Into The Fire (23 page)

He steps back, indicates the door. The pack, chastened, press out into the street.

Ducat could have got them to leave, but he would have had to bully them and they would have gone resentfully. He seethes; the raw heat of it scorches Picaut’s back. For it is Luc and Inès Picaut who will share tomorrow’s headlines.

She turns towards him. ‘Maître, if we could discuss—’

Luc is at her elbow. ‘I’m sorry. We were trying to draw them off Christelle Vivier and her whole
Front National
insanity. I swear we had no warning about Henri Aubel’s act of sabotage this morning. We’ll do what we can to deflect the damage.’

‘I’m sure you will.’ She takes a step away from him. ‘I have, as we both pointed out, a job to do. For which I need to speak with the Prosecutor …’

‘Of course. My apologies.’ He lifts her hand, kisses it. They have stepped into the lobby of Ducat’s office. The pack is outside, standing on the steps, between Picaut and her car. She turns a full circle, looking for a way out. There is the fire escape, and a back door. And between them Lise Bressard, wearing a platinum grey Saint Laurent suit and a Chanel scarf that sets off her night-dark hair.

Here, now, she is the closest thing to a friend Picaut has got.

She says, ‘Lise, I have to go somewhere without the pack on my heels. How would you feel about leading them astray?’

It’s probably the first time she’s ever addressed this woman by name. She might well be rebuffed; just now, she doesn’t care.

Perhaps because of that, Lise looks interested. ‘What have you in mind?’

‘Take this.’ Picaut shrugs out of her buckskin jacket. ‘And these.’ Her sunglasses are Police, not police, but still far inferior to anything Lise Bressard might choose to wear. On the other hand, every shot the pack took this morning had her wearing them. ‘If you tuck your hair in at the back, it’ll look shorter.’

‘And if I’m wearing your jacket, you must have mine …’ Luc’s cousin slips out of her slubbed silk creation, grey with maroon points, and hands it over. Her scarf is a matching shade of quiet red, the silk smooth as sunlight. ‘Luc will have to drive you away from here,’ she says. ‘It’ll look strange otherwise. He needs to go to the office. After that, you can take the car and do with it what you will. I’ll drop yours back here at the station when I’m done. Where should I go, and for how long?’

Lise looks cheerful, buoyant, even; a side of her Picaut hasn’t seen before.

‘North towards Paris. An hour should be enough.’

‘Consider it done.’

They watch her go. She has modified her walk, Picaut realizes; her stride is longer, lower to the ground, somehow.

‘Do I walk like that?’

‘You do.’ It is Ducat who answers. His face is unreadable. ‘If you have a minute?’

She leaves Luc by the window. Ducat lets her lead the way into his now-empty office. Truly, today is a day of firsts.

Inside, he says, ‘Where are you going?’

‘Meung-sur-Loire. Iain Holloway used his credit card at the station there on Saturday morning, before he came to Orléans. I’ll pick up the trail there.’

‘And what if our friends in the press aren’t fooled by Annelise’s little stunt? Are you seriously going to start looking for witnesses with a TV crew on your tail?’

Picaut presses her fingers to the closed lids of her eyes. ‘Is there any kind of injunction …?’

‘Not that I could enforce.’

‘Great.’ She slides into Lise’s jacket, brings her shoulders back, tries to think how Lise might walk. ‘Let’s hope it works, then.’

At the door she stops. ‘Patrice is trying to break the code in the USB file. He may need to …’ Her hands move in a vague circle. Ducat scowls in a way that is hearteningly familiar.

‘I don’t want to know. Nor, I think, do you. Tell him to obey the eleventh commandment. And that he’s on his own if he fails so to do.’

LISE BRESSARD DOES
draw off the media hounds. Driving fourteen kilometres west along the line of the river, Picaut sees not one single press photographer behind her. There is a small pale yellow Peugeot that seems to remain a steady distance behind her, but it continues on the main route when she turns into the town.

It is nearly noon when she arrives in Meung-sur-Loire, barely more than a village, at whose minuscule railway station Iain Holloway bought a cup of coffee and a bar of chocolate and paid for it by credit card on Saturday afternoon, just over twenty-four hours before he died.

