by Scott, Manda
She is every bit as beautiful as Elodie Duval. Seeing it now, seeing it, the relationship is not in question.
So that’s one question answered. We don’t need the DNA. But who else knows?
More importantly: when did Elodie find out?
And is it enough for her to kill? Or for her to be hunted?
Who, in fact, would care, beyond those already dead?
Start with the easy ones. Picaut takes out her phone and makes some new notes:
– Who knew about Elodie? (Besides Sophie.)
– Who was the father? François Duval?
– Elodie’s cipher: Paul Rey’s son. Diem’s legacy?
– Who is Diem?
– Who is Paul Rey’s son?
– How is he Diem’s legacy?
– Who was John Lakoff?
– Why did he die?
She throws the phone down and leans back, looping her hands behind her head. What difference would it make to me if I found out my father was not my father; my mother was not my mother?
My mother? I never knew her, let that one go.
Father?
Her mind is an open void in which her father’s face blurs and shifts. His truth was the foundation stone of her life. It is impossible to imagine a world in which he was proved unreliable. Look at the pictures on the walls and on the sideboard; Elodie Fayette loved her parents equally – it shines from her eyes, on her face. She is the kind who loves fully, without restraint. Any mother would be proud to name her daughter.
Sophie, why did you give her away?
A knock at the door. Picaut uncurls from the sofa. ‘Martin, you don’t have to—’
Not Martin.
‘Sup.’ Patrice is as she remembers: alive, wild, electric. He reaches out as if to touch her arm, and then stops. His hand drops to his side. The smile falls from his face. ‘Can I come in?’
She steps back. They stand inside the threshold, stiffly, unsure of where the boundaries are. The fire that flared between them was so brief and … bad metaphor. Picaut takes another, bigger step back. Patrice does the same. ‘My mistake. I’ll go.’
‘No!’ She reaches for his arm, pulls him in, kicks the door shut. ‘No. Come in. For God’s sake, come in. Have some coffee? I don’t have any Red Bull.’
‘I’ve given up.’
‘Coffee?’ She can’t imagine that.
‘No. The tins. Coffee’s fine.’ He fixes on a smile and she remembers this from the hospital, the sense of blotting paper in her mouth, a thick tongue, cheeks that hurt from smiling when she doesn’t want to smile. He’s the same. It’s why she let him go. Or sent him away: it might have been that.
Not smiling, he says, ‘Does this have to be such hard work? I thought we were doing OK earlier. I thought you might like to see me.’
‘I do. Really, I do. Is it me making the hard work?’
‘I don’t think it’s me. I just got off a plane from Brussels.’
‘That’s not the point. I didn’t …’ She closes her eyes and then forces them open again. ‘Let’s start back at the beginning. Patrice La Croix, I am really, really happy to see you. Really. Just surprised and out of practice at being human. Come in and sit down. It’s fine. I’ll make coffee and you can explain why you’re here.’
‘Isn’t that obvious?’ He follows her through to the kitchen. ‘I came to help.’
‘How? And … why?’
‘Why: because I can. How … You tell me? Coffee first, maybe?’
He is talking, but his eyes are speaking different words. He takes his phone out, and reaches into her pocket and lifts hers, light-fingered. Holding both close to the sound of the boiling kettle, he mouths the word: Fridge?
It’s concealed behind the kitchen facade, in the corner. Rolling her eyes, Picaut opens the door. He gives her a thumbs up, disembowels both phones and lays them with their batteries on the top shelf.
With the fridge safely shut, he leans against it, laughing at the look on her face. ‘What? You think I’m paranoid?’
‘I know you’re paranoid. What worries me is that you’re the one usually doing the listening, so in this case, I have to believe you’re right.’ She sweeps her hands over her eyes. It’s been a long day and the accumulated hours are beginning to eat at her. ‘It’s lovely to see you, but really, why are you here?’
‘Relax. It’s OK.’ He leans over and places a chaste kiss on her cheek. ‘I found Paul Rey’s sons. All of them. Pour me a coffee and I’ll tell you.’
They sit in the living room, shoulder to shoulder on the sofa. It’s like it used to be, almost.
