Authors: Kevin Wignall
Chapter Twenty-four
They both slept on and off during the journey to Paris, making up for how little sleep they’d had the night before. Inger was in low spirits too, understandably given what she’d been through. She looked as if she wanted to talk about what had happened that morning but, rightly or wrongly, Dan got the feeling she didn’t want to talk about it with him. With some small amount of guilt, he was grateful for that.
As they traveled from Gare Montparnasse in the cab he said, “We’ll book into the Hotel Vergoncey if they’ve got rooms. It’s a nice place—I’ve used it before.”
She agreed blankly, but a moment later she said, “Why did you need a hotel in Paris before now—you have an apartment, don’t you?”
“I’ve only owned the apartment for eighteen months. Actually, I lived in the Vergoncey for about six weeks when I was searching for the right place.”
She made no obvious response to that, but turned to him as if preoccupied and said, “We’ll need two rooms.”
“Of course,” he said and, ridiculously, felt stung all the same.
“I really enjoyed last night. I like . . . I like you, Dan. But it’s too quick to . . . and it’s not because of what happened this morning.”
He shook his head, and put a reassuring hand on her thigh, immediately feeling queasy with the memory of Sebastien Merel comforting his wife in the same way.
“I understand, and you’re right. Don’t try to explain.” He waited a beat and added, “Connecting rooms?”
“If they have them. After all, you need my protection.”
He smiled, because she was joking about it, which was a first step.
They checked in—there were no connecting rooms available, so they were placed directly across the corridor from each other—and then Dan made a call to the cell phone of Sabine’s old college friend Sylvie. She was working at home and gave them the address of her apartment in the 17th arrondissement.
They hadn’t really talked about the plan from here on in, but as they rode in the cab to Sylvie’s place, Inger said, “Who else do we see today?”
“After Sylvie, we visit Yousef.”
“You’ve called him?”
“No, I’ll ask Sylvie if I can call from there. Then I have to try to meet with another contact Patrick gave me, but I’ll go alone to that.”
She looked at him, immediately suspicious, and said, “Why alone?”
“You can come if you like, but I think he’s more likely to talk openly with me. He’s DGSE and he’s meeting me off the record.”
She still looked on the verge of objecting, but accepted it grudgingly and said, “And then?”
“I’m hoping we turn up something among those three people, because there’s no one else on the list.” The cab pulled over and he said, “We’re here.”
As they got out and looked at the building, Inger said, “It’s a nice place. A nice neighborhood.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty good. Actually, my apartment’s a couple of blocks in that direction.”
“Oh.” She sounded surprised, which made him wonder what kind of neighborhood she’d imagined him living in. “Maybe we could . . .” She stopped herself before the thought had even fully formed, probably realizing that it was impossible to visit Dan’s apartment. Even so, he liked that she seemed curious about it.
“Exactly. Brabham wouldn’t expect me to show up there in a million years, but I imagine he’ll still have someone watching it. You’d be disappointed anyway—it’s quite minimalist.”
They were buzzed up, and met at the door by Sylvie, a stylish woman in her mid-thirties, not pretty exactly but striking, with a bone structure that seemed to hint at a childhood spent in a country château and a lifelong love of horses.
She smiled and said, “Sebastien called me about you. Nice to meet you. So you know I’m Sylvie, and I presume you must be Inger.” She kissed her on both cheeks. “And Dan.”
“Thanks for seeing us.”
She waved away the thanks and walked on ahead of them into the apartment. They might have been in the same neighborhood, but that was where the resemblance stopped between Dan’s place and Sylvie’s.
The apartment they were in was vast and expensively furnished, a mixture of antique furniture and modern art. There were a couple of children’s toys lying about here and there, and a picture book open on a rug in the large sitting room. He thought Sylvie would pick it up, but she appeared not even to notice it. Dan couldn’t hear children, or any other noise in the apartment.
“Might I get you something to drink?”
Dan was almost tempted to say yes, just to see if she went for it herself or rang a bell, but he said, “No, thank you, and we won’t keep you very long at all.”
“If you’re here to talk about Sabine you can take as much of my time as you wish.” She walked across to a table against the wall at the side of the room and said, “This is one of hers.”
They both walked over and looked at the abstract bronze sitting on the table, abstract but somehow a completely feminine form, curved and fecund. Inger reached out and stroked the belly of it.
