Into The Fire (32 page)

He does not see it. He does not know to look for such things. It comes on him suddenly; one moment sun, sky, ice, warm, brilliant, cheerful – and the next cold, black water. So very cold. He can’t breathe. He can’t think. He panics and, panicking, may die; he knows boys do, who fall under the ice and cannot find air.

This single thought clamps down on his panic: if he does not think clearly, he will die. He stops fighting, makes himself still in the water. He bobs up until the crown of his head taps on something solid. He stretches out his arms and finds that his left hand has met something living; the arm of his father (not his father, but he doesn’t know and at this moment, even if he did, he wouldn’t care: he loves this man) reaching into the black water to find him. They link hand to arm and he is pulled up from the drowning.

And so he is out again, under the sun, but cold now, and older, and wiser. A line has been crossed that cannot be uncrossed. If he were to put a time on the start of his natural caution, on his need always to think ahead, to his ability to quell his own panic, it would be here, this moment, and the long, slow thaw in front of the fire afterwards.

But here, now, sitting in a stinking inn within striking distance of Paris, he drops once more from fire-bright-warm into black-ice-soul-sucking-cold and this time, he is alone; nobody is here to lift him out.

He wrenches his hand from hers, but it is far, far, far too late. He spins, rendered clumsy by shock and grief, hauls open the door, crashes into the page, Louis de Coutes, whose brother is dead. ‘Where is my lord d’Alençon? Find him. I must speak to—’

‘Here, Tomas. I am here.’ D’Alençon is a revenant; a monster come back from the dead to taunt him with the success of his own plan. The duke is white, dead-eyed. His hands hang by his sides, useless. His words are wrought in dust.

‘It is over. The king has ordered the army to stand down. We have not permission to continue the attack on Paris. Tomas, the King of France has had his sappers blow up your bridge …’

THE SIXTH FIRE
is called in at 06.09 on the Wednesday after Iain Holloway’s death. The target is the offices of Orléans! 24/7 and the fire is broadcast live by Henri Aubel and his producer who manage to keep a camera rolling for each step of the fire-fighting retreat out into the streets.

Every media anchor in France is on the scene long before the flames reach their zenith and the rest of the world’s newscasters are there before they are finally quelled. The networks are sending their big beasts out now; men – and a few women – who might otherwise be reporting from Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, Nigeria, find themselves on the Loire, watching fire lick at the sky.

Picaut is on the site by quarter past six. The world’s media feast on her presence. By nine, they are reporting the fact that Marianne Roche, one of the interns, is missing, and may have been inside. Her name flashes round the world. Picaut sends a team to find the young woman’s parents and protect them from the scrum, but they arrive after the media masses and have to fight their way through to an already grieving couple. It’s a PR disaster and can only get worse.

‘We need to get in,’ Picaut says to Martin Evard.

‘Not until it’s safe. They used incendiaries on this one, and I want to be sure there aren’t any more waiting to go off.’

A booby-trapped building would break every pattern, but that’s not a reason to assume it can’t happen. She waits. The cameras roll. The news anchors interview anyone who will stand still long enough. Picaut is not one of their targets.

Shortly after ten-thirty in the morning, the fire chief finally gives his permission for her to enter. The images on the lunchtime news are of her in white overalls, hard hat and closed breathing kit, standing by the technician whose job it is to open doors that locked shut when the power went down.

She is about to go in when she feels a tug at her sleeve. Lumbering, she turns, and Trudi is there, Marianne’s friend. Her pink-blonde hair is smeared now with soot and the fringe has been scorched back to half its length. Her perfectly oval sky blue nails are scratched and broken. Her red dress is filthy. She has been weeping, and may do so again.

Picaut says, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t come in.’

‘I know. Colin … that is, Mr Graves, asks if you will wear this.’ She holds up a spider’s lace of webbing with a lens attached.

‘Is that a helmet camera?’

A shrug. Half a smile, all apology. ‘There’s a microphone as well. It’ll stream to us live whatever you see and say.’

Picaut shakes her head, aware that every move is being broadcast worldwide. ‘I can’t.’