Patrice pulls his laptop onto his knee. ‘Paul Rey is a one-man population explosion. Three American wives, one Canadian, one Columbian, all involved in espionage one way or another. Plus a French mistress at the UN who is the reason wife number five left. He never married the mistress and the relationship seems to have lasted longer than most. From the actual marriages, he has six sons that are legitimate, all military. The eldest died in Iraq. The next down is a navy cryptographer— What?’
He’s been typing his password into his laptop. Picaut just watched the flurry of letters, digits, capitals, lower case.
‘Can you hack into a laptop? This laptop?’ She hands him Elodie’s.
He laughs again and this really is quite like she remembers it. ‘Not legally.’
‘But still.’
‘Here—’ He takes it, wires it up to his own laptop, starts typing. ‘So, let me tell you what I found. Paul Rey’s first six sons are all models of probity. They’re boring as hell: buzz-cut forces officers who’ve never stepped a foot over any legal line. The seventh was the son of the mistress, the one who was a French “diplomat” at the UN.’ He puts quotes round the word.
‘You mean she was DB.’
‘Or as we’ve called it for nearly forty years, External Affairs. Her only child was a son. Paul Rey acknowledged fatherhood, which was the point when his fifth marriage fell apart. The kid followed his father into the CIA.’
‘But?’ She can hear the but.
‘But I can’t find his name and there are limits to how deep it’s sensible to dig into these things. I can look further if you need, but— Well, that didn’t take long.’ He has opened Elodie’s computer. The password is D13Ms L3g4cY. Of course it is.
She says, ‘Nicely done,’ and moves closer. Knee to knee, they watch Elodie Duval’s screen come to life. The desktop image is the now-famous still of the Maquis leaping the wall. Picaut looks at it differently now; Sophie is angled away from the rest. She is not one of them. Still, a single folder is placed over Sophie Destivelle’s heart: KRAMME’S WEDDING.
Within the folder is a video file: eighteen seconds of the Maquis assault on Kramme’s wedding. Picaut’s palms prickle. Her hair feels static. ‘Can I play this without it erasing itself or blowing us all up?’
Patrice leans back, loops his fingers behind his head. He gives her a look that used to curdle her innards and now simply warms them, which is good, probably. He says, ‘What can possibly go wrong?’
What, indeed? She presses PLAY.
He’s right. The hard drive does not chatter, the screen does not grow blank. In fact, nothing happens at all except that Paul Rey’s film begins to play.
It is in old, wartime colour, or has been made to look as if it is. The first few frames are almost pastoral in their beauty: a wide opening shot shows a blue sky, a snow-shouldered mountain, a valley, sparsely populated, and a small church, decked out in Nazi regalia. The groom and his bride emerge from the church, radiant: he in uniform, bedecked with medals, she in white, bearing a bouquet of lavender. She does not look happy. Something startles them, they turn to their left, and—
Patrice gives a long, low whistle. ‘They didn’t hold back, did they?’
And here it is: the film from which the still image was taken. Picaut watches the front line of the Maquis de Morez hurdle the wall. She knows them now: Céline, Paul Rey, Daniel, René, JJ, Laurence
, Sophie … Their guns blaze. The hate is real, and vividly alive.
At the moment she knows best, Picaut leans forward to stop the action. The image is wholly familiar, but the faces are sharper here, and while the colour may be faded pastel, it’s clear nonetheless; if it were shot yesterday, this could not be sharper, or better quality. She asks, ‘Can the CIA take really old film stock and bring the resolution up?’
‘Effortlessly.’ Patrice collects the original Maquis picture from the sideboard and brings it back to sit alongside the video. ‘What’s Sophie looking at?’
This is why she loved him. One of the reasons. ‘René Vivier asked that and I’ve not discovered the answer.’ Picaut restarts the action. ‘Let’s find out.’
The scene moves on. From Paul Rey to JJ, the Maquisards continue to charge at the camera. But Sophie darts off screen, and a few strides later, Laurence follows.
In the face of the screaming, firing Maquis, the camera swings violently away, wobbling, shooting on a crazy angle, so that Picaut and Patrice tilt their heads, following the picture, trying to keep it square. The line of sight runs clear past the church to where three figures sprint towards a line of cars. Four figures: one is up ahead, nearer the road.
