Into The Fire (41 page)

‘Certainly not a police salary.’ She stands back to let him in and leads the way to the kitchen. He accepts coffee, but will not sit. He spends his time studying the view from the windows.

Picaut asks, ‘What have you got?’

‘It’s more what I have not got that matters.’ He leans in the corner furthest from the door. Like this, he has a wall to his back and a window to his left. His gaze ceases to roam the world outside and settles on her face. ‘It seemed to me yesterday that you would know if and when I spoke the truth.’

‘I wouldn’t guarantee it.’

‘Then you will have to decide now whether or not this is the truth. I will tell you that I believe it to be so.’ He presses his hands together, looks out again and back at her. ‘There is not a single group affiliated to Islam, not the jihadists, not the secular groups who use religion as a front, not the mosques, not the imams, not a single living soul who can put a name to the arsonists of Orléans.
Jaish al Islam
has not a single member in the Muslim community of this city. Nevertheless, we are all afraid of what will happen to us in the backlash from the fires. We are already seeing it in the demonstrations, and how soon before those demonstrations become riots in which innocent lives are lost? I cannot prove this, but I do not believe these people would tell me untruths.’

If he is lying to her, he is good at it. She doesn’t dismiss the idea. ‘Who do they think is behind the fires?’

‘Who stands to gain most if we are vilified? Who wanted to be the new Maid of Orléans before you stepped into that role?’

‘You really think Christelle Vivier would light fires in her own city?’

His smile is slow, and sad. He pushes himself away from the kitchen counter and heads for the door. ‘I will leave you to ponder why your first instinct is to believe that this is her city more than it is mine, or that it is too precious for her to burn it for political ends, but not too precious for me or men like me to burn for religious ones.’

He turns on the threshold. ‘I wish you well in your bid to bring the guilty to book, but my cousin has died at the hands of people who would destroy us all, not just me. Or you. Au revoir, Capitaine Picaut.’

When the downstairs buzzer rings and rings and rings again soon after he has left, she thinks he has come back, that the paparazzi are on his tail, that Christelle Vivier has set the attack dogs of the
Front National
on to him.

She activates the screen that opens the eyes of the hidden cameras. Patrice is staring up into one of them, his hands over the other, so that she might not be confused by the multiple images. He is not laughing. He isn’t even smiling.

‘Let me in.’

She does.

She thought Cheb Yasine was fast. Patrice takes the stairs three at a time and is at her door to meet her as she opens it. His T-shirt says E
DWARD
S
NOWDEN FOR
P
RESIDENT
over an image of an ‘Anonymous’ Guy Fawkes mask.

He slams in through the door and spins round in her hallway. ‘What the
fuck
was Yasine doing here? Don’t shake your head at me. I watched him come out.’

This is a new Patrice; blazing. She matches question with question. ‘Where’s he gone?’

‘Back to his lair. What was he thinking? What were
you
?’

‘He wants me to know that he’s hunting for the killers of his cousin and he’ll get there ahead of me. Have you slept at all?’

‘Sleep is for losers. Current company excepted, of course.’ He exhales, hissing, through his teeth, and looks up towards the kitchen. ‘Coffee?’

‘Are you sure that’s what you need?’

‘No, but I’m guessing you don’t keep stores of Red Bull.’ He pulls a tight smile, and she can relax and, relaxing, think.

‘Have you been staking out Cheb Yasine all night?’

‘No, as instructed that was Rollo or Garonne, and either they didn’t know he was coming here or they did, and I’m not sure which is worse.’

‘I’ll ring them later.’

He hitches one hip on to a tall stool at the breakfast bar. Sunlight paints him in shades of gold and mercury. Her guts roil, just to have him this close. She hands him a mug of coffee. Their fingers touch. He lifts her hand, kisses her palm, folds her fingers over. Her blood is an electric current. He smiles an apology. They are so fast, his mood changes. Luc could simmer for weeks when he was angry. ‘Are we OK?’

She runs her fingers through his hair. Already it is familiar. ‘Not if Garonne and Rollo find out you’re here.’

‘I came to advise you on security. Which I have done. My advice is that if you want to be secure, the last fucking thing you should do is let Cheb Yasine into your apartment.’

