Shallow Be Thy Grave (15 page)

Lily bit down on her bottom lip. Why hadn’t she kept in touch better? ‘Because I was jealous’, came that horrible voice that always insisted on speaking the truth if a direct question was asked. ‘I was jealous that she’d created a new life and didn’t need me’.

Lily stood up. The chair legs squealed as they dragged along the kitchen floor. “Ok. You’re right. That’s what we need to find out. What shall I do?” She couldn’t sit still with her thoughts, had to be doing something.

 “I suggest,” said Jo, “that we take one of those missions each and see what we can find out. It’s twelve thirty. If we haven’t come up with any satisfactory answers, or leads, by 6 o’clock?” She glanced at each of them in turn. “We go to the police.”

“How are we going to find out whether Brigitte was a prostitute?” asked Stuart.

“Start with asking the neighbours. There must be someone around here that knows Brigitte and knows what she did for a living. Whoever does that could also try and find out whether any of Brigitte’s family have been hanging around, how long she’s lived here, whether she’s got any mates…”

“Ok,” said Stuart. “That’s not a bad idea. I could do that.”

“Brill. And Lily, you could see what you can find out about Beaumont. Nell might give you some ideas. She was about to say something about him, remember? Before Madame Bitchmont came back.” An idea occurred to Jo. “And did Bitchmont know about the affair? Because if she did, that puts her in the frame too.”

“Jesus. It’s like Hill Street Blues.”

“And there’s Grace. She must have known something.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Stuart.

“I’m going to find Bruno,” said Jo. She stated it like it was a fact. As certain as Sunday as Aunt Edie would say.

“How are you going to do that?” asked Lily, trying to stop herself from begging for them to do things together.

“Andy’s going to see what he can find out.  He knows a lot about this kind of thing.” Jo sounded genuinely surprised. She crossed the room and busied herself fishing the teabags out of the mugs. “Never thought having a copper for a fella would come in handy.”

“I’m not sure we should split up,” said Stuart, and Lily wanted to throw her arms around him. “If Fiona is in some kind of danger, the last thing we should do is wander into it on our own.”

“I know, but we’re not going to do that. We’re just fact-finding,” Jo was impatient. Then she caught sight of Lily’s face and her voice took on a gentler tone. “We’ll cover much more ground if we split.”

Lily nodded. It made sense, even though she couldn’t help the thought that Jo was speaking more like Andy these days.

“So, we agree?” asked Jo, putting the mugs down on the kitchen table. The unlit spliff lay in the ashtray. “We split up, meet back here at 6?”

Lily could still taste the Pastis she’d drunk with Monsieur Beaumont every time she swallowed.  It made her want another drink, and not the tea in front of her. She lit a fag and tried her best to ignore her cravings.

They left Stuart in the hallway outside the flat. He was heading upstairs, ready to start banging on doors and interviewing the neighbours. Lily and Jo looped back across the square to Pigalle Station together. It seemed an age since they’d come back from Amsterdam, but was in fact only a few hours ago.  Jo said goodbye at the top of the stairwell and headed off towards the public telephones. Lily made her way underground, intending to catch the Metro to Grace’s house. Grace seemed like the least terrifying of her options. People rushed past in all directions, no one making eye contact, and Lily felt glad of the respite. She was tired of Jo and Stuart’s sideway glances, their joint looks of concern. It felt like a relief to be somewhere no one knew her, among people all going about their business, heads up their own arses. She could run through here naked and no one would give her a second glance. The best place to be alone is in a crowd.

Lily was still trying to work out which train she should get, when her fingers lighted on the business card that Philippe Beaumont had given her, tucked into her jacket pocket. She looked at the address. Avenue de l’Opera, Paris 75001. Jo had taught her the basics of the French postcode system - enough to know that 75001 meant the first district - the centre of Paris.  Same as Leeds - LS1 meant the city centre. She studied the Metro map in front of her. She would have to change trains at Madeleine station.

