Into The Fire (27 page)

‘When we get there, check out the CCTV. If there’s any that might have picked anything up, get hold of the feed.’

‘On it.’

The fire is deep within the complex, at the very latest conversion, right on the boundary where new meets old. Picaut parks at a safe distance, and Patrice heads off to find the CCTV footage, while she walks in towards a towering banner of flame. The heat is appalling, the air full of soot and cinders. The stench is of burning plastic. She inhales in short, sharp bursts, like a hound on a spoor, but finds no taint of flesh or blood or bone.

Martin Evard is ahead of her, grimly silent.

‘Anybody inside?’ Picaut asks.

‘Not that we know of.’

‘What’s the risk to other buildings?’

‘Depends on the wind.’

Just now, there is no wind; not so much as a feather of a breath on her cheek. This is the saving grace; even the slightest breeze would torch half the industrial park and it would be down to fate as to whether it was the new half or the old that was destroyed.

It may yet come to that. Picaut studies the gap between this warehouse and its neighbours on all four sides. Paint is blistering in the heat, but the units are not yet burning. Martin Evard’s men are playing water across them, working inwards to the fire’s heart.

She turns back to discover that the press pack has arrived. Cameras begin to flash. She wants to run and has nowhere to go. She is considering whether she can face calling Lise Bressard for help when she sees Patrice in a hooded sweatshirt that covers his hair, standing on the bonnet of her car, signalling joyously. Her phone pings on a text from him.

CCTV G
OLD
. COME!

‘There – Honda Civic, coming from the main road.’

They are in the tiny not-quite-a-cupboard surveillance office of the tech company building that is one unit away from the fire; an empty unlet lot separates them from the blaze.

Inside, Patrice is running a bank of monitors, watching eight screens at once. This is the latest technology; nothing fuzzy or uncertain here. In perfect clarity, Picaut watches an old-model Honda that has seen better years, perhaps better decades, take a corner too hard and speed down the service road heading right to left across the screen.

Programmed to follow motion, the camera pans round after it. At the very margin of its viewing arc, the car stands on its nose and two lean, fit men – thirties rather than twenties; maybe Asian? She can’t see enough of their faces to be sure – fling the doors open and tumble out as if they are under machine-gun fire. They delve into the trunk and come out with two oil drums of such size and weight that each can only just be lifted. They carry-roll-kick them out of sight of the camera.

A breath-held pause follows, in which neither Picaut nor any of her team says a word. They are all here now, packing into a room that was crowded even when Patrice and she were in it alone.

Picaut wishes for sound to match the non-action on the screen. She watches the time stamp tick over, trying to work out how far they have got, how long it will take to spread the fuel around, how far away they’ll be when they light the rag or the bundle of paper and hurl it into the wall of vapour they have created. She wants to hear the explosion, to know when the worst has happened.

Without warning, the screen blasts to white so they all flinch away, and when they look back, it has refocused on the two men sprinting back to the Civic.

Their handbrake turn would put a Hollywood stunt team to shame. They speed back the way they have come, towards the main road and the city. The camera watches the space where they were, then tracks back to the new source of motion, the flames that lick at the edge of its vision.

‘Four forty-nine,’ Picaut says.

‘What?’

‘Four minutes and forty-nine seconds from leaving their car to getting back in again.’ Sylvie, too, has been watching the date stamp; she can answer Rollo’s question. ‘They knew where to go and what to do.’

‘The stamp said seventeen forty-three when the fire first lit,’ Picaut says. ‘When was it reported?’

‘Seventeen forty-six. If they’d been half an hour earlier, we’d have been all over them, but pretty much everyone here goes home at five-thirty. I’m guessing they knew that.’ Evard is staring at the screen. ‘Can you get the registration? Maybe trace them that way?’

‘Patrice is on it.’

Picaut glances across at Patrice, who makes an ‘almost there’ gesture with one shoulder. Because she is watching him, she sees the moment he finds out, and the sudden shock.

‘What? Who?’

‘Abayghur Amrouche.’ Everyone, even Picaut, looks at him blankly until he says, ‘Algerian. One of Cheb Yasine’s cousins. He lives three doors away from the man himself.’

