The Good Thief's Guide to Paris (11 page)

The final item was a flexible piece of laminated white card with a metal lapel clip fixed to it. I turned the card over and discovered that it was some form of nametag, perhaps a security pass. There was a quarter-inch digital image of the man from the photograph, this time looking straight at me. Alongside the image was the name Jean-Patrick Deville. Beneath the name was a barcode and nothing else.

The nametag at last gave me a few links. It told me the name of the man in the photograph with the girl and, of course, his was the only name on the list I’d found that had an asterisk beside it. He was important in some way, though quite how wasn’t clear. But it was a start and it had felt like a long time coming.

I pushed the articles and papers around on the desk for a while, moving certain items alongside one another, overlaying them, trying to come up with connections. So far it wasn’t happening but I had a feeling there was more to come. I held the strip of negatives up to the light again, trying to determine if Jean-Patrick Deville appeared in any of them. I didn’t think so, although I couldn’t be sure. Once they were developed, I’d know for certain.

Eventually, I grew frustrated and decided to put everything away and give my subconscious time to digest what I’d uncovered. So I collected the papers and photographs and blueprints together, put them back into the same order in which I’d found them and returned the lot to the brown business envelope. I re-positioned the envelope on the rear of the canvas, slipped the hardboard backing into place once again and finally levered the metal brackets down so that the painting was just as it had been before I took it apart.

I turned and scanned the room, looking for a good hiding place. As a professional thief, I soon realised there were none. Every possibility I thought of necessarily meant that it was somewhere I would also think to look if I was searching the room. And I really didn’t want the painting to be found. It was my trump card – the one item that everything connected back to. So long as the painting was in my hands, I had some control over my destiny. I needed to guarantee it would be absolutely safe, and there was only one way I could think of achieving that.

FOURTEEN

Under different circumstances, I like to think I would have been concerned by how readily the hotel receptionist gave me Victoria’s room number. As it happened, I was just grateful for the break. Her room was on the same floor as my own, in the opposite direction from the central elevator bank. She must have paid extra for the view, which made me wonder whether I should have negotiated a little harder over the commission I was paying her. Not that right now was really the time to be bothered by such things. Now was the time to grovel.

I knocked on her door and awaited a response. When none came, I checked my watch and saw that it was closing in on eleven o’clock. I guessed she was in bed, which just made things worse. I knocked again, louder this time.

“Victoria,” I said, in a low voice. “It’s me, Charlie. I need to talk.”

I heard a bumping noise, followed by footsteps. A floorboard creaked on the other side of the door.

“Victoria?”

“What is it?”

“Thank God, I was beginning to think I had the wrong room. I need to talk. Can you let me in?”

“I’m not in the mood, Charlie.”

“I know that,” I said, resting my palm against the door panel. “But this is important.”

“Why don’t you just go home and give us both some space? We can talk in the morning if we really have to.”

“I’d like to go home,” I told her, “but I can’t. That’s what I need to talk to you about.”

There was a pause.

“What do you mean?”

“Please Vic, I don’t want to discuss this out in the corridor. If you could just let me in . . .”

“Why should I?”

I swallowed hard and glanced down at the painting in my hand. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, after all. Maybe I should have just taken my chances and hidden the painting beneath the chest of drawers in my room.

“Charlie, you tell me,” Victoria went on. “Why should I let you in?”

“Because if you don’t, I’ll just use my picks?”

I laughed faintly but there was no response. I rocked forwards on the balls of my feet and pressed my forehead against the door.

“Vic, please,” I said, squeezing my eyes shut. “I know I screwed up. I know you have every right to be mad. But I’m really in a tight spot here and I could do with a friend just now.”

My words seemed to have no effect. I was beginning to think it was hopeless. I checked that the corridor was still empty before giving it my final shot.

“Listen, there’s a dead woman in my living room,” I whispered, and felt my shoulders sag. “She was murdered.”

Victoria didn’t reply. I really thought I’d blown it. Then, with a sudden thud, the deadbolt slid back and the door opened. I looked up to see Victoria stood in one of the hotel’s monogrammed robes, her hand on her hip and her hair unkempt.

“I take it you didn’t kill her,” she said, mouth pursed.

I shook my head. Victoria gave me a stern look, one that instantly reminded me of the dorm matron at my old boarding school.

“Come in then,” she said, at last. “We’d better work out who did.”

