Into The Fire (54 page)

They head together up the last flight of the spiral staircase. Nothing changes, but Picaut feels as if she has passed through some kind of static membrane; that the world is more dangerous on this side than when she was safely downstairs. The sun is still too bright. She hasn’t brought her gun. For the first time, this strikes her as careless.

The door to Patrice’s apartment is identical to all the others in this house: solid – exceedingly solid – oak, painted white, with brass fittings. Valérie’s key opens it.

‘Wait.’ Picaut catches her in the act of pushing it open. If he does live with his parents, this is her last moment of ignorance. If he doesn’t … that might be more worrying still. She asks, ‘When did you last see him?’

‘This morning, around half past nine. He’d been to see you. He was … very happy. Very pleased with himself. He thought you were pleased with him.’

She was. Did she say so? She can’t remember and that, too, feels bad. Everything here feels not-right. ‘Did he say he was going to sleep? That he didn’t want to be disturbed?’

‘No. He just said, “Life is good!” and ran upstairs. To here.’

‘Who else lives here?’

‘Me and Sebastien.’

‘No, I mean, here, with Patrice? In this apartment?’

Valérie wrinkles her brow. ‘Nobody. Just us.’

So he doesn’t live with his parents. It would be pleasant to indulge in the relief of this. Later, maybe.

‘Who owns this place?’ Picaut asks. This apartment, which must cost more than his annual salary if he rents it, and more than his lifetime’s salary if he tried to buy it.

‘We do. Me and Trice and Seb.’ Valérie flashes a grin. ‘You think that’s impossible?’

Picaut would clearly never make a poker player because that’s exactly what she thinks. She is wondering if they perhaps all three are cousins and inherited this from some childless great-uncle, and wishes she had read more of Patrice’s family background. She remembers a father in military cyber-intelligence, nothing else. She doesn’t know if he has a sister. Or a lover. His mother, she thinks, is long dead.

Valérie Tavel, who could be either, pushes open the door to his apartment. ‘You’d best come inside.’

Inside is … The first thing Picaut notices is that inside is pleasantly dark when compared to the blasting, unfiltered sunlight outside, at least until her eyes adjust to the subtleties of light. Then, it is reassuringly abnormal. Which is to say she has not walked into a chintz-flavoured drawing room, or a hallway with carpets of a depth to match Christelle Vivier’s hotel suite. She has, instead, stepped into a long, echoing room that extends from side to side of the building and all the way from this end to the other – which is further than she’d imagined from the outside.

This is not one apartment in a terrace, but the entire row. Studying it, counting the tall sun-hazed windows, she’s sure that this room extends through all four houses side by side; all the internal walls have been removed and the structural ones replaced by rolled steel joists. The result is a space that is easily sixty metres long, by fifteen wide. You could park aircraft in here, hide half a revolution. There’s one solitary door set to the left of the entrance which she assumes leads to a bathroom.

In the main room, the floors are of plain wood, sanded smooth and sealed with something matt, while the walls are probably the same off-white plaster as downstairs, but they are covered in posters of skateboarding, snowboarding, base-jumping, mountain biking, sport climbing, capoeira, bushido, krav maga, wing chun … everything youthful, fast and dangerous is here, and if it involves dexterity and muscle and violent Day-Glo lycra, then so much the better.

There is more light than she’d first thought, just that it’s filtered through muslin fixed across the windows, which acts to mellow the day’s glare and makes it easier, she imagines, to work at a computer. Or to play.

The main part of the room has been converted into a skateboarding track, complete with built-in jumps and dips and ramps. Before she reaches it, Picaut passes a double bed against the far wall. Nothing complicated; a futon base topped by a duvet with a black cotton cover. But it’s neatly made.

Beyond it is a kitchen area on the left, under the first of the windows. Here are no signs of breakfast, of half-finished food, unwashed coffee cups. She has never thought of Patrice as being particularly fastidious, but looking back she can’t remember a time when he failed to wash a mug, or left his desk disordered.

Carrying on, she crosses the last part of the skateboard track and comes to a workstation in which is a collection of computer equipment that would make Éric Masson weep with envy.