“It’s beautiful.”
Sylvie smiled sadly and said, “She was so talented. Women, especially, can never resist touching it. Such a lovely piece.” She gestured across the room then. “Please, let’s sit down.”
She sat on the edge of her chair with a remarkably straight posture, and looked expectant, as if to say she was completely at their disposal.
Dan cut straight to it and said, “Catherine Merel, when I asked her if Sabine’s roommates had noticed anything, she seemed a little confused, as if perhaps she thought you didn’t tell her everything at the time . . .”
He thought she might object but instead, she said, “We told the police. It was never made public, so we saw no need to upset Sabine’s parents.”
Inger sat up herself, as if mimicking Sylvie’s posture, and said, “So something did happen?”
“Yes. She said some guy tried to rape her at a party, about a week before, perhaps ten days. She managed to fight him off, but I think it shook her quite badly. And then he kept pestering her, telling her he was sorry, she’d misunderstood, that it hadn’t been what she thought. She had wanted only to forget it, but in the end she told him if he didn’t leave her alone she would go to the police and report it.”
“She didn’t?”
She looked skeptical as she said, “A woman going to the police two weeks after a party to say someone tried to rape her but failed? Sabine wasn’t stupid, she said it only to get him to leave her alone, but I think he believed it. She said he became quite threatening.”
Inger looked grave as she said, “You said you told the police, but nothing came of it?”
“We had no name, there was no record of suspicious calls. There was nothing to go on. And the entire case—it was as if it just vanished in the following months. Nothing. As if Sabine never existed.”
Dan started, “Were you ever tempted to—”
Sylvie put a finger up, silencing him, and she smiled, saying, “There is one more thing that happened. I’ve never told anyone else, but I knew this was a clear indication not to get involved.” Both Dan and Inger stared at her, waiting, intrigued. “We left the apartment later that summer. Neither of us were happy there after what had happened to Sabine, and something hadn’t quite felt right afterwards. You probably think me foolish if I talk of a sixth sense, but we both had the same feeling. And then, when we were packing up to leave, we found two . . . electronic bugs, one behind a picture, one behind a bedside cabinet. We didn’t know what they were, of course, but I took them to a friend at the university and he knew right away. A coincidence? Possibly. But I’m confident, we both were, that somebody had bugged our apartment, and I think what they wanted to discover was if we knew the identity of the man who tried to rape Sabine.”
It was quite a leap, but Dan could understand how they’d made it, and knowing what he knew, he guessed they’d probably been right.
Inger said, “Did you show the bugs to the police?”
Sylvie looked a little wistful as she said, “We were twenty. Innocents, really, but we knew enough, had seen enough scary Hollywood films, to know that it was best we forget all about it. We wouldn’t help Sabine, or find her killer, only bring more trouble for ourselves. So, no, we didn’t go to the police again. You think we were wrong?”
Inger didn’t answer, but it seemed Sylvie was waiting for a response, so Dan said, “No, I think you did the right thing. I’m guessing you never heard any more after you left the apartment?”
“Nothing. But if the bugs were for the reason I think, they would have known by then that we knew nothing, the man at the party, it was a mystery to us. And afterwards, I almost forgot about it.”
Almost
, thought Dan,
but not quite.
“Thank you, Sylvie, you’ve been more help than you could know.”
She shrugged noncommittally and said, “You’re going to Yousef?”
“Yes. In fact, do you mind if I call him from here?”
She stood and said, “I’ll call him for you, tell him you’re on the way.”
As she reached for the phone she pointed at a sweeping canvas opposite, abstract oranges and browns and sandy yellows. “That’s one of his. He’s very successful now.”
They both got up and looked at the canvas as she spoke animatedly in the background, a light-hearted catching up before the more serious business of telling Yousef about the visitors.
She ended the call and joined them in front of the picture and Dan said, “For some reason I thought he was a sculptor, maybe just because he was in the studio with her that night.”
“You’re right, he did start out with mainly sculpture, but then he moved into painting and became a great success.” She smiled, pleased with herself as she said, “I paid very little for this, back when we were all still poor, and now it’s perhaps the most valuable piece in my collection.”
Dan smiled, thinking of Sylvie, probably never poor the way most people saw it, supporting her artist friends, staying true to them through the years. And Sabine might have remained part of that circle, had the events of fourteen years ago not reduced her role to that of a tactile bronze, a talking point for memories.