Jo’s words kept playing in her head as she made her way down to the platforms, a radio play she couldn’t switch off. Maybe Beaumont had killed Fiona in order to stop her telling his wife about their affair. Maybe that was why Fiona had been so upset on the telephone that night. Maybe she’d had an argument with him, had threatened to tell his wife. Maybe he’d gone round later that night, slipped out of the house while his wife was sleeping, and killed her little sister. She felt her jaw clench as she slipped the card back into her pocket and boarded the train for Madeleine.

She came up from the Opera station right outside an enormous building with gold statues on the top, which glittered in the light of the sun. The statues looked like angels, and the gold lettering said Academie National de Musique. Lily turned her back on it and wandered down the avenue, until she found the right number on a large polished wooden door. Lily looked down at the card he’d handed her.  Cabinet d’Avocats. She found the name on one of the brass plates outside the door.

She wasn’t sure what to do. The anger that had boiled up and put her on the Metro to here had simmered down during the journey, to the point where she felt faintly ridiculous being here. For one thing she refused to believe her sister was dead. And, even if she did allow herself to explore the theory that Beaumont had killed Fiona, what had happened to Brigitte? Had he killed her too? And what had he done with their bodies? The theory was full of holes.

She stood on the pavement, running through the arguments in her head. Should she march inside, demand to see him and confront him with a half-baked theory? Or should she wait on the street until he showed up? It was almost one o’clock. She could be waiting all day. He might work late, in fact hadn’t Madame Beaumont said as much? But then, she slapped her forehead - she was starting to think like a dumb wife. Working late? She tutted at her own naivety. More like screwing her sister. Screwing her and possibly killing her.

After her third cigarette, just as she was deciding it made more sense to find Grace and see whether she had any information to support Jo’s theory, she saw him coming out of his offices. He stopped on the pavement right outside the front door, unaware of Lily stepping back into the shadows. He bent his dark head to light a cigarette and for a moment Lily glimpsed what she supposed Fiona had seen in him. Debonair, a word she never used, flashed into her brain. She watched him for a moment, as he glanced up and down the street, smoking his cigarette quickly, insistently. Then he hailed a cab, which seemed to materialise from nowhere. Lily waited until it had pulled from the kerb before coming out of her hiding place, and frantically trying to flag down another taxi. By the time one pulled up, Beaumont’s car was disappearing out of view. The driver looked at her expectantly. “Please, follow that taxi,” said Lily.

“For real?” The taxi driver grinned, revealing a set of uneven, dirty teeth. “American? The movies, huh?”

“Please.” Lily clambered into the back seat.

“You rock star?” he asked as he pulled the car away from the kerb and set off at a lively pace. Lily was thrown back against the rear seat.

“Drive as fast as you can,” said Lily.

“Who’s in the car?”

She saw the taxi driver’s knuckles tighten on the steering wheel. “Some perv.”

“What is perv?”

“A man who has sex with someone young enough to be his daughter.”

“Paris is full of pervs. You should see it at night. The ninth district.”

“Yeah, well while there’s men like him around, there will always be prostitutes.”

“We need a man who stands up against the scum.”

“Yeah, well, I’m still waiting.”

“Here is a man who stood up!”

Lily had the feeling he was quoting someone or something from the excitement in his voice. The excitement seemed to have transferred itself to his whole body, especially the accelerator pedal, because they were fairly whizzing along now. She could see the taxi up ahead, the one with Beaumont in, making a left turn across a busy junction.

“Left up ahead,” said Lily.

The taxi’s wheels screeched as they turned round the corner and the car skidded across two lanes of traffic. Lily braced herself as the shop fronts advanced with terrifying speed. She grabbed onto the handle above the rear window to try and keep herself on the seat.

“Whoa, steady on,” she gasped as the driver regained control of the car. “Arrive alive.”

The taxi driver started shouting out of his window. Lily couldn’t see who he was shouting at. “Listen, you fuckers, you screw heads. Here is a man who would not take it any more!”

Lily groaned inwardly as she saw Monsieur Beaumont’s taxi pass through a set of traffic lights just before they turned red. “Shit.”

“I got some bad ideas in my head.” The taxi driver was laughing now. He turned to grin at Lily and she was shocked by his poor dental hygiene. As he turned back to face the front, he drove straight through the red traffic light, narrowly missing a stream of cars that were coming in from the left, their traffic lights having just turned green.

