by Scott, Manda
‘We?’
‘My father and I.’
‘May I ask why?’
‘You can, but I’m not sure we’d have a good answer. Instinct, maybe? The hope that we might see something that would crack this open and bring my grandfather back? I realize it’s not likely and we’re grasping at straws, but sometimes straws turn out to be just what we need.’
His gaze skates off hers, shyly, and he is not a shy man. How can she refuse? ‘Of course,’ she says. ‘I need to call in at the IR. I’ll meet you at the pathology suite in half an hour.’
Rollo is waiting for her at the incident room. He hands her coffee and a cheese baguette as she walks in and, through mouthfuls, she says, ‘I want you to pick up Laurence Vaughan-Thomas and René Vivier. We’re getting a safe house near the river where we can keep tabs on them. Ducat’s covering the cost. I’ll text you the address when I have it.’
‘Right.’ He picks up his keys, his phone, his gun. Picaut still hasn’t checked her own gun out of central holding. He says, ‘If it’s urgent, I’ll go for Laurence. Send Petit-Evard for René Vivier.’
‘No, René has a Colt automatic in a drawer by the front door. Evard doesn’t know how to handle a gun. You need to take that one. It’s not urgent. You can take both.’
‘OK. How was Ducat?’
‘Surprisingly calm given that Lakoff just took a piss all over his territory. I seem to be flavour of the month but I can’t imagine it’ll last. I’m going to ask Ducat to put a tap on his phone. It’s time we had a handle on how much he knows.’
There’s a pause. She glances up and finds him looking back, shaking his head.
She says, ‘Rollo? You think we can’t tap his phone?’
He shrugs. ‘You can’t.’ The emphasis is on the pronoun.
‘Who then?’
By way of an answer, he lifts her phone from her jacket pocket, and carries it, with his own, out into the corridor. Back inside, with the door shut, he says, ‘We need your ex.’ And then, in case she hasn’t got the point: ‘Patrice.’
Patrice. Hardly even an ex, more of a holiday romance except that they weren’t on holiday. Anyway, nobody needs Patrice, except presumably the team he’s working for in Brussels. She says, ‘Why?’
‘Because if you or I put a trace on Conrad Lakoff, he’ll hear about it in exactly the time it takes us to dial the number. Patrice walks the Dark Net the way the rest of us walk up stairs. He can do it under the radar without setting off warning bells – and if someone does notice, he can cover his tracks so the fallout doesn’t feed back to him. So if you really want to take a good look at Lakoff without bringing the entire weight of US spookdom down on your head, you need to see if you can entice Patrice back from wherever it is he’s hiding.’ He checks his gun, slips it into a shoulder holster; a man in his element. At the door, he turns. ‘And before that, you need to call Eric. Apparently you missed an appointment with Ingrid. He is not happy.’
14.50
Eric is not at all happy. More accurately, Eric is furious, but because he’s Eric, and because Picaut arrives accompanied by Strategic Operations Director Conrad Lakoff, and his father Edward, the former senator from Illinois, it would be hard for an outsider to tell.
Picaut knows, because he doesn’t make eye contact from the moment she walks in. He shakes hands with the Americans and puts himself at their service. You want to see the bodies? Certainly. Sophie Destivelle first. Of course, that’s not her real name. I don’t suppose we’re any closer to knowing who she is? If not, then we’ll call her Sophie. Her details are on the wall-file. Her body is here, in the cold cabinet.
And now she is here, lying on the trolley under the cold white lights with the smell of death and Hibitane and surgical spirit tainting the air. Her hair shines like spun starlight. Her eyes are closed. Her mouth is a thin, violet line, closed and stiff now, so that the loss of her tongue is not as evident. The cut to her throat, though, is fully open; Eric has cleaned away the blood and death has retracted the skin and muscle so that, when they tip her head back, both ends of her severed trachea show as a pair of oval pipes and the pale shimmer of her vertebrae is visible deep down in the back of her neck. Whoever made this cut put some power into it.
Beyond the knife wounds, she is whole. Eric has the neatest suture pattern in pathological history. You wouldn’t know he’d opened her up to look at her internal organs and closed her again.