‘I don’t see why not when he let me into his, but I don’t want to fight over it. Have you cracked another of Iain Holloway’s ciphers?’

He stops, mug halfway to his lips. ‘How do you know?’

‘Why else would you come …?’ It’s her turn to smile. ‘Can you eat when you’re like this? Or do you just mainline neat caffeine?’

‘What have you got?’

Less than she had when she was Luc’s wife, that’s for sure. There is bread, of a kind, although she bought it before Iain Holloway died. The cheese is older still, but has survived better. She puts them together and Patrice eats as if it is his first food in days and talks with his mouth full.

‘The key to one of the texts is the numbering of letters from the last three emails that Iain Holloway sent to Monique Susong. I lifted the mails from her laptop while she was talking to you. Put together, the mails make almost a PGP cipher, but not quite. And even then, we don’t get text. It took me till an hour ago to work out what he’d sent. It’s an EXIF file.’

‘
Patrice!
’

‘Sorry. It’s been a long day.’

‘It’s not half-past seven yet.’

‘An exceptionally long day.’ He laughs, leans forward, wipes a crumb from the side of her mouth, kisses his finger. ‘EXIF is the transfer protocol for smartphone images.’

‘So the file is a picture?’ That really does surprise her.

‘Not just any picture. A skull. See?’ He opens his laptop and spins it round. On the screen is a colour picture of a skull, green with mildew and missing fragments from around one eye socket, but otherwise intact. Beneath it are a few cervical vertebrae, lined up in order, and beneath them is a black and white chequered marker for scale, and a small white-topped plastic pot of the type that medics use for sending samples to the lab.

‘Iain Holloway’s email said he was sending samples to Monique Susong’s lab.’ Patrice’s fingers drum lightly on the screen. ‘Et voilà! A sample pot.’

‘And a woman’s skull.’ Picaut is learning to look for the supraorbital ridges. There are none, and the shape of the nasal bones is distinctly female.

‘I’ll take your word for it. So we think this is of Iain Holloway’s sample subjects?’

‘Pass. A name would have been nice.’

‘If he knew it at all, he’ll have put it in the last of the files; nothing too easy in case the wrong people start breaking the ciphers. I don’t suppose you found your father’s laptop?’

She had forgotten that. ‘No. Luc texted while Cheb was here.’ She opens her phone, turns it round.

S
ORRY
. L
ONG GONE ONTO E-BAY
. H
E WAS
G-
BRANCH, WHAT CAN
I
SAY
?

‘G-branch?’

‘All the names begin with G: Guillaume, Gérard, Georges. That kind of thing. It’s family practice. It’s why Annelise calls herself Lise. L-branch, obviously, is the top of the pile.’ She shrugs. ‘They came from Lyon.’

‘Is this some kind of psychosis?’

‘It feels sane enough when you’re in the middle of it.’

‘I don’t believe you.’ Patrice is eating more slowly now, bite by bite, bringing himself back to earth. Even so, Picaut can feel heat radiating from his skin, as if his metabolism has been racked up beyond human tolerance.

He is, if this is possible, too alive, and he is watching her, too-alive with possibility. She can count in her mind the steps between here and the bedroom. Her body sings to the thought.

She fills the kettle, clicks it on to boil again, says, ‘Have you sent the image to anyone?’

‘Besides you?’ He hasn’t even done that, but he does it now. The message pings into her phone.

‘Send it to Éric, just to make sure I’m right that it’s a woman. Then …’ Her self-control is abysmal. She has crossed the room, is standing behind him, her fingers locked in his hair, pressing her lips to the crown of his head. She breathes him in like a drug, breathes out heat and need.

He stops eating. With wonderful deliberation, he lays down his bread, pushes the plate away and turns round in his seat. His eyes are level with her breasts. His breath is fire, burning her heart. Of this pain, she is not afraid.

He says, ‘If you want me to leave, now might be the time to say so.’

She takes his head between her two hands and draws him up. Her lips trace dry patterns along his cheekbones, the lids of his eyes. Her fingers loop through his, and lock there. She takes a step away, and another, drawing him with her, and like that, wordless, leads him the thirty paces to the bedroom.

