Sophie shook her head in irritation. ‘Who else uses a meat cleaver?’
‘A butcher.’ This from Bertrand.
‘Exactly.’ Sophie looked at her father triumphantly. ‘Butcher in English,
boucher
in French. It doesn’t matter which, it’s a surname in both languages.’
Enzo looked doubtful. ‘You can’t jump to quick conclusions with these clues, Sophie. We’d need something else to confirm it.’
‘What about the baking tray?’ Bertrand said.
‘Well, that doesn’t need any confirmation.’ Sophie was piqued by her father’s lack of enthusiasm.
Enzo and Bertrand looked at her expectantly, and Nicole said, ‘Of course, being men, they wouldn’t know.’
Sophie hesitated then, and Enzo saw that her eyes were beginning to fill up. ‘Every young girl makes them with her mum,’ she said. ‘Except me, of course. I made them at school.’ She quickly brushed away a tear with the back of her hand and made a brave attempt at a smile.
Enzo looked at her and felt his own emotions well up inside. However hard he might have tried, and for all the love he had given her over all these years, there were still things she had missed out on. Things that only a mother and daughter can share. And now he had let her down, exposed her to danger. It had been his duty as a parent to protect her, and he had failed in that, too. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, and he heard the crack in his voice.
‘Madeleine cakes,’ Nicole said. ‘As every little French girl would tell you, that’s what the seashell moulds in the baking tray are for. Making Madeleine cakes.’
‘Madeleine Boucher.’ Bertrand tried the name out for size. ‘I suppose it’s possible.’
Sophie looked to her father for his approval. But it was as if he had set eyes on the face of the gorgon and turned to stone.
If Enzo had believed it possible for his heart to stop, then he would have said it had done so. And for the first time in his life he understood how it might feel if his blood were to turn to ice. He remembered the handwritten inscription in the book so very clearly.
For Madeleine, aged seven. Happy Birthday, darling
. And he remembered how evasive she had been.
Why won’t you tell me?
he had asked her. And finally she had sighed and told him,
She’s me. All right? I’m Madeleine
. He remembered, too, how strongly she had reacted against his suggestion that he call her that.
No! I don’t want to be Madeleine!
‘Papa?’ Sophie had risen from the bed and crossed to touch his face with her fingertips, leaving a little trail of mud flakes in her wake. ‘Papa, what’s wrong?’
‘
Mad à minuit
,’ Enzo said. ‘Madeleine at midnight. That’s who he was meeting in St. Étienne du Mont.’
Bertrand was watching him closely. ‘Do you know her?’
Enzo pulled himself back from the brink of an abyss he dared not peer over. ‘Maybe.’
Sophie frowned. ‘Do
we
?’
‘You met her last night. Charlotte’s her middle name. Her given name is Madeleine.’
‘Papa, I don’t believe it!’
Enzo did not want to. It was almost impossible for him to think of those dark, smiling eyes as the eyes of a killer. He remembered the tenderness of her touch, the softness of her lips, the sweet taste of her on his. He closed his eyes and drew a deep breath.
‘I mean, how many Madeleines must there be in France?’ Sophie persisted. ‘Thousands, tens of thousands. And, anyway, Boucher isn’t her second name, is it?’
Enzo shook his head. ‘It’s Roux.’
‘There you are, then.’
‘We don’t know that Boucher is the right name. But, in any case, she was adopted, Sophie. She told me herself that she tracked down her birth parents when she went to university. It’s quite possible that her mother, or her father, was called Boucher. Or something else that we haven’t figured out yet.’
Sophie threw a defiant hand in his direction. ‘Well, there’s another thing. When she went to university, you said. That was the Sorbonne, right? She told me that last night.’ Enzo tipped his head in reluctant acknowledgement. ‘And you told us that all the other killers were students of Jacques Gaillard’s at ENA. Well, Charlotte wasn’t at ENA, was she?’