A half-hour later, I’d apologised for my deceit at least three times more and filled Victoria in as best I could. My story hadn’t been delivered in the orderly fashion she might have preferred, and I’d found myself looping back to prior events and repeating myself more often than I would have cared for, but as first drafts go it could have been worse. I thought I’d covered the main facts and my most salient interpretations and while some of my descriptions were necessarily rushed and a shade clichéd, I hoped that could be forgiven, even if my recent behaviour might not be. When I was done, I stopped pacing the floor and sat down in an armchair over by the floor-length curtains. I placed my chin in my hand and awaited Victoria’s verdict.

From what I could see, she appeared to be caught up in the details already. I guess that shouldn’t have surprised me. Despite the things she’d said in our last telephone conversation, I’d long been aware that Victoria took a kind of vicarious thrill from hearing about my criminal escapades. It was a sure sign of how big a murder mystery nut she happened to be. In fact, I sometimes got the impression the reality of some of the scenarios I found myself in never fully registered with her. Even now, I could picture her moving the facts and foibles of my latest scrape around in her mind, almost as if she was rolling a dice and nudging Professor Plum around a Cluedo board, peering archly at her suspect cards and trying to figure out exactly whodunnit in the modern apartment building, with the plastic bag and the roll of electrical tape.

And while we’re on the subject, I guess I could be guilty of the same thing too. Perhaps it was a kind of survival mechanism – a way of enabling myself to think my way out of a predicament before I became paralysed by fear. And if that was the case, maybe it was no bad thing. It had worked in the past, so there was no reason to suggest it couldn’t work again.

Just then, Victoria seemed to come round from her thoughts and she focused on me intently.

“You’re sure she was killed?” she asked, for openers.

“Well, she certainly didn’t have a pulse when I left.”

“What I mean,” Victoria said, in a controlled voice, “is are you certain she didn’t do this to herself?”

“Absolutely.” I straightened. “Her hands were bound behind her back with cable ties. There’s no way she could have done it.”

“Cable ties? You didn’t say.”

“Didn’t I?”

“No,” Victoria said, shaking her head resolutely. “You mentioned the bag that had been taped over her head but you didn’t say her hands were bound.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

Victoria exhaled in a melancholy way and folded her legs beneath her on the bed, as though she was adopting a yoga pose. “I didn’t think it could be suicide,” she said. “I can’t think of a logical reason why she would have come to your apartment to kill herself.”

“Me neither.”

“Could she have known who you were?”

“I don’t think so. Our only connection is that I burgled her place and I didn’t exactly leave a business card.”

“Who did know?”

“Pierre. Bruno.”

“And Pierre’s client?”

I bobbed my head from side to side. “I hope not. The whole idea is that Pierre acts as a go-between. That way the client has no way of knowing who I am.”

“And you have no way of knowing who they are.”

“It’s a flaw, granted.”

“Have you been in touch with Pierre?”

I glanced at the carpet. “Not yet. I’m due to meet him tomorrow at ten. I figured I’d see what I could find out before then.”

She peered hard at me. “You trust him?”

“I have to.”

“So call him.”

I shrugged, a little awkwardly. “Why don’t we just see what we can figure out first?”

“What are you worried about, your reputation? Christ Charlie, there are bigger things going on here.”

I just looked at her.

“You do remember Pierre’s number?”

“Of course.”

“So call him.”

Victoria withdrew her mobile telephone from the pocket of her robe and held it out to me in a no-nonsense way. Reluctantly, I accepted the phone and entered Pierre’s number. While I waited for my call to be connected, Victoria slipped her fingers into one of the gloves I’d abandoned on her bedcovers and reached for the zoom photo of the man and the woman I’d found among the bundle of papers hidden at the back of the painting. The painting was further away on the bed, resting face-down, with the hardboard backing off to the side.

I listened to the telephone ring eight times and then I looked up.

“No answer.”

“Leave a message?”

“Best not,” I said, and let the telephone ring out. I set the mobile down on the bedside cabinet. “Your number might have shown up his end. He could call back.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t answer unless I’m here.”

“Okay.”

I smiled thinly. “You probably knew that.”

She nodded in a non-committal fashion and put the photograph back with the remainder of the documents. She rested her gloved hand on the terry-cloth material covering her thigh and took a deep breath.

“Have you thought about going to the police? If you report Catherine’s body before someone else does, there’s a good chance they’ll believe you.”

I gave Victoria my most sceptical look, the one I reserve for the accordion players on the Paris métro system.

“It’s an option,” she said. “And it’s one I think you should give serious consideration to.”

“Hmm,” I replied, stroking my chin and frowning, as though consumed by thought. “Nope, I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because this isn’t one of your police procedurals, Vic. The cops here aren’t the good guys. They don’t necessarily have the sharpest minds; they probably won’t work tirelessly to ensure justice is done. In all probability, they’ll arrest me for murder and I’ll never have an opportunity to clear my name.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Sure I do. But more to the point, I’m not taking the risk.”