‘Oh, Jesus, fuck.’ Picaut falls back against a wall. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,
fuck
.’ She opens her eyes. Martin Evard is staring at her as if this is the first time he’s heard a woman swear. Everyone else is either studying the floor or spitting curses of their own.

For the fire chief’s benefit, she says, ‘Cheb Yasine is third generation French Algerian. Badder than bad. Rémi’s drug squad spent two years on an undercover op and in the end they lost three of their people, one tortured to death with a power drill, the other two shot in a firefight. They still didn’t get enough on Yasine to hold up in court. He’s beyond hard and if he’s found God and decided to wage a religious war on Orléans, we’re fucked from here to midnight.’

‘You think he’s behind Jaish al Islam?’

‘I really, really hope not.’ She turns away. It’s not a good lead, but it’s a lead, and that’s way beyond anything she expected. Now, at last, she can act. ‘Alors, mes amis …’

Garonne and Rollo have been here before, more or less; they know what she needs. Garonne is smiling. Rollo looks as if he’s already striking bargains with his war gods, promising sacrifices of life and blood. Picaut only has to nod and they’ll be off, back to the station to arm and pick up the vests, the long-range cameras, the flasks and empty bottles they will need to piss into if they have to set up a long watch.

There’s a moment’s tension. She nods. ‘Sylvie, get back to the office and keep up pressure on the two priests.’ Everyone is relieved by that. ‘Patrice, you’re with me. I need an address that overlooks Yasine’s place, where we can set up a hide.’

‘Chief, you can’t go there.’ That’s Garonne, sounding almost like he used to. ‘The press are on your tail like dogs after a bitch in heat. Sorry, but it’s true. If you go anywhere near this, Yasine will know it in seconds and we’ll lose any lead we have. It has to be me and Rollo. You can send the others in one at a time if you want.’

If you want us to teach them how it’s done is what he means.

He’s right.

‘Go.’ She nods to the door. ‘I’ll get rid of the press and come for the night shift.’ It’s not right, and it may not be possible, but it’s the best she can do for now. ‘Patrice, you and I will head back to the station. Most of them will follow us. Sylvie, you go next. See if you can get whoever’s left to follow you, so they’re not after Garonne and Rollo. If the bastards stop you, make a point of this fire being a change in the pattern: it’s daylight and they’re targeting the work of a man. Both are new. It might not be the same group. We can’t afford to assume that it is.’

‘What do you really think?’

‘I think we’re about to get another phone call.’

Picaut is cutting her own three-point turn on the tarmac when Patrice takes the call on her mobile and puts it on speaker phone.

‘
Ici Jaish al Islam …
’

IT IS MORNING
. Brother Tomas stands at the head of the French army as it lines up on the broad plain of Montépilloy to face the English. Unmounted, he stands in the front row, not far from the Maid.

He was with her at Mass, and afterwards, for the first time, he heard her confession: litanies of men dead and others injured, of curses vented against the king. She is clean now, clear of taint, and she is where she wants to be, on a battlefield, with her king behind her. She shines.

Just now, the sun is their most pressing enemy. Already, barely halfway to noon, the heat is killing. Even his white robes are a cauldron. Heaven knows what it is to stand in full armour.

Dust is his benediction; all along the lines, the bright colours of honour wilt, drab and dry and dirty. Heat boils up in shimmering panels from the rows upon rows of men. They shift from foot to foot, test their blades, the run of iron on leather. Bowmen worry about their strings. Everyone worries about the flies. A man three rows back pulls out his cock and pisses where he stands and the air feels fresher for it.

Nobody complains. The men know God is with them because the Maid is with them. Against them is Bedford, who calls himself regent of France, brought to bay after nearly a month of hunting across the country.

He will not give them an easy battle. He has done what his brother did at Agincourt, which is to say that his men have dug a ditch around the edge of their chosen stand, and every man has set his stake pointing outwards to cripple the French horses. Their carts are pulled up within, making shields against French arrows, and their longbowmen wait in that shelter to rain their own shafts on French heads.

