Into The Fire (45 page)

If she is found dead in a fire, there will be no doubt at all: she will be a martyr to Jaish al Islam and her party will reap a landslide in the polls. This shouldn’t be Picaut’s problem, but she has made a promise and so it is, and it is here, in the form of her soon-to-be-ex-husband.

‘Inès, the polls open on
Sunday
. If Christelle’s been kidnapped, they’ll either cancel the election or she’ll get a sympathy vote that’ll leave the rest of us in single figures. You have to find her.’

Luc is a wreck. His skin, once so bronze, so smooth, is blotched a muddy red around his eyes. He looks dishevelled, which only adds to the surreal nature of the day.

Worse, the press pack no longer respects him as it did. Men and women with microphones and earpieces jostle him just as they jostle Garonne and Rollo and, heaven forbid, Prosecutor Ducat in their effort to get to Picaut, to get a picture, to get her, above all, to offer some pithy sound-bite that they can file for the next bulletin, the next blog, the next report.

Ducat is thunderously angry. Truly, the newshounds have no idea what wrath he can call down upon them, or how close he is to doing so. Actually, Picaut hasn’t much idea what wrath he can call down either, only that it will be terrible and she would dearly like him to get on with it. Now, in fact, would be perfect, so that she can get into the station and talk to her team and make some kind of plan.

She reaches the door, which falls open before she can push it. She half expects Patrice to be holding it for her. But no, it’s Rémi from Drugs.

She feels her face tighten. She can be thunderous herself if she has to. ‘If you fucking told them that Cheb Yasine—’

‘Wait.’ He holds up his hands, warding her off. ‘I’ve called everybody in. I thought you’d need help.’ His face has grown thin. His eyes dodge and weave, never settling in one place. He’s the leak: she would put money on it. ‘Peace, OK? We can’t let them crush us like this.’ It’s an admission and an apology, all in one. Today, clearly, is a day in which the normal order of things is exploded. He thrusts a hand out. ‘OK?’

‘OK.’ They shake. His palm is damp. He is as scared as he looks. She feels her own small lurch of terror. ‘Who else is missing?’

‘Six Algerians from Marseille; the one who visited Yasine yesterday and five others who drove up last night and arrived this morning. They’re his hit team. We have no proof, nothing that Ducat’ – he nods towards the door where the Prosecutor is holding back the tide – ‘would let us use in court. But he’s planning revenge for his cousin. Of that I have no doubt.’

‘
Shit
.’ It’s ten o’clock in the morning and already Picaut feels as if she’s lived the day twice over. ‘If he takes on the
Front
, we’ll have war on the streets.’ She pulls out her phone. ‘Get everyone to my office. Not only do we have to fix this, we have to be seen to be fixing it.’

Her office is three flights up. She runs up the back stairs, avoiding the elevators, which are full of listening ears. She rings Cheb Yasine as she goes. Call it intuition, a stab in the dark: it works.

‘Capitaine Picaut, what can I do for you?’ He’s in a car, driving with the windows open; she can hear the traffic noise and a radio poorly tuned to an Arabic station.

‘Tell me where you are. Tell me you’re not about to use imported Algerian muscle to launch a war on the
Front National.
Particularly, tell me where I can find Christelle Vivier.’

‘You have lost her?’ His voice is stripped of its humour. He is not a stupid man. He can work out the implications of this.

She says, ‘You need to listen to some of the French language stations. The press are already making her a martyr, dead at the hands of Algerian Islamists. The
Front National
are gaining a point per hour in the rolling polls.’

He doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t hang up. She hears clipped, rapid Arabic, a quiet curse, the distress of tyres cornering hard.

He says, ‘I don’t know where she is, nor do I wish to. Whatever is happening to her is none of my doing. I apologize if I upset Lieutenants Garonne and Rollo by leaving, but you must understand that I am an innocent man and unless Prosecutor Ducat has invited you to press charges I am not, in fact, required to let you, him or anyone else know where I am going and what I am doing. Which is not outside the law. On that I give you my word.’

‘The Algerians from Marseille?’

‘Are here to make sure I live to see tomorrow. I advise you to find people of similar calibre who will ensure your own continued good health.’

