Into The Fire (13 page)

Patrice holds out his hand. ‘Mine, I think?’

‘You want to be careful where you put that,’ Masson says. ‘It could be crawling with viruses.’

‘Trust me. I eat viruses for breakfast.’ Patrice is the master when it comes to sleight of hand. He has the chip out of Masson’s palm and into his machine before he’s finished speaking. His hard drive makes barely a whisper. The keys sing their comfort songs. And then don’t.

‘Shit.’ He frowns, hits some more discordant keys, frowns again. ‘What temperature did this get to?’

‘Our man was cooked through and his bones are brittle as brick. So eighty or ninety for over an hour with peaks up to one fifty or thereabouts.’ Masson pulls a face. ‘I did warn you.’

Picaut leans back. Her head bounces softly off the glass wall behind. ‘Tell me you can get something from it, Patrice. Anything.’

No answer. A new dance across the keyboard, the longer murmur of a hard drive called to serious action. Patrice bites his lip.

‘Well?’ If he’s worried, she will be worried. She’s never seen him look remotely serious before.

He shrugs. ‘The NSA have ways of getting data off a disk that’s been wiped clean and written over seven times. They can rebuild entire drives from fires a lot hotter than this.’

‘But can
you
do it? Even Ducat hasn’t got what it takes to commandeer the US.’

Patrice rolls his eyes at her. His grin burns as bright as she remembers. ‘If the Americans can do it, I can do it. Just give me time.’

‘We don’t have time.’

‘I know.’ He jumps off the table. ‘I have better kit at home. If you can live without me …?’

‘Whatever it takes. Call me when you’ve got an answer.’ Picaut turns to the rest of the team. ‘Sylvie, if Patrice is on the chip, you’re on the credit cards. I want to know every electronic payment Iain Holloway made while he was in France. See if we can create a time line that goes from Thursday to Sunday night.’

‘On it.’

‘Rollo, follow up the witness statements and see if daylight has helped jog anyone’s memory. I want background details on all the residents, staff and owners of the Hôtel Carcassonne. Include the recently departed residents. Go back a month and see if anyone stands out.’

‘On it.’

‘Garonne, call in at the Fire Department and see if they know more about the accelerant. See if it’s the same as the first three fires. Text me if you find anything. If not, go home. Don’t shake your head at me. This is the fourth fire in three weeks and the intervals are decreasing. If they’re following any kind of pattern, there’ll be another one soon. I need you sharp.’

‘And you?’ Éric asks. ‘Don’t you need to be sharp too?’

‘I’m going to see Ducat. We might need some phone taps and I don’t want him pulling the rug from under us for the fun of it.’

Prosecutor Ducat’s oak-lined office is in the shadow of the cathedral, so close that in the old days, when he left his windows open, the clatter of tourist cameras was a constant counterpoint to the typewriter of his clerk.

Now the tourists take their pictures silently on their mobile phones and his clerk uses a soft-touch keyboard on her iMac and Ducat has one less thing to complain about. Which leaves him free to pick other, more personal, targets.

‘What’s your husband doing interrupting your work?’

‘Bringing me this.’

It wasn’t how she meant to start, but it’s as good a place as any and the maybe-parchment has been burning a hole in the pocket of her leather jacket since Luc gave it to her. ‘He suggested I show it to you. For verification.’

She drops it into the anal neatness of Ducat’s desk and waits for him to snatch it off, or at the very least lay it straight.

He does neither. Seeing the signature, he doesn’t touch it.

‘Why is Landis Bressard writing to you?’ The flatness in his tone is testament to his loathing of the Family. Orléans was his demesne until the Family came north and spread their largesse and their threats. He is diminished now, in his own eyes, if nobody else’s.

‘To make me an offer I can’t refuse. Read it.’

He does, and when he looks up he makes full eye contact with her for the first time in their joint history. ‘What’s your former husband asking you to do that is worth so fulsome an undertaking? Or is that too intimate to reveal?’

‘I have to agree to be his arm candy.’ Her smile does not withstand his stare. ‘He wants to have a wife he can show to the press. Specifically, he wants me to be at his side for a press conference at eight o’clock tonight.’ The text containing this particular request – is it a demand? – came through as she was parking the car. ‘If I do what they want, then the moment he is elected I am free. If that letter is worth anything at all.’

