Into The Fire (26 page)

‘So we have a break in a pattern: Iain Holloway, a man who lives on his broadband connection, shifts for no obvious reason from four star, full Wi-Fi, to one star, off-grid. Added to which, he tells the hotel staff that his wife has died and he wants solitude – and at least the first part of that is untrue. So he was lying and people don’t generally lie unless they’re running from something.’

‘He had good reason,’ Sylvie says. ‘He burned to death twenty-four hours later.’

‘Only if we assume that whatever he was afraid of is the same thing that killed him,’ Picaut says. ‘We’ll hold an open mind on that one and keep looking.’

Leaning to her left, she picks up a yellow highlighter and runs it across the unaccounted hours on each day. ‘The gaps are too long. Somebody must have seen him. I’ve sent his image to the press pack. It’ll be on the next news bulletins. Expect a flood of phone calls with a less than one per cent hit rate.’

Sylvie says, ‘We’ve already got some sightings. There are two witnesses who think they saw him getting into a car driven by a woman in Blois on Thursday evening.’

‘Was she black, the woman?’

‘They didn’t say. They didn’t say much at all. They weren’t what you’d call credible witnesses; that’s why I didn’t mention it before. Why?’

‘Because according to a moderately credible taxi driver in Meung-sur-Loire, Iain Holloway arrived by train from Blois three days in a row and then went to the basilica at Cléry-Saint-André. There’s no credit card trail on this, so he must have paid cash, which is interesting in itself. And if it’s true, most of the missing hours on Thursday, Friday and Saturday seem to have been spent there. Monique Susong spent nine minutes in the same basilica today, at around one forty-eight p.m. She left a note taped to the bars that surround the tomb of Louis XI. This is it.’

Picaut tabs across and opens the image on the big screen on the back wall. They can all see the note reproduced as it was when she took the photograph with her phone.

Iain Holloway sent me to speak to you. 06 89 61 98 71

Sylvie asks, ‘Is that Monique Susong’s mobile number?’

‘It is.’ Picaut doesn’t say, ‘I told you she wasn’t all she seemed,’ but Garonne nods as if she has, feels in his pocket for a ten euro note and slides it across the floor towards her.

Coupled with his taking down of Rémi from Drugs this morning, she would like to read into the gesture a thawing of their nuclear winter, but can’t bank on it without more evidence. Still, she is unusually pleased.

He says, ‘Have you brought her in?’

She shakes her head. ‘Rollo is at the basilica with a camera. We need to know who picks up that note before we move.’

‘Has Patrice tapped her phone?’

Patrice affects an air of injured innocence. ‘That would be illegal without a directive from Prosecutor Ducat, who—’

‘Who will look the other way until the moment you’re caught. At which point he’ll publicly guillotine you on the steps to his office.’ Garonne makes a swift, decisive gesture with the edge of his hand to demonstrate Patrice’s probable fate. ‘But in the meantime, we will hear every word she says. Has she said anything useful?’

‘Not yet,’ Picaut says. ‘If she does, a transcript will go up on the board. Until then, all she gets is a picture.’ She has already pinned an image of Monique Susong on to the board to the right of Iain Holloway. ‘We know she’s lying to us. I’d like to find out as much as we can about why before we lift her. In the meantime, Patrice has made a breakthrough on the USB chip. Patrice?’

Patrice has had some sleep and is recharged. He hops up on to the desk, leaving Picaut to sit on the floor by the door. She thinks better, sitting on the floor. She can rest her forearms on her knees and stare at her feet and see whatever she needs to see in the blur of not-looking.

Just now, she sees Iain Holloway as if still alive. He is an organized man, who plans his weeks ahead of time. He sets an itinerary, but has the flexibility to break it if he has to. He has obsessions and follows them wherever they lead. He has the resources to find off-grid hotels in a country where his grasp of the language is not great. Last, but far from least, he is a man who has knowledge, and swallows it to keep it safe. A man who, when he knows death is imminent, leaves behind a code. It therefore follows that he must also have left the key.

