A Death in Time, page 37
‘To me too. Please, it’s important you know I meant no harm to your baby. None.’
Lily stirred but went back to sleep.
‘I need to be careful what I say here. You certainly called out a warning and that will go on the record.’
‘I had to warn you. He killed the officer who came looking. He killed my friend Dédé, too.’
‘Actually, he didn’t kill Denise. But he did kill her killer and an associate. Among those and other charges, he’ll also be held on suspicion of murdering the surveillance officer you mention.’
‘I saw him do it, Madame. Stabbed him in the throat as if it was nothing. I saw it.’
‘We’ll have the opportunity to talk through everything later but in the meantime, I must know something.’
‘I want to tell you everything, Madame. The photos, the roster and the other things in the place? Did you find them? Is that how you knew what he was planning?’
‘They were found, yes.’
‘Before he ran off, he ordered me to dump it all but I didn’t. I left it so you would find it. And I left the prescription with his name on. I left it all deliberately, Madame.’
Frankie knew that had Granot not instantly grasped the significance of what he’d found, units from the city and beyond would now be searching for the baby she was holding tightly to her breast. Cassie had clearly been part of Malraux’s plan to abduct Lily but if she was telling the truth, she was also instrumental in foiling it.
‘Thank you, Cassie,’ Frankie said, as neutrally as she could manage. ‘Listen, we know why Malraux wanted to exact revenge on my husband but…’ She braced herself. ‘He could simply have waited for him in the dark one night and stabbed him, couldn’t he? He could have stabbed me. Or thinking that the greatest pain he could inflict on us was to kidnap our daughter, he could have snatched her away from one of her carers at any point. You called Malraux deranged and that’s clearly correct. But he’s also cunning and resourceful. Why all the elaboration? Why the charade with your disguise and so on?’
‘Because I resemble Madame Tardelli so closely, his original plan was to fool one of your baby’s carers into handing her over to me without a thought that anything might be wrong. Then when he’d got well away from the area, he was going to call you. It was evil and insane – Dédé and I knew it from the beginning. But we were caught like fish on a hook.’
‘How was this original plan to have worked?’
‘Dédé used to be an actress and she was going to play the part of someone who knew MT well – that’s what we called Madame Tardelli in our notes and messages – so when a carer who had never met her before showed to hand over the baby, Dédé was to chance by and in greeting us, come out with personal stuff designed to underline that I was MT. We knew the chances of there being a carer who hadn’t met her before were slim at the beginning. And by the time he had learned enough about them to drill it into our heads, they were slimmer, still. Eventually, there was just one carer left still to meet MT – your husband’s stepmother.
Stepmother. It was obvious now. ‘For stepmother, read SM in your messages?’
‘Yes. We didn’t think any part of his plan would work but some things did.’
‘Such as?’
‘Whenever Malraux learned that SM and MT were going to meet at last, he was pretty successful at taking steps to prevent it.’
‘How did he learn that?’
‘From watching. Eavesdropping.’ Cassie hung her head. ‘Sometimes, I’m afraid, he learned it from Dédé and me. He gave us these hearing aid-like things. You can make out what people are saying even quite quietly to each other from metres away.’
‘So Denise overheard my conversation with SM in C’est Ici! last Friday – the day I bumped into you later?’
‘Yes, Madame. I’m sorry.’
It chilled Frankie to realise how easily her personal space had been breached. ‘And she reported that conversation to Malraux. What did he do then?’
‘He called SM’s frail old next-door neighbour to say he thought his dog had got into her garden and could he come and look? He can read people, Madame. He can identify their weaknesses and strengths. So, as he knew she would, the neighbour rang SM in a panic and asked her to pop round to sort it out. SM agreed, as he knew she would, and so the pair still hadn’t met by the time you saw me.’
‘With that being the case, how close did he come to putting the original plan into action?’
‘Very close, we thought but then Dédé was killed and everything changed.’
There was much to get through later but Frankie needed to know one more thing now.