‘That’s clever.’ Patrice points to the edge of the screen. ‘See the pixels at the margins? The original camera lost focus there. Cleaning that up won’t have been effortless.’
And so they see Sophie Destivelle running, shooting, then kneel to take one final shot at the German staff car on the edge of the picture. They see the rifleman in the back seat of the car fall. ‘Can you zoom in on that?’
‘I can try.’
He tries. He succeeds. Picaut taps the screen. ‘That’s Toni Gaspari, the third man in the Jedburgh team. Laurence told me he was shot by a German sniper.’ She chews on the edge of her thumb. ‘Why would Sophie kill one of her friends?’
‘Maybe she wasn’t aiming for him. That’s a German officer getting into the car.’
Picaut stops the film. Half a dozen frames, no more, focus on the figure by the car. They are as clear as digital wizardry can make them, but still, he is too far away, too small, too blurred to be useful. ‘Can you zoom in on him?’ To the right of the frame, Laurence has reached Sophie and is pointing a Colt at her head. Paul Rey is coming in on the other side. It’s a captivating tableau, but still …
‘Give me a minute.’ It takes him longer than that. Waiting, Picaut studies Paul Rey, the raw passions coursing across his features as he stands by Sophie Destivelle. It’s easy to see why it took the studio so long to find an actor to play him in a way that would adequately light up the screen. Easy, too, to imagine that he might get through five wives if Sophie Destivelle chose to marry someone else.
Patrice nudges her arm. ‘That’s the best I can do.’
His best is a miracle, or close to it. The Boche officer is in the process of throwing away his hat. The swing of his arm brings him face-on to the camera, which is, by chance – or perhaps not – looking back at Sophie and Paul. ‘Can you zoom in on his head? On his face?’
He can.
He does.
And there it is.
‘Inès? Inès, are you all right?’
‘I’m fine.’ Her head is a balloon, rising. Bright sparks float past her eyes. Her scar … does not hurt. ‘Fine. Really.’
‘You don’t look it.’ He’s gazing at her, wide-eyed, in a way she remembers, dimly, from the hospital.
She cuffs him across the head, lightly. She says, ‘Can you find me an image of Conrad Lakoff?’
It takes him longer than she thinks it might – Conrad Lakoff doesn’t like to be photographed – but Patrice is … Patrice. He finds what she needs.
‘Put it up there.’ Alongside Kramme.
‘Ah.’ He squints. ‘Think they’re related?’
‘I really do.’ Picaut drains her coffee. The feeling of standing on the edge of a cliff is back, full of adrenaline, magical.
Patrice says, ‘Sylvie’s trying to ring your mobile. Do you want me to divert it to a number they’re not listening to?’
She does. To Sylvie: ‘What have you got?’
‘Madame François Duval owns a cabin in the mountains north and east of Saint-Cybard. The Google Maps location is coming through to your phone now.’
‘Thank you.’
‘And Monsieur François Duval died in 1957, six months before Elodie was born.’ There’s a pause. Sylvie is not given to drama, so this is going to be good. ‘Elodie’s middle name is Céline. So you could say Elodie was the legacy of the Maquis.’
Of course she was. Nothing is quite as it seems. Where is she? Who cares who she was? To Sylvie again, she says, ‘Don’t go away.’ She fishes Conrad Lakoff’s business card from her pocket. To Patrice: ‘Can you trace a phone and show where it is on the map?’
Of course he can. A minute or two later, a red dot creeps slowly down a line south and east from Orléans. He says, ‘That’s the—’
‘A5.’ Straight to Saint-Cybard. ‘OK, find these.’ She gives him Martin Gillard’s number, Martha Lakoff’s, Clinton McKinney’s.
Two more dots join the first one – ahead of it, closer to the cabin that Sylvie has found. It turns out that Martha is leading the convoy, with Martin a few cars behind – he might be tailing her, he’s keeping a constant distance – and Conrad Lakoff is about an hour behind those two.
‘McKinney?’ Picaut asks.
