Into The Fire (48 page)

‘Capitaine Picaut. We owe you and your force a wealth of apology. Please be assured we are informing the vampires in the media that the fault was all ours and your response was exemplary.’

She has seen him on television. She saw him in the foyer of Orléans! 24/7 before it became a crime scene. But she has never shaken his hand before. It is as coolly crisp as the rest of him. He’s younger than she’d thought, too, closer to forty than fifty, but his south-coast tan and ghost eyes beneath the brilliant platinum hair give him an air of ageing decadence.

His suit today is palest grey, his tie a silvery blue to match his eyes; he is by far the best-dressed man in the room. His accent is high-class Parisian and in this alone he is not unique; it applies to all of Christelle’s team with the single exception of Old René.

He’s there, the war hero, rumpled and lined in his open-necked shirt and trousers that may well be relics from his war days, a direct contradiction to the rest of the team. And he is smoking, which they are not. A hand-rolled cigarette hides between his remaining thumb and forefinger, the tip tilted in to burn his palm. When he draws in, his cheeks cave with the effort. Exhaling, he turns his gaze slowly to Picaut.

‘What does the officer think? Is it the pretty boy’s fault?’

‘Grandfather, don’t. Capitaine Picaut is here to help. She doesn’t need you to—’

Christelle is back in the office, which means someone moved quickly when they found her. You might expect her to be discomfited, or perhaps just cross, but she is flushed and tight-lipped and close to tears. Whether her discomposure arises from her grandfather’s evident hatred of Troy Cordier or Picaut’s presence, or just the ravages of the morning, is hard to say.

She doesn’t like cigarette smoke; that much is evident. She hovers just on the margins of the blue haze that surrounds Old René with her hands on her hips, bridging the gap between him and Picaut, or blocking it.

Picaut says, ‘It’s fine.’ And to Old René, ‘We don’t know if there is a fault or if there is, whose it is. That’s what we’re here to find out.’

Whatever Christelle and her grandfather think, Troy Cordier wants Picaut gone. His smile is ten thousands watts of blistering brilliance. ‘As Prosecutor Ducat has already noted,’ he says, ‘mistakes were made. We shall address them. I really don’t think we need to waste any more of your time.’

Picaut can polish her own smiles if she has to, but right now she doesn’t bother. ‘If someone is trying to stoke racial tension,’ she says, ‘it’s not a waste of my time to find out who it is and how they did it, and, most important, why. We’ll need to interview the driver, and I’d like to see the details that were sent to his laptop, which means I’ll need access to your server to check the data and the backups.’ She gestures to Sylvie, bringing her into the room and the conversation. She is as white-blonde as Troy Cordier, but her hair is cut into rough spikes and gelled, and she wears gothic eye shadow and chains on her sweatshirt, which probably reduces the Aryan appeal.

Smiling now, Picaut says, ‘This is Lieutenant Ostheimer, our technical specialist. If you could furnish her with whatever she asks for, we’ll be out of your hair all the faster. And meanwhile, if I could see your itinerary for today?’

‘That’s confidential.’ Cordier’s face droops into a frown. ‘If I might say so, capitaine, you are the wife of our principal opponent.’

Picaut sighs. ‘I am entirely capable of separating my work life from my private life. If you think otherwise, you should take it up with Prosecutor Ducat. And as the entire world knows, I will very soon be the former wife of your opponent.’

She heads towards the computer set on the oak desk by the wall. Troy Cordier blocks her progress. He is so tall, and standing so close, she has to crane her neck to look up at him, squinting against the fierce sun.

‘Just let me see the detail you had of the school, and exactly what was sent to the driver.’

‘They are identical. He was ordered to take Madame Vivier to the Saint Francis of Assisi primary school for nine thirty where the press would meet them and take some photographs of Madame Vivier speaking to the children.’

‘Very touching. And where, instead, did he take her, given that it obviously wasn’t the right place?’

‘To the Saint Francis of Assisi primary school. Only, the one on the itinerary was in Orléans, and the one he took her to was an hour’s drive away.’ Cordier gives a theatrical shrug. ‘It would seem he was sent the wrong address. An easy mistake.’

‘If it was a mistake. Who sent him the details?’

‘My personal assistant emailed them to him last night.’

‘May I speak to her?’

‘She has been given the day off.’

‘You mean she’s been dismissed?’

‘Her employment status is under review. It was a mistake of the kind that we can’t afford.’

‘She left her laptop behind?’

‘Of course.’

‘So have you checked whether what she sent out is what the driver received?’

Puzzled, he asks, ‘How could it be otherwise?’

‘Monsieur Cordier, you have no idea what a resourceful hacker could do with your data stream. The exact detail is beyond me, but I’m reliably informed that intercepting the output from one email stream and sending something marginally altered in its place would be, and I quote, “trivial”. So perhaps if we could look at your PA’s laptop together?’

The laptop is locked in a drawer in the desk set against the northerly wall. Cordier liberates it and then marches it and Picaut to a small desk by the most distant window.

Picaut keeps her back turned while Cordier keys in the pass codes and fires up the email client. She says, ‘I don’t need to see anything except the specific part of the email that relates to the school trip.’

‘Here.’ He slides the laptop across the desk with a single email open on the screen.

From:
Christelle Vivier Campaign office <
[email protected]
>

To:
Yves Perusse <
[email protected]
>

Subject:
CV/driver Itinerary 27 February

Date:
26 February 2014 18:58:38

Cordier says, ‘The lunchtime interview has been cancelled. The rest, of course, is private.’

