Authors: Manda Scott
Éric turns to his right. ‘This one inhaled a lot of smoke, but he didn’t die of it. Something else killed him first, and then he was in the fire’s heart. This is serious damage. If we start with basic morphology, we have—’
‘A history of youthful body-building?’
Éric is about to set off in full flow. He brakes hard, gazes at her. ‘How do you know that?’
She lets herself smile. ‘My father thought my education wasn’t complete unless I could tell the difference between a trained knight and a peasant by picking up the femur. If nothing else, I know the signs of extensive load-bearing before the growth plates close.’
‘Right.’ Éric stands back. ‘Get anything else from this?’
‘Nothing that matters. I can’t see what killed him.’
‘Nor can I, and it’s occupied a deal of the past couple of hours. I’m running tox tests, but the rest will be on the PM.’
‘So tell me what you’ve got.’
‘Male, early twenties, one metre sixty-five, a lean sixty-one kilograms and of North African descent.’
‘Fuck.’ The fingerprint was from one of Cheb Yasine’s cousins. This is too close for comfort. ‘Are you sure about the race?’
‘Take a look.’ Éric turns to the radiographs on the wall, speaking as he goes. ‘Skull lateral and AP: we’re looking at the size of the supraorbital margin, bony glabella, largeish, squareish mastoid process, et cetera et cetera ad nauseam. No question as to gender: this one is male. Early twenties because the growth plates in the femur are closed, which puts him over twenty, but the sagittal suture of the skull hasn’t closed yet, which puts him under twenty-six. Race is trickier, but the zygomatic arch is halfway between the narrow of the Caucasian and the wide of the negroid and I’ve only ever seen that in the northern African communities. We need to find a relative and get a DNA match. Until then, I’m stabbing in the dark.’
‘So he could be Algerian?’
‘Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian … Whichever, he was at the fire’s heart and it’s the hottest yet: he’s far more badly burned than Iain Holloway was. If you want my guess as to whether the rogue fingerprint is his, my money’s on a positive. Whether he put it there is another question entirely.’
Indeed. Her phone rings: Ducat. She hits the elbow patch that brings him on air. ‘Maître, you lied to me. The cameras love you.’
Ducat snorts. ‘Do you have any IDs yet?’
‘The girl is Marianne Roche. We’re waiting on dental confirmation, but she’s right height, right age and in the right place. The other … Éric says he’s North African.’
‘And the fingerprint?’
‘That’s a perfect match for Tahar Amrouche, one of Cheb Yasine’s myriad cousins and youngest of eight brothers. It may be a plant, but if it’s from the dead man, then there’s no doubt he was present when the fire was lit. The thing we have to remember is that Iain Holloway was present when the fire that destroyed the Hôtel Carcassonne was lit, but nobody thinks he lit it.’
‘This is the value, no doubt, of being white and having a medical degree. You will not tell our friends in the media I said that. Does our current body have a fractured skull in the way Iain Holloway did?’
‘Not that Éric’s found, no. He was alive when the fire was lit. He may not have been conscious.’
She can hear the tap of Ducat’s pen on his desk. ‘You don’t sound to me like a woman on the verge of a major breakthrough, Capitaine Picaut.’
‘I’m not. Our best lead was Cheb Yasine and I had people on him all night. We have him on a tape from Garonne’s listening post that’s time-stamped from nine-thirty to nearly midnight, after which he went to bed and slept in silence. He and his cousin set up a coke deal for next week that I’ve passed to Rémi in Drugs. They also talked about the fires and the
Front National
and how fast they’d have to clear out of Orléans if Christelle Vivier were to be elected and Troy Cordier were in charge. They talked about long-term plans for shipping AK47s from Romania to some other branch of the family in Syria. They were relaxed and open and thoughtful. They were not men planning to light the sixth in a series of fires within hours of parting. And they didn’t know that one of their own was about to die, I’d bet my job on that. These men are like the Bressards: family is everything to them. They wouldn’t sacrifice one of their own.’
‘So—?’
‘So I’m waiting for Éric to give me a cause of death on the unknown body from last night, but I think he was a victim, not a perpetrator. And if he did light it, Cheb Yasine didn’t know he was there.’
‘Amrouche is a minnow in a pool of sharks. Maybe he thought it was time to set up on his own?’
