie.’

  ‘When do you start the chemotherapy?’ asked Claudine.

  ‘I might not.’

  ‘That’s stupid.’ She’d delay the inhaler for as long as possible.

  ‘It’s my choice.’

  ‘I told you to consider others in making it,’ Claudine reminded her, carrying the breakfast coffee to the table beside her mother and pouring it. The older woman didn’t attempt to pick up her cup and Claudine said: ‘Can I help you?’

  Her mother looked at her directly for the first time, without speaking. Claudine replaced the cup in its saucer, picking up her own, saying nothing more.

  Monique said: ‘It’s not going to be immediate, if I accept the treatment. Several months. Even a year. More.’

  ‘Which is why you must have it.’ Maybe she was wrong about the morphine and the heroin.

  ‘I can’t work in the restaurant any more. And I won’t sit there, not like I am now.’

  ‘You could.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘There is still a lot you can do. You always worked too hard.’

  ‘The restaurant was my life. All I ever wanted to do.’

  ‘Now you can’t, not any longer,’ said Claudine, refusing the self-pity. ‘Accept it.’

  ‘It’s difficult.’

  ‘But possible.’ Unable to wait any longer Claudine depressed the plunger of the inhaler, sucking in the muscle relaxant.

  ‘It is possible for you to come down during the week?’

  ‘I don’t know. Why?’

  ‘I want you to instruct the notaire.’

  ‘It’s not essential that I’m here. He might not even want me to be.’

  ‘I want you to be.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  The older woman at last picked up her coffee with a wavering hand. Some splashed into the saucer and then on to the carpet. ‘I’ve decided to marry Gerard.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘Not that it will do him any good.’

  ‘You didn’t mean that. You shouldn’t have said it. It was cruel. You’re not cruel.’

  ‘Who knows what anybody is? Do you think you do?’

  ‘I’m supposed to.’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ admitted Claudine, who had no intention of fighting her mother about anything, absolutely wrong though the psychology was. ‘When’s the wedding?’

  ‘When I’m stronger.’ There was a head movement towards the bedside cabinet. ‘I’ve got some pills that will help.’

  ‘I’d like to be there.’

  ‘I want that, too.’

  Head sunk forward on her chest, so that it was hard for Claudine to hear, her mother said: ‘I’m very proud of you. I always have been. I need to know you understand that.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Thank you. I saw the television, about Rome and Cologne. They talked about Europol. Weren’t you involved?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why weren’t you on television then?’

  ‘It’s not part of what I do.’

  ‘I’d like to see you on television. For you to be famous: my own sanglier.’

  ‘I got a commendation, from the Commission, for what I’ve done.’ It was for her mother’s benefit but Claudine wondered about hopefully turning it to her own. ‘Sanglier was part of it.’

  Monique smiled. ‘Can I tell Gerard?’

  ‘Of course.’ Claudine made her decision. ‘Sanglier’s mentioned my father.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Talked about the coincidence of both of them working in Interpol archives.’

  Monique snorted a laugh. ‘Imagine, thinking of one with the other!’

  ‘Was it possible they knew each other?’

  There was a curt headshake. ‘William Carter was posted from England after the war: after the transfer here, from St Cloud. Sanglier himself only returned to St Cloud briefly. He only came here for special ceremonies.’ There was a smile of nostalgia. ‘They were always fabulous occasions … bands … flags …’

  It didn’t sound unnatural to Claudine for her mother to refer to her father by his full name: she’d begun to do so at the time of the disgrace, as if trying to distance herself from the man. ‘So he might have met him, at least?’

  There was another headshake. ‘I don’t think so. On the special occasions here Sanglier was always with the important people. The Director-General himself. Their wives were invited. I never was. I was glad, later.’

  ‘Did he ever talk about Sanglier?’

  ‘William Carter?’

  Claudine nodded.

  ‘He may have done, when the visits happened. I can’t remember.’

  ‘They were big events? I thought something would have been said.’

  Her mother frowned at her. ‘Why is it important?’

  ‘It’s not. It was just that Henri Sanglier mentioned it. I was curious.’

  ‘William Carter was a failure. A weak man. You know that as well as I do. The two men shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath.’

  ‘I’ve never been able to understand why he didn’t tell you - refused to tell me, when I asked him - why he had to leave Interpol.’

  ‘Shame for whatever he did. Something he was too ashamed to tell me about. What else? The same reason he didn’t appeal, as he could have done. I hate weak men.’