Six ultra-wide HD screens stand on a semicircular desk set around the treadmill, and these, in turn, are linked to an array of circuit boards, fans and heat sinks that looks homemade and powerful. Giant speakers sit between the screens, and behind them is a laser printer. Three iPads and a Samsung Galaxy lie in a rectangular arrangement on one table amidst the relics of a bygone era: an Apple Lisa, an Atari, an Amstrad, a BBC Micro … all the old names from the age when computing was new and memory was measured in kilobytes and backups were made to tape.

Each screen has a small sticker on its frame that reads,
CTS TECHNOLOGY
. Elsewhere is paper with the same heading, and a logo which she has seen before, once, on a T-shirt.

Picaut points to it. ‘What’s this?’

Valérie hesitates. ‘Does Patrice get into trouble if he’s got more than one job?’

‘Patrice does not get into trouble, I guarantee it. Tell me what it is.’

‘We’re joint directors of a technology consultancy company. The company owns this building.’

‘All of it?’ Picaut’s disbelief spans the length of the room. ‘All the way along?’

‘It came up at a very good price.’

Anything less than ten million would count as miraculous. ‘What, exactly, do you do?’

‘We test people’s digital security, find the weak points, work out how to fix them before the hackers get in. Don’t worry – Patrice spends most of his time on police work for you. I’ve never seen it take him longer than half an hour to crack anything we’ve been sent.’

‘Let me get this right. The three of you earn millions of euros for half an hour’s work?’

Valérie smiles shyly. ‘Experience comes at a price. It’s like breaking into cars: it doesn’t matter what the manufacturers do, there will always be somebody somewhere who is one step ahead. You must have men in your force who can walk up to any locked car and open it as if they had the key?’

Garonne can do this. There was a time when it impressed Picaut deeply. She says, ‘Who do you work for?’

‘Anyone with enough money. When we started five years ago, most of our clients were in the US. Now most of them are in China, some in India, Brazil, Africa, South America. We’re just starting to look at South Korea: there’s been an upsurge in interest since the boy in the north started executing his relatives.’

‘I thought the East Asian countries had their own techno-genius graduates?’

‘They have some very bright people, but they still aren’t the best.’

‘And you are?’

‘Our clients think so. One day they won’t. Then we’ll put the whole building back as it was and sell it.’

Picaut can imagine what it must have looked like; she baulks at the work it would take to put it back. ‘Is each floor like this one?’

‘Seb and I share the floor below; it’s not a skateboarding track, but it’s not four apartments any more: we like open space. The ground floor is where we bring clients. It hasn’t changed much.’ Valerie has moved to the workstation. She nudges a mouse on the desk and all six monitors come to life. On the first five, the screen scrolls so fast Picaut can’t read whatever is on it. On the sixth is an email.

Valérie studies it. ‘Can you read English?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘You might want to sit down. Pull up his chair. Here.’

Picaut does not sit. And then, after a moment, she does.

From:
Charles Picaut <
[email protected]
>

To:
Iain Holloway <
[email protected]
>

Subject:
MdV and the Maid

Date:
15 October 2013

Dear Iain,

Further to our correspondence of 5 October, I offer my apologies for my delay in replying (if you are ever given the option, I advise you most strongly to avoid chemotherapy: death is a better alternative, and it comes to us all in the end). That apart, I have to say that I am immensely impressed with your work so far and the conclusions that you draw, and am proud to have played my part in this, however small.

To recap, we are both agreed that the Maid cannot have been what history suggests: she was a trained knight, not a visionary peasant.

We are further agreed that Marguerite de Valois is the most likely contender, and that Charles VI, called the Mad, is both her father and the knight who trained her. In a world where it was heresy for a girl to dress in doublet and hose, nobody but a king would have had the authority over the Church to arm a girl child and teach her to ride. Charles was obsessed with the tilt: he is known to have attended tourneys incognito, and could easily have taken his daughter with him as a squire. He had the means and the motive, and nobody else, frankly, was mad enough to try. Finally, he was surrounded by men who would indulge his every madcap venture as long as he wasn’t actually trying to rule France: it can have been nobody else.