They are looking, though, closely, and there is something deeply unwholesome about two strange men studying her naked body with such intensity.
The whole thing makes Picaut’s face ache and the sensation doesn’t abate when Pierre Fayette’s corpse is wheeled across to lie at Sophie Destivelle’s side.
‘I’ve only just made a start on Pierre,’ Eric says. ‘It’s a simpler death, obviously, in a much younger man.’
‘Definitely not suicide?’ asks the older Lakoff, bending down to get a better look. ‘There’s some powder tattooing around the wound?’
Speaking for the first time, Picaut says, ‘It wasn’t suicide.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I met Pierre while he was alive. I’m sure.’
Conrad Lakoff leaves his father studying the body and goes to look at the images of Pierre’s kitchen that are projected on the wall. ‘Tidy man?’ he asks, eventually.
‘Very.’
‘And a messy death.’
‘Very.’
He steps back. Picaut asks, ‘Did we miss anything?’
His smile is a counterpoint to Eric’s frigid politesse. ‘Nothing that I can see. Good call. Sorry to have wasted your time.’
‘Not at all. Glad to have your input.’ They shake hands. Conrad Lakoff is charming on the surface, and working like fury underneath. He smoothes the sleeves of his suit. ‘I ought to get back. Flesh to press, egos to stroke. And I have to go over my speech one more time. I hate speaking in public. If you hear anything of JJ, you will let me know?’
‘Of course.’
They leave, gathering their security men at the door. She watches them go and turns, slowly.
‘Eric, I—’
‘You blew her off. You blew me off. It’s fine. Forget it. You’re fine. Two failed surgeries that fell apart at round about this date but you don’t need a check after the third. It’s no problem.’
‘I’m—’ She runs her forefinger delicately along the scar on her jaw. When she thinks about it, it feels as if someone has slid needles under the skin and wired them up to the mains. ‘Am I too late to go up now?’
‘She’s a professional woman. What do you think?’
‘I think I’m fine. I don’t need to be seen. But I would like to apologize.’
He turns away. ‘She’s upstairs. You know how to get there.’
The clinic is on the fourth floor of eight. The lifts have a particular smell that leaves Picaut queasy. The waiting area is lit in a way that smoothes over skin tones. Even after the first surgery, if she waited until she was here to look in the mirror, it looked … acceptable.
Dr Sorensen is not immediately available. Picaut glances at her watch – it is nearly three o’clock. She checks her phone and finds no texts she must attend to, nothing in her timetable that needs her urgent attention … nothing, in fact, to offer a ready distraction.
She leans back and closes her eyes, which does little to help. It’s the smell of this place that undoes her; some part of her reptilian brain drinks in the unique cocktail of surgical antiseptic and hot-house roses and with no control at all, she’s back in a bed in a darkened room with a drip in one arm and a pulse oximeter hovering just above the level where the alarms scream in her ear and it hurts to breathe, to move, to open her eyes.
From here, it is too easy to step back through the gates of memory, to heat and smoke and blazing flame and the sense of breathing in death, of her lungs falling in on themselves, of the world narrowing to her hand in front of her face, and then not even that.
‘In�
�s?’
Picaut can stand next to a discharging firearm without flinching, but Ingrid Sorensen makes her twitch. She blinks open her eyes and here is Eric’s lover, dark-haired and solemn. If anyone can derail Picaut’s return to work, it is Dr Sorensen. Picaut says, ‘I’m sorry I’m late.’
‘Eric thought you weren’t planning to come.’
Well, yes. Is that surprising? ‘I have a case—’
‘I heard. Congratulations. So we’ll be quick, shall we?’
The smell in the air is fear, of course, not roses, and while there may be some catharsis in daydreaming while she’s alone, in company it’s altogether different. Picaut lies down on the inspection couch under a too-bright light, and all she can see is fire, and all she can taste is smoke, and her jaw is locked and her fingers are crushing each other, knuckle to knuckle, bone to bone, and—
‘Does it itch?’ A white light etches the edge of her jaw. She doesn’t flinch.
‘Not much.’