  Her mother was flushed, beneath the rouge, and Claudine decided the conversation, pointless anyway, was upsetting the older woman. She was aware her mother had stopped short of including Warwick in her condemnation. She’d only made the accusation once, directly after the suicide which of course she had regarded as a mortal sin. Both of us were cursed by weak men. She had stopped short then, too, from saying they were both fortunate to be freed from the burden. ‘I have to go out this morning.’

  ‘Why?’
/>
  ‘Things to shop for,’ Claudine lied. ‘There’s no time during the week.’

  Her mother’s oncologist was named Andre Foulan and his consulting rooms were on the rue de la Martiniere. There was no less traffic in Lyon during weekends than there was during the normal working period but Claudine got there early and Foulan ushered her immediately not into a sterile consulting room but into his comfortable, family-photograph-festooned lounge. It seemed the wrong place for their intended discussion: too personal. Claudine thanked him for making the special appointment and Foulan, a white-haired, professionally sympathetic man, insisted it was not inconvenient.

  ‘It wasn’t caught in time, was it? demanded Claudine bluntly.

  ‘It would have been better if she hadn’t delayed.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘It’s impossible to estimate. Your mother is an extremely strong-willed woman when she wants to be. When she’s motivated. Which she isn’t, at the moment. There’s no evidence of secondary tumours.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘There’s the possibility of a spread to the lymph glands, which you already knew about.’

  ‘Will the chemotherapy help?’

  ‘I hope so. But there are distressing side effects. Hair loss. Diarrhoea. A general weakening.’

  ‘My mother intends getting married again. A longtime friend.’

  The specialist pursed his lips. ‘That’s a good idea. It will give her a focus, to go on fighting. It would be best, for her well-being, for the ceremony to be as soon as possible, before the effects of the treatment.’

  ‘I saw some medication at the apartment this morning.’

  ‘Morphine isn’t necessary at this stage. Heroin, either.’

  ‘My mother has accepted she is going to die.’

  ‘I wish she hadn’t. She insisted on complete honesty, which is her right.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ She was thinking according to her training as a psychologist, not as a daughter.

  ‘Pray,’ suggested the man.

  ‘I don’t have that option.’

  ‘Make sure she agrees to the chemotherapy. Radiotherapy if necessary. And doesn’t abandon it when it becomes unpleasant. Don’t let self-pity get a hold.’

  ‘I don’t live or work here in Lyon.’

  ‘I know. Arrange the wedding ceremony as soon as possible. And ask the man to come to see me.’

  She hadn’t arranged her own gynaecological check-up or mammogram, Claudine remembered. She was shocked she had forgotten. She’d do it as soon as she got back to The Hague. ‘I’m very grateful.’

  ‘I’ll always be available if you want to call.’

  ‘Would it create an ethical problem to ask you to call me, if there’s something I should know in a hurry?’

  Foulan did not reply immediately. Then he said: ‘Probably. But why don’t you leave all your contact numbers?’

  Back at the rue Grenette Gerard Lanvin abandoned his kitchen and sat nodding over an early cognac to Claudine’s account of her meeting. When she finished Gerard said: ‘The treatment is precautionary, that’s all. It will be much longer than a year.’

  ‘Of course it will,’ agreed Claudine, knowing the man’s need. ‘You’ll see Foulan, won’t you?’

  ‘This week. As soon as it’s convenient for him.’

  ‘I’m glad it’s happening. The marriage, I mean.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘She didn’t think you’d want to.’

  ‘She told me you’d said I should be given the choice. Thank you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I’m not doing it out of pity. Or because I feel I should. I’m doing it because I love her.’

  Her mother was dozing in her chair when Claudine got back to the upstairs apartment and Claudine dismissed the half-formed idea of suggesting they go for a brief walk, perhaps as far as the river. The older woman managed some soup for lunch, and in the afternoon announced that she intended returning that evening to her restaurant. It took a long time for her to bathe and prepare herself and she didn’t make the effort with the unaccustomed rouge this time. It wasn’t necessary because the prospect of going downstairs brought some pinkness to her face. The white-bloused and black-skirted uniform did not overwhelm her mother as much as Claudine had feared it might. Throughout the preparation Claudine helped where she could and warned Gerard in advance, so the table at which Monique usually sat at the end of every evening was kept free. Monique didn’t question the arrangement, nor insist upon trying to stand at her usual welcoming post, just inside the door.

  Instead that night the customers came to her, which they did in continuous homage. Monique ate far more poached sole than Claudine had hoped and Claudine did not have to encourage her mother to go to bed. Monique announced the decision herself, just after nine o’clock. Claudine let her leave the observing restaurant unaided.