She walked them toward the door, pointing out other paintings, ceramic pieces, another bronze, but then Dan thought of something else and said, “Did Sabine ever mention anything about the man who tried to rape her, how old he was or his nationality?”
“Never. I’ve always assumed he was American, because of the party, but I don’t know for a fact.”
Inger beat Dan to it, saying, “Why, where was the party?”
Dan had assumed until this point, and maybe so had Inger, that this had been some drunken student party, but Sylvie said, “It was some dreadful thing, celebrating cultural ties, lots of young and promising artists invited. I’m not sure why Sabine was invited, perhaps she was suggested by her tutor, but it was the kind of thing that seemed to happen back then—there were so many parties. And yes, so it could have been a Frenchman, because there were hundreds of people there, but the party was at the residence of the US Ambassador.”
She shrugged, as if excusing herself for making what might have been a fanciful leap. And she probably didn’t understand the expression on Inger’s face, and on Dan’s, or even begin to appreciate that neither of them thought she was being anywhere near fanciful enough.
Chapter Twenty-five
They managed to hail a cab right away, but as Dan held the door and let Inger in first, he looked along the street and noticed a car with a couple of guys in it. He knew right away that they were company men, though he couldn’t take a long enough look to see if he recognized them.
Inger had shuffled along the seat and he climbed in next to her, but sat at a slight angle, as if eager to talk to her. He only had a peripheral view as a result, but he could see the car pulling into the traffic behind them.
Before he could say anything, Inger said, “How old is Bill Brabham?”
It was obvious she’d been preoccupied with the thought since hearing about the location of the party.
“I think he’s sixty now. So he would have been around forty-five or forty-six at the time, height of his powers, supremely confident.” By way of clarification, he added, “I don’t know the guy at all, but boy do I know the type, and yes, to answer your question, it’s entirely feasible someone like that might assume a friendly young sculptor at a party was genuinely interested in him.”
She took in what he was saying, sighed heavily and said, “We need proof.”
He didn’t respond directly, but said, “By the way, we’re being followed, two of Brabham’s guys.”
“But . . .”
“My fault. We were careless. They knew we were in Limoges, probably had a good idea we’d be coming back into Montparnasse. With the resources this guy has available to him, we would have been easy enough to track.”
“But they’re only following us?”
“For now. Obviously, I don’t have a very high opinion of Bill Brabham, but I guess he’s still smart enough to know his superiors wouldn’t appreciate his guys shooting me in a busy Paris street in the middle of the day, and they’d appreciate it even less if a member of the Swedish Security Service got hit in the crossfire.”
“So I saved you again?”
He laughed and said, “You could say that. If I’m reading him right, his guys will keep track of us, but if he’s still got some freelancers in reserve, he’ll use them for the hit.”
She seemed genuinely shocked by his relaxed tone and said, “Aren’t you worried?”
“Not really. You know, I’m not James Bond. I let a guy sneak up on me this morning, I let Brabham track me from Sweden to Limoges to here. But I’ve been doing pretty risky stuff for a long time and I
am
still here. I’m not infallible, but nor are they.”
She looked reassured, and leaned over and kissed him quickly, and said, “They can report that.”
Yousef’s studio was an old factory of some sort, dark soot-stained bricks on the outside, but light and white and modern inside. He wasn’t alone in there either. There was a woman behind a desk fielding calls, a couple of young women and a guy working on frames and priming canvases.
Yousef was also in his mid-thirties, but he had a shock of white hair, his eyebrows alone showing how dark it had once been. He greeted them warmly and looked immediately fixated by Inger, a look that simultaneously pleased Dan and made him uncomfortable.
Yousef asked the woman behind the desk for some coffees and then showed them down to an area at the far end of the room where mismatched sofas and easy chairs formed a small lounge area. He pointed out the works in progress and explained things about the building as they walked, as if he was used to being visited by journalists.
“I’m glad you came,” he said, as they all finally sat down. “It’s been too long that I spoke to Sylvie, a year at least, but we’ll have dinner next week.”
Inger said, “She showed us your painting—it was really beautiful.”
He seemed to thank her, though without words and hardly any facial movement, and said, “You’re from Sweden?”
