Into The Fire (18 page)

‘Done?’ Colin Graves, the producer, is English and speaks French with a broad London accent. White-haired, bluff, jut-jawed, it is easy to imagine him as a knight in the army that tried to take Orléans by force.

Today, in the tamer twenty-first century, he looks very much the type of man who might sack an AP who failed to produce the latest hot topic for the morning’s show. Or someone more senior than a producer. In the ten minutes before she was asked to switch her phone off, Picaut used the search engine to good effect. She knows, she thinks, what they plan. Her only hope is that they are not as good as Patrice; that they don’t know every detail of Iain Holloway’s past activities.

Esteban steps back, lifting the tissue clear of her collar. Graves gives her a bland smile, his gaze already sliding out to the screen mounted in the wall to her right, where the channel’s overnight news anchor is beginning to wrap up on a résumé of the night’s demonstrations. Picaut has not yet been to look at the scenes of broken glass and discarded litter. The world’s media are there in force, and she probably has a better view of it on screen than if she walked along the streets.

She makes herself look away from the chaos, searches instead for Henri Aubel among the studio engineers, the assistant producers, the lighting people. She hasn’t seen him yet, and doesn’t, as she is ushered through three more whispering doors into the hot-white goldfish bowl of the studio.

The Bressards kept their cameras small and inconspicuous. Here they are big beasts, prowling. The sofa of her imagination is not a sofa but three swivelling office chairs – padded, leather, expensive – set in an intimate circle around a smoked glass coffee table on which lies a selection of the morning papers and a steaming cafetière (standard blend, boring; Éric would spit it out) and three mugs, already poured, with milk and sugar added, or, in Picaut’s case, not.

Three chairs. Three mugs of coffee. So she was right. The sofa of her imaginings was built for two, but only because she prefers optimism to its opposite. It doesn’t take much deduction to work out that she is most likely to be sharing her morning interview with …

Christelle Vivier, shining in emerald green, her hair a banner of flame laid full about her shoulders. She has been brought in by another door and she, unlike Picaut, was not remotely expecting this. Across her face flows surmise, fury, the promise of revenge.

‘Capitaine Picaut! I didn’t know—’

‘Neither of you did. Don’t blame each other. You wouldn’t have come if we’d told you.’ Behind her, Henri Aubel sounds altogether more vibrant than he did on the phone last night. He is taller than she remembers, no longer bespectacled, newly possessed of American-white teeth, and if he was ever truly shy, you wouldn’t know it now.

‘Ladies—’ A long stride, a flourish of the arms. Is he wearing a bow tie? He is! How very … English. Is that Colin Graves’s idea? She wouldn’t have thought Henri up to this, but then there is no part of him that is as she remembers. His shirt is silk, the colour of white gold. His suit is pale blue Italian linen and Landis Bressard would look twice at the cut and enquire as to the name of his tailor. Henri manages to look at once louche and raffish, edgy and thoroughly radical.

He sweeps in, long-legged, to take his seat in the centre. ‘Christelle, if you’ll come on my right, Inès on my left.’

She catches his eye, flatly. He gives a single truncated shrug, no smile to go with it, no apology, and then he is facing the camera, asking a question of the producer, pressing his finger to his ear for the answer, and then the signature tune is caterwauling in the background and the light on top of the leading camera is blinking red and red and red and … green.

Henri, radiant, to the camera. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Orléans! Six–Huit this Tuesday morning. We are less than a week away from an election that will decide the fate of us, the ordinary people of Orléans, in ways perhaps we cannot yet imagine, for this campaign has always been electric, but recent events have made it – dare I say – incendiary? Another fire on Sunday night, and then last night further demonstrations in favour of the
Front National
. For now, the streets seem to be calm again, but for how long? Will we even get to the polls in safety? We are caught up in a time of unprecedented social and political unrest and here in the studio to discuss it with me we have two of our leading lights.

‘On my right, Christelle Vivier of the
Front National
whose members have been conspicuous by their absence from last night’s … what shall we call them? Gatherings? Although many in the crowd have been retweeting their slogans in defence of a France kept wholly French.