Tomas knows the strategy, but he is not sure it will work this time. The Maid gave a speech after evening prayer last night and before Mass this morning, saying to the knights, who said it to their men at arms: that under no circumstances were they to charge the English position. ‘We shall learn from the mistakes of the past, and not repeat them.’

So the French will not charge the English. And the English will not charge the French. For hours, therefore, nothing moves between them but dust.

Brother Tomas stands not much more than a good bowshot from the English. The Maid is to his left, bright in her white armour. She has slept in it, eaten in it, fought in it for three months now and it has moulded to her, or she to it, so that she looks easy, as any knight might. Still, she wears the bassinet with the open face, that all might see her, and know her for who she is.

The king sits his dull gelding to her other side, and of all of them, he is the least willing to be here. Therein lies their deficiency.

Once, if he were captured, Charles VII might have been ransomed, but these last weeks Bedford has dashed off proclamations by the score naming him traitor and promising to behead him as a common criminal when – not if – the English catch him.

All of the French nobility who have set themselves against England face the same fate; this war has gone beyond the niceties of chivalry. They have known this since they broke out of Orléans, but Charles de Valois, it would seem, only came to understand it last night in his tent, with all talk gone, and England camped at his feet, when honour demanded that he fight.

He looked sick with fright last night and was no better this morning: a startled fawn caught at bay by mastiffs, with nowhere left to turn.

The Maid, of course, makes the move. Of a sudden, turning, she wrests her standard from de Coutes, her page. He opens his mouth to protest, catches sight of her face within the open circle of her helm and closes it again, with a click of his teeth.

On either side, knights grip their reins tighter, causing their horses to fidget and stamp. D’Alençon is there, and La Hire; they go nowhere without her now. Jean de Belleville is somewhere further back; he has not yet earned a place at the forefront of any fray. Father Huguet will not be far away; those two are never parted, and neither is ever far from the Maid.

Tomas watches her and those closest to her. He sees the moment she meets d’Alençon’s eye and gives a small nod. La Hire doesn’t understand.

‘Girl, where are you going?’ He’s the only one who doesn’t speak to her as a knight. He treats her as one, though. Where she leads, he will follow.

‘I’m going to draw them out.’

‘Jehanne, you can’t …’ René d’Anjou, Yolande of Aragon’s second son, grabs her wrist. He is the son of a queen; he can do things the rest would not dare. He says, ‘You can’t go near them. It’s too much of a risk. Bedford’s said publicly he’ll burn you.’

She tips her head, in the way she has that says ‘What of it?’ Aloud: ‘But he has to catch me first, and to do that he has to come out, and he won’t come alone. Trust Xenophon; he is the better of any English horse.’

Once more, René d’Anjou says what everyone else is thinking. ‘Your horse is better than their bowmen? I know you think a lot of him, but really …’

The Maid pats his arm. ‘He’s good enough, you’ll see. Let La Hire come and get me if they try anything. He’ll enjoy that.’

She thinks to go alone, but Tomas follows behind on foot. He is a priest; even with the acrimony of both sides, he does not believe he will be the target of anyone’s bowmen, gunners, or men at arms. He is clad in white, and his head is shaved. One arm is in a sling. The other holds a staff that Huguet found for him. To all who see him, God carries him close; they will not risk the wrath of heaven.

He walks through the hot, hard dust until he is level with her and he, too, can see into the ranks of the English: his brothers. Or at least his countrymen. His half-countrymen, then. Well, anyway, he is on their side, did they but know it. They don’t. They look on him with hate.

The Maid, as far as he can tell, knows no fear. She stares directly at Bedford, at his knights and men at arms, at the English bowmen who are too busy making the sign of the cross to lift their bows against her. Not only the archers, but the knights. Tomas can see them, see the furtive signs to ward off evil, the amulets twisted, the crosses kissed. They know exactly who she is, but there is not one of them cares to come out to fight her, man to … woman.

She stands before them breathing in the war-stench of England, which is not so different from the war-stench of France, and then she puts her mount through its paces, just as she did when last he watched her on the water meadows outside Rheims.