Victoria studied me for a good few moments, as though she was weighing up if it was worth pursuing her argument. I adopted an expression that made it clear that would be pointless. After we’d traded one or two more meaningful looks, she finally decided to move on.

“So let’s talk about Bruno,” she said, with a shake of her head. “He’s our number one suspect, correct?”

“I guess.”

“What? You don’t picture him as a killer?”

I shrugged. “Maybe, given the right motivation. But I don’t know what that motivation could be.”

“You said you thought he’d framed you.”

“And I did. At first. But now I’ve had a chance to think about it, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

“How so?”

“Well, it doesn’t fit with the way he behaved. Say I did get picked up for the murder, he’d have to know that the first thing I’d do would be to tell the police about him.”

She frowned. “Really?”

“Well, maybe not the very first thing. I’d probably keep quiet to begin with. But say things were looking bleak for me – I’d much rather face a burglary rap than a murder charge. And maybe all I’d have to do is point them in Bruno’s direction, which wouldn’t be that hard because I had plenty of time to get a good look at him and I managed to find out his real name without a great deal of difficulty.”

Victoria pinched her bottom lip with her gloved fingers and narrowed her eyes. “Maybe that would be your problem. It could look a bit
too
easy.”

“What? You think it might seem as if I’d framed myself in a half-arsed way to conceal the fact I was really framing Bruno?”

Victoria screwed up her face. She waved her hand. “Forget I just said that. Way too complicated.”

“I’m not sure I follow the logic.”

“There isn’t any.” Victoria hitched her shoulders and began to remove the latex glove from her hand, one finger at a time. “What else about Bruno, though? You need more than a feeling, Charlie.”

“You’re right,” I said, watching her fingers emerge. “I also have locks.”

“Locks?”

“The ones on the door to my apartment. Whoever killed Catherine picked their way inside.”

“You’re sure?”

I gave her a funny look. “I like to think I’d be able to tell.”

“Fine,” she replied, tucking some hair behind her ear. “I’m just playing Devil’s advocate here. So the locks were picked and you don’t think Bruno could have done it.”

“Not now I’ve thought about it properly. When I moved in, I fitted four new locks to my door,” I said, showing her four fingers, as if to explain how numbers worked. “I don’t always use them all and my best recollection is that I’d only engaged two of them before I went out yesterday,” I went on, curling two fingers back into my palm, continuing to demonstrate my credentials as a mathematician. “But even so, they’re top-quality merchandise and Bruno was an absolute beginner. He hadn’t mastered the rake yet and those locks would require a lot more skill to be picked. Besides, I didn’t leave him any of my tools.”

“Maybe he was bluffing about being a beginner.”

“So why involve me in the theft of the painting?”

“To frame you.”

I squinted and shook my head. “We’re going round in circles.”

“Maybe because we have to.”

“No. The framing scenario was just a dumb idea I had. If Bruno wanted to kill Catherine he could have done it in entirely different circumstances without the need to frame anyone. And besides, I’m beginning to think killing Catherine was more a way of threatening me.”

Victoria raised her eyebrows. “Pretty extreme.”

“I’m not arguing with you. But it makes sense when you factor in the message on my laptop. I really don’t think Bruno could have typed it.”

“Why?”

“Because he’d sold the painting to the antique store. My best guess is he had no idea what was hidden behind the canvas.”

“But we don’t know if any of this means anything,” Victoria said, picking up a handful of the documents.

“It has to,” I said, trying to ignore how she was touching the papers with her bare hands. “You’re forgetting Pierre’s client. Nobody pays twenty thousand euros for a nothing painting. Those papers are what this mess is all about.”

“But if we discount Bruno, where does that leave us?”

“Stuck. Which is why I’m not discounting him just yet. I need to find him. And I need you to look after the painting while I’m gone. If I’m not back in time to meet Pierre tomorrow, I want you to go straight to the police with it.”

“Charlie . . .”

“Come on,” I said, finding my feet and giving her a tight smile. “You know how this works. I’m the lead character, the one who jumps into reckless situations and comes out the other end with the answers we need.”

“Don’t joke with me,” she said, shaking her head as if in warning.

“I’m not. And you’re the brains in the partnership, right? Which is why I need you to stay here and go through these documents to see what you can come up with. You’re bound to find something I can’t. Otherwise, this would all be a bit too real.”

“It is real, Charlie.”

“Hush,” I said. “Don’t spoil the illusion.”

I clenched her shoulder. She looked up at me and I fixed on her eyes. I exhaled wearily.