‘On my left, we have Capitaine Inès Picaut, the police officer responsible for bringing to justice those who have lit the fires which, I dare say, are at least part of the cause of the recent events. Both have recently been likened to our city’s heroine, our national saint, and their resemblance to her is obvious in each case.

‘Christelle Vivier, let’s start with you.’

He turns to his right. The cameras track across. ‘As we all know, Jeanne d’Arc, also known as the Maid of Orléans, was a figurehead, the poster-child of the French fight back against the English. She rallied the troops. She rode her white charger into the besieged city of Orléans and brought hope to the people, but legend says that she didn’t actually
fight.
So given that your campaign team have gone to extraordinary lengths to frame you as the new Maid, are you likewise a powerless puppet?’

Whatever Christelle is expecting, it isn’t this. Her interviews to date have been with pliable news anchors solidly briefed by her team on topics previously agreed by both sides.

She opens her mouth, shuts it, makes up her mind and changes it, all in the time it takes to turn towards the giant Cyclops lenses, three of them, homing in on her face. She’s had sufficient media training to know that three seconds of silence is quite enough to stop the early breakfast audience in its tracks.

‘You flatter me,’ she says. ‘But I think the Maid did everything she could possibly have been expected to do, given the time in which she lived. As a woman – a girl, really – it was extraordinary that she even rode to war. Nobody expected more of her. As to any similarity between me and her, that very flattering comparison grew on its own.’ Her voice is soft, unthreatening, early-morning parlour. She sips at her coffee, not a strident strand in her entire DNA.

‘So you’re saying that it was there before the posters? You were not picked as candidate, then, because of the colour of your hair?’

He is good at this, the sudden, unexpected thrust. Christelle tilts her head. Her bones are strong, the way they catch the light; she knows how to control the cameras. ‘I don’t think anyone has ever suggested that the Maid’s hair was red.’

Luc says she hasn’t the bandwidth to be a Bressard and he may be right, but she’s no Sarah Palin, to be reduced to dithering word-salad by a single unscripted question. Christelle can think on her feet, and is doing so.

She says, ‘The Maid clearly saw the injustice of a France occupied by invaders who were not and never would be French. In trying to correct this injustice, she came up against opposition as much from the different factions within the French court as from the English occupying armies. With the benefit of hindsight, we know she was right. Our hope – our prayer – for this election is that it doesn’t take us six hundred years to realize the danger we’re in today.’

‘Indeed. So, seventy years after the end of Nazi occupation, are we once more on the brink of an occupied France, with foreigners endeavouring to take over our institutions?’

Henri’s eyes shine. He swivels his chair left to face Picaut. ‘Capitaine Inès Picaut, good morning. Leaving aside the demonstrations for the moment, because these are not your affair – not yet, anyway – are you, too, seeing an injustice of epic proportions in Orléans today and if so, are you endeavouring to rectify it?’

She shakes her head, plays it straight back. ‘I am a police captain, doing my job. I am seeking patterns, and where we find them we will find the details that will lead us to the perpetrators of the arson, who will now also be charged with murder.’

‘You’re looking for patterns in the fires?’

‘Naturally.’

‘Which are lit by a group calling themselves Jaish al Islam which means, I understand, army of Islam?’

No insinuation, no slandering of the Islamic community, only a question left to hang in the air.

Picaut spreads her hands. ‘Just because someone makes a claim doesn’t mean that claim is true. When you have worked in the police for longer than about two days, you realize that there are dozens of people who will claim to have committed a high-profile crime. Often those who keep the quietest are the most culpable.’

‘So you think the Islamists are not responsible?’

‘As my job requires, I’m keeping an open mind. If I did otherwise, you would be first to complain.’

‘Do you think the rioters – sorry, demonstrators – are right to seek a whiter France, a France free of incomers, just as the Maid did?’

‘I think you can turn any demonstration into a riot if you keep naming it as such often enough, particularly on television.’

‘You credit us with more power than we deserve.’ There’s a particular double blink Henri does when he’s thinking; she’s seen it twice already and again now. ‘What of the Maid? Are
you
the new incarnation?’

