The Good Thief's Guide to Paris (10 page)

THIRTEEN

I went back to my room and slumped on my bed, staring at the wrapped painting leaning against my wall. I’d lost all sense of what my next move should be. I didn’t know whether I should call the police and report the body in my apartment or call Pierre and come clean about everything that had happened. I gave some thought to leaving Paris altogether, for that matter, though I realised it might make me appear guilty. Had the body been found yet, I wondered, and if it had, were the police on my trail? It wouldn’t take them long to learn my name – they need only ask the concierge – but they wouldn’t know where I was staying or have any idea that I was using a false identity. I guessed I was safe for at least the night, barring some really bad luck.

So I had plenty of thinking time, even if, at that moment, I wasn’t all that sure what I should be thinking about. Normally, I’d have called Victoria and talked the situation through. Oddly enough, though, I suspected that dialling her number and unburdening myself about Catherine’s body might not be the best way to mend fences. And besides, part of me was reluctant to drag her into the whole thing. She’d made it plain recently that she’d had just about enough of being caught up in my criminal behaviour and I couldn’t see how involving her in a murder mystery would improve her mood.

Without Victoria to bounce ideas off, I was left with only the bare wall that faced my bed. Strangely, the wall didn’t seem to be coming up with anything particularly insightful. Maybe it was just biding its time, waiting to offer me the killer perspective when I thought all hope was lost. Or maybe the wall had just about as little to offer as I did.

I growled and threw a pillow at the wall but even then it refused to stir. I eyed the mini-bar once again and toyed with the prospect of oblivion but it didn’t strike me as the most constructive of approaches. Unusual for that to stop me, I guess. After all, I was the same dum-dum who’d imagined a bad Highlands accent could trick a good friend into believing I was a complete stranger.

Alright
, I told myself,
enough of the self-pity. Do something useful and imagine this is one of your Faulks novels. You’ve plotted yourself into this mess, you can’t ask anyone else what to do and you need to come up with a plan. So, what is it
?

I scratched my head and stroked my chin and clapped my hands together. I clicked my fingers and drummed my nails on the beside cabinet. And . . . nothing. Nada. Not a clue.

I growled some more, then leaned over the side of the bed and reached for my holdall. My laptop was packed inside and I pulled it out and opened the screen. My intention was to make a quick summary of everything that had happened to me and try to work things forwards from there. It was what I sometimes did with my mystery novels when the problem I’d run into was too early in the book for me to trouble Victoria. And I really thought a methodical approach might help. I could see myself drawing up a series of bullet-points and short notes, and extrapolating from there until I reached a stage where my next move was inescapable.

Which it was, the moment the screen lit up and I was confronted with the following message:

BRING US THE PAINTING. WE ARE WAITING.

I froze, then glanced over my shoulder towards the window. The curtains were closed but even so, it was unsettling. I looked at the screen once again and read the message for a second time.

BRING US THE PAINTING. WE ARE WAITING.

Had it been typed while I was down at the bar, hamming it up as a haggis-eating Scot? No, of course not, I realised, because if that was the case the painting would be gone. It was hardly difficult to find in my room and nobody would have stepped over it to dig out my laptop and leave me a quite unnecessary message.

I thought back and remembered that my laptop had been open on the desk in my apartment when I’d headed out that morning, in sleep mode as I normally left it. So whoever had killed Catherine had gone to the trouble of typing me the message before they left. And that meant two things – one, they knew I had the painting, and two, they hadn’t reported the killing just yet. How did I know that? Because if they’d reported the killing, there was a good chance I’d be in custody without access to the nifty little message they’d left me or the painting they were aiming to acquire.

And I also knew a third thing, or at least thought I did. They couldn’t have been watching me all that hard because otherwise they would have seen me go into my apartment with the painting under my arm and they would have been able to confront me when I came back out.

But they’d killed a woman and I had no idea who they were, or even how they knew me.

I scrolled down, just to check that they hadn’t written anything more. It was peculiar. How was I supposed to bring them the painting if I had no way of finding out how to get it to them? And why hadn’t they left Catherine alive and waited in the apartment for me to return? They could have ambushed me, if they’d liked, and seized the painting without needing to kill anyone at all.

Maybe, I thought for just a moment, it was a smokescreen. Perhaps, as I’d first thought, the killer was Bruno and he was trying to throw me off the trail with the cryptic note and the misleading references to “US” and “THEM”. But that didn’t make any sense. I was a thief, not a detective, and so far as I was aware, Bruno had no idea that I’d managed to buy the painting he’d stolen. And if he wanted it that badly, why would he have sold it to the gallery on Rue Quincampoix?

Now I was really confused and no list of bullet points was going to get me out of the mess I’d found myself in. I closed the laptop and checked through the rest of my things for any other messages. There was nothing at all.

I glanced across the room at the painting. Everything seemed to revolve around the damn thing and I figured it was high time I had a proper look at it, so I crossed the room and retrieved it from the floor and set it face-up on the bed. The gallery owner had knotted the parcel string too tightly for me to unpick with my fingers, so I fished around in my collection of burglar tools until I found a small razor blade and then I used the blade to slice through the string and afterwards the brown paper, being very careful not to scratch the surface of the painting. I peeled the paper away in long strips, then lifted the painting and threw the torn paper onto the floor. I set the painting back down and looked once again at the miserable scene of Montmartre.

I didn’t recognise the area in the painting but the scene had almost certainly been set among the tacky market stalls in one of the main tourist squares that led to the Sacré-Coeur. I could have gone out looking for the exact spot but I didn’t think it would achieve very much. If the artist was so bad at rendering human beings then the chances of him accurately reproducing a specific location were slim. And besides, what could it possibly tell me?