Ducat nods and goes on nodding to the rhythm of some inner dialogue. At the end, he opens a drawer in his desk and slides out some paper of a weight only slightly less than the one used by Landis Bressard. He thrusts a fountain pen into Picaut’s hand.

‘Write what you just said to me, without the crack about arm candy. Write it all, sign it, date it, time it.’

She writes, signs, dates, times. He signs beneath it, then calls the grey-haired woman who has organized his office for the past thirty years.

‘Mademoiselle Templan?’

He is not supposed to use the diminutive any more. She should be Madame, regardless of her marital status. As a lawyer, Ducat knows this. As a man of a certain age, he will not consider it. As a lawyer’s clerk, Stéphanie Templan knows it, too. As Ducat’s clerk, she knows it will never happen.

She is neatly conservative, in her late fifties, heading to retirement. If she was ever going to suggest to Maître Ducat that he had made a mistake, she would have done it thirty years ago, and would be employed elsewhere, in an office that might, perhaps, close over a weekend.

She reads what Picaut has written, and then she too, appends her signature, the date and the time. With no further urging from Ducat, she makes a copy, which she gives to Picaut, and locks the original into the safe in the wall behind his desk. With a nod to them both, she returns to the outer office.

Ducat sits back behind his desk and regards Picaut over the steeples of his fingers. The peg-toothed proto-simian smile has gone. There is no bonhomie now, false or otherwise.

‘Is it worth this price to you, to be free of him?’ he asks.

‘Yes.’

‘Then I wish you good luck in front of the cameras.’ He bites the edge of his thumbnail. ‘They don’t flatter me. You, they will like. Particularly if you can tell them that you know who is lighting the fires that are consuming Orléans. Can you?’

‘Not yet. I can tell you the burned man was a consultant orthopaedic surgeon from Scotland, who had an interest in forensic archaeology and a passing fascination with the Battle of Patay. We don’t know what he was doing in Orléans, or why he died. We have a USB chip that he swallowed before he died. Dr Masson has sent you the details. Patrice is on it now.’

‘Was it murder?’

‘I can’t prove it yet. I can’t put a name to whoever is lighting the fires, either.’

‘Other than Jaish al Islam.’

‘If they’re for real, I’ll buy you dinner.’

Another man might grin or wink or comment on her recklessness, might endeavour to take her up early on her offer. In the past, Ducat might have done any or all of these.

Today’s new, serious Ducat raises a single brow. ‘So then find me who is doing this. One death is one too many.’

As if she had not thought of it before, Picaut says, ‘We have some computer data. I may need a tap.’

‘Call me. Anytime, night or day. Just make sure it’s worth it.’

‘
GREAT GOD IN
heaven, it’s Tod Rustbeard without his beard! I wouldn’t have known you, man! Fuck, your own mother wouldn’t know you like that. What’s happened? Are you ill?’

Tomas – now once again Tod – Rustbeard bows to his master. Actually, there are at least two occasions when Bedford has seen him without his beard, he just didn’t recognize him either time.

He says, ‘There wasn’t a house or a hovel between Patay and Paris would offer food to an English voice. The whole of France has gone French again.’

‘Fuck them. They won’t stay that way long. No nation loves a weak king.’ Bedford can ignore the fact that the King of England is six years old and showing no signs of martial vigour. In his head, he is all the strong king any two nations need, and Tod Rustbeard agrees with him, heart and soul.

John of Lancaster, first Duke of Bedford, is a bull of a man, straining through his doublet, greasily sweaty, his breath a swamp of wine and garlic and a discomfited liver. He is a soldier’s lord, thick-fingered, his rings set about with garnets big as knucklebones, fit to break open French skulls.

Just now, one hand grips the stall. The other soothes his sword in its sheath, out … in … out … in … a finger’s length at a time, a fornication in metal. One can pity his wife, or perhaps rather his mistresses, his wife being safe in great wealth in London. But even the mistresses have it relatively easy, for Bedford is a man given to warfare, happiest in the gore and drench of battle.

Above all else, Bedford lives to kill Frenchmen. He will have France made English within the year and Tod Rustbeard, his agent, will do whatever is necessary to facilitate his lord’s desire.

And so to his plan. ‘You received my message, my lord?’