‘If the original kidnap plan had succeeded…’ She braced herself once more. ‘Where would he have taken my baby?’
‘We… weren’t supposed to know. But Dédé overheard him on the phone one day. There’s a farmhouse somewhere in the Luberon. Secluded. Difficult to find. Near Carpentras, she thought he said, but she couldn’t be sure. That’s where he would have taken her. You see, he wanted you, your husband, the poor carer involved… everyone to suffer for as much as possible, for as long as possible.’ She began to weep. ‘He made me go along with it, Madame. I was scared. I couldn’t get away from him. He controlled everything I did. But now the nightmare is over, I’ll say all this in court. I will.’
‘That is duly noted.’ Feeling exhausted, suddenly, Frankie gave Flaco a beckoning nod. ‘Thank you, Cassie.’
‘Madame, just once, may I see your baby close to?’
She thought about it. And turned Lily momentarily towards her.
Cassie smiled. ‘Thank you.’
‘Off you go now. We’ll see you later.’
On the street, Darac waited until a raving Malraux was thrown into the cell van before he turned to embrace Granot. Unable to hold back tears, his words emerged in a barely intelligible slosh of syllables. A transcript would have read: ‘Thank you, man. Thank you. But for you, this would have ended very differently. We can never repay you. Never.’
‘You could start by relaxing your hold,’ Granot said, his words emerging in a constricted croak. ‘You’re crushing my windpipe.’
SEVENTY-ONE
The Babazouk night was a wondrous thing. From comedy to tragedy, all human life was there. Following the dramas Darac and Frankie had been part of earlier, the evening had brought everything from profound reflections on life, death and the supernatural to heightened emotional outpourings. With Lily safely asleep in her cot, the couple had curled up on the sofa to put the last remaining touches to the picture of their day.
‘We must review our security arrangements for Lily,’ Frankie said, her contralto tones sounding silkier that ever in Darac’s ear. ‘Without allowing a maniac like Malraux to dictate how we live, and without making everyone involved with her care paranoid, we must tighten things up.’
‘Absolutely agree. It won’t take much, you know.’
‘Lord, we were so lucky, weren’t we? I believe Cassie when she says she deliberately left the photos, the roster and the prescription. Do you?’
‘I’d like to think so. Of course, she could have had no idea how long it would take us to discover her handiwork.’
‘But thank God she did leave it all. And thank God dear Granot found it when he did and realised so quickly what it all meant.’
‘And when he called it in on his phone, consider the importance of the very first thing he said. I’m paraphrasing but it went something like: “Before we go any further, it is absolutely crucial that we maintain radio silence about this.” He couldn’t have known Malraux was able to listen in to part of our comms network; he just thought that he might be able to. And sure enough, that proved to be the case. Malraux could have heard the control unit mobilising everyone to the scene, Frankie.’
‘It doesn’t bear thinking about.’ She pursed her lips. ‘Considering Cassie’s part in preventing the abduction, and her enforced subjection to a raving lunatic, what sort of sentence do you think she’s likely to get?’
‘There’s mitigation, certainly, but there’ll be a deterrent aspect to the sentencing as well, you would think. I don’t know. Something else I don’t know, or rather don’t understand…’
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t you think Malraux took a hell of a risk leaving poor old Terrevaste where he did? He’d dumped the bodies of his two previous victims nowhere near where he’d killed them.’
‘It would have been a bigger risk trying to get a body with its throat cut out of the building in broad daylight. He couldn’t draw any kind of vehicle up to the place, remember. The ruelle outside is too narrow.’
‘Is it? Ah, I hadn’t realised that.’ The image conjured thoughts of Zoë Laborde pushing her bike along the hidden path to the Stade, Samira’s bleeding body entombed in a Gianluigi Vera garment bag slumped over the handlebars. Darac exhaled deeply and, as he often experienced in the aftermath to a murder investigation, became acutely aware of his own life breath. And Frankie’s, too. In celebration of it, he kissed the corner of her mouth and nothing was said for some minutes.