‘Of course.’ Picaut nods to Sylvie. ‘Check the ISP and the servers. See what went in and what went out.’ To Cordier: ‘Can I see the driver’s printout?’

‘There isn’t one. It’s all on his phone.’

‘Then I need to speak to him. Is he here, or—’ She reads his expression. ‘He’s been given the day off too? Tell me you kept his phone?’

Cordier looks around. Eleven of the dozen aides shake their heads. The twelfth, a young woman with russet hair and flat, unplucked brows, crosses to the same desk as the laptop. The phone is locked in the lowest drawer. Relief swells thicker than Old René’s cigarette smoke.

Picaut says, ‘I sense a promotion coming on. Can someone open that at the incoming email, please? The one that relates to the school.’

It’s different. The realization is written across every face. Shaken, Troy Cordier turns the phone so she can read it.

From:
Christelle Vivier Campaign office <
[email protected]
>

To:
Yves Perusse <
[email protected]
>

Subject:
CV/driver Itinerary 27 February

Date:
26 February 2014 18:58:38

From the dense, tense silence, Cordier says, ‘Who would do this? And why?’ At least he is no longer asking how.

From the corner, Old René says, ‘Who stands to benefit most from our apparent mistake? And who has invested most in fancy gadgets and the men who run them?’

Christelle Vivier has joined the gaggle of fretting aides. She flashes a glare at her grandfather. ‘I’m sure Capitaine Picaut does not believe the Bressards would do this.’

‘Capitaine Picaut,’ says Picaut, ‘will believe whatever the facts support. At the moment, your own campaign team are as high in the frame as anyone else.’

‘
Us?
’ Cordier is incensed. ‘Why would
we
…?’

‘You are the ones with the poll bounce. You are also the ones who might wish to see a man dead who believed he’d found the mortal remains of the Maid.’

‘
What?
’

If he knew anything of this, he is an exceptional actor. Picaut is inclined to think he is not. Having stepped in this far, she has to explain. ‘Iain Holloway found bones he believed were hers just before he died. He was the victim of the fire at the Hôtel Carcassonne …’

Troy Cordier steps in front of her, making the most of his height. ‘Capitaine Picaut, you are entering the same fantasy land as your father. If you continue with this victimization of our campaign, I will request that the Prosecutor remove you from—’

‘Which is why I won’t. For the record, I think you’d have to be immensely stupid to amend your own server. But then the Bressards would need a particularly good reason, too. At the last poll, you had all the bounce on the back of sympathy for Christelle. The Bressards may expect a counter-bounce, but with only two full campaigning days left before the election, that’s a particularly high risk strategy and, his family’s wartime conduct with respect to your grandfather notwithstanding, Landis is not the kind of man to take unnecessary risks.’

Eyes meet across the room and all of them avoid hers. Old René says, ‘Notwithstanding his family’s betrayal of an entire Resistance cell, that man is the worst kind of snake.’

‘
Grandfather—
’

Troy Cordier moves towards the door. ‘You’ll forgive us if we still consider the Bressards to be top of our list of suspects. We respect your need for evidence and we will help you to gather what you can. We will notify the press.’

‘No. Not yet. Please. As it is, we have a short enough window in which we might track down whoever did this. If they know we’re on to them, they’ll wipe everything beyond any kind of retrieval and we lose any advantage we might have.’

‘We can’t let them go on thinking we were at fault. It will hurt our poll ratings and the election is—’

‘On Sunday. I know. But if you can say that there appears to have been a typographic error, would that suffice? We can come clean tomorrow if we’re no further forward. Just give me twenty-four hours. If it turns out to have been the Bressards, I swear we will pursue it as hard as if it turns out to have been Cheb Yasine.’

Troy Cordier shakes her hand at the door. ‘It’s been a pleasure.’

‘No, it hasn’t. But it may yet prove useful in our search for the arsonists. I hope so.’

Back at the car, the press have largely disappeared. The story has lost its bite. No motorbikes follow them, nor any photographers. As they turn the corner, she says to Sylvie, ‘Do we need Patrice?’

‘No. I can handle it.’

‘Thanks.’ Picaut checks her watch; it’s twenty past twelve. Her hands twitch. She wants to phone him, to hear his voice. She has more self-control than that. Really, she does. To Sylvie, she says, ‘I’ll drop you back at the station and you can at least access the servers and get a list of all the activity. See if you can find out where the backups are too. If we’re lucky, they’ll be time stamped and we can see when the changes were made.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To talk to Éric Masson about a skull.’

ON THE TABLE
in Éric’s lab lies a young Caucasian woman in her twenties, with needle tracks on her inner arms and at her ankles.

‘OD?’ Picaut leans over the woman, and studies the freshest of the self-inflicted injuries: about eight centimetres long, a dull red track almost lost in pale, blue-grey flesh, with the crust of a scab at the base where the needle has dragged. The girl is heroin-thin. Her hair has lost its gloss; her breasts lie flat against her chest.

Éric Masson has completed his dissection and is coming out, closing the incisions he has made in chest and abdomen.

Quietly, she asks, ‘Where’s she from?’ Not Orléans, obviously, or she would have heard about it. Even on a day like this, news of a heroin death would have reached her.

‘Tours. Found dead this morning. Her father is something big in the city administration, so they sent the autopsy out of town.’ Éric lays the last knot and pulls off his gloves. ‘She’s been using for seven years and he swears he didn’t know until he found her last night.’