Into The Fire (8 page)

‘Inès will be at my side.’ Luc spoke with the precision of one who has drunk to the point of absolute honesty. ‘She may be difficult in some things, but in this she knows her place.’

Picaut was gone by the morning. Since then, she has communicated with her husband only through her lawyer and has made sure she is never alone in his presence.

She owns this apartment; Landis was true to his word. If the divorce gives her nothing else, this is her pension, and a good one. Luc left within a week, but it still doesn’t feel secure and her own lawyer has told her not to change the combination on the number pad that locks the door, not to do anything that might give Landis ammunition to suggest her a less-than-perfect wife. She has not been back often in the past eight weeks.

She reaches the wet-room at the far end of the hallway and stands on the heated marble floor, discarding her ash-strewn clothes.

This, oddly, is her favourite place. In here she is safe. She can lock the door if she needs to, and because she can, she doesn’t. The window faces east, to the rising sun, the shutters are open, the glass opaque. She stands in front of it naked, feeling the grit of the night rough against the soft skin under her arms, in the fold beneath her breasts, in her ears, her hair, her eyes, her nose.

She turns on the shower. The steam builds to the high ceiling. She steps underneath and hot water seeks out the places where falling cinders burned her.

She burns again, and there is a part of her that revels in the pain and draws it inside, as if by this she might come to know what burning is, might reduce it, might make it manageable. The sight of a man’s incinerated corpse will not leave her, nor the manner of his death. She could be sneezing out charred parts of the body, washing him out of her hair …

She turns round and lets the power wash her shoulders, the curve of her back. She leans into the pressure, is held by it, could sleep in it … Is sleeping in it—

‘Inès? Is that you?’

She rockets forward into dryness and cold. Her eyes snap open.

‘
Luc?
’

He is standing in the doorway to the shower room, his eyes wide, his hair awry. He is a dark god, a sculpture of pure beauty, and the shock of his presence punches through her belly, a raw, ripe thing, snatching at animal instincts that have lain dormant these past four months. She draws a halting breath.

‘Inès …’ With one hand, he reaches for her. Lust lights his eyes, carves new lines around his mouth.

She hasn’t seen him since January, and he is here, and he wants her, and every plane of his face, of his being, is stronger than memory, more glorious. She remembers his touch, his breath on her cheek, his hands on her breasts, on the flat of her abdomen, the downward drift of his lips. Her nipples should be rosily soft from the heat. They are not; they are brown and solid as chalk stubs and they ache for—

Inès knows her place.

She grabs a towel and scrubs herself with it. ‘Get out.’

Her eyes are windows to her soul. His reaching hand drops. He takes a breath to speak, thinks better of it and backs away, shaking his head. ‘
Pardon. J’suis désolé. Pardon.
’

Luc never apologizes. Not ever.

She asks, ‘Why are you here?’

‘They said … The fire.’ He looks haggard, as if he, too, has had no sleep. He pulls himself together, gives a brief, apologetic shrug. ‘I thought you wouldn’t be here.’

‘That’s why
now
, not why
here
.’

‘I needed some clothes.’ He glances down at the heaps on the floor, one filthy, one ironed by the day-woman. ‘Like you.’ He has backed right to the door. He makes another conciliatory gesture with his hands, palms up, submissive. ‘I’ll come back later. If that’s all right?’

She shrugs; she cannot trust her voice. He eases himself out. His head is the last to go, his eyes feasting on her, his voice a caress. ‘You are so very beautiful.’

Now, he says it:
now
, and her father not alive to tell. Listening to him leave, she stands dry-eyed in the folds of her towel, and wonders what it will take to make her weep.

THE CAR RADIO
speaks to her endlessly of the fire, and of the possible identity of the body.

A woman from the US State Department says the National Security Agency is focusing its considerable resources on Jaish al Islam. The implication is that America will succeed where France has failed.

Picaut hits the column switch. The hush that fills the car could all too easily be filled by Luc. He hovers half a thought away, and his closeness threatens to melt her marrow.

She stares ahead, but he smiles back at her from every second billboard: Votez Bressard!