He hangs up. She reaches the third floor. Rémi has excelled himself: every serving officer not currently on sick leave, maternity leave or abroad is here, in the open-plan area around her fish tank of an office. Patrice is the only one absent, but then Patrice is sleeping. She hopes he is sleeping. There must be limits to how much Red Bull anyone can drink and stay sane.

There’s no room in Picaut’s office so her vastly expanded team is in this outer room, which has space for five times this number. They part to let her through, waiting in silence, as if she has all the answers. She climbs on to a chair, the better to be seen and heard.

‘Cheb Yasine is near the main railway station, I heard the station announcement on his phone. He’s driving a large vehicle, probably his Toyota Hilux: there’s one registered to his name that he keeps in the garages two blocks from his house. If he has Christelle Vivier, then he knows we’re on to him: he’ll act soon. I want traffic patrols out looking for his car now. Follow him, don’t take him in without word from me.’

The Traffic Department is eight men strong. She favours them with an encompassing nod and they drag their gloves from their pockets, check their phones and leave. She turns her attention to the rest.

‘Right: the first thing you need to know is that Iain Holloway thought he had found the mortal remains of the Maid. We all know that’s impossible, but I have a priest who thinks this is the reason he died – and he may be right. Whoever is doing this, these three things are linked: the fires, Iain Holloway’s death and now Christelle Vivier’s disappearance. We cannot rule out her own campaign manager, he has form. So who has the details of Christelle’s last known movements?’

‘Me.’ That’s Rollo, who lost Cheb Yasine and is now overcompensating. ‘She had a breakfast meeting with Troy Cordier, who is her campaign manager, and as you say may now be in the frame. They were at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Hotel near the cathedral and then they separated.

‘Cordier stayed there to coordinate today’s photo-calls. Christelle’s car picked her up from the front of the hotel at eight forty-five and was due to take her to a children’s day care nursery, ETA nine twenty-five, ready for a photo-op with the kids at half past. When she didn’t turn up the nursery called Cordier, who sent his own men out to look for her. He didn’t call us until six minutes past ten. He says he’s personally driven her route twice and there’s no sign of Christelle or her car.’

‘Right.’ Picaut presses her thumbs to the bridge of her nose in an effort to find clear thought. ‘We need a car of our own to check the route. Look for signs of a shunt: broken headlight glass, tyre marks on the road. You know the kind of thing. Rollo, Garonne?’

They nod and prepare.

‘Sylvie has run a trace on her mobile phone and that of the driver. They both switched off soon after they left the hotel so there’s no help there unless they switch back on again, in which case we’ll be notified of the time and the place. I want all the news channels to shut the fuck up. Given that they won’t, the next best thing would be for them to put out an all-points appeal asking anyone who may have seen her to call into the station. Rémi, can you get someone on it? Thank you.’

The phone rings on her desk. Sylvie picks it up for her. ‘It’s Éric Masson. About a photograph of a skull?’

‘I’ll call him back.

‘I want everybody else to go to the hotel and fan out from there. Go in your cars, and keep in touch with everyone else. The chances of finding her walking the streets are close to nil, but we need a massive police presence out there being seen to be looking. There’s an election in three days and whoever wins will own us. If it’s Christelle Vivier’s replacement, whoever that is, from her grandfather down, we don’t want to be the ones who sat on our backsides while she was being burned alive. Sitreps every fifteen minutes. No lunch breaks, no coffee breaks, absolutely no smoking. If I see one picture on the twenty-four hour news of one officer taking one break, that officer will be out of a job, is that clear? Go.’

The room empties with gratifying speed. Soon, only Picaut and Sylvie are left. ‘What are you going to do?’ Sylvie asks. ‘Besides talking your husband down from whatever heights of anxiety he’s scaling.’

‘Fuck him, he’s got Lise for that. And Uncle Landis to talk him back up again. I’m going to go to the hotel and talk to Troy “I have a holiday house in Switzerland and a penthouse flat in Hampstead” Cordier, and see what he knows.’

Somewhere in her desk is a packet of chewing gum she keeps stored for the days when she’s not going to be able to stop to eat. She keeps a tidy desk, but the gum isn’t there. She’s easing the drawer out, ready to tip it upside down, when the first phone call comes in to Sylvie.