In. Out. In. Out. The hiss of metal on metal. Bedford nods. ‘You want us to put out word that we’ve captured Patrick Ogilvy of Gairloch, and are ready to swap him for Talbot, Suffolk or Scales. A fine plan, but what do we do if they agree?’

‘They won’t. Ogilvy had no kin in France and the Maid wants to swap those three for Charles of Orléans, the dauphin’s uncle.’

Bedford, sharply: ‘We can’t do that. My brother ordered Orléans kept until the king is of age and can decide for himself if it’s safe to let him go.’ In one sentence, the power in England and France: dead king to living regent until the boy is old enough.

‘I know. So there’s no risk. Leave it a few months and you can let it out that he’s had an unfortunate attack of gaol fever and you are grieved to say you cannot even return his body.’

My lord of Bedford is not his late brother, to kill a man out of hand for insolence, but he is not known for his patience either. He flogs men for such behaviour and few of them live long after. Tod Rustbeard leans back against the nearest stall. He takes a breath, takes a risk. ‘Sir William Glasdale died bravely. He wanted me to tell you that.’

‘I heard he threw himself in the river rather than surrender to the witch. Self-murder is a sin. He’ll rot in purgatory at the very least.’ Bedford makes it sound mildly inconvenient; like being in Paris when your enemy is heading for Rheims with an army that grows by the day. He draws his sword half out, slams it home again. ‘You haven’t killed the woman.’

Obviously. The whole world would know if the Maid were dead.

‘I came close, twice. The first time, when the men thought she had died, I saw what they would do if she were martyred. Lately, I have come to think that Glasdale was right.’

A space. A chance for my lord of Bedford to think. He is not a stupid man, far from it. In the stall to their right, a liver chestnut mare with a white off hind lifts her tail and heaves out a succession of small, hard pellets.

The sword slams home. Bedford says, ‘Go on.’

‘He saw her fight; Glasdale, that is. He saw the Maid fight, and before he died he told me that it wasn’t enough just to kill her. We need to find out who she is, and use it to destroy her.’

‘What do you mean, he saw her fight? Women don’t fight.’

‘My lord …’

How can he say this without causing offence? She fights as you do? Actually, she fights as did your late brother, the king, and that is not a thing I thought to see ever again in this lifetime.

Carefully. Carefully. He is not altogether tired of living.

‘My lord, five days ago I saw her couch her lance and ride down Talbot’s archers. She is not natural, but nor is she a demon. She has been trained, and well. I think … I have heard things that lead me to believe that she may have been a ward of the king of France. The late king.’

‘Daft Charles?’ Bedford laughs. ‘Did you ever meet him? No? Mad as a snake. He sometimes thought he was a footman called Georges, made of glass, and he’d break if he bumped into the walls. In the bad years, he kept that up for months at a time. His brother of Burgundy had the devil’s own job to keep control of him. You can’t run a country like that for long, not when even sane men get a taste for power.’

Rustbeard says, ‘They say he lived for the tilt. He fought in the tunnels beneath Melun. He went incognito to the match at the bridge at Saint-Denis.’ A famous tourney: three knights took an oath to hold the bridge for three weeks. And the King of France dressed in black, pretending to have no name, came to test them on it. They say that nobody knew it was him until after. Mad he may have been, but he was also king; nobody was going to talk against him. If he’d ordered a girl to be trained, he could have taken her anywhere as his squire. Nobody would have known.’

‘Jesu.’ Bedford is frowning. ‘Is this possible?’

‘Lord, I believe it is. She understands artillery and battlefield tactics, and she can think strategically. She took the gatehouse at Meung and neutered Talbot and Scales without ever meeting them in battle. By the time we’d taken Jargeau and Beaugency, they’d run. We took the town with ease.’

‘We?’

Tod Rustbeard holds his lord’s gaze. ‘I was in the French army then—’

‘And killing Englishmen to boot, I’m sure. If I ever grow tired of you, I’ll have you hanged for treason.’

Bedford takes a turn around the mare, tests her tendons, her hooves, pats her arse. He is kinder to his horses than he is to his men; the horses cost more to raise and train. ‘I still find it hard to believe that the drivelling fool who calls himself king has raised an army. He can’t even lie in a bed without its falling through the floor. Did you hear about that?’