Into The Fire (20 page)

They asked her for a sign from God. She told them the relief of Orléans was her sign, and to let her go there. They found themselves unable to stop her. She went. She conquered. She rendered them silent. And now she marches at the king’s right hand up the aisle of the cathedral of Rheims, and the archbishop, who openly hates her, must smile and bow and lift the crown.

And he does.

You could hear the cheers in Paris, did you find yourself minded to try.

He is only a man, Charles de Valois.

He is a young man lying face flat on the dressed stone steps of the altar with naked legs sallow between the stone and the white linen of his shirt. The cathedral of Rheims swells bare above him, a heaven of old, pale stone granted the grace of God’s gold sun in the heights, while below is ruin and poverty, for England has taken the plate and chalice, the vestments and the altar cloths … everything that could be carried has gone to Paris for the coronation of their boy king who claims rule of France.

Some things they did not find: the crown; the two sceptres, one of gold, one of ivory. Most important of all, they have not the sacred oil that the angels brought for the true consecration of Clovis a thousand years ago, which has anointed every true King of France since. Everyone knows that Gilles de Rais hid that when Regnault of Chartres, archbishop of this place, would have handed it gladly to Burgundy, and so to England.

It is as archbishop that de Chartres must use it now to anoint a king, in the presence of his god. He trembles, the archbishop, under the greatness of this; it was not of his making. He holds the flask with unstable fingers, scrapes with a gold pin the smallest clot of the air-shrivelled wax from its base, dissolves it in myrrh, the Holy Chrism that anointed the Child in the crib, and blesses now the new-made king on his head, on his breast, on his bony elbows, shoulders, wrists.

‘Arise now.’

The trumpets! A silver clarion of France to make the walls shake and lift the flutter of the Maid’s standard. On such a sea of sound rises a gauche young man in his nightgown, his knees red from the scrape of the steps.

Charles d’Albret, the comte de Dreux passes to the king a tunic of shimmering red damask that reaches to his knees, and he becomes in the moment a man. A coat over it, of deep sea blue brocade with gold fleurs de lys scattered over, each as big as a palm print. He is almost a king.

Pale gloves of kidskin, supple as a spring leaf, and a ring; the sceptre of ivory and the other of gold and, last, caught in a strand of high sun, mistletoe-pearls shimmering, bleeding with rubies, the crown of France passes from hand to hand to hand of the gathered peers of the realm – except Burgundy, obviously, who would not come – and the gauche youth
is
a king, ascending his throne. The Maid is beside him, she and her banner, in the place of majesty.

When she descended on Chinon, she said her father in heaven had set her three tasks: to relieve the siege of Orléans, to bring the dauphin to his consecration at Rheims, and to free the Duke of Orléans, the rightful duke, who languished in an English prison.

She has achieved two out of these three and has set her mind on Paris in lieu of the third. She is a miracle made living: Maid of Orléans, Victor of France.

‘
SHE’S NOT THE
fucking Maid. She never has been, she never will be, and if I see you with this trash anywhere near here again, I’ll rip your head from your shoulders.’

Picaut hears Garonne before she turns the corner, and stops out of sight, that she might not interrupt what is clearly not meant for her ears. She was at boiling point long before she parked the car and ran the paparazzi-gauntlet into the Police Department. Each additional stare has pushed her further down the line towards some kind of physical explosion.

It hasn’t occurred to her that this would be obvious to her team, nor that they’d take action to protect her from the fallout, but as she turns the corner she sees Rémi Meuret from the drug squad bent backwards over a desk on the end of Garonne’s fist and Garonne’s other hand crushing an A4 sheet with her image on it.

Garonne catches sight of her and flushes an ugly purple. He opens his fist and lets Rémi fold to the floor. The look he gives Picaut is complicated; she’s his to diminish, not anyone else’s. There’s an odd kind of comfort in this thought.

The remainder of her team are waiting in her office. Patrice is sitting cross-legged on the floor with a laptop balanced across his knees. His hair is one long titanium-oxide braid that hangs straight down his back.