The gum is in the back of the second drawer and it’s a lot newer than the one she put there. This one isn’t nearly past its use-by date. The chances of anyone’s stealing it are nil, except for Garonne. So he’s been ‘borrowing’ it and replacing it. She’s weighing it in her palm when Sylvie comes to find her, office phone in hand.

‘It’s Troy Cordier from the Hôtel Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Christelle Vivier’s driver just called in to say they’re at the school, and why are there no press there to make the most of the photo-op?’

‘
What?
’ Something sharp and hot detonates behind Picaut’s eyes. ‘If this whole thing has been a hoax—’

‘It’s not. That’s the thing. The school they were supposed to go to is south of the river, not far from the hospital. The one they’re actually at is halfway to Tours. The driver swears he went to the address on his itinerary. He says his satnav was preprogrammed. They’re there now. They want their photo-op. Do we let them call in the press?’

‘Fuck.’ Picaut wrings her hands across her face. ‘I don’t think we can stop them. No, wait, yes we can. We have to. Tell them Prosecutor Ducat is already dealing with the press and he’ll make appropriate arrangements. I’ll call Ducat. He can make it bloody clear that we were not the ones to fuck up on this. You start calling in the teams. As soon as we’re done, you and I are going to the Hôtel Jean-Jacques to have a serious word with Troy Cordier. Either something’s gone catastrophically wrong with his communications or he’s trying something really, really clever that we need to stop before it starts. Or someone – maybe him – is trying to distract us from something more important. Which means we must not be distracted. I want a maximum police presence through every part of Orléans. Get everyone who can walk or drive out on the streets. If there’s going to be another fire, I want us there before the smoke reaches knee height.’

‘Are you still going to see Troy Cordier?’

‘Absolutely. And you’re coming too.’

THE MAID IS
in Compiègne.

The city has not yet surrendered to Burgundy and so to England, and shows no sign of doing so, but the King has not yet gone so far as to send his armies against them: Bedford is doing that well enough. The Maid is among those who have come to the aid of her countrymen.

She is not alone. Over winter, her reputation has spread to the far corners of the continent. The pope in Rome has written his approval. The Scots adore her. The people of Italy are entranced.

More important than these, are the men at arms who are daily coming to join her. Now that she is a free agent, a mercenary captain in her own right, with successes to her credit, they are flooding to the plains of Compiègne to fight beneath her banner.

Only those expressly forbidden by the king have stayed away. D’Alençon is not here, nor La Hire, but there are amongst her retainers, knights of almost equal calibre. The way things are going, by summer Bedford will face an army of a size that will make last year’s purge of the Loire valley look like a pack of unruly schoolboys on an afternoon’s jaunt.

He has therefore abandoned his assault on Rheims. He will have to take it back if he is ever going to anoint the snivelling boy for whom he is regent, but nobody will believe that God might anoint two kings and just now, Charles VII is monarch in the eyes of God, brought there by a Maid who works at God’s right hand. If Bedford wants his nephew to wear the French crown, he must destroy the man whom the Maid has elevated, and to do that, he must destroy the Maid.

Lacking the help of Tod Rustbeard, he has abandoned subterfuge, and is resorting to a bludgeoning violence. He has given the Duke of Burgundy every one of his field guns. The scouts say that the assaulting force has five large bombards the size of Rifflard or bigger, two veuglaires, one large and one small, uncountable numbers of culverins of all sizes and two engines which hurl rock overhand, and can kill. All of these he has brought to bear on a city which once thought itself impregnable.

Compiègne is well defended. The River Oise is its moat. The walls are a mile in circumference and thick enough to withstand a sustained bombardment. Towers and turrets keep watch on all sides and the drawbridge works with buttered smoothness. There is only one bridge. It has a gatehouse at one end and a boulevard at the other.

The city has a new governor, Sieur Guillaume de Flavy, a favourite of the king, recently appointed. A big, hard man, he has a history behind him of bloody battles, feuds and scores settled by violence. He is also the personal friend and confidant of Regnault de Chartres, archbishop of Rheims.

Tomas doesn’t like the feel of this. He didn’t like it when he heard de Flavy had been appointed, and he didn’t like it any more, when de Chartres himself turned up to join the Maid’s company.