‘Zoë and Samira, Paul. Talk about them.’
‘Zoë’s confession interview, Frankie.’ He shook his head. ‘I almost lost it when she said it was Samira’s pity for her that had pushed her over the edge. Gilles Laborde is a shallow, controlling, mendacious, hypocrite, right? And though he went through a tough time during interrogation, it’s difficult to feel much sympathy for a tosser like him.’
‘With you all the way.’
‘So what do I think?’ He took a moment. ‘Put it this way. If Zoë’s reaction to everything she’d seen and heard had been to take a pair of scissors to the designer suit she’d given Laborde a couple of days earlier – I would probably have cheered. If she had opted to assault, or even kill him, I may not have countenanced it but I would at least have understood. Alright, Samira may not have been a saint in this thing but bludgeoning her death for a liaison she tried desperately to end and about which she expressed a deal of sympathy for Zoë? No.’
‘Actually, Zoë’s anniversary gift did play a part, didn’t it? There’s something particularly horrible about her using the garment bag to transport Samira’s body to the dumping site.’
‘Absolutely. But Samira’s murder wasn’t just hideous and undeserved. It’s difficult to square it with the perpetrator. Think of the chapter Zoë contributed to Boss Women. She writes that from shop floor to boardroom, a pervasive culture of misogyny flourished in the company she used to work for. She felt powerless to counter it, she says, and that was one of the principal reasons she wanted to strike out on her own.
‘Now look at Samira. Here was a young woman who spent her entire life battling more extreme forms of the same malady. Her earliest misfortune was to have been born into a family who recognised that her burgeoning beauty could be exploited for gain. Theirs, not hers. And why did the Padars perceive the need? Perand managed to get out of Dilip that for years, the family business has been ill-served by its boss men – the elders pulling the strings.’
‘What about its women? I always thought a powerful matriarchy was a feature of life in that country.’
‘Samira aside, the power of the women appears to have been confined exclusively to the domestic sphere.’
‘I can see where you’re going with this. Knowing and believing all she did, why didn’t Zoë feel a deep enough connection with Samira to at least spare her life?’
‘Exactly. Where was the sisterhood? That Samira was regarded as no more than a bargaining chip by her family was cynical enough. To beat her to death as a way of getting even with a philandering husband? Even to a woman like Zoë, Samira still had no value of her own. I find that very difficult to fathom.’
They talked things over for another half-hour or so.
‘Bedtime,’ Frankie said. ‘Come on.’
They set off hand-in-hand. ‘Oh, I nearly forgot again – what did Agnès want to see you about after the team meeting?’
‘Oh, she asked me what I thought about succeeding her as commissaire.’
Darac stopped in his tracks. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said how sincerely flattered I was to have the endorsement of a woman for whom I have the greatest respect, admiration and love. But that we had plans which rather ruled out my accepting such a full-time role. For a few years, anyway.’
‘Ah.’
Looking in on Lily was always a beautiful thing for her parents. Tonight, it was loaded with such an acute awareness of her preciousness that neither could say a word.
In her cot, Lily kicked out a foot and slept soundly on.
Thursday, May 1st
SEVENTY-TWO
The seven members of the Didier Musso Quintet rolled into Cambridge in a buoyant mood. The two UK dates they had played so far had been an unqualified success and everyone appreciated that Ridge had had the band’s welfare uppermost in his mind when he’d organised the tour on such a travel-friendly basis. Less time spent on the road meant more time for rest and recovery and, practically unheard of on tour, the prospect of a spot of sightseeing. For Darac though, the Cambridge gig presented an altogether different prospect.
He had arranged to meet Inès Laborde in her apartment.
The minibus set them down alongside a broad greensward right in the heart of the city.
‘I take it the palace with the pepper pot domes is our hotel, Ridge?’ Didier said, flashing drummer Maxine Walda a crafty wink as they began unloading the luggage and instrument cases. ‘Right?’