Patrice is speaking. She hears him through a mesh of clashing patterns.

‘Holloway was a good orthopaedic surgeon. We have his CV from Glasgow and he was a busy man. When not working, he was an obsessive who spent all his free time examining war graves, trying to put names to the dead, often from minimal information. His wife says this is why she left him; he spent all his time digging up the dead and none of it with her. Even his holidays were spent at war graves. In 2006, he worked in Bosnia under the auspices of the UN. There was a grave with five hundred and eighty-three bodies in it, all men and boys down to the age of ten; he identified all but nine.’

‘He’s good, then,’ Rollo says from the door. ‘Most of the war graves are lucky if they identify fifty per cent.’

Picaut feels him come in and find his usual place, leaning against the side wall by the window. She doesn’t look up.

‘He’s good,’ agrees Patrice. ‘And the list of names of those men and boys, in alphabetic order, is the key to the first of the ciphered files on the USB chip.’

‘
What?
’ Picaut’s head snaps up. ‘How?’

‘It’s a standard document number code.’ Patrice is a man in his element, a fish flashing through a sea of figures. ‘You number each letter in the source text, then use them in sequence. Easy to make, there are programs that will do it, but completely impossible to break if you don’t have the source.’

Sylvie says, ‘You’re going to have to give them more than that, Patrice.’

‘OK, so suppose you wanted to use my name as the key, you’d write out Patrice Lacroix over and over and then number the letters, so P=1, A=2, T=3 and on. Then if you wanted to write the word capoeira – which is a Brazilian martial art and happens to be a partial anagram of my name – you’d write 6, 9, 15, 26, 35, 41, 46, 51. You never go back in the list; you always look along for the next number in the sequence.’

‘What happens if I want to write “Happy Birthday Patrice” and your name doesn’t have the right letters?’ Picaut asks. ‘No H, no B, no Y.’

‘That’s why you need a long document for this kind of code: a book or a play or a scientific paper – or a list of names from a war grave – that’s going to have the entire alphabet multiple times over. The result is utterly unbreakable unless you’ve got the key.’

Sylvie says, ‘There’s a three-part code in the US, where the middle section is based on the Declaration of Independence. It’s been broken, and what it says is that the other two parts give the exact location of where a pile of gold bullion is buried that was worth twenty million dollars at the time of burying it in the mid-nineteenth century, which means it’s worth about as much as Facebook and Google put together by now. But nobody can work out the keys to the other two parts, and they’ve been at it for nearly two centuries.’

Patrice is visibly impressed. Picaut rolls her eyes. If these two end up in each other’s beds … it’s not her business. But still.

She says, ‘So if all the codes are number codes, you need the keys.’

‘Yep. We’ll be collecting our pensions before we ever break them otherwise.’

‘We’ll deal with that when we get there,’ Picaut says. ‘What have you got from this one?’

‘This.’ Patrice opens his laptop and connects it to the screen. His hands blur across the keys and a single white page snaps into view.

There is a hush as Picaut’s team reads to the end.

Sylvie speaks first, thoughtfully. ‘Divorced. No children. And he writes love letters to Jon. Was he on any gay dating sites?’

Patrice shakes his head. ‘Not that I can find and, yes, I have looked.’

Picaut says, ‘Forget that, it’s not our problem. We just need to find out who Jon is, where he is, what he does, and what kinds of samples he’s just received. If nothing else, we don’t want to see him added to the body count.’

Garonne: ‘It’ll be whoever Holloway was calling on Saturday night in the hotel. The one the German overheard, at Cornell.’

Picaut: ‘Possibly. So we need a list of possible contacts at Cornell, and another of people who worked with him in Scotland, or on his foreign forensic expeditions, or the various historical forums he hung out on. After that we can spread the net, and— Yes, Patrice?’