‘I don’t think so. Would you be inclined to go self-employed if big cousin was there offering easy money and free use of his whores when the alternative was being tied to a chair with a sixteen-millimetre drill bit ripping holes in your kneecaps? I wouldn’t. Cheb is still our best link. Just now he’s our only one. I need to put some pressure on. If he’s being set up, he may know who’s doing it and why. I need to push him and then see what he does.’
‘If you need a twenty-four-hour extension on the wiretap, let me know.’
Picaut blinks. In the entirety of their joint existence, she has never known Ducat to offer an extension on a tap; she has been bracing herself to beg.
She says, ‘That would be useful, thank you.’
‘Excellent.’ He is briskly, sharply, earnest. ‘Don’t do anything precipitate.’
‘I’m sorry for your loss.’
It is the middle of a hot afternoon. Picaut is alone, without either Garonne or Rollo – or the entourage of the press – standing in Cheb Yasine’s front room.
What she has seen so far of his residence is a careful hybrid between contemporary France and ancient Algiers. The sideboard in blond wood, with clean, almost Scandinavian lines; the pale leather sofa, with the muted, expensive look of Maison Lafayette; the polished parquet floor: all and each of these could sit in one of the Bressards’ many homes and not look amiss.
What could not be are the heavily padded thick-silk cushions with the single central button in royal blue and gold, the carpets hanging on the walls, the wide, sweeping archways decorated with Arabic script in gold lettering on blue paint.
The air is light with spices, tobacco and peppery incense. Picaut sips sweet, scalding mint tea from a glass. Cheb Yasine stands opposite her, slack-hipped, one hand on the ash wood sideboard. Behind him, the script-mounted arches lead through to a kitchen, and other rooms she cannot see. The women are there, invisible and silent.
Yasine is dressed in Ralph Lauren jeans and a marine blue hooded sweatshirt of the kind that were worn at the Palme d’Or last summer. His gold is limited to a thick cable chain at his wrist. He is smooth-shaven, with a boyish, open face and perfect teeth. His lips are sensuous, full; on a Caucasian, they’d be proof of silicone and expensive surgery. His brows are strongly horizontal. He emits a sense of studied courtesy, fragile as fine porcelain.
‘Are you wired?’
‘Of course. My colleagues are monitoring all that we say. It’s safer for us both.’
A slow nod; he knows the law and what counts in a court. ‘The man that is dead. Are you sure it’s Tahar?’
‘Not certain. We’ll need to take DNA from the closest relative to be sure, but we think it’s likely. I can show you photographs, but you may not want to see them.’
He shrugs, holds out a hand. She passes over four images of the blackened body that Éric Masson printed off before she left. She didn’t tell him she was coming here; his response would have been the same as Garonne’s and harder to deal with.
Cheb Yasine’s pupils flare as he studies his cousin’s remains; it is the only response, but it’s genuine and when he looks up she says again, ‘I’m sorry. Did you know he was missing?’
‘His mother called this morning. I have three people out looking for him.’ With deliberate slowness, he draws an iPhone from his pocket. ‘If you’ll allow me?’
She nods. He hits a single key. He doesn’t give his name, makes no introduction, only says, in strong French, ‘Stop looking. No, in the fire … Yes, here, now. No, that won’t be necessary.’
He shrugs her an apology as he hangs up. ‘They wish to come and protect me from you. I am safe. I have told them so. Now you tell me why you are here. You could have sent anyone with this.’
There are very few advantages to being a media celebrity, but Cheb Yasine’s appreciation of her rank is one of them. Choosing her words with care, she says, ‘It seems that there are people who wish me to believe that you are both the leader of Jaish al Islam and the primary arsonist. I am not currently inclined to believe either of these.’
He takes out a slim, black cigarillo, asks a question with a raised brow, lights at her nod. The texture of the air changes. ‘If Jaish al Islam existed, and if I led it, would I tell you?’
‘Not in words.’
He hooks up one brow. The silence stretches. ‘And in not-words, what have I told you?’
‘That you didn’t know your cousin was dead. Whoever lit the fire knew he was there, therefore you didn’t light the fire, or order it lit, and you didn’t order someone to plant Tahar’s body at the location. Also, I don’t think you’re stupid enough to let anyone leave a perfect set of prints on the entry door of a burning building. Nor are you stupid enough to use a car registered in the name of your family to light a previous fire when there were half a dozen CCTV cameras trained on the door of the building in question. Particularly not when whoever lit all the previous fires was well aware of the cameras and their timings. We were allowed to see the Honda. I don’t think by you.’