‘Let me see.’ Ridge’s gravity of mien was never more apparent than when considering a question. ‘You’re getting a grand between you for tonight’s gig, right? Taking into account the hire of the bus, your et ceteras and your je n’ sais pas quois … No, Monsieur Tête Aérienne, it’s not. We’re along the way there.’
‘Just checking. Where are you staying, by the way?’
‘With your fans from the Marsden gig a few years ago – Steve Randall and his wife. He’s one of the guys who runs the club.’
‘Sweet. How many CDs have we sold on the tour so far, by the way?’
‘Our cup runneth over.’
‘Which comes to?’
‘Plenty.’
‘One helluva expanse of grass, huh?’ observed trumpeter Jacques Quille, surveying the sward as if worried he might suddenly be called upon to mow it. ‘Grass and cyclists.’
‘They call it Parker’s Piece,’ Englishman Dave Blackstock said, swinging his sax case on to his shoulder.
Luc Gabron seemed impressed. ‘They named this after Bird? Cool.’
Darac was ready to head off to his appointment but first, he took Ridge to one side. ‘The Vault,’ he said. ‘When’s the sound check?’
‘Six o’clock.’ He knew all about Darac’s other gig. ‘Go carefully, now. But be on time, Garfield.’
SEVENTY-THREE
Inès and Sue Talbot’s flat was on the first-floor of a modernist housing block no more than a ten-minute walk away. Introductions made and remade, the first thing Darac noticed on being shown into to the sitting room was the piano, a hand-annotated score of a piece he knew well – Erik Satie’s first ‘Gnossienne’ – open on the stand. He glanced at the opening phrases, intrigued at the imposition of tempo markings, bar lines and other instructions on what had been written in free time by the composer. And then he realised Sue was re-imagining the piece for a small chamber group, musicians possibly less used to such liberties than say, the DMQ would have been. It didn’t seem the appropriate moment to comment.
His Francophone tones to the fore, Darac began lightly, if fatuously, in English. ‘This corner position is nice. Although the view is not… classic Cambridge, I suppose. Not what one imagines, I mean.’
‘Actually, pet,’ Sue said. ‘It’s a famous street in Cambridge folklore is this. Mainly for the number of boozers it used to have. Pubs, that is. Oh, please sit wherever you want.’
Darac gave Inès an enquiring look. Whatever Sue had just said, he had understood about as much of it as he would one of Inès’s scientific papers. No translation was forthcoming but Inès told Sue to “lose the Geordie” – whatever that meant – and to think “received pronunciation” – whatever that was.
‘This any better for you, Captain?’ Sue said, enunciating her words more clearly.
‘Much. Thank you.’
Holding hands, the couple sat down on the sofa.
Inès made a show of their intertwined fingers. ‘This doesn’t disturb you?’
‘Expressing the love and support you feel for each other? Not at all.’
‘Paul,’ Sue said, ‘if I may call you that? I should warn you that I’ve become quite a fan of your band and I shall be at The Vault this evening. Is that alright with you?’
‘Yes you can call me Paul and yes it is alright to come this evening. I’d be delighted, in fact.’
‘Good, because apart from looking forward to the music itself, I want to pick your bandleader’s brains about a few things.’
‘He has only the one brain but he will do his best.’
‘I’ll go back to Geordie if you’re going to be cheeky, pet.’
Darac smiled. ‘We do the sound check at 6 o’clock so come then by the means… by all means but if you are free this afternoon, Didier will probably be free, too. May I take your number?’
‘You alright with this, Innie?’
‘Sure. I’ve got some work to be catching up on, anyway.’
‘Does Didier speak English?’
‘If you talk only music, he speaks it quite well. Our tenor player, Dave Blackstock, he is totally bi-lingual and he will be happy to translate if he is present. In a crisis, our manager, Ridge Clay, is fluent but difficult to understand in either language. In a bigger crisis, if I am present, I will try, also.’
Lily stirred but went back to sleep.
‘I need to be careful what I say here. You certainly called out a warning and that will go on the record.’
‘I had to warn you. He killed the officer who came looking. He killed my friend Dédé, too.’