If he knew his life was under threat, did he know this far ahead? And why was he here in the first place?

After much thought, the Asian woman at the kiosk in the corner regrets that she does not recall the gentleman from any of the images Patrice has provided. Her daughter, however, who comes to take over at midday, may do so. In the meantime, if Madame would like a coffee and perhaps a cake?

She offers this with no sideways looks, no sense of awe, and it may be that she genuinely doesn’t recognize Picaut in her current guise. What this says about her reliability as a witness is a moot point, and entirely overshadowed by the relief of anonymity.

Picaut sits on one of the high stools and drinks the cat’s piss coffee and eats a croque-monsieur and when the kiosk-owner’s daughter still has not appeared, she walks out on to the platform and shows the picture of Iain Holloway to the two women with the four children, the man reading
Die Welt
who doesn’t understand French and has only the barest smattering of English, and the stationmaster, a broad, well-fed, grey-haired Parisian, who comes to see if she’s causing trouble.

‘Capitaine? I have seen you, no? Pardon – my apologies. The newspapers, they make things up. Here, we do not believe their fantasies. This man? Yes, he was here on Saturday. Twice. He arrived in the morning, around nine o’clock, on the train from Blois, and he left in the afternoon, perhaps around one o’clock, going to Orléans. I was leaving my shift then. I saw him standing on the platform with his coffee. In the morning, he took a taxi. I know not to where, but you could ask in the rank? I’m sure they’d be happy to help someone of your stand— Yes. They will help.’

The men of the taxi rank are positively effusive. One owns to having taken Dr Iain Holloway – or at least a man very like him, if you’ll excuse the uncertainty, one would hate to bear false witness – on a tourist trip through the town, not just once, but three days in a row last week, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.

—A tourist trip? In Meung-sur-Loire? What is there to see?

—Ah! The
capitaine
makes a joke. He could have visited the chateau, of course.

—Did he?

—No.

—The taxi took the gentleman from the train station to Cléry-Saint-André and thence to the basilica where the gentleman, doubtless very devout, spent the morning. Yes, four hours. He called for the same taxi to return him to the station. He had done the same, more or less, on Friday and Saturday.

—He used you each day?

—He did.

—Why?

A shy shrug. I speak good English. I used to work for Apple in their foreign sales department. And the gentleman, he had hardly any French at all. That’s why he wanted me. The
capitaine
has her own car. Does she know the way?

Picaut knows the way.

Cléry-Saint-André is a fleck on the map in which the only building of any note at all is the basilica.

Picaut was brought here by her school when she was nine. She remembers being awed by the size of the church; it was nowhere near the size or complexity of the cathedral at Orléans, but it was still
big.

Tall-spired, with the angular Gothic architecture beloved of the fifteenth century, it dominates the surrounding cottages. A king lies here: Louis XI, son of the man the Maid of Orléans put on the throne.

He it was who took the village church and ordered it rebuilt into a resting place fit for a monarch and his wife. A vague memory from her school visit says that both the original tomb and its successor were destroyed in the various wars and revolutions that convulsed the region; not everyone reveres royalty.

Entering quietly by the small door in the long side, nearest the road, Picaut leaves the sun and the startling blue sky for the cold, shaded interior, the hard wooden pews, the smell of damp and age and bone-dry dust.

The tomb of Louis XI is the first thing she sees: an unfortunate Gothic monstrosity of pillared marble set just inside the entrance. A low fence of iron railings protects the tomb proper from prying fingers, while four marble pillars hold aloft a marble roof, on which the statue of the king kneels in eternal prayer. Four of the near-naked cherubs the Church loves to spread around its places of worship attend him, one at each corner.

Walking around it, Picaut imagines Iain Holloway doing the same. She learns nothing. Whatever he was doing here, it didn’t take him four hours to look at one tomb and it’s hard to see what else he might have done with his time.

There are rows of wooden pews, and an altar to her left, and all the usual trappings of a church, but they are not especially interesting. Picaut checks them out, just to be sure, and then heads up to the opposite end and the west door. A small side room is set off to the left, empty, softly echoing, as if the ghosts of the past wait for her there. She backs out. To her right is the main entrance.