His T-shirt tells the world that he has taken back the night. Above the text, a stick figure sleeps on the curve of a new moon. Beyond him, Rollo is leaning on the door, hands in pockets. Spiky-blonde Sylvie sits on the only spare chair. Éric is at the back. He’ll have driven through the epicentre of the demonstrations; that he could get here at all bodes well for the day.

They all rise as Picaut comes in. She waves them down and takes her usual place, sitting with her legs hanging over the edge of her desk.

It’s just another day at work. If she can believe this, perhaps the building will cease to hum with gossip; perhaps she will be left alone to do her job.

As on any other day, therefore, she takes the coffee Patrice hands her and launches into the results of the phone calls she made in the short hop between the television studio and the station.

‘The Fire Department has nothing for us on Sunday night’s fire beyond what they said at the time: that the accelerant was ordinary gasoline. Forensics say it’s the cleanest site they’ve ever met. Every room in the house had the prints of the occupants and signs of their presence – except Iain Holloway’s. In there, they have found not a single print, no DNA, nothing.’

‘So it was cleaned,’ says Éric.

‘Exactly. But if one line of inquiry is closed, we can put our resources into whatever’s left. We have Iain Holloway’s basic itinerary from when he stepped off the Eurostar in Paris a week ago, to when he ended up in the Hôtel Carcassonne late on Sunday afternoon. Most of it has come from his credit card trail; we need to fill in the gaps.

‘Sylvie has made a list of the addresses where it was used. We’ll each take a day. Garonne, you have Wednesday in Paris, moving to Blois on Thursday morning. Sylvie and Rollo, take over Thursday evening, Friday and the first part of Saturday in Blois. I’ll take Saturday and Sunday, when he moved from Blois to Orléans. Take a picture and see if you can get any sightings.’

Patrice has printed out copies of Iain Holloway’s image from the various Internet forums. Picaut passes them round. ‘Someone should recognize him from these. Look for any connections. He was Scottish, he worked on war graves, he had contacts in Glasgow and maybe Cornell. He had an interest in medieval battlefields and he took my father’s side in the debate last year, so he’s not completely clueless. If we can work out what he was doing and why he was doing it, we might find out why he was killed. Any questions?’

‘What’s Patrice doing?’

That’s Garonne, who has just worked out he’s about to drive to Paris and of course thinks this is a slight. A year ago, he’d have taken it as a perk: two hours in a car each way and nothing to do but shuffle tracks on his iPod. A year ago, someone else would have given the order.

‘Patrice is code-breaking.’ With a nod, Picaut cedes him the floor, or rather the desk. He is definitely wearing eye shadow. And lip gloss. He still looks ruggedly male. She hasn’t worked out how.

He hops up on to her desk and sits cross-legged with his iPad balanced across his ankles. He has no fear of public presentations, of talking to those twice his age with a kill count he can match only in online fantasy games. He blesses Rollo and Garonne with his easy grin.

‘So: Iain Holloway’s USB chip has been swallowed and then cooked. Short of smashing it with a sledgehammer and feeding the bits to an alligator, there’s not much more you could do to destroy the data that was stored on it.’

‘But you got something.’ Rollo is not known for his patience.

‘I did. It took a stunning amount of time and some software I’ve never seen before, but yes, we got to the data. Or at least to some encrypted files. Opened, they look like this—’ Patrice holds up his iPad.

Rollo ignores it and carries on picking dirt from under his fingernails. Sylvie frowns at the screen, mouthing words to herself, but it’s Garonne who grabs it in his meaty fists, stabbing it with his forefinger in a way that makes Patrice wince.

‘This is garbage.’

‘No, it’s hexadecimal code.’ Patrice prises the Pad from Garonne’s hands before he can do real damage. ‘Which is to say it’s alphanumeric, written in base sixteen instead of base two so we can read it more easily. Some of us can read it more easily. You, obviously, are an exception.’

Sylvie says, ‘But there are no letters here. It’s all numbers, except maybe an exclamation point, and a colon?’

Sylvie can read hex code. Her stock amongst the team rises appreciably. Patrice, delighted, offers her a salute, fist across chest.

‘Right,’ he says. ‘Yes. Exactly. There are two colons, an exclamation point, an ampersand, an apostrophe and a few other minor dots and dashes. Beyond that, we have a string of numbers of ever-increasing length which is a fairly standard cipher technique. We need the key to this, and to the other two files on the chip. Just getting this open took all night. I haven’t broken into any of them yet.’