  Monique went down again the following day, to supervise Sunday lunch, and stayed longer and ate even more fish than she had the previous evening.

  Later, upstairs again, she announced triumphantly: ‘I can work again! From the table. Everything is going to be almost like it was before,’ and Claudine said she’d known it would be all along.

  Claudine pressed the wedding discussion to the point of their deciding a provisional date, a Sunday three weekends away to fit Claudine’s convenience. Monique promised to start whatever therapy Foulan prescribed immediately afterwards.

  Claudine’s return flight was uneventful and on time and she made it thinking only of her mother, regretting during part of the reflection that she didn’t feel able to pray but encouraged by the enthusiasm that had so abruptly returned to her mother on being in the restaurant again.

  The message light illuminated one call on her answering machine when she entered her apartment. She clicked it to replay, her mind so occupied by the weekend that she expected to hear her mother.

  Instead it was a man whose modulated tones she’d heard once before on a recording. The voice said: ‘Claudine! Long time no see. My fault entirely. I’m sorry … sorry that I didn’t get to Warwick’s funeral, either. Why don’t you give me a call on this number? It’s Paul Bickerstone, by the way …’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  It was a long night made longer by Claudine’s confusion, which was one of the few things she positively recognized and which compounded itself - briefly blanking her mind completely - because one of her few other rational thoughts was that she should have been too well trained, too professional, to give way to the mental and physical numbness that gripped her after listening to a man who absurdly - hysterically, she accepted - always appeared in her mind’s eye in a fancy dress gorilla suit. In those first hours the asthma banded vice-like around her chest so that the breath groaned from her and she sat slumped in the chair, gasping the contents of the inhaler into her blocked lungs so often she risked overdosing on salbutamol.

  Not even finding Warwick’s slowly twisting body at the end of a suicide rope had affected her so badly, robbing her not just of the ability to breathe but of the mental and physical control of which she had always been so confident. It was her confidence, the touchstone upon which, until that moment, she had always been able to rely.

  It was her anger at that, the feeling of being robbed, that finally enabled Claudine to start thinking in anything like a rational way, although with gaps in her reasoning. She started breathing more normally, too.

  It was her training that made Claudine logically analyse her near collapse - never before needing so much to observe her ‘know thyself’ precept - and the self-diagnosis satisfied her. Seven months before she had found a man she’d believed fulfilled to be her husband dangling from a strangling rope. Then she’d been told he was a suspected homosexual member of an insider trading group at the same time as she herself was assigned to an investigation upon which her entire future depended. And this very day she’d returned, to a message from the man in a gorilla suit at the centre
of the £200,000,000 fraud, from having confirmed that a mother who had been the bedrock of her life - the only person in her life, now that her husband was dead - was going to die within months.

  The surprise was not that for a few brief hours - no more than four, at the most - she had mentally been unable to function and could scarcely breathe. It was that it hadn’t been much worse and lasted much longer. That she was, within limitations, functioning normally again proved just how incredibly strong she was, mentally. Most of all it proved she had no cause to doubt herself. It was the most comforting reassurance of all and one she would have clung to if she’d required reassurance, which she told herself she didn’t need but welcomed, snatched at, just the same. Know thyself echoed in her mind, mockingly.

  For the remainder of that night Claudine didn’t properly sleep, but in her half-awake, half-somnolent suspension she actually realized how the identification appeal could be made successful and became fully conscious thinking more about that than her several-layered personal problems. Which she took as further confirmation that she’d recovered from the totally understandable hiatus and was back in full control of herself again. It didn’t solve her overwhelming problem but it wiped away a lot of her subsidiary uncertainties.

  Claudine studied herself for a long time in the magnified make-up mirror, resigned that she couldn’t do anything about the black hollows around her eyes but otherwise satisfied with her appearance, which certainly didn’t attract the wrong sort of attention when she arrived at the incident room, or during her presentation of her sleep-suspended idea.

  ‘Amnesty?’ demanded Poulard.

  ‘Why not?’ said Claudine. ‘We’ve got the facial identification, without the names. So we can’t be cheated by any false claims, although inevitably some people will try it. And when they do and are found to be lying they can be prosecuted as illegals and expelled. If we offer the victims’ families an amnesty against expulsion, there won’t any longer be anything to stop them coming forward. If just one person does …’ She stalled, briefly, stopping herself from saying ‘I’. Instead she continued: ‘ … we’ve got the chance to find out one of the most important - perhaps the most important - linking factor in our Céleste killings. We’ll get the guide to why they were killed. Open everything up.’