Patrice has his hand up, like the kid at the back of the class who knows the answers without having to work at it. His attention never leaves the laptop.

‘There’s a Jonathan Stephenson, ophthalmic surgeon on the clinical staff at Cornell University medical school. He’s English, but he did his degree at Edinburgh at the same time Holloway did his in Glasgow, so it’s possible they could have met. He’s married with three school-aged kids, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t having an affair with his old friend from college. The best option is to get into his email and find out if he had any contact with Iain Holloway, but I’ll need an hour or two. He’s behind the university firewall, and getting through that isn’t as trivial as it sounds.’

It doesn’t sound trivial to anyone except Patrice. Picaut pushes herself to standing. To Rollo, she says, ‘We’re all waiting to hear who took the note Monique Susong left in the basilica.’

He rolls his eyes in a way that says she’s not going to like the answer. ‘Father Raymond,’ he says. ‘He’s the priest of the basilica. But he called for backup straight away. Enter Father Cinq-Mars, personal assistant to the bishop. Here—’

He passes her the chip from his camera. She slots it into her laptop and brings up the contents on to the screen.

A series of images shows a portly, balding priest, with nothing to distinguish him from a world of portly, balding priests; black shirt, white collar, black cassock, black trousers, black shoes.

Father Raymond checks that he is alone, takes the note, reads it, scowls, walks a tight circle, and makes a phone call. Later – the time stamps are on each frame – a second priest arrives. This one is thinner and younger, but with markedly less hair: Father Cinq-Mars.

With some animation, they discuss the note, then both take pictures of it on their phones, much as Picaut did, although they spread it out flat on a pew where she spread it out on the top of her thigh, with her jeans as a backdrop.

She put it back where she found it. Cinq-Mars produces a disposable lighter and destroys it.

All eyes are on Picaut. ‘Sylvie and Rollo, I want everything you can get on these two: find where they live, their phone numbers, their past history. Anything and everything. I want a watch put on their homes. Patrice, can you get me a list of the numbers Monique Susong has called or texted since the fire?’

He nods.

‘Good. We’ll want to—’

The phone rings.
The
phone; the line they have set aside for the fires. Even as she lifts the handset, Picaut is checking her watch and writing the time on the diary that lies open on her desk.

17.58. If it’s a fire, this is a major break with tradition: all the others have been lit in the small hours of the night, when police, firemen and press were all asleep.

‘Inès?’

Martin Evard of the Fire Department is on the line. She can hear sirens behind him. Her mouth runs dry. She doesn’t need to ask what, only where?

‘The newly refurbished warehouses in the South Orléans Project area west of the hospital. The exact location is being texted to you now.’

The warehouses are Luc’s pet project; once, she sat up with him, helping him design the layouts. Every other fire has targeted women. Now they are targeting him. Unless they’re targeting Picaut through him.

The ramifications are too complex. She doesn’t have time to work them through. She grabs her jacket and heads for the door. Her team is already moving out.

The last thing she hears as she leaves the room is Evard, in despair, saying, ‘Be careful. The press are on their way.’

PICAUT DOESN’T OFTEN
resort to the siren, but it sits aslant on the roof of her car now, clearing a path through the early evening traffic, south over the river and then a right turn towards the industrial park west of the hospital.

Once a faceless sea of rotting concrete and corrugated iron, it is being reclaimed one unit at a time with the kind of edgy twenty-first century architecture that manages to make a single-storey box look interesting.

Luc has personally overseen most of the restoration. The South Orléans Regeneration Project is part of his legacy to the city, his belief in the power of Orléans to rebuild itself. He wants to invest in the highest of high technology. He wants to create a Silicon Loire, and he is starting here, on this site. If not the centrepiece of his election plan, it is one of the keystones.

Was one of the keystones. Now, it’s in flames. The horizon has acquired a smeared saffron tint long before Picaut crosses the river.

With Patrice as her navigator, she weaves through the maze of service roads with their executive signage and hints of a technological future.