‘I am to offer you half a million euros to be paid to the charity of your choice.’

‘It’s not about money. It’s about safety and sanity and not turning a catastrophe into reality TV. It’s about Marianne’s decency, if she’s even in there.’

‘She is. She was on shift with me.’ Old tears already weld Trudi’s lashes together. New ones ripen, ready to fall. Picaut signals for Garonne, who has come from the stake-out of Cheb Yasine and is hovering, waiting for something useful to do. He’s good with the bereaved; surprisingly compassionate.

To Trudi, she says, ‘Wait out here with Lieutenant Garonne. I’ll let you know as soon as we find her.’

‘The camera …’

‘Not a chance. If Colin Graves needs me to explain why, tell him it’s time he found a new job.’

She turns back to where Martin Evard and the technicians are waiting. The door is open.

‘This way.’ Her voice echoes through the microphone in the helmet. She pushes past the others, through the door, and then has to wait in the foyer while the no-longer-whispering inner door screams back, wrenched in slow motion by a pulley and chain. At least none of the reporters tries to follow her inside. Danger has its uses.

A corridor stretches ahead, scorched and black, full of smoke and warped metal. The tiled floor has bucked and cracked. Evard says, ‘Round to the left, then third door on the right.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘To the start of the fire.’

In her mind’s eye, Picaut can see the green room as it was on Tuesday morning. Marianne ushers her in, sends Trudi for coffee, Suzanne for magazines. Esteban, the make-up technician, is at work. A prickle at the back of her neck says that whoever started this fire knew she had been here. Whoever did this, they set the incendiaries where she was. Every step closer makes her more sure.

She wants to run and can only shuffle in the wake of the technicians. An age and an age and they can creep on round, taking photographs at every step until they reach the door and force it open and there, amidst the shattered mirrors and plastic chairs melted to doorstops …

‘Oh, God.’

Curled up on the floor are the charred remains of a corpse. The clothes are burned away, and the hair. The eyes have long since boiled to nothing. It’s not even possible to tell if it was male or female. Only that it was once human.

Picaut stands, stranded, in the middle of the floor. Her memory of Marianne vanishes in a whisper of smoke: the shape of her face, the colour of her eyes, the angles of her teeth, all gone. She remembers only the dynamism, the vivacity, the utter, unquenchable
life
.

She walks out. Behind her, Martin Evard speaks into his headset to the listeners outside. ‘Call Ducat. Tell him we have a body.’ He listens for a moment, shrugs heavily under his protective gear. ‘They can speculate all they like. We won’t have any information for them in less than twenty-four hours.’

Picaut is in the corridor. Ahead, the door to the ladies’ lavatory is being winched open. And so she is there when the body that has been pressed against it tumbles out into the corridor.

‘Martin!’ She kneels, as if there were something useful she could do. But this corpse, too, has been burned beyond distinguishing. Still, she would bet her rank on its being Marianne.

‘Marti—!’

‘I’m here.’ His hand heavy on her shoulder, his white-wrapped bulk a comforting presence. ‘There’ll be a feeding frenzy on the steps if they see we have two dead.’

‘Which is exactly why we won’t tell them. Get the ambulance to back right up to the door. I want this kept quiet until we have some idea of who they both were and why they were in the building.’

Standing, she phones Éric, and then Ducat, and breaks the news. Later, blinking in the daylight, she finds that Garonne has succeeded in pushing the press back behind a crime scene tape. Now they can shout questions all they like, and she can ignore them.

Someone – Ducat? Luc? – has arranged for an escort to get her back to the station. On the radio is news of a fresh wave of demonstrators gathering at the
Front National
offices across the river. They plan to march in force north across the bridge, giving vent to the fury of a France under siege, bolstering with every step Christelle Vivier’s chances of election.

Four days remain until the polls open for what is now the most heavily reported mayoral election France has ever seen. It is impossible to imagine how anything worse could happen by then, only that it will almost certainly do so.

‘
MAÎTRE DUCAT! IS
it true that a fingerprint was found at Orléans! 24/7 that might lead you to the people who perpetrated this atrocity?’