‘On a scale of one to ten?’
‘Three, maybe? Not all the time.’
‘Is that different from the last times?’
‘It was much worse last time.’ Either that, or her ability to ignore it is greater. She may have said this last time, too.
Ingrid makes notes. Over the scratch of the pen: ‘Do you ever see redness at the edges of the scar?’
‘No.’ This is entirely true: she has seen nothing, because she hasn’t looked in a mirror since the first surgery fell apart. Not until today, when Ducat lured her into it. There was no redness then. She would have noticed.
Ingrid writes something that is longer than ‘No’. Really, why bother asking questions when Eric is providing all the information? Lean, cool fingers probe at the places Picaut is not allowed to scratch, setting off a fire of prickles.
‘I can give you something to take the heat out of it when it gets bad.’
‘Honestly, it’s fine.’
‘If you scratch it and break the skin, we’re back to square one and another round of surgery is not going to be easy.’
‘I haven’t scratched it yet. I won’t scratch it now.’ Picaut sits up on the couch and swings her legs over. The idea of rubbing cream into the scar makes her want to gag. ‘I’m fine. I’m really, really grateful. And I’m fine. Honestly.’
Ingrid Sorensen sits on the chair beside the couch and takes Picaut’s hands. Her thumbs soothe over the white-green knuckles in a way that makes Picaut want to weep. ‘You’re on the way to being fine. You’re not there yet. I would like you to keep heading forward and not back. So I’m going to give you the cream and you don’t have to use it. But if you do, rub it carefully from the back to the front in small circular motions. I’ve put it in your coat pocket. If you never use it, that’s fine by me. I’ll see you again in a month. OK?’
1942: Baedeker Blitz on English provincial towns underway in revenge for RAF assault on Lübeck. Targets picked from the popular European guidebook.
Home Front, July: 87 British civilians killed, 471 injured. Civilian petrol ration abolished. Widows’ and pensioners’ allowances increased by two shillings and sixpence per week. Labour MPs say it is not enough.
SOE, F-Section: Of eight agents so far parachuted into France, five are thought still to be at liberty. Of those taken captive, at least one is dead.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BAKER STREET
24 July 1942
‘ALORS, MES INFANTS. Have we had an exciting night?’
It is high summer. Laurence’s office is busier these days. He shares it now with his cousin Theodora and her astonishingly attractive raven-haired lover, Julie Hetherington.
Theo was always going to be a valuable addition to the team, but Julie is a revelation. She is, Laurence has discovered, the kind of woman who renders ordinary men dumb, with that glazed look that means they have forgotten, temporarily, about the difficulties in Yugoslavia, where the partisans are fighting each other rather than the Germans; or the failure to destroy the heavy water plant in Norway (so far; that will come, he is sure), or the distressingly short life span of W/T operatives behind the lines in France.
A constant stream of nervous young captains find reasons to visit his office and, on leaving, extend invitations to dinner. Julie rebuffs them with a generosity of spirit that leaves them eternally hopeful and hopeful men work harder, with the result that there is a sparkle to F-Section and to Signals in particular that was lacking before.
Beyond her obvious effect on the Firm’s morale, Julie has proved to be a brilliant mathematician. If anyone can squeeze meaning out of a mangled cipher, it is Julie; Laurence has almost begun to look forward to the morning’s cache of mis-spellings, fuzzed reception and failed transpositions all neatly realigned.
Just now, a copy of Le Grand Meaulnes lies open on her desk and a night’s worth of squared paper lies piled, edge perfect, in her out-tray.
He pulls a face. ‘Paul Mignon sending us rubbish again?’
‘Don’t fret, I’m nearly there.’
Whoever is operating the set, Mignon’s scheduled time is near midnight. If Julie’s near to cracking it, then it’s a record: the garbled ciphers from Saint-Cybard are a breed apart. It is to be supposed that men under pressure will make mistakes. The obverse of this is that one might imagine – Laurence certainly does – that German wireless telegraphers are man-machines of immense discipline who can rattle out Morse at over thirty words a minute with never a missed dit.