Seconds later Lily heard the unfamiliar sound of a French police siren and the taxi driver swore. At least she imagined it was swearing. He’d gone back to speaking French again, but she thought she recognised ‘merde’. He pulled the car into the kerb and held his hands up, like he might be shot or something. Another wave of fear washed through Lily. Did French policeman carry guns like their Amsterdam counterparts?

They did, she discovered as two uniformed officers approached the cab. The taxi driver got out of the car, his hands still in the air. The policemen spoke first to the driver and then one of them turned his attention to Lily. He rapped on the glass and she wound the window down. “Where are you trying to get to, young lady?” asked the policeman in almost perfect English. “This man says you are in a hurry. That you need to find a man who has hurt you?”

The taxi driver nodded encouragingly as Lily’s mind froze. She remembered Jo’s repeated warnings not to get the police involved until they were certain a crime had taken place. She remembered the ripped Rizla papers in her pocket. She remembered the piece of paper she had with Grace’s address written on it. She cleared her throat. “I think perhaps something got lost in translation. My French is terrible. I’m sorry.” She pulled the slip of paper from her jacket and showed it to the policeman. “I want to go and visit my friend. She’s an au pair in the seventh district.”

The taxi driver glared at her but Lily kept her eyes on the policeman. She spoke with the best little girl voice she could muster. She sounded to her own ears like she’d gone to boarding school. “I’m terribly sorry for the misunderstanding. I think I should probably stick to English in future.”

“What is your address in Paris?”

“My address?” Lily stalled for time.

“Where do you stay?”

Lily thought of all the addresses she’d been to since they arrived in Paris, and tried to sort them in her own head in order of appropriateness. None of them seemed to fit. “A hotel,” she lied. “By the railway station. I can’t remember the name.”

The policeman turned to his colleague and Lily noticed a decision pass between them. He turned back towards her. “This man will take you to your friend. He has promised to drive more carefully for the future, or he knows he will not have a licence to drive any more.”

The policeman handed her back the piece of paper and spoke firmly to the taxi driver. The taxi driver held his head low, and nodded at the pavement. When they finally got back into the car, he set off at a much more sedate pace. He didn’t say a word all the way to Grace’s house, but the tension in the cab was palpable. She handed him a fifty Franc note and dived out of the cab.

No one answered when she rang the bell and Lily sank onto the steps with her chin in her hand. Hunger made her feel cold, even though the weather was warm, much warmer than she was used to. Her stomach churned from the alarming taxi ride with Robert de Niro though, making food feel like an alien concept.

What to do next? She was kind of done with taxis. She tugged at her dreadlocks. Mission impossible. How was she supposed to hunt down her sister in a foreign city when she couldn’t even speak the language? She was embarrassed by how well everyone seemed to speak English - she couldn’t understand a word of French.

She wondered whether Jo or Stuart were faring any better. The only thing that stopped her going back to the flat, was the thought of Jo and the look of disdain she’d give Lily if she told her she’d fallen at the first hurdle. She was getting tired of Jo’s Juliet Bravo impersonation. In fact she hated everyone.

She hauled herself up to standing, turned left for no other reason than that was the direction the taxi had drawn up, and was just starting to walk down the pavement when she saw a young woman staggering up the road, her arms pulled down at her sides with the weight of several carrier bags. “Any news?” Grace called out before Lily was even a hundred per cent certain it was her.

Lily’s heart fell to about knee level, which was unfortunate because her knees were already shaky. “We went to Amsterdam. They’re not there. We’re thinking we should go to the police,” said Lily.

Grace drew level with Lily and dropped the carrier bags to the floor. “What do you mean, they’re not there?”

“We went to the café you said. Frank doesn’t exist. No one’s heard of them.”

“But why would they tell me they’d got a job?”

Lily shrugged her shoulders and tried to select the least alarming of Jo’s theories. “We think they might be on the run from Brigitte’s family.”

“No! Really?”

“So, maybe, they decided to spread the rumour they’re going to Amsterdam, but actually they’re… somewhere else.”