‘You will,’ Picaut says. She has faith. She needs to have faith.

‘I’m doing my best, but if it’s PGP, we’re screwed.’ Patrice glances over at Garonne. ‘That’s Pretty Good Privacy.’

‘And Pretty Good Privacy is …?’

‘Unbreakable. You don’t want the detail of how, but the important bit is that if every particle in the universe was a computer and they had each tried one iteration per second of all the possible options that might break it since the dawn of time, they still wouldn’t have worked it out.’

There is a moment’s silence as they grapple with the enormity of this, then Picaut says, ‘Iain Holloway swallowed this chip. He wanted us to have it. He wouldn’t have left it in an unbreakable code.’

‘That’s what I thought.’ Patrice loops his fingers together, turns his hands over and cracks all the knuckles at once. ‘So there’ll be a key. If it’s short, like a name, we stand a chance. If it’s long, like a book, we don’t. I can tell you now it isn’t his mother’s maiden name, his address, the name of his cat, his ex-wife’s cat, the street address of his childhood home or any variant thereof.’

‘How do you know that?’ asks Éric Masson.

‘I tried them.’ Patrice is serious now, and Picaut can see how his night has been spent. ‘I’ve tried every iteration of all his close relatives, his colleagues, his home address, his work address, his alma mater, his pets, and the names of the people he talked to on the various historical forums he was on or the messages he left. None of them fits. He was intelligent enough to encode this, so he’s not going to use something that every hacker and his parrot could find. It will be obvious, but only to someone who knows him well.’

‘Or someone who has his laptop,’ Picaut says. ‘Which his killer may well do.’

Patrice chews his lip. ‘If he’s as bright as we think he is, he won’t have left the key on the same machine as the cipher text, but the bad guys may still be one step ahead. Depends how good the hackers are.’

‘Is there anyone else in Orléans better than you? In the whole of France, even? Europe?’

‘I’d like to say not, but I don’t want to lie to you.’ Patrice ticks the names off on his fingers as he thinks of them. ‘Geraldine in Cork has been busy recently and won’t say what she’s doing. Tahar went off the radar in Sintra this weekend when he was supposed to be in a Guild Wars tournament. Wolf Nijenhus in Utrecht has been in lockdown for the past fortnight and isn’t answering emails. Any one of these could have a serious go at cracking any cipher in the world. The best we can hope for is that now we’ve got the hex code, we’re faster than they are at finding the key. He was an intelligent guy. It’ll be something we can find out as we get to know him.’

‘Right.’ Picaut rounds on the rest of the team. ‘Our priority is breaking this code and for that we need to know what Iain Holloway was doing, who he spoke to, what he said, and why. Which means everyone needs to do some actual, boots-on-the-ground police work. Go carefully, keep your eyes open and for God’s sake call for backup sooner rather than later. I’d rather drive halfway across France on a false alarm than lose one of you to a broken skull and a fire.’

She stands, snapping her fingers. ‘Let’s go, people. First one with something concrete that takes us forward gets free drinks for a week. Pray for me as you go. I’ll be stuck between Ducat on one side and the press on the other.’ She pats Garonne on the shoulder as he leaves. ‘I promise you, driving to Paris is better.’

‘’
COURSE I KNEW
her. Grew up with her, didn’t I? Do you want me to …?’

‘Not yet. Today is a special day. Will you sit with me awhile?’

Claudine, army whore and former ward of King Charles VI, is not sober.

She is hardly alone in this. The entire population of Rheims is unsober, with the possible exception of Brother Tomas, Austin friar, who has paid a whore for her services for an hour in the late afternoon of the day of the new king’s anointing.

He has not taken Claudine indoors; today of all days, there is not a room to be rented anywhere in the city. He is forced, therefore, to sit in front of a smithy on a bench made of sawn planks laid on barrels, with a girl who will get on her knees and wrap her lips around him if he gives her half a chance.

And then she will leave, and seek more coin elsewhere, which is not what he wants. He folds his hands together and leans forward and slides another coin under the leather beaker. ‘For your memories. I would know more of God’s creation that walks among us.’