She nodded, on the edge of being uneasy under his gaze. If he’d always been like this, Dan could begin to understand why the police had talked to him. He had to hand it to him, though, he had taste, because Inger was ridiculously beautiful, a quality Dan couldn’t even quite narrow down—he just felt good being with her, looking at her, and he could understand Yousef feeling the same way.
“Yousef, do you mind if we ask you a couple of things about Sabine?”
He turned to Dan and said, “Coffee.” The woman had arrived and put the tray down, the next minute or two taken up with arranging the drinks. They settled again and Yousef picked up as if there’d been no pause, saying, “Of course not, but I know very little, certainly much less than the police thought I knew at the time.”
Even after all these years, it clearly still rankled with him, and understandably so.
“You were in the studio with her that night?”
He smiled, to himself, as if the question had taken him back to some golden age in his youth, and said, “Those two weeks before, nearly every night, just Sabine and me, we were always the last to leave. We had so much to do, but it was fun because we both liked to be there together. Crazy. Maybe I wouldn’t have remembered those two weeks if she’d lived, but now, I think about them so often.”
Inger said, “Was there a relationship between you, or just friendship?”
“She was so beautiful, just like you, but a different kind of beauty.”
Inger looked embarrassed or uncomfortable, but Yousef didn’t seem to notice.
“Yes, beautiful, but it was never like that between us. I had a lot of girlfriends then, and I think Sabine was popular with the boys, but with each other, we were more like brother and sister. It was fun.”
“Did she seem okay the night she died?”
“Hmm, maybe, maybe not. She was okay, but she had a couple of messages on her cell, and it made her mad. She didn’t tell me what they were about. I guessed it was guy trouble. And I couldn’t be sure—the police, they kept asking me again and again, ‘this man you
claim
you saw’, like I’m lying—no, I couldn’t be sure, but when she
left I thought I saw a man waiting for her along the street, and . . .”
He stopped, this thought playing out across his face, and as if concluding some internal argument, he said, “It was dark, and I couldn’t have known. How could I?”
“What did you see?”
“Who knows if I saw what I thought, or if I imagined it. The man was along the street, he stepped out and waited for her as she approached. And I thought she hesitated when she saw him, almost as if she might turn back. But she didn’t and I went back to my work without thinking. I was perhaps the last person to see her alive.” But then he corrected himself, forlorn as he said, “Second last.”
Dan could see how that one tiny detail, the moment’s hesitation he’d witnessed in Sabine’s footsteps, so easily discounted at the time, would have preyed on his mind in the years since. What if he’d followed her out, called to her? What if?
“You didn’t see him clearly,” said Inger.
“A shadow, nothing more.”
Pressing him, she said, “You mean a silhouette?”
“Yes, of course.”
“But from a silhouette you can see, sometimes, how a man is dressed, how big he is, even how old sometimes.”
“The police asked me this too.” He laughed as if at some private joke. “I think he was older than us, only because . . . All I could see was that he wore a long coat, a heavy coat, like you wear over a suit, so he looked like a banker or finance worker or something like that. But it’s guessing, no?”
“It’s better than nothing,” said Inger, which seemed to please him.
And when they stood to leave a short while later, he seemed oddly energized, and pointed at them, saying, “You’re gonna get this guy, I know it.”
Inger looked about to speak, but Dan replied first, and said, “We will, and he’ll pay for it.”
They left and walked a hundred yards or so before seeing a cab. That suited Dan anyway, because it gave him a chance to study the street. The same car was parked a little way up, but there was no one else, which suggested they were biding their time.
In the cab, Inger said, “Do you think we’ll be safe in the hotel?”
“For now, and after the guy came for me in Limoges, he knows I’ll be ready for that, so I think he’ll try something else. Probably when I’m out on the street.” He thought of Mike Naismith in Baltimore and said, “Probably need to take care crossing the road.”
“And what time do you meet your contact this evening?”
It was the one meeting that had been set down for him, Patrick’s DGSE contact dictating the time and the location.
“Nine. I have a few hours yet.”
She didn’t respond and he turned to find that she was staring at him intently, a look in her eyes that made it perfectly clear how she wanted to spend those few hours, a directness he found refreshing, and almost instantly arousing. He smiled in response, and willed the taxi to move faster, willed the traffic to clear, willed himself some place only with her.