Into The Fire (55 page)

‘And how was your mother when you got there?’

‘Coughing fit to die, but she’s smoked for sixty-two years, so that’s nothing new. I called the doctor anyway and had to wait for her to find time to come and then run through a complete medical and then lecture us both on the evils of tobacco and the benefit of nicotine patches. I got home about twenty minutes ago. Trice was gone, but I thought he was with you, so I wasn’t worried.’

‘And now you are. Where’s Seb?’

‘I told you; in South Korea, with the men who make deals. He’s the one who does the talking. You wouldn’t send a man with electric blue hair to Korea, and most of these people won’t deal with a woman.’

‘Plus ça change … Your mother’s neighbour, has he ever called before?’

‘He’s not really a neighbour. He’s just some random bloke who was staying at the hotel next door. He heard her coughing through the wall.’

‘He told you that?’

Pale, Valérie says, ‘You want me to check with the hotel?’

‘Is he still there?’

‘Probably not; he was calling from his car. And I didn’t ask his name.’ Her hands rise slowly to her face. ‘Shit.’

Picaut can count the miles back to Orléans to get her gun. She leans back against the wall, seeking solace in solidity. ‘Let’s go back to the beginning. Patrice came home when he was expected to, and came upstairs. Was he here when you left?’

‘I think so. The stairs are pretty loud. I’d have heard him if he’d come down again.’

‘So he was still here when you went out. What time was that?’

‘About quarter to ten this morning. I got back just before four.’

Six hours. She is doing her best not to become fixated by numbers. ‘Is his bike still here?’

‘I haven’t looked, but it’s kept in the garage at the bottom of the road, chained with three padlocks and two webcams, one hidden, one visible trained on it round the clock. You’d have to be mad to try to take it.’

‘I’m not sure we’re dealing with sanity here. Can you check the feed from the webcams?’

While Valérie clears all six screens and scrolls through the feed, Picaut makes a single rapid circuit of the vast room.

She checks behind the closed door at the far end and finds a wet-room with high pressure shower and toilet: empty. The kettle is dry. The fridge is stocked. The bed is cold and neatly made.

A wardrobe built into the wall has a rack of jeans and another rack of black T-shirts. The front one says N
ERDS
2
²
Ever. Without effort, she can imagine him wearing it.

Her circuit brings her back to where Valérie is checking the webcams in the garage. ‘Anything?’

‘Nothing. The bike’s still there. Nobody has been near it.’

Patrice’s workstation desk is busy, but ordered. The only thing awry is the spectacular three-dimensional pyramid of Red Bull cans built to one side; at least a hundred cans, arranged with mathematical precision. Three have fallen off the top.

‘How long has he been building this?’ Picaut asks.

‘Since the start of the month.’ Valérie gives a tight, half-shy smile, as of a sister with a mildly eccentric, but much-loved brother. ‘He takes them all to the recycling centre on the last day of the month and starts again. He reckons one day he’ll make it to the ceiling inside thirty-one days.’

‘When he’s with us, he’s very precise. He wouldn’t let cans fall off the top.’

Valérie nods slowly. ‘Here too. He’d go mad if something was out of line. In fact, it should be a physical impossibility. That thing is structurally stable.’

She’s right. Picaut takes the three cans and fits them back into place. She has to tap them hard to get them to move, but a larger disaster, like a physical struggle nearby would topple the entire construction.

Even more than the scribbled Post-it slapped under the desk, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that these were moved deliberately, and harder to escape the idea that Patrice has done it to send a message.
I left under duress. I couldn’t leave another note, but I leave you this, and trust you can read it.

Picaut closes her eyes. Her heart is a stone, sinking. To Valérie, she says, ‘Have you somewhere safe you can go? Not your mother’s; they know that address. Somewhere anonymous. A hotel, maybe? Not here.’

‘There’s a small hotel in Blois that we send clients to …’

‘No. It has to be somewhere with no connection to you or the company. Somewhere small and out of the way. Go to Paris or Chinon. Don’t stay in Blois or Orléans or Tours. If you can pay cash and use a different name, do it. Stay low.’ Picaut is in a hurry now. She finds a used envelope and writes on it the number of the disposable phone that she keeps for emergency use. ‘Don’t use your own phone. Go to a kiosk and buy a pay-per-use one and text me on this number when you’ve done it. Keep off-grid. Keep away from people you know.’