It would be immensely suspicious, therefore, if every missive from an operative supposedly in the field were to be perfect, but the fact that in the past six weeks not a single one of Paul Mignon’s twenty messages has come through without an error, is a statistical improbability verging on the impossible. It is this, above all else, that has led Laurence to conclude that the Frenchman is certainly dead, and that a more than usually clever German wireless operator is striving for verisimilitude by inserting errors.
A copy of the mutilated code lies on his desk:
And on … He has his own copy of Alain-Fournier’s novel in his drawer. Mignon never used the poem code: he trained in Paris and then London using the MI6 book-based system, which is infinitely more secure than the poem codes of the Firm. For one thing, the enemy cryptographers are unlikely to know the words off by heart. Furthermore, if they have the wrong edition, the page, line and word numbers set out in plain text at the start of each message will be worthless. The only reason the Firm doesn’t use the same system is that Six has forbidden it: their spies are too valuable and they don’t want amateurs from the Firm spoiling a perfectly good routine.
Laurence’s check on the first indecipherable message was to find out if Mignon had suddenly switched to a new edition of the book, but Julie broke that one after two days’ work by finding that he had spelled fiancée with only one ‘e’ at the end. It’s the kind of mistake agents make all the time, but not one you’d expect of a Frenchman who professes to love literature.
That was the simplest of the mistakes. Since then, they have worked hard to crack each one of his messages: the longest attempt took eight thousand permutations before they found the one that worked. On bad nights, Laurence still dreams of it.
‘I think I may have got it.’ Julie lifts her head. ‘He’s spelled “Sablonnières” with an “O” instead of an “A” as the first vowel.’
Theo says, ‘Are we really supposed to believe that whoever is keying this is not just an idiot, but also functionally illiterate?’
Laurence asks, ‘What does it say?’
‘Patience, patience, it’ll be with you soon enough.’
They work on in silence for twenty minutes while Julie cracks the message, then types it out and passes it across to Theo at the middle desk, who hands it to Laurence on her left.
Julie lights up a valedictory cigarette, blows an evil-smelling smoke ring at the ceiling. The cigarettes are not what they were, even this time last year. Rumours of horse hair being mixed in w
ith the tobacco may not be true, but it’s certainly been diluted with something unpleasant. Laurence’s chest feels permanently tight and when he coughs in the morning, his phlegm has a strange dun-coloured tinge.
Theo comes to read over her shoulder. ‘Do they really have wrist detectors? Or is this some kind of Boche bluff to scare the agents?’
Laurence says, ‘Let’s hope for Sutherland’s sake it’s the latter.’
Patrick Sutherland gets on a train every morning and heads out to one of the research stations in Oxfordshire, helping the men in brown lab coats to perfect the timing pencils and work out wireless telegraph techniques that can’t be picked up by the Boche. Some people might be happy to spend their war this way, but Sutherland has been promised a return to the field and he is doing a fine impression of a caged tiger while he waits.
‘It’s not all rubbish,’ Theo says. ‘Lucas reported the increasing arrests of Jews in the north when he came home in February. It’ll almost certainly be the same in the south. They have deportation quotas to fill, so that’s true.’
‘Yes, but they’ll know that we know that. Lucas’s circuit was blown after he left. So they’re telling us things that are no longer secret.’ Laurence tips his chair back, lifts his heels onto the desk. He thinks better this way and he has a new idea. He passes the sheet back to Julie. ‘Take it upstairs. You deserve the credit in any case, and they’ll appreciate seeing you more than they will me.’
One has to assume they do because Julie doesn’t return to Laurence’s den until two o’clock. He hears her long stride and looks up as she bats open the door. ‘Good lunch?’
‘CD sends his regards.’
‘Goodness, you have soared high.’ CD is the Firm’s new director; the good one, who replaces the utterly abysmal one they had to start with. The new boy is their best, if not their only, hope of fending off the machinations of Claude Dansey and his team of vermin at Six.
Julie pulls a face. ‘I did nothing for an hour while you worked on your new problem. I think you have the better deal.’ She comes to sit on the edge of Theo’s desk and they share a cigarette with the ease of long practice, their blonde and dark heads tilted together.