A single finger pressed on his breastbone is enough to topple him backwards, on to the bed. He falls fully clothed on to the duvet. His eyes feast on her for a long, last moment, before he reaches out and grasps her wrist and pulls her down on top of him.

Later, unclothed, sated, she lies on him, skin to skin. Her ear is pressed to his sternum. The slowing drum of his heart beats up to meet her. His legs hook loosely over the backs of her knees. He kneads her palm with his thumb, traces her life line with his tongue, and on up to her elbow.

She turns her head and sees her alarm clock: eight-thirty. Already she is late for work, she who hasn’t been late any day through her father’s death and all the recent chaos. She wasn’t late even in the earliest days of Luc, when tearing herself from his bed felt like tearing off her own skin. To think of that now would be sacrilege, and anyway she can’t think past the hour just gone, and the wild, cataclysmic soaring. Was it like this with Luc? She doesn’t remember it if it was.

Patrice is pressing his lips to her brow. She closes her eyes, makes herself think of something other than the taste of him, the feel. In the swim of her mind is a thought with hard edges. She speaks it before she can decide it’s too much trouble. ‘My father had a Dropbox account. He might have kept his emails in there.’

She feels him tense beside her, sit up. She pushes him down, presses a kiss to his sternum, feels him stir. ‘I don’t believe this.’

‘All you have to do is mention email.’ He pulls her up, kisses her head. He is not entirely unserious. ‘Tell me you have his login details written somewhere?’

‘Burned into my brain.’ She leans over the bed, finds her phone in the catastrophe of clothes, types with one hand:
[email protected]/margueritedevalois

Her phone hisses a send and sings to its arrival on Patrice’s phone. He picks it up. ‘Password is all one word, all lower case?’

She nods.

‘And Marguerite de Valois is who?’

‘Charles the sixth’s bastard daughter. My father believed she was the most likely contender for Jeanne d’Arc. The only problem is that she lived until 1458, so she couldn’t be. He ignored small details like that …’

She pulls him close, kisses his eyelids, feels the different layers of tension and exhaustion through his body.

‘Patrice?’

‘Hmmm?’

‘If I asked you to go home and go to bed and get some sleep, would you do it?’

‘When you’ve just given me the key?’ He lifts his head away from her. ‘Are you kidding me?’ His eyes are alight with fires she cannot source.

‘The email address is the key?’

‘No, the password. It won’t be in plain text, but there’ll be something based on this, I can feel it.’ He angles up on one elbow, searches for his jeans.

She catches his arm. ‘Patrice, you need to sleep.’

He pulls away from her, only half laughing. ‘I can’t.’

‘Patrice!’ She is not laughing now, either. ‘Please.’

He raises her to standing, wraps his two arms around her, kisses her brow. ‘I’ll do a deal. Give me six unbroken hours’ work, and if I haven’t cracked it by the end of that, I’ll sleep, I promise.’

‘Why not the other way round?’

‘I work best when I’m wired.’ He stoops for his T-shirt, hauls it over his head. ‘Trust me, I can do this. Then I can sleep.’

She raises her hands. ‘Six hours.’

‘I’ll call you at three with whatever I’ve got.’ He is at the door. His mind has already left her. He hauls it back. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to visit Father Cinq-Mars and see if the threat of a murder charge gets him talking. With a bit of luck, I might have the answers before you do.’

‘
WRITE THIS TO
the citizens of Rheims:

Very dear and great friends, know that you are greatly missed and that the Maid has received your letters stating that you live in fear of assault and siege. Please know such an assault shall not occur; and if it should come to pass that I do not intercept your enemies and they come against you, then shut your gates, for I will be with you presently. And if they are there I will make them put on their spurs so fast that they won’t know how to attack you, and very swiftly I shall come.

I will write no more now, except to say that you should always be obedient and loyal. I pray that God keeps you in His care.

Written at Sully this 16th day of March.

I would send you some additional news which might bring you good cheer, but I fear that the letters would be stolen along the way and our enemies would see this news.

Jehanne

What changes is how Tomas feels.

His heart is not a stable thing. His nights are sweaty, dark, lost in impossible desires and all too probable nightmares. Knotted in damp linen, he dreams of fires that eat the Maid living, and not a thing he can do about it.