I.
‘I was married to Christian when I was still working at the Société Générale,’ she said. ‘But finance was his forte, not mine. Still, it was useful to have a wealthy husband to support me through two and a half years as a student at ENA.’ She gazed back up the stairs at Enzo. She was a woman who liked the sound of her own voice. ‘It was starting to become fashionable at that time to accept students from the
real world
. It went against the stereotype of the cloistered academic, even though I already had my degree from Sciences-Po. But I preferred to be enrolled under my maiden name. Didn’t want to be thought of as a kept woman. So I was Marie-Madeleine Boucher, then.’ She smiled. ‘But when I ran for Deputé in Val de Marne, the name seemed a little too religious for a secular politician. And so I was happy to become Marie Aucoin and take my seat in the National Assembly.’
‘Where’s Kirsty?’
The Garde des Sceaux seemed disappointed by his lack of interest in her story. She sighed. ‘All in good time.’
‘Whose good time?’
‘Mine, of course.’
‘What do you want?’
Something hardened in her cold, blue eyes. And there was an edge to her voice. ‘To fulfil my destiny. I am forty-five years old, Monsieur. I am a woman, and I am the Garde des Sceaux. Do you have any idea how impossibly difficult it is to be all those things at the same time?’ She allowed herself a small smile of self-satisfaction. ‘And that’s just the beginning. Already they’re whispering in the corridors of Matignon about the possibility of my appointment as Prime Minister. But the Élysée Palace is my real destiny. To be the first woman elected to the office of President. An office from which I can change the future of my country. To which I can restore the vision of Napoléon and the genius of de Gaulle. I can lead France back to greatness.’
‘I admire your modesty.’
‘Modesty is for fools!’ She jumped down from her shelf. ‘Why don’t you come down and join me?’ It wasn’t so much a request as an instruction. She moved away from the foot of the stairs to the far side of the small chamber the monks had built to accommodate the
fontaine.
She took off her rucksack and laid it on the shelf beside her and folded her arms.
Enzo hesitated. He knew that once he had descended into the chamber he would be trapped there. ‘Where’s Kirsty?’ he demanded again.
‘She’s nearby.’
‘If you’ve harmed her….’
‘She’s alive and well. And it is not my intention to do anything to change that.’
Still he hesitated.
‘Unless you force me to.’
He had no choice then. Slowly, reluctantly, he climbed down the six steps into the pit and turned to stand facing her across the green basin. They were only two meters apart, and he saw now that her eyes were quite dead. Almost opaque. She saw the world through cataracts of self-deception. She looked at the baseball bat dangling from his right hand and smiled.
‘Really, Monsieur, did you think you were going to beat me to death?’
‘It’s dangerous down here.’
‘Not if you know your way around. I’ve been exploring the
catacombes
since I was a student. I love it. It’s like life, really. You need to know what lies beneath, to understand what’s on the surface.’
‘Why did you kill him?’
The sudden directness of his question seemed to ruffle her surface calm, and for a moment he caught a glimpse of the darkness that lay beneath.
‘He humiliated us.’ Her mouth curled in anger. ‘Picked us out as the brightest and best and then told us how much smarter he was than we would ever be. A process of daily, ritual humiliation. He had this compulsive need to demonstrate his superiority. Always at our expense. In private he would tell us that we were the future of France, in public he made fools of us in front of our fellow students. He wanted to mould us in his image, but made it clear we would always be inferior copies. He wanted us to worship at the altar of his brilliance, an acknowledgement from the intellectual cream of our
promotion
that we were mere cerebral midgets in the shadow of his towering intellect.’ She almost laughed. ‘And what had he become, this great brain? A reviewer of films.’
‘So you killed him?’
‘Have you any idea of what it is like to be mocked and ridiculed, Monsieur Macleod? To be
fêted
and flattered in one breath, and then denigrated in the next?’ She paused. ‘Yes, we killed him. He needed to know, in the end, that we were smarter than he was. That the future was ours, not his. It was a demonstration of
our
superior intelligence.’
Enzo began to see how twisted minds worked. They had all been child prodigies. Little geniuses. Groomed for greatness. The cream which had risen to the top of the Schoelcher Promotion. The elite of the elite. ‘I’ve always thought that violence was the first and last resort of the inferior intellect,’ he said.