‘We don’t know that,’ Enzo insisted. ‘We only know what she’s told us.’ He was playing devil’s advocate to his own feelings. ‘But we do know that she was Gaillard’s niece. And most murders are committed by people known to the victim. Usually a member of their own family. God knows what kind of motive she might have had for hating him. For wanting him dead. Maybe he abused her as a child.’
‘Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Papa!’
‘Sophie, she tried to conceal from me that he was her uncle, that her real name was Madeleine. Why?’ And then he answered his own question. ‘She must have known that in the end I was going to get to these clues in Auxerre.’ The voice of his rational self was fighting to be heard above the emotional one in his head. A voice that screamed down everything he was saying. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. She was the gentlest, loveliest creature he had met in the twenty years since Pascale’s death. She had issues, yes, and dark places in her head that she guarded closely. But there was a spiritual centre to her that was as still and beautiful as her smile.
He tried to picture again all the faces in the photograph of the Schoelcher Promotion, all the students who had flitted across the screen in the video record of the Class of ’96. Had she really been somewhere there amongst them? Ten years younger—hair a different cut perhaps, a different colour? If Charlotte really was Madeleine, then she must have been supremely confident that he would not recognise her. It had been her idea to watch the video. Maybe she had just been playing with him. For wasn’t this, after all, really just a game? An extreme IQ test where the cracking of clues was rewarded with the pieces of a murdered man?
But why? It’s what he kept coming back to. What was the point of it all? He knew now that there had been four killers. But three of them were dead, and so there was only one person left alive who could answer that question. And her name was Madeleine.
The four of them spent the next hour in reflective silence until Bertrand said, ‘Don’t we have the right to make a phone call?’
‘Yes,’ Sophie said immediately. ‘And they can only hold us for twenty-four hours without charging us. But there’s some stupid clause that says if they think it would be against the interests of the investigation, they can withhold the right to the call. Which means we don’t have the right to one at all. It’s ridiculous!’
Enzo never ceased to be amazed by how much kids knew about their rights. Things that had never crossed his mind as a young man. Perhaps it was a sign of the times, that young people had higher expectations of conflict with the authorities.
The cold in the cell was getting into his bones now, and like Bertrand, he pulled his legs up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them for warmth. He felt the bulge of something hard in the knee pocket of his cargos. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he said suddenly, startling the others.
‘Papa, what is it?’
‘I’ve still got my phone. They never took my
portable
.’ They had removed rings and watches and piercings, and made them empty their pockets. But Enzo had forgotten about the leg pockets of his cargos, and in their hurry to lock them up, so had the police. Perhaps they had been obscured by mud.
He squeezed fingers into the pocket and pulled out his cell phone. He pressed the on-button. The screen lit up and the phone beeped loudly. They all froze, listening for any indication that someone out there might have heard it. But there was nothing, except the same interminable silence. Enzo looked at the indicator and saw that the battery was low. But there was a strong signal. He hesitated. Who would he call?
Then, to his horror, it started ringing. He was so startled by the electronic rendition of
Scotland the Brave
that echoed thunderously around the cell that he almost dropped it.
‘For goodness’ sake, Papa, answer it!’
He fumbled for the answer button and pressed the phone to his ear. ‘Jesus Christ, Magpie, where the bloody hell are you?’ It was Simon. In spite of years in London, his Scottish brogue was always particularly strong when he was stressed. Enzo started telling him that he was in a police cell in Auxerre, when the voice cut over him, and he realised it was a recording on his messaging service. ‘Call me when you pick this up. It’s important.’ And the line went dead. There was something in Simon’s voice that sent a strange chill of premonition through Enzo. He hung up on the soporific voice telling him that he had no more messages.
‘Who was it?’ Sophie asked.
‘A message from Uncle Simon.’
‘Well, call him back, quick. He’s a lawyer, isn’t he?’
‘In England, not France.’
‘Well, he must know someone in France who can help.’