He’s not used to being read, or to that reading being spoken of openly. He glances towards the window, as if he expects Garonne or Rollo to be sitting in easy view. When they are not, he leans back against the wall, shoves his hands in his jeans, loses a decade. ‘How did he die?’
‘The pathologist isn’t sure. There’s no damage to his skull. He thinks perhaps a stiletto to the heart.’
‘Why does he think that?’
It was Éric’s last comment before she left, said with some uncertainty. ‘Because it’s incredibly hard to discover at post mortem. The flesh closes over the wound and if the body is burned enough—’ Picaut spreads her hands. ‘He is performing histology on the left ventricular myocardium, but—’ How to say this? ‘The fire was hot. We may never be sure.’
‘So he thinks it because he’s found nothing else?’
‘More or less.’ This is kind. Actually, Éric thinks he was sedated, but not unconscious. That, too, is a hunch that will be difficult to prove and she sees no reason to let this become common knowledge. Her cover-up starts here. She drinks her tea, lets him think, waits.
Then: ‘Who’s doing this?’
‘If I knew that, I wouldn’t be here. Do you have any enemies?’ A stupid question; she deserves the scorch of his stare. ‘Have you any particular enemies who would be interested in lighting six fires in Orléans with the express purpose of framing you for the havoc they’ve caused under the glare of maximum publicity?’
He gives a thin smile. ‘All my enemies use SIG-Sauers and shoot to wound, not kill.’
The SIG is the police weapon of choice; Picaut has been trained to aim for the right shoulder except in dire emergency. This is not a serious answer.
She waits.
Relenting, he says, ‘If someone wanted to damage me, Tahar’s body would have been left on my doorstep and it would be very obvious how he had died.’
‘Not a stiletto?’
‘Nothing so merciful.’ He considers something, rolls it round his mouth, tests the taste and then, hesitantly, the sound of it. ‘There are some Somalis from Marseille. They think they will make a new base for themselves here. If anyone might try to intimidate me, it is them. I don’t think they would burn half of Orléans to do it, but …’ He stubs out his smoke. ‘I will ask some questions.’ His eyes promise things about the nature of the asking that he will not say when she is wired. One way or another he will get answers, and they will be true. ‘Is there a number on which I can reach you?’
She gives him the number Patrice, Garonne and Éric Masson use. Nobody else has it.
At the door, they shake hands. His grip is firm and light. He says, ‘Will you tell the press about Tahar?’
‘Not until we have to. At some point, we’ll have to give a name, but we won’t offer any link to you. I’d like to think they won’t make that connection themselves, but I can’t promise it.’
Walking back to the car and Garonne’s bad temper, she feels oddly light, as if she has made a breakthrough, when in reality she is no further forward than she was before the fires started.
Garonne is not where she left him. Nor is Rollo. Patrice pulls up just as she begins to dial his mobile. He throws open the passenger door and guns the engine. She climbs in. ‘We need that man sewn up tight. Where is everyone?’
‘Sylvie is in the watch-room keeping an eye on Yasine. We didn’t get a tab on the number he called, it was too fast, but we got the conversation in the can. If he moves, we’ll know about it.’
‘Where are Rollo and Garonne?’
‘Tailing Monique Susong. She took a call ten minutes ago from Father Cinq-Mars, the bishop’s heroin-chic assistant, inviting her to meet him at the basilica at Cléry-Saint-André. They’re following her; they went less than three minutes ago. If we leave now, we’ll catch up.’ He casts a sideways glance. ‘We thought you’d want …’
‘Oh, I do. I really do. Thank you.’ Picaut blows a kiss at the sky. Maybe there is a God. ‘If anyone knows why Iain Holloway died, it’s Monique Susong. It’s time to bring her in, and the priest with her.’
‘
HAVE A CARE
. A
care
, damn you!’
The palliasse is Tomas’s own design, stuffed with horsehair and slung on a hessian stretcher with loops for two poles. Jean de Belleville, Father Huguet and the Piedmontese captain, Pietro di Carignano, are amongst those lifting the poles. The rest were chosen by lot from the men at arms who still surround the Maid, half of them Piedmontese.