The trams are no better. She turns on to the bridge across the Loire, looks down at the heavy, chocolaty water. Here is the bridge to the tower of les Tourelles. Here is the site of the battle that launched the Maid as the city’s hero. Here are the crowding memories of her father, which are not useful. Two deep breaths and she’s safely across and on into the new development south of the river, that didn’t exist in the Maid’s time.

She considers the water. Yesterday it rained and today, here, now, the Loire is gorged to fullness. But it was not raining last night, when the fire was lit. The arsonists have one eye on the weather forecast, which, if nothing else, is part of a pattern and it is in patterns that answers are found.

The traffic is easing. Just before nine, she pulls into the car park of the pathology suite adjacent to the Hôpital de la Source in southern Orléans. The receptionist nods as she passes, heading for the second floor.

‘Have you a name for me yet?’

Black on silver, cased in white, the roasted body of the unknown maybe-American lies curled on a stainless steel table in the shining new white-tiled autopsy room.

Free of Luc, dressed and clean, Picaut feels sharper than she has any right to do after a night of so little sleep. She docks her phone in the slot on the wall and hitches up to sit on a stainless steel table.

‘Not yet.’ Éric Masson does not raise his head. ‘One eighty-six, Caucasian, fitter than average, a runner, or more probably a climber; his upper body has muscling here – here – here’ – his pointer circles shoulders, pectorals, biceps. ‘No ID so far.’ He looks up. ‘X-rays. Get clear.’

Picaut hitches off the table, slides behind a screen of leaded glass and watches him work with a professional appreciation for his clinical precision.

The facility is a little over two years old, a relic of Sarkozy’s pre-election largesse. Beneath the scents of antiseptic and death, it’s still possible to smell the faint new-build aura of paint and plaster.

Lured here from the Hammersmith in London, which had lured him from Harvard, which had lured him from Montpellier, Dr Éric Masson has been in place since the day the lab doors opened.

He had considered and rejected offers of post-doctoral funding from Groningen and Heidelberg. When asked why he eschewed honour and fame in favour of a relative backwater, he says that his second wife was from Orléans, but, if he’s honest, it was the chance to mould the department in his own image that persuaded him to come.

Picaut has never asked. She watches him, crisply green in theatre scrubs and latex gloves, his widow’s peak trapped beneath a neat green cap. He is silent, immersed in that technology and its pleasures.

Three days a week, Rosa, his technician, turns her hand to radiography, but she has four children under the age of ten and he is kind enough not to drag her into work when he doesn’t need her. There is an office rumour that Rosa – dark, petite, with ravishing eyes – is the reason for his latest divorce, but Picaut has seen them work together and thinks they are too comfortable in each other’s company ever to have been lovers.

Fifteen minutes pass, in which time Picaut checks her phone and reviews the report sent in by Garonne, bracketed top and bottom by a rant about Jaish al Islam and the damage they are doing to the fabric of France.

He has statements now from all the witnesses. The only one remotely of interest is Monique Susong, the tall black woman who works for
Vogue Paris
and has come south from the capital, so she says, on the strength of a fashion rumour concerning some minor celebrity who was said to have been spotted in an Orléans bar wearing something off-trend.

Garonne thinks this is so laughably implausible that it’s clearly a cover story and even Picaut, who could not be less interested in the vagaries of fashion, could have told anyone who’d asked that the chances of a Celebrity Event’s taking place in Orléans were vanishingly small.

She is not, however, inclined to let Monique Susong get on the next train to Paris, however loudly and frequently she offers the view that Orléans is a tedious little dump and she would be eternally happy if she could return to the metropolis at their earliest convenience. Picaut sends a text to this effect to Garonne, then docks the phone and allows herself the luxury of Éric Masson’s latest coffee.

Along with his acknowledged expertise in forensic pathology, Éric nurses a passion for single-estate beans, freshly ground and brewed with spring water. This month’s sample is from Tarrazu in Costa Rica. A map showing the exact location and a review from Fortnum & Mason grace the data card pinned up behind the grinder.
Creamy and full-bodied, yet with a citrusy flavour …

Picaut doesn’t often get to grind the beans and she loses herself in their earthy sensuality, the roll of them in her hand, the spin and jive in the grinder as they leap and leap away from the blades. She catches the tang of citrus but it’s the caffeine that sweeps away the fog and lets her think again.