Enzo pulled up the recall option and and listened as the phone began ringing at the other end. It was answered almost immediately. ‘Magpie, where in God’s name have you been? I’ve been trying to get you all bloody day.’
‘Simon, just shut up and listen.’ Enzo knew he had to make this quick and concise. ‘I’m in a police cell in Auxerre. Nicole, Sophie, Bertrand and I have been arrested. We need help. Legal representation. Someone to get us out of this mess.’
‘Jesus, Magpie, what have you been up to?’
‘It’s a long story. I’m going to give you a name and a number in Paris.’ He flicked through the
repertoire
in his phone’s memory and rhymed off the number. ‘His name’s Roger Raffin. He’s a journalist. His paper’s lawyers got us out of trouble before. Tell him I know the names of all of Gaillard’s killers.’ There was a long silence at the other end of the line. ‘Simon, are you still there?’
‘Give me his address,’ Simon said. ‘I’ll go and drag him out of bed personally.’
Irritation creased Enzo’s face. ‘Simon, there’s no time for you to fly to Paris.’
‘I’m
in
Paris.’
And something in his voice brought earlier forebodings flooding back. ‘What are you doing there?’
‘Enzo, that’s why I was trying to get you.’ Enzo heard him draw a deep breath. ‘Just don’t panic, okay?’
‘Why would I panic?’ But he was starting to already.
‘Magpie, Kirsty phones her mum once a day, every day. She has done ever since she arrived in Paris.’
Just the mention of Kirsty’s name made Enzo tense. ‘What’s happened to her?’
‘Just listen!’ Simon’s voice was insistent. ‘She hasn’t phoned home in three days. Her mum’s tried to get her several times on her cell phone, but it’s always switched off, and she hasn’t responded to any messages. Linda phoned me in a panic yesterday, and I got the first flight over. According to the
concierge
, Kirsty hasn’t been home in three days. She hasn’t been at work either. Magpie, she’s just vanished. Into thin air. And no one seems to know where the hell she is.’
The single fluorescent strip in the ceiling burned out everything around it. The world turned a blinding white. Enzo closed his eyes tight to shut it out. A line had been crossed, and there was no going back. His life, he knew, was about to change again. Forever.
‘Magpie?’
‘Just get me out of here, Simon. As fast as you can?’ His voice was barely a whisper.
He hung up and the phone slipped from his grasp and clattered to the floor. He stared at it blindly.
‘Papa?’ Sophie was kneeling beside him. She picked up the phone and looked at him. He could hear the fear in her voice. ‘Papa, what’s happened?’
He looked at her, and saw her mother in her, as he always did. ‘They’ve got her.’ His voice was strained and quiet. There was no doubt in his mind. No question of innocent coincidence.
‘Who’s got who?’
‘Gaillard’s killers.’ Then he corrected himself. ‘Killer.’ He looked into Sophie’s eyes. ‘Madeleine. Whoever she is, she’s got your sister.’
I.
They had no idea what time it was, or how long they had been sitting in the interminable fluorescent glare of this square, featureless police cell. Without windows they did not know whether dawn had broken, or if it was still dark outside. But they had not slept. Tired eyes scratched and burned with every blink, heads aching, necks stiff, faces shadowed and drawn.
The first indication that things were about to change came with the sound of raised voices from the corridor. Then the door flew open, and Simon stood there grinning, his beard bristling, and he looked greyer than Enzo remembered. In spite of the smile, he too had dark penumbrae beneath his eyes.
Sophie hurled herself across the cell and threw her arms around him. ‘Don’t do that,’ he said, mock embarrassed. ‘You’re dad’ll think I’m only after your body.’
‘Thank God you’re here,’ she said, and she gave him a big hug.
Simon put his arm around her and shook hands with Enzo and Bertrand and Nicole. ‘You guys okay?’
Enzo nodded.
‘No, we’re not!’ Sophie protested. ‘We weren’t allowed a phone call, we weren’t allowed to talk to a lawyer.’