‘You sound just like him.’
‘Is that why you want to kill me, too? Because I found out you weren’t as smart as you thought you were? Because, in the end, you couldn’t get away with murder after all?’
She shook her head. ‘Oh, but we did. No one even knew he was dead. It was the perfect murder, Monsieur Macleod.’ She smiled. ‘The thing about intelligence is that in itself, it has no real value. It must be practised and applied. If you have a vision, you need the courage to see it through. My co-conspirators turned out to lack the courage of their convictions, that’s all.’
‘So you killed them, too.’
She shrugged. ‘Hugues saved me the trouble. Philippe was weak, and his weakness was a danger to me.’
‘And Diop?’
‘An old favour repaid, by someone who knows better than to ever open his mouth.’
‘Juge Lelong?’
‘Good God, no. Lelong’s a pedant. A zealot. As straight as the day is long. He really believed you were raising a middle finger to his precious enquiry.’
‘So it wasn’t the good judge that you delegated to try to dispose of me?’
A frown of genuine consternation crinkled her eyes. ‘You? What
are
you talking about?’
‘The two men on the bridge. The truck on the
autoroute
.’
Now her consternation gave way to amusement. ‘I think you’ve been letting your imagination run away with itself, Monsieur Macleod.’
Enzo experienced a fleeting embarrassment. Had he really just been a victim of his own paranoia? He moved on. ‘What I don’t understand is why you left clues with the body parts in the first place.’
‘There is a great deal you don’t understand, Monsieur Macleod. I’m not sure it’s even worth your while trying.’
‘Indulge me.’ He needed to keep her talking. He needed every moment he could claw back from her to think of a way out of this.
She sighed, bored now, it seemed. ‘Each of us took responsibility for burying one piece of the Maître. And each of us revealed that location to only one other. The clues were then designed to lead from one trunk to the next, revealing the identity of one of us each time. That way, none of us could betray the others, without the circle of clues leading eventually back to him.’
‘Or her.’
She inclined her head in acknowledgement. ‘Or her. Of course, we couldn’t make the trail too easy. If one of the trunks was discovered by accident, we didn’t want some knuckle-headed policeman putting it all together. We had to make the clues hard enough that it would take someone of equal intellect to solve the puzzle.’
‘Someone like me.’
She laughed, then. And her mirth seemed genuine. ‘No, Monsieur. You were never in our league. You had the internet at your disposal. In 1996, we had no idea what the internet might become, or how it might unravel all our carefully considered clues. It took us five months to assemble them and put our plan together.’
‘And one bloody night to carry it out.’
‘You should have seen his face, Monsieur. That moment of realisation. When he knew, for all his arrogance, that those he had humiliated were capable of far more than he ever suspected.’
‘So, really, you just killed him to show how clever you were. An intellectual game of murder which no one would ever know you had won.’
‘Until now.’ She held his gaze for a moment, enjoying the opportunity to echo his words.
‘So what are you going to do?’
She turned and removed a small gun from her rucksack and levelled it at him. ‘I’m going to kill you, and then it’ll just be our little secret. A fitting reward for your obstinate persistence, don’t you think?’
Fear flooded his being like a poison gas. ‘What about Kirsty?’
‘Oh, I won’t have to kill her. Nature will do that for me. A very trusting girl.’
‘Where is she?’ Enzo looked around for some way out.
‘Chained to a wall in one of the transversals below the Rue d’Assas. Water’s pouring in from the sewers. A fortuitous summer storm. It was more than half full when I left her. I doubt if her misery will last for too much longer.’
The full horror of the circumstance she had so calmly described created a still centre to Enzo’s fear. ‘Kirsty!’ he bellowed at the top of his voice, and when its echo faded, silence was the only response.
‘Too late already, perhaps.’
And, then, very faintly, they heard a voice calling out of the darkness. It seemed a long way off. A tiny voice full of terror and despair. And disbelief. ‘Daddy?’
He felt as though someone had plunged a knife into his heart. He could not remember when she had last called him that.
‘Daddy, help!’ It was a scream filled with both fear and hope.
But he was powerless to help her. Marie Aucoin had let her gun drop for a moment, but now she raised it again. Enzo’s breathing became rapid and shallow, and he turned his eyes to heaven as if appealing for help from a higher power. And like the answer to a prayer, he heard a voice from above. ‘There’s no point in killing anyone, Madeleine.’