As it happened, I was more interested in the artist himself. If, as I was pretty certain, there was no intrinsic worth in the composition, then something else had to be going on. The work was signed Maigny, as Pierre had told me, and though the name meant nothing to me, I had to admit that minor Parisian artists of the early twentieth century were not exactly my specialist area. Sometimes, an artist’s story can give their work far more value than it might otherwise merit. So it occurred to me that Maigny could be famous in a way that had escaped me as well as the owner of the art gallery. If Maigny happened to be notorious, it might explain what all the fuss was about.

With that in mind, I reached for my laptop and connected to the wireless Internet service inside the hotel room, then called up a search engine and searched for “Maigny, Artist”. But I found nothing significant. Several hits came up for a sculptor called Pierre Bontemps because he happened to have produced a statue of Charles de Maigny that was exhibited in the Louvre. But that didn’t strike me as at all relevant to my current predicament and nothing else did either. On a whim, I called up a genealogy site and discovered that the French name Maigny derived from an old province of France lying to the east of Bretagne. Useful. I closed my laptop and returned my attention to the painting.

So, if the work was awful and the artist was a nobody, what else could be going on? I ran my fingers over the glaze and double-checked that the painting was definitely an oil. It was, so this wasn’t one of those ruses you see in the movies where a valuable painting has been covered with some dreary watercolour to disguise its true worth.

Hmm. I picked up the painting and turned it over and found that a thin sheet of hardboard had been set into the rear of the frame to protect the canvas. The backing had a torn and faded sticker on it, discoloured with age, and the sticker bore the fragments of some handwritten French that I was unable to decipher. Very carefully, I reached for the metal brackets that were holding the hardboard in place and prised them away. I used one of my flat-headed screwdrivers to lever the hardboard up and remove it completely.

As soon as the backing was clear of the canvas, I looked down and a small charge ran through me. Resting on the canvas was a brown A4 business envelope. The envelope was unsealed and bulged very slightly in the middle. I was all set to reach for it and remove the contents when good sense took hold and I decided to slip on a pair of disposable gloves first. I dug around in my holdall until I found some and then put them on as quickly as possible, mindful of my fingers, yet eager to answer the questions that were hurtling through my head. At last, I reached for the envelope, parted the paper as carefully as I could and eased my hand inside.

My fingers emerged gripping a selection of papers and acetate cards. I checked the envelope for anything further, then when I was sure it was empty, I placed it back down on the rear of the canvas and carried my findings over to the small writing desk in the corner of the room. I flicked on a reading lamp positioned on the desk and started to sort through the documents.

I began with the acetate cards. They were a blue colour and largely transparent, which made seeing what was printed on them tricky. I angled the desk lamp upwards and held the cards against the light from the bulb. The images were still hard to pick out because they were very detailed but I was confident I knew what I was looking at: floorplans. There was no text to indicate what building the plans related to but there were three separate cards and each card contained a different layout of similar proportions, so assuming the plans were to scale, it seemed to me that they were likely to be from the same building and that the building had to have either a minimum of three floors or perhaps three wings.

I put the acetate cards down and reached for the square of paper that was next in the pile of documents. The paper looked as if it had been torn from a pocket notebook, of the kind that detectives are always carrying in television shows. Written on the paper in a rushed, slanted scrawl were a series of six-digit numbers.

45-98-90

45-27-81

60-21-56

77-70-09

16-30-78

I ran through the numbers in my head, as though reciting them might trigger something in my mind. Unsurprisingly, my attempt failed. No doubt they were codes but without knowing what the codes corresponded to I was pretty lost. They could have been scrambled telephone numbers or references to some kind of cipher wheel or even future winning lottery numbers for all I knew. But they were obviously worth something to someone.

The next piece of paper contained a list of names, written by the same hand as the six-digit combinations. I counted fifteen and all but three were for men. There were Christian names and surnames but no middle names or initials. I scanned the list but none of the names meant anything to me. I thought they were all French, though I couldn’t be certain. Four of the names had two-digit numbers beside them and I guessed these numbers were the ages of the relevant individuals. I wasn’t sure what significance this conferred on the names in question but I spoke them aloud almost without thinking.

“Henri Jetter, 51. Luc Murrel, 56. Jean-Patrick Deville, 39. Christian Fortin, 24.”

The third name, that of Jean-Patrick Deville, had an asterisk beside it. Clearly, he was important somehow, though for what particular reason I hadn’t the faintest clue.

The next item was a folded, photocopied document. It consisted of three sheets of paper that had been stapled together. Each sheet of paper contained a diagram of an electricity circuit of some description. The diagrams were very complex, full of a whole host of symbols that I couldn’t begin to comprehend. I scanned them for any explanatory notes, of which there were none.

Next was a strip of photograph negatives. The strip contained six individual frames and I held each of the brown windows up to the lamp in turn to see if I could make out any of the images. It was surprisingly difficult. All I could see to begin with were a blur of sepia shapes, but on certain angles I could make out the interior walls of a room. Some of the images contained the tops of people’s heads but they seemed to be incidental to what the photographer had been focusing on. I squinted and strained my eyes, twisting the negatives right around and turning them back to front, but I still couldn’t be sure what I was seeing. To be honest, I wasn’t too disappointed. I figured I could always get the photographs developed somewhere in the morning and if they contained anything useful, I’d be able to consider them in greater detail then.

Just two items remained. The first was an actual photograph – a zoom shot of a man and a woman in profile, holding hands across a café table and looking intently at one another. The man was middle-aged with a neat side parting and a handsome face. He wore a black roll-neck sweater and a chunky sports watch. The woman was much younger, early twenties at a guess, with blonde cornrows and a deep tan. It certainly looked as if the couple were unaware of the photograph being taken and the whole thing gave me an uncomfortable feeling, as though I’d trespassed on a private moment.