‘You called me, didn’t you?’
Sophie’s laugh of contempt sounded more like a bark. ‘Only because they forgot to take my Papa’s
portable
off him. I was refused access to a doctor after all their manhandling.’
Simon raised an eyebrow. ‘Were you? One more to add to the list, then. These guys are in deep shit. Roger figures they were trying to keep you under wraps and out of the way for forty-eight hours so they could make some kind of announcement to the press.’
Enzo nodded, realising now why they had been locked up like this. ‘To claim the credit for finding Gaillard’s remains and revealing his killers.’
‘Before we could run the story in Libé.’ Raffin appeared next to Simon. He looked flushed and weary, and he shook all their hands gravely. ‘Your detention order was signed by Juge Lelong. Again.’ He nodded back along the corridor. ‘He’s here, you know. He might try to argue that you damaged public property, or that you were interfering with a police investigation. But it’s not going to wash. Not now.’
Simon grinned. ‘He’s fucked,’ he said. ‘And you guys are free to go.’
Enzo put a hand on his arm. ‘Any word of Kirsty?’
Simon’s grin faded and he shook his head. ‘Nothing.’
Raffin said, ‘We’ve got a car waiting for you outside. We can be in Paris in a couple of hours.’
***
At the charge bar, they had all their possessions restored. Bertrand was told that his van was in the yard behind the police station. ‘Take Sophie and Nicole straight back to Cahors,’ Enzo told him. ‘And don’t let either of them out of your sight.’
‘No!’ Sophie stood her ground defiantly. ‘We’re going to Paris, too.’
‘All of us,’ Nicole said.
For almost the first time, Sophie and Nicole were in accord. ‘We’ll follow you.’ Sophie thrust her chin out and dared her father to challenge her. But he knew better than that. She was, after all, her father’s daughter. And in many ways he was happier to keep her close. The thought of anything happening to Sophie, too, was almost more than he could bear. He sighed and nodded, and they were led through to the foyer. It was daylight outside, but the rain from the night before had not stopped, and it streaked the windows all along the front of the Hôtel de Police. Through them, Enzo could see the blurred shape of a rain-stained church tower across the street. Traffic sat in long, patient queues, windscreen wipers beating countless paths back and forth through the endless summer downpour.
The
accueil
was filled with uniformed officers and men in dark suits. There was some heated debate in progress. As they followed Raffin out through the front door, Enzo caught sight of the pale face of Juge Lelong among the men in suits. Their eyes met for just a moment, and Enzo saw defeat in the set of the other man’s face. Long gone the arrogance which had so characterised their first meeting. He had made a mess of this, and the Garde des Sceaux would be furious. Only scandal and humiliation awaited them both now. But Enzo had other things on his mind.
‘What time is it?’ he asked Simon.
‘Just gone ten.’
They had lost nearly twelve hours, and it would be after midday before they got to Paris. God only knew what might have become of Kirsty in that time.
II.
The seventeenth century wooden staircase was protected by the Beaux Arts, the
concierge
told them.
It had taken ten minutes, and a studious examination of Enzo’s
Carte de Séjour
to convince her that he was Kirsty’s father. Finally, reluctantly, she had given him the key. She would not come up with them, she said. She was no longer able for the climb.
The staircase ended abruptly on the third floor, and a narrow corridor led to a spiral stairway which took them up another three flights. By the time they reached the top landing, Enzo was breathless. Sophie, too, was breathing hard. But she was impressed. ‘She must be fit, my half-sister. You wouldn’t go out casually for a coffee, though, would you?’
Enzo waited with Sophie and Bertrand until Raffin, and finally Simon and Nicole, completed the climb. Simon was panting and red-faced. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘She certainly knows how to discourage visitors.’
Rain battered against a narrow window in the stairwell. It opened on to a fire-escape. Six floors of flimsy steel ladder. It was a long way down. Enzo slipped the key in the lock and opened the door. Immediately he smelled her perfume, the same scent she had been wearing the day he left her shopping bags at the foot of the stairs. Its almost tangible presence seemed only to underline her absence, and it caused a sickening lurch in his stomach. He feared the worst.