‘You’ll be looking for Trice?’

‘With everything we’ve got. We can—’

Her phone rings.

‘Father Cinq-Mars, I don’t have time just now …’

‘Yes, you do. The gentleman currently pointing his gun at my head informs me that he is in possession of your friend. If you wish to see him alive, you will do as he tells you.’

‘They have Patrice?’ Relief punches into her solar plexus. At least there is this much certainty. And she has spent days, weeks, in hostage training. Keep them talking. Speak slowly. Keep them on the line as long as you can.

She signals silence to Valérie and scribbles
Can you track this call?
on the back of the envelope. It’s a vain hope: it takes Patrice twenty-eight seconds to build the links that will allow a trace, and he’s ready waiting when the call comes in. Today, here, now, it will take longer.

To the priest, Picaut says, ‘I need to speak to Patrice. How else do I know he is alive?’

There is a pause, the silence of a muffled phone, then Father Cinq-Mars is back again.

‘I’m sorry, but you will have to take my word for it. I swear I have seen him alive.’

‘Describe him to me.’ Each word is weighted, slow, sure. Valérie’s fingers are flickering too fast to follow. It is possible that Valérie can type faster than Patrice, which is something to behold. The rightmost monitor in the bank of six has turned into a map of the Loire valley. A red haze spreads across it, becomes stronger near Meung-sur-Loire, not yet quite Cléry-Saint-André, but not far off.

Father Cinq-Mars, too, does not speak overly fast. Possibly, he knows this game, and is on her side. ‘He has violent blue hair and a brilliant smile. His nose is perhaps a little large to be in balance with the rest of his face, but he is undoubtedly attractive, with the vitality of youth. His T-shirt is black and it features a cat in blue with beneath it the proclamation that computer games have ruined his life, and it is therefore a good thing that he has eight left.

‘You should not count on those extra lives, Capitaine Picaut. The men who hold him, I believe, set fire to things, and they will use him as their tinder if they feel slighted. They may well burn my church in the process, which would, at least to me, be the greater catastrophe. I am told I must go. You are to leave the building you are currently in. Take your car. A new phone is in the front seat. You are to drop your old ones – both of them – down the drain outside. Goodbye.’

‘No! Don’t hang—
Fuck!
’ To Valérie, ‘Did we get it?’

‘Out by about eight seconds. They know what they’re doing.’

The map is still a disappointment of red. He could be anywhere within a ten-mile radius of the basilica at Cléry-Saint-André.

‘Right. We have to assume they’re watching here. I have to do what they say. Can you make a phone call in a way that can’t be traced?’

‘Of course.’

‘Call here.’ She writes Garonne’s mobile number on the envelope, and then Ducat’s. ‘Tell them both what’s happened. All of it. Tell them that Jaish al Islam, whoever that really is, have Patrice and we know they’ll kill if they have to. Their priority is to get Patrice out alive. I’ll take care of myself. Got that?’

‘They won’t listen.’ Valerie speaks as if she knows them. Or maybe she just knows their type.

‘They’d fucking better. Tell them I said so. And then you get off-grid and don’t talk to anyone, OK?’

‘OK.’ There is a short, awkward pause. Valérie says, ‘Do you want to take Trice’s gun?’

‘Patrice has a gun?’

‘He was given it the day he was recruited. He’s never taken it out of the drawer. Wait.’

Valérie crosses the room. Below the bed, hidden by the fall of the duvet, is a full length drawer. She hauls it out and hands over a standard issue SIG-Sauer.

Picaut hefts it. It’s nice, but it’s too light. ‘Where are the rounds?’

‘Are they not in the gun?’

They had better not be: not if Patrice has listened even slightly to the regulations. She opens it. They are not in the gun. They are not in the drawer. They are not in any of the adjacent drawers.

‘They must be somewhere.’ Valérie is turning and turning, looking through cupboards in the kitchen.

There is no time. Picaut says, ‘It’ll do. Nobody but us needs to know it’s empty.’ She slips it into the belt of her jeans. Following Valérie down the stairs, she chooses not to think of the circumstances in which it might become apparent that she cannot fire.