None the less, there
was
a maid: when Pierre Cauchon sent men to Lorraine to discredit her story, they found nothing that he would not have been happy to hear about his sister. Therefore a substitution was made prior to the Maid’s arrival at Chinon in the late winter of ’29: we are agreed on this, you and I. Marguerite de Valois departed the court on the death of her father in 1422 and
a different girl
returned five years later in 1429, sheltered by Yolande of Aragon, and later legitimized by the king.

So the obvious question therefore is not who was the Maid, but who was this new Marguerite de Valois, the woman who married Jean of Belleville and lived to a goodly age? Whence did she come and to where did she go? To this latter question, I may have an answer, or at least, the first part of one.

I believe that Louis XI, son of the craven Charles VII, knew the truth and Louis’s bones reside in the basilica de Notre Dame at Cléry-Saint-André. Through a family link, I have gained access to records which few others have ever seen. If these are accurate, then
the bones of Marguerite de Valois lie with him
: a silent honouring for who she was, made in ways which need never have been spoken aloud, but which will have mattered to a devout king, who wanted to honour the truth.

These remains hold the key. If my theory is correct, then a DNA match against Louis XI should prove that they are not related. (Louis was the son of Charles VII who was widely believed to have been illegitimate, but if his natural father was the king’s brother, then there should still be a sufficient familial link to connect blood relatives – or not,
if she was someone else
).

I shall not live to see this, but I sincerely believe that you will. Go with my blessing, and my hopes for your success: our nation deserves the truth, but more than that, we owe a debt of honesty to the woman who fought for our freedom and was forced into lies from which her reputation has never escaped.

CRP.

‘Capitaine? Capitaine Picaut? Are you all right?’ Valérie, at her side, blocking her view of the screen. She makes herself look away, look at the room, at the other screens, the pile of cans, makes herself
here
, and not there, in his room, where he wrote this.

‘Do you want a drink? Coffee? Beer? We might have vodka somewhere?’

‘No. Thank you. I’m fine.’ She will make it true.

‘Did you know your father was corresponding with Iain Holloway?’

‘Not until this week.’ She rouses herself, stands, walks around, comes back to the desk, sits again. ‘I gave away his laptop, which was something of a mistake, obviously, although I— What’s this?’

She has run her hands along the edge of the desk. Beneath the right-hand end is a flutter of garish yellow paper: a note stuck underneath. She pulls it off, turns it over.

Your father’s paper is the key to the last file. Email is the first part. Second is an image. Decoding now. Screen 4.

The handwriting is Patrice’s, hurried.

‘Your father,’ Valérie says. ‘Not “the capitaine’s father”. Not “Picaut’s father”. This is written to you. He knew you were coming. Or he hoped you were.’

‘He knew.’
Give me six hours.
Her eyes are dry, burning. Her palms are sticky. ‘What’s on screen four?’

It takes moments to find it: on the furthest left screen, another image is building.

Already the skull is in place: green with mould, teeth intact. Picaut knows this one, she carries an image of it in her phone, but this is taken from further away, and it’s an entire skeleton. Only it isn’t, yet; the image is emerging with excruciating slowness, pixel by laborious pixel. The first three cervical vertebrae are here, complete with signs of arthritis that would be consistent with a woman wearing a battle helm, but equally, they’d be consistent with falling from a horse, a high building – or wearing the kind of head-dresses that were the fashion in the court of mid-fifteenth century France.

She says, ‘If my father is even half-right, this is Marguerite de Valois, bastard daughter of the king of France.’

‘Your father thought she was the Maid?’

‘He did. But he was wrong.’

‘Then why did Iain Holloway die?’

‘I have no idea. And right now, finding Patrice has a higher priority.’ Picaut turns her back on the monitors, makes herself think. ‘Has anyone been to visit in the last few hours? Anyone who could have asked him to go out?’

Valérie spreads her hands. ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t here. A few minutes after he got in, a neighbour of my mother’s called to say she was ill: my mother, that is, not the neighbour. She lives on the other side of Tours. The traffic was bad. It took me over fifty minutes to get there.’