The studio apartment was tiny, built into the slope of the roof. There were two windows on the east side, and one facing west over a wet Paris roofscape of tall chimneys and television aerials, towards the twin towers of Notre Dame. It was a stunning view, almost unreal, like a set from a fifties Hollywood movie. The sun, Enzo realised, would go down behind the cathedral. His daughter must have had one of the most privileged sunset views in Paris.
Kirsty’s personality filled the room, even though she had not been there for days. Her clothes were draped over a chair. A bed settee, pushed up beneath one of the east-facing windows, was folded down, unmade since the last time she had slept in it. The shape of her head was still pressed into the pillow. With a jolt he recognised the soft toys lined up along the top of the settee. A threadbare panda with one of its eyes missing, a large cartoon pussy cat with its head tipped to one side, an old-fashioned dolly in a faded blue ruffled dress. One of its red shoes had been lost. These were things he had bought her when she was barely old enough to walk. Much-loved toys which had gone with her everywhere. Overnights at her grandparents, weekends at the home of her best friend, midge-infested camping holidays in the Highlands. Panda, pussy and dolly always went, too. Even here, to Paris, apparently. Even after all these years.
But wherever she was now, for once she had left them behind.
Sophie followed his gaze. ‘Pretty crappy toys.’ Enzo heard the jealousy in her voice.
‘No one touch anything,’ he said. And with difficulty added, ‘We might be looking at a crime scene.’
He cast his eyes quickly around the room. The walls were painted a pale yellow. There were some cheap pictures on the gable, bought from street artists in Montmarte.
Clichéd
views of the old square. A huge movie poster of
Gone With The Wind
, the lurid flames of Atlanta glowing red behind Clark Gable, the prostrate figure of Vivien Leigh draped in his arms. There were shelves of books and CDs. A laptop computer open on a small table below the west-facing window. A stout wooden beam followed the slope of the roof, creating a semi-partition between the living area and a minuscule kitchen flooded with light from the window on the east side. A small, cluttered dining table was pushed in below the beam.
Enzo saw, lying on a kitchen worktop, a hand-written card with a thumb tack pushed through its centre.
Kirsty, elle est chez-elle
. A note, left perhaps for friends downstairs, so that they knew whether or not she was at home before embarking on a long, fruitless climb to the sixth floor. Today her father had made the climb because he knew that she was not at home, and he wondered why the note was here. Surely she would keep it with her when she was out, so that she could pin it up at the foot of the stairs when she returned?
‘Monsieur Macleod….’ He turned, and Nicole nodded towards the dining table. ‘Look.’
He looked, and at first saw nothing unusual. An untidy pile of books, an open box of sponge cakes, a medal of some kind. ‘What?’
‘The cakes,’ she said insistently.
And he realised with a shock that drew the skin tight all across his scalp, that it was a box of Madeleine cakes. A message. He knew it instantly. This casual arrangement on the kitchen table was a carefully constructed note, just for him, the box of Madeleine cakes a signature.
Raffin stepped forward to look at the table. ‘What is it?’ He saw only what anyone else would have seen. Innocent clutter in a young woman’s apartment. Had the police made a search of the place they would certainly have missed it, probably disturbed it, destroying it in the process.
Enzo was having trouble controlling his breathing. ‘I’d say it was probably a ransom note.’
Simon frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Madeleine. She’s telling me she’s got Kirsty.’ He carefully lifted the box of cakes and laid it to one side. He had run out of latex gloves, but he did not believe that the woman called Madeleine would have been foolish enough to leave fingerprints. He pulled up a chair and sat down to examine the remaining items on the table. The others crowded around. ‘I’ve already been inside her head. She knows that I know how she thinks. But, in any case, she won’t have made this too difficult.’