A man of unknown identity has died in a fire.

Luc was at the apartment.

A man of unknown identity has been murdered in the latest of four fires, each of which has fallen within the confines of the city of Orléans and is therefore under the jurisdiction of her department.

Luc was at the apartment and he looked more unsettled than she has ever seen him. He said she looked beautiful.

A man of unknown identity has been murdered in the latest of four fires, each of which has been claimed by Jaish al Islam, an organization about which she knows nothing, and nor does anyone else.

They have not managed to infiltrate it, or tapped its phones, or listened to its email traffic, or met any of its members. As far as the world is concerned, Jaish al Islam did not exist before the first fire, but now the global anti-terrorism fraternity wants to know everything she knows, which is painfully little. Luc is a minor problem when set beside the scale of this. She can ignore him. She will.

Her Nokia, parked in its dock, lets loose the medley of Inuit throat singers that is Patrice’s ring tone. Touch sensitive areas on all four walls allow her to pick up the call.

‘Picaut.’ The water is boiling again. She pours it on to the filter and watches black gold drip into her cup.

‘Did the Hôtel Carcassonne keep a backup in the Cloud?’

‘Slower, Patrice. That sound you can hear is only the second coffee of the day.’

His laugh is muted, for the sake of her fragility. She can imagine him, hunched over the phone, his platinum-blond pony-tail hair gathered back in a magenta scrunch, his nose a little too big to be classical but matched by strong features, a black T-shirt adorned with the latest design, crowd-sourced from a cultural milieu Picaut has never explored.

He lives in a parallel world, which runs a little bit faster, a little bit younger than her own. Now he is trying to reach over to her side of the line. Slowly, he says, ‘I had a thought: did the owner of the burned-out hotel—?’

‘Madame Foy.’

‘That’s the one. Did Madame Foy keep a backup of the hotel’s hard drive on a remote site, or in the Cloud somewhere? If she did, we could access it and find the name of your corpse.’

‘To access anything, we’d need the permission of Madame Foy which she is hardly going to hand over, given her current state of high umbrage. And we won’t get a warrant for a fishing trip.’

There is a delicate silence. Patrice’s father was something big in military cyber-security, which means the young Patrice was playing Diablo pretty much as soon as he could speak and graduated on to World of Warcraft in its vanilla incarnation at launch.

From there it was a short step to darker waters. He was a black-hat hacker, and founder member of SINK, otherwise known as the SilverFish Ninja Kolektiv, until a plea bargain with someone a great deal higher up the food chain brought him across the legal side of the line. Mostly. The silence has weight.

Picaut closes her eyes. ‘Whatever you do, I don’t want to know.’

‘What if I get a name?’

‘Match it to the dentals from Éric. Or the DNA. Or something.’

‘Done.’

Patrice hangs up. Picaut hits the touch-square with the point of her elbow. On the inner surface of her closed lids is an image of Prosecutor Ducat and what he will do if he finds out.

‘
Capitaine?
’

She opens her eyes and finds Éric Masson standing in front of her, his head cocked towards the darkened viewing suite to one side of the pm room. His radiographs are ready.

‘Want to see?’

‘You tell me.’

He gives his quiet half smile. ‘You’ll want to.’

Packed with the highest of high technology that only Masson and Patrice understand, the suite is nonetheless a place for calm reflection. Picaut has seen him in here with Patrice, and knows that whatever he says about his ex-wife, it was this meeting of minds which lured Éric Masson away from what he called his H3 post-doctoral pop-idol posting.

The place is snug without being claustrophobic. It has no windows and the lights are adjusted to dusk or dawn temperatures; the décor is quietly minimal. One wall is made up of a video screen, on which swirling pastel screen-savers further pacify the mind until Masson begins to call up the images.

There are no keyboards here; everything is done by touch or voice.