She is standing there in shadow, when the side door by Louis’s tomb opens and, as quietly, closes. A figure appears, dressed in black.

There is a moment when Picaut thinks it may be the priest, and feels a flash of guilt for desecrating his church with her presence.

Then the figure steps into the light and is not a man but a woman, and she is not dressed in black, she
is
black. She is dressed, in fact, in autumnal shades of browns and faint greens that must be entirely on trend in Paris but, here, look urban and slickly professional.

Monique Susong stands with her head bowed and her fingers looped before the tomb of Louis XI, and Capitaine Inès Picaut praises all the listening powers that her trip has not been in vain.

TOMAS HAS NOT
found the Maid’s friend, Hanne. Two days of quiet questions and he has not found a Hannah or a Hanni, or any woman whose name is remotely similar.

He is in a foul temper, but in that, at least, he is not alone. In the days immediately following the king’s anointing, Rheims is a hushed and sluggish place. Men and women, if they walk at all, step heel to toe, silently, as if their heads are blown eggshells, and their feet stabbed with glass. Fresh vomit curdles the air.

Tomas, sober, clear-headed, coldly furious, meets Stefan, his small, dark agent, in the same back alley as before. This time, the stench of old urine and rotting faeces is an improvement on the air he has been breathing.

‘I need you to find me Claudine.’ At least he knows who she is and what she looks like. ‘Bedford will want to question her. If you can get her to—’

‘Gone.’ Stefan leers.

‘Gone where?’

Stefan points between his feet, then reconsiders and points to the sky. She is in hell, or maybe in heaven.

Tomas’s knife is in his hand. His palm itches. ‘She was the witness who would have testified that the Maid—’

‘Bertrand de Poulangy was looking for her. She’d have betrayed you.’

Tomas is not Bedford. He has never yet slain a man without good reason. And Bertrand de Poulangy is not a man to bed a whore as low as Claudine. He slides the knife away. ‘You saw this, or you heard it?’

‘The one and then the other. I heard it. I followed him. He led me to her. I made a disturbance. He went to look. When he came back, she was gone. He won’t find her.’ Stefan’s small, black eyes search his face. ‘If she had remained alive, and had talked … you would have been in a stone cellar by now, making close acquaintance with knives and hot irons. De Poulangy is the arm of his lady’s law.’

‘You did right.’ This is what Tomas pays for: intelligence and forethought. ‘What else have you for me?’

‘News of the Maid. She is lodging in the house of Jean de Belleville, and his betrothed. They treat her like an old friend. The future lady of Belleville is Marguerite de Valois, the old king’s bastard daughter. The new king’s sister.’ Stefan casts a sideways glance. ‘I have heard that the lady Marguerite is very godly. In her piety, she may wish to welcome a new priest.’

‘Ah.’ This is worth silver. Possibly, it is worth gold. Tomas throws a coin. If he cannot find Hanne, who grew up in Domrémy, the angel-princess who stopped the battle amongst the king’s wards on the day of Agincourt will have to suffice.

Tomas steeples his fingers, taps them together. He needs to be closer. With Bertrand de Poulangy sniffing around, he cannot simply walk up to the door and introduce himself. He will need to be invited in, and then to stay.

So. A plan … a plan. One shapes in his mind, even as he speaks. ‘When is she alone? The Maid?’

‘Not often. In the mornings, she schools her horse down by the river. The vicious one d’Alençon gave her that was the old king’s breeding.’

‘Alone?’

‘She was this morning.’

And that, for certain, is worth silver. Tomas pays what is owed and goes in search of the butcher and his son; his idea grows with each stride in the new direction.

Thus it is that, on the third day after the king’s coronation, Brother Tomas rises early and heads down to the meadows by the river, south and west of the cathedral, where, if Stefan is right, there will be … and yes, there is: a solitary figure, showing no signs of drink or pain, riding her snake-headed grey across the flat ground.

She loves this horse. She enjoys its company. On the water meadows of Rheims, on the day after the king’s coronation, she rides it as if the gift were still new, as if they were still learning each other, the horse and the Maid, preparing for some display to assembled knights that might show each to the best advantage.