There were three books. An unabridged version of Victor Hugo’s
Les Misérables
. A book called
Les Artistes Font le Mur,
which appeared to be a largely photographic record of a fresco sixty meters long created by a group of school children. And the prosaically titled
Computers, an Illustrated History
. The only other thing on the table was a metal cross with four flared arms of equal length, attached to a piece of ribbon. It was black, with the letter W in the centre, the date 1914 on the lower arm, and a faded silver trim around its edges. It was about four centimeters across.
‘What is it?’ Bertrand asked.
‘An
Eiserne Kreuz
,’ Enzo said. ‘A German Iron Cross, a medal given out during the First World War.’
‘So what’s the message?’ Simon said.
Enzo raised his hand in irritation. ‘I don’t know. I’m going to have to work it out.’ Somehow the urgency of it was making his mind go blank. It was Nicole who kick-started his thought processes.
‘Victor Hugo’s hero in
Les Misérables
was called Jean Valjean,’ she said. ‘But he had another persona, didn’t he?’
‘Monsieur Madeleine,’ Bertrand said suddenly, as it came back to him from some long-ago reading.
Enzo’s mind was racing. ‘Yes.’ But there was something else significant, something just beyond his reach. Then all at once he grasped it. ‘There’s a long sequence in the book where Valjean rescues a man by taking him through the sewers of Paris.’
Simon pulled a face. ‘You mean you think she’s taken Kirsty down into the sewers?’
‘No, not the sewers. Below that. The
catacombes
. After all, that’s where the first body part was found. It would kind of be like coming full circle.’
He picked up the book about the children’s fresco and flipped through its colourful pages of naively painted tropical fish and underwater seascapes. He could not, for the life of him, see the relevance of it. A mural painted on a wall sixty meters long. And a book about the history of the computer. He picked up the Iron Cross and held it between thumb and forefinger. If she was making this easy for him, why was he finding it so hard? And, in his mind, he answered his own question. Because he was looking for difficult answers.
He dropped the cross and picked up the computer book.
Computers, an Illustrated History
. Why couldn’t he see it? And then suddenly he did. ‘Goddamn!’ he said, angry with himself for trying to make it so complicated. He stood up, pushing past the others, and crossed the studio to Kirsty’s laptop on the desk below the west-facing window. He checked the cables. It was connected to the mains, and to the telephone line via an ADSL modem, which meant she had a high-speed connection to the internet.
‘What is it, Papa?’ Sophie asked.
‘It’s in here,’ he said, and he switched on the computer. It would take a minute or so to boot up.
‘What is?’ Raffin stood behind him as Enzo pulled a chair up to Kirsty’s desk and sat down in front of her laptop.
‘When you’re on-line,’ Enzo said, ‘you leave a trail of the sites you’ve visited. They get stored under History, in the browser.’
‘Of course,’ Nicole said. ‘
Computers, an Illustrated History
.’
They watched and waited in silence while the computer took what seemed like a lifetime to load its desktop screen. And when, finally, it did, Enzo stared in shocked disbelief at the picture Kirsty had chosen for its background. It was an old photograph, taken more than twenty years ago, in the back garden of their red sandstone terraced home on the south side of Glasgow. Kirsty was maybe five years old. She had been almost blond at that age, a head full of big, soft curls. She was wearing a pale lemon sleeveless dress and a wide-brimmed straw hat with a blue ribbon which she had pushed back on her head. Her eyes were sparkling, and an impossibly wide grin revealed one missing front tooth. Crouched beside her, an arm around her waist pulling her towards him, a young Enzo smiled self-consciously at the camera. His hair was shorter then, darker, his white streak more pronounced. Kirsty had one arm dangled around his neck. Father and daughter as Kirsty remembered them. As she wanted to remember them. The father she had loved. The father who had loved her. A moment shared. And not all the years which had passed since could take that away from her. Enzo bit his lip and fought to hold back his tears. How could he have been so careless with his daughter’s love?