Both he and the Garde des Sceaux turned to see Charlotte standing on the top step. She had a gun pointing at the other woman, trembling slightly in an unsteady hand. Enzo recognised the polished wooden hand-grip. It was Raffin’s revolver. Just behind her he saw the gleam of Bertrand’s nose stud, and the shadow of someone else.
Marie Aucoin’s self-confidence seemed shaken. She turned blazing eyes on Enzo. ‘I told you to come alone!’
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ Charlotte said. ‘The whole world knows who you are, Marie-Madeleine Boucher. The police are on their way.’
‘And who the hell are you?’
‘You murdered my father.’
Marie Aucoin frowned in confusion. ‘Gaillard had no children.’
Charlotte glanced at Enzo. ‘I’m sorry, Enzo. Another deception. I didn’t know myself until I tracked down my birth parents. I’d always called him uncle and thought he was an old friend of my adopted parents. It seems I was one of his early indiscretions. My mother wanted nothing to do with him, and I was to be aborted. But he couldn’t bear to destroy any part of himself. And so he bought her off, and persuaded the son and daughter-in-law of an old family retainer, a childless couple in Angouleme, to adopt me. I think I was the only thing he ever loved apart from himself. A man of strange contradictions. Flawed in ways that maybe only a daughter could love.’ She saw Enzo flinch from the thought, and looked back at Marie Aucoin. Her hand had stopped shaking. ‘But you, you’re a much more interesting case. Would you like my professional diagnosis?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Narcissistic Personality Disorder. It’s quite rare. At first I thought you were displaying the classic symptoms of catathymia. You remember we discussed that, Enzo? But I was wrong.’ Charlotte paused, and refocused her attention on the Garde des Sceaux. ‘No doubt someone of your academic background will have read Dostoevsky.’ Marie Aucoin remained unresponsive. ‘And so no doubt you’ll remember how the murderer, Raskolnikov, wrote an essay on
extraordinary
people, and how such people are above the law. People like you, Madeleine. People who value themselves above all others. People who have no empathy. People who become so preoccupied by grandiose fantasies that they will commit any crime to achieve their goals. People who believe that they are above the laws that lesser beings like us must follow.’ She shook her head. ‘How ironic that we should have made you the guardian of the very laws you feel so at liberty to ignore.’ Anger filled her dark eyes. ‘Narcissism is the beating heart of psychopathy. I shouldn’t hate you, I should pity you.’
Marie Aucoin let her gun fall to her side. She seemed smaller now, diminished by her defeat. But no more so than in her own eyes. ‘You came to kill me, didn’t you?’
Charlotte nodded. ‘Yes.’
Marie Aucoin took a deep breath and pulled herself up to her full height.
Enzo watched with horror as Charlotte’s finger tightened on the trigger. ‘Don’t!’ he said. She was trembling once more. The gun shook increasingly as she tried to hold her aim. And then suddenly her eyes cleared. She lowered Raffin’s gun. She had found her pity.
And that, Enzo realised, was probably the hardest pill of all for Marie Aucoin to swallow. She would probably never know, as they did, that she was not the extraordinary person she believed herself to be. She would never see herself through their eyes as the pathetic, deluded individual she really was.
‘That’s the trouble with you people.’ Her defiance was brittle. ‘You have no courage. To realise your vision you need the courage to carry it through.’ She raised her gun, bit down hard on the barrel and pulled the trigger.
Green turned to red.
‘Daddy!’ Kirsty’s scream echoed through the dark chambers of the
catacombes
.
‘Jesus…’ Enzo stepped over the prone figure of the Garde des Sceaux where she had fallen at the foot of the steps and leapt up the stairs. ‘Kirsty’s going to drown.’
‘Where is she?’ Enzo saw now that Samu was the shadow beyond Bertrand. His face was blanched, shocked.
‘Somewhere beneath the Rue d’Assas. In one of the transversals. It’s flooding.’
‘We’ll have to go back to the bunker, then,’ Charlotte said. She put a hand on his arm and squeezed it. ‘That’s how Samu brought us in. Bertrand made a
chatière
with a sledgehammer.’