It’s true, yes, they have a fingerprint. A single, perfect, absolutely clear-as-newsprint set of swirls. They have a 98 per cent probability match in the local database that has given them a name. The press know about the print, but not the name. They scent something, though, and are not about to let it go.

From the cool of Éric’s lab, Picaut watches on a wide screen TV as the BBC reporter asks his question. The camera pans to Ducat, harassed, sweating, standing on the steps that lead up to his office. He gives his gap-toothed smile and replies in perfect English.

‘It is true that one hundred and fifty different prints have so far been identified in the Orléans! 24/7 building. The police are sampling all the staff from the cleaners to the CEO. When they have ruled them out, they will begin to look at who else might legitimately have been there. Only when we rule out all of those can we consider that the print might belong to one of the perpetrators.’

‘Maître! Is it true that not one but two bodies were found inside, and that therefore one of the arsonists was caught in the blaze?’ This is
Die Zeit
, but the question comes in French. Ducat could probably answer in German. So far, as well as French and English, he has spoken Italian, Dutch and a Scandinavian language that Picaut thinks might have been Swedish. She had no idea he stretched this far. She is impressed.

‘You all saw the ambulance. We cannot comment on identity until we have a pathology report.’ That’s clever. He hasn’t mentioned a number, so, later, he can’t be accused of lying.

‘But you did find the missing intern from Orléans! 24/7 staff? Marianne—’

‘As I said, we cannot comment.’

Ducat’s face is thunderous. He can’t comment, but they can keep asking questions, can play out the entirety of Marianne’s biography on their rolling news channels, her Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook streams, the Facebook page set up in her memory, the trolls already lurking at its nether margins, spinning webs of hate.

More than ever before, Picaut is working in a goldfish bowl. The forensic team was filmed going in and coming out, and when they found the fingerprint on the inner door frame the long-lensed cameras broadcast the fact before they had time to call in the news to the station, never mind identify whose print it was.

Picaut, meanwhile, is waiting for the moment when someone asks, ‘Is it true that your police captain is the target of the last two attacks?’ Luc’s warehouse and now the studio that hosted her. Everything at one remove, but coming closer.

On the steps to Ducat’s office, the questions press on.

—When will you bring a case against the perpetrators?

‘When Capitaine Picaut provides me with sufficient evidence to do so.’

—So we can hope for a report later today?

‘You can hope, as we all do, for an end to the fires and peace to be restored. We’re working as fast as we can, but nothing is as simple as we’d like it to be. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.’

Ducat turns his broad back to the pack and stalks in through the doors to his office. Nobody makes any attempt to follow. The men and women of the press are no longer cowed by the Family or by the prosecutor, but terrified of their own story. If a television station can be torched, any one of them might be the next target. And now one of their own has died, or so it seems. The knowledge of this shrouds every report.

The doors close behind him. The shot cuts away to the studio where serious people wear serious faces. Picaut taps her elbow on the control that mutes the sound. Without it, the room rustles to the shallow echo of white tiles and stainless steel and death.

Today, two burned bodies lie on adjacent tables.

Éric stands between them, clean in his pale blue theatre scrubs. Radiographs are displayed on screens on either side.

Picaut says, ‘We need IDs soon. Ducat won’t be able to keep the sharks at bay much longer.’

‘We’re getting there.’ Éric pushes down his surgical mask. It hangs from his ears, loops like a hammock just below his chin. He looks tired.

‘On the left we have a Caucasian woman in her mid-twenties. I’ll need to check the dental records to be certain, but I’ll give you ninety per cent odds that we can tag this one as Marianne Roche, the missing intern. If you can give me another hour before you send someone to see her parents, I’ll have definite proof. She died trying to get out of the door. We can say she died swiftly, of smoke inhalation. Her parents will need that.’

Her parents, of course, are already broken. Her name was broadcast from the beginning by a courageously tearful Henri Aubel, who is wearing black now, in mourning. The parents are newly under police guard in a small, select, immensely discreet hotel. So far, they are being given a modicum of privacy. It’s hard to imagine that it will last.