‘Certainly not. I couldn’t be less like her if I tried.’

‘Really? Editors across the nation will be sorry to hear it.’ One by one, he flips over the newspapers that lie on the coffee table in front of them. L
A
N
OUVELLE
P
UCELLE?
is all or part of the main headline on each. Somewhere else, a camera takes them in and hoists them on to the screens of the watching public.

‘Your father, of course, was Charles Picaut, the famous – some might say infamous – historian and anthropologist. Was he not dismissed from the faculty of the university here in Orléans for his radical views on the Maid?’

You have to admire the skill. He has dug the hole. It would be so easy for Picaut to walk into it. A single step, and she’ll be up to her neck in the old, familiar shit. She can smell it, taste it, drown in it.

She is not her father. His obsession is not hers.

She says, ‘If we’re going to stick to facts, he published one paper in 2013 in which he analysed the historical record of the Maid’s actions and known statements and drew certain inferences from them.’

‘For which he was dismissed?’

‘After which he retired.’

‘Because three million, two hundred and eighty-seven thousand, three hundred and fifteen people signed an Internet petition asking for him to go.’

The number spins out into the ether. Picaut can see it out of the corner of her eye. She looks away. ‘We live in the age of Internet petitions, Henri. Given the coalition ranged against him, it’s surprising it wasn’t thirty million.’

‘Coalition?’

Thank you, Patrice. ‘What would you call it? The Catholic Church denounced him from the pulpit because they need their saint to be a weeping virgin who had visions of angels, in spite of the fact that she never once spoke of them when she was a free woman. The historians who were his colleagues hung him out to dry because their careers are built on the fantasy of magical thinking that has a mythical God who can bypass twenty years of training and teach a peasant girl how to ride as a knight in full plate. The political parties made mincemeat of him because they have harnessed her myth in defence of their own rampant xenophobia, and when he questioned its veracity, they were prepared to do whatever it took to destroy him. He had death threats near the end from members of the
Front National
, which, for a man dying of laryngeal chondrosarcoma is hardly an intelligent manoeuvre.’

‘Indeed.’ Blink-blink. Henri is staring at her, one finger tapping his jaw. She can’t tell if he’s shocked or smug or simply listening to instructions in his ear. He nods, pensively, and turns to his right.

‘So Christelle, you are a member of a political party which has hijacked a false legend to justify your rampant xenophobia. And you or those around you sent death threats to a dying man. How do you respond to that?’

Christelle’s smile is drenched in acid. ‘I have never in my life sent a death threat, nor been party to such a thing. If Capitaine Picaut wishes to suggest—’

‘They’re a matter of record.’ Capitaine Picaut can dip her smiles in poison too. ‘I can send your campaign the IP addresses from which they came. They all traced back to Troy Cordier, your campaign manager.’ For which, once again, thank you, Patrice.

‘What about the Maid?’ Henri is like a bloodhound chasing down a trail, and Christelle is his quarry. ‘What do you say about her? Are you clinging to a dying myth to support your own views about the purity of French descent?’

If Christelle could spit … But her training has been extensive, and she knows how the polls will react if she loses her temper.

She spreads her hands, tilts her head, becomes the very model of reason and sanity. ‘My church tells me who she was and I would never disagree. I will say this much: whoever she was, the Maid understood that we need a France that is French, governed by French citizens for French citizens, by those of us who have lived here for generations beyond counting, who know the suffering of this land, and its greatness. In that, I am hers, one hundred per cent.’

The Family would love this. Truly, Luc should have married this woman. She’s just produced a perfect on-message answer, blown every single dog whistle that Christelle’s campaign wants her to sound. Henri’s smile never slips, but he’s lost his chance to break her open and he doesn’t push again.

The remainder of the interview offers neither spark nor danger. They discuss the size and fervour of the demonstrations, and nothing new or surprising emerges. Henri wraps to a close in time for the next news roundup.

Released, the same energetic interns who ushered them in escort Picaut and Christelle Vivier back out again with no diminution of vigour or enthusiasm; except this time they are not kept apart.