‘He hasn’t left Orléans. Or at least, his phone’s still at home.’
‘Right.’ Too many variables. Picaut rakes her hands through her hair. ‘How long before Martha reaches the cabin?’
‘An hour? Bit less if she cuts across country at the end.’
‘And it’ll take us four hours at least. We don’t have that. Sylvie, are you still there?’
‘Sure am.’
‘Get Rollo and Petit-Evard, meet me at the studio ASAP.’ To Patrice: ‘Who do you know who has a plane that can take off and land in a field, and is fast enough to get us to Saint-Cybard in under two hours?’
He spreads his hands. ‘Ducat?’
‘Not if Conrad Lakoff’s listening in.’
‘Then you need someone who knows how to get past the law. Which means either a drug runner who doesn’t mind lending their wings to the police, or someone powerful enough that they might reasonably be taking off from Orléans without anybody paying attention. And the cash for a Cessna or something like it. And a pilot.’
That’s obvious then. There’s only one person they know with that much money and that much power. She says, ‘Lise Bressard and I went through a fire together: the least she can do is lend me a plane.’ Picaut grabs her bag, her keys, Elodie’s laptop. ‘I’ll drive. You see if you can find us a flat, safe, cow-free landing field close enough to the cabin, but not so close they’ll hear us come in.’
‘On it.’
‘And Patrice—’
‘Yes?’
‘The name of Paul Rey’s French mistress, was it Sophie Duval?’
‘No. It wasn’t her. This was a real flesh-and-blood woman who’s just retired from her post in the UN. Martine Gillard.’
And there we are. The final pieces slot into place. On her cliff edge, Picaut takes a breath, leans into the wind and jumps.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
SAINT-CYBARD
6 March 1957
KRAMME IS HERE. The feel of him is pure intravenous opium: just walking through the door, Sophie is more alert.
Her palms ache. Her head is too light, her vision too clear. She hasn’t seen him yet, but he is here.
She has spent four days in the bars and back rooms of Saint-Cybard, looking for a man whose features have been remoulded, whose voice has been coached into new cadences and dialects so that she will no longer recognize its pitch.
She has kept going, following a felt-sensed trail to this, the bar of the unimaginatively named Hôtel de Ville which was once the Hôtel Cinqfeuilles, and is now rebui
lt, refurbished, reborn in duck-egg pastel paints and linoleum floor tiles and strip lights that give off a headache-inducing glare.
Outside, it has snowed again, and the streets are crisply white, tinged to amber under the glare of the street lights. In here, oil-fired radiators keep the atmosphere damp and over-warm. Women cast off heavy coats. Men shed hats and gloves and scarves.
Sophie is sober in slacks and a dark sweater, low shoes, an Italian leather jacket in a dark pewter that matches her shoes and cost more than all the rest put together. She’s wearing a greying wig that puts ten years on her and make-up that diminishes her lips and eyes. Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she is a hard-faced, embittered loser. Probably, she supported the wrong side in the war and will spend the rest of her life trying to forget it. France is full of these.
At the bar, she orders wine and uses the time it takes to pour to check the mirrors. Thus she finds a man behind and to her left, in the dining area, eating alone with his back in a corner so that she can only see the edge of his hair. It is red, almost the colour Patrick’s was when he was whole. Céline said he’d done this and she didn’t believe it, but now, her body twitches. She has not seen him this close since he proposed to her. The thought makes her intestines writhe. It is him, though, without doubt. Kramme. Here. At last. Her Browning is a living thing, whispering in her handbag. Use me. Use me. Use me.
She is stronger than the voice. Other things matter than just his death. Wait and we shall have vengeance twice over.
Another glance in the mirror. He has a short, neat beard the same colour as his hair, and his glasses are more stylish and he’s wearing tweeds that look astonishingly foreign, here in the Jura, but she has visual, as Paul Rey would say, and it is entirely unambiguous.
Quietly and without fuss, she sets down her wine and leaves the bar.
In the lobby, she borrows the hotel phone and dials a number, not the Fayette farmhouse. She lets it ring three times, hangs up, rings again and lets it ring twice. Like the Morse tapped on her leg, the old code comes as instinct.