At the door, they clasp in a brief, awkward embrace. ‘Good luck,’ Valérie says. ‘Bring him home.’

Her heart is lost. She remembers the pain of it from when her father died; the desolation. Patrice is not dead yet: she holds on to this. ‘I intend to.’

IT IS EVENING
. Tomas has done all he can to make the Maid comfortable after her ordeal and come away to the private room above the tavern.

Jean de Belleville is here at last. He entered Rouen in the afternoon, wearing the clothes of a merchant: poor Dutch wool, undyed, and shoes of horse hide with nails in the soles. He walked in through the gates bearing a skin of wine on his back and was not stopped by either English or French guards.

And so the Maid’s closest family is joined again: de Belleville, Huguet, and Marguerite de Valois, except she is not Marguerite, she is Jehanne, called Hanne, the one Tomas has been seeking since the day of the king’s anointing: the angel princess who disturbed the fight amongst children on the day of Agincourt.

The other three seem relieved to be able to talk. And so he can at last have answers to the questions that troubled him. Did Yolande arrange this subterfuge? Is it all her doing? She is a strong woman, of discretion and power. He would not put it past her.

When he asks, Hanne gives something that is partway between a nod and a shake. ‘It couldn’t have happened without her. Yolande helped me to be accepted at court. She sent her men to bring the Maid from Vaucouleur, and made sure she was admitted to the king’s presence at Chinon, to make her case.’

‘That must have taken rare courage, to spin tales to the king, and all the time he might have recognized her.’

De Belleville bristles. ‘The Maid never lied. She said, “My father in heaven has ordered me to bring France back to wholeness,” which is true. If they chose to think she meant God, so be it. That idea was hers, and the making of it was Yolande’s but the first thought was her father’s. He made her swear on his sword three oaths: to take France back, to ransom Charles of Orléans, who was captured at Agincourt, and to liberate Paris.’

‘He thought she could do all that?’

Hanne says, ‘He was a king, she carried his blood. Of course he believed it. More than that, he was a knight, and he had trained her. From childhood, he saw what she was, what she could be, and he knew what Charles was. The king. Our brother.’

‘Or not your brother, if the rumours regarding his parentage are true.’

She shrugs. ‘It doesn’t matter. That, too, is what Father saw: that she could unite the army, could lead it, could do all he asked, but she could never take the throne. She could not even lay claim to royal blood, because if she did, the peers of the realm would fight each other like stags at the rut to marry her and take the throne in her name. And then France would be torn apart again, because the losers would side with England.’

‘Jean d’Alençon wouldn’t marry her,’ Tomas says. ‘I tried to make him, at Paris.’

‘Yolande made him promise not to,’ says Huguet.

Tomas raises his head. ‘He knows?’

‘Of course, how could he not? We grew up together. He fought with her with wooden swords for hours when they were younger. He knows. La Hire knows. All those who support her, they know.’

‘The king?’

‘Not him, no. He was never at court when we were young. He’d gone to live with Yolande before we were born. He didn’t meet her before that day at Chinon, and nobody will tell him; they wouldn’t dare.’

Tomas wants to believe that Charles would not abandon his own flesh and blood, but the truth is that he has abandoned the Maid, to whom he owes everything, and it does not matter exactly what he knows.

A memory comes back to him, of a ditch outside Meung and Bertrand de Poulangy, a man who certainly knew. ‘Was she ever a horse breaker? Before she came to Chinon?’

‘Yes!’ For the first time in months, he sees Hanne smile. Her eyes take on the same faraway look the Maid’s do when she speaks of her past. ‘That was later, after she and her mother left Burgundy.’

‘Why did they go to Burgundy? Duke Philip is her enemy.’

Huguet says, ‘Odette de Champdivers was Burgundian by birth. When the old king died, his mistress and his bastard daughter were driven out of court. There was nowhere else for them to go. I was at Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois. They came through and we buried her sword beneath the altar.’

Tomas sits bolt upright. ‘The Crusader sword?’

De Belleville rises. ‘The one her father gave her, yes. And the next morning, the Maid and her mother went on to Burgundy.’ He goes to the door, shouts an order. ‘And now, my lady should eat.’ The tavern girls bring up onion soup, and bread, and small cakes of saffron and ground almonds.