‘Actually, he didn’t kill Denise. But he did kill her killer and an associate. Among those and other charges, he’ll also be held on suspicion of murdering the surveillance officer you mention.’
‘I saw him do it, Madame. Stabbed him in the throat as if it was nothing. I saw it.’
‘We’ll have the opportunity to talk through everything later but in the meantime, I must know something.’
‘I want to tell you everything, Madame. The photos, the roster and the other things in the place? Did you find them? Is that how you knew what he was planning?’
‘They were found, yes.’
‘Before he ran off, he ordered me to dump it all but I didn’t. I left it so you would find it. And I left the prescription with his name on. I left it all deliberately, Madame.’
Frankie knew that had Granot not instantly grasped the significance of what he’d found, units from the city and beyond would now be searching for the baby she was holding tightly to her breast. Cassie had clearly been part of Malraux’s plan to abduct Lily but if she was telling the truth, she was also instrumental in foiling it.
‘Thank you, Cassie,’ Frankie said, as neutrally as she could manage. ‘Listen, we know why Malraux wanted to exact revenge on my husband but…’ She braced herself. ‘He could simply have waited for him in the dark one night and stabbed him, couldn’t he? He could have stabbed me. Or thinking that the greatest pain he could inflict on us was to kidnap our daughter, he could have snatched her away from one of her carers at any point. You called Malraux deranged and that’s clearly correct. But he’s also cunning and resourceful. Why all the elaboration? Why the charade with your disguise and so on?’
‘Because I resemble Madame Tardelli so closely, his original plan was to fool one of your baby’s carers into handing her over to me without a thought that anything might be wrong. Then when he’d got well away from the area, he was going to call you. It was evil and insane – Dédé and I knew it from the beginning. But we were caught like fish on a hook.’
‘How was this original plan to have worked?’
‘Dédé used to be an actress and she was going to play the part of someone who knew MT well – that’s what we called Madame Tardelli in our notes and messages – so when a carer who had never met her before showed to hand over the baby, Dédé was to chance by and in greeting us, come out with personal stuff designed to underline that I was MT. We knew the chances of there being a carer who hadn’t met her before were slim at the beginning. And by the time he had learned enough about them to drill it into our heads, they were slimmer, still. Eventually, there was just one carer left still to meet MT – your husband’s stepmother.
Stepmother. It was obvious now. ‘For stepmother, read SM in your messages?’
‘Yes. We didn’t think any part of his plan would work but some things did.’
‘Such as?’
‘Whenever Malraux learned that SM and MT were going to meet at last, he was pretty successful at taking steps to prevent it.’
‘How did he learn that?’
‘From watching. Eavesdropping.’ Cassie hung her head. ‘Sometimes, I’m afraid, he learned it from Dédé and me. He gave us these hearing aid-like things. You can make out what people are saying even quite quietly to each other from metres away.’
‘So Denise overheard my conversation with SM in C’est Ici! last Friday – the day I bumped into you later?’
‘Yes, Madame. I’m sorry.’
It chilled Frankie to realise how easily her personal space had been breached. ‘And she reported that conversation to Malraux. What did he do then?’
‘He called SM’s frail old next-door neighbour to say he thought his dog had got into her garden and could he come and look? He can read people, Madame. He can identify their weaknesses and strengths. So, as he knew she would, the neighbour rang SM in a panic and asked her to pop round to sort it out. SM agreed, as he knew she would, and so the pair still hadn’t met by the time you saw me.’
‘With that being the case, how close did he come to putting the original plan into action?’
‘Very close, we thought but then Dédé was killed and everything changed.’
There was much to get through later but Frankie needed to know one more thing now.
‘If the original kidnap plan had succeeded…’ She braced herself once more. ‘Where would he have taken my baby?’
‘We… weren’t supposed to know. But Dédé overheard him on the phone one day. There’s a farmhouse somewhere in the Luberon. Secluded. Difficult to find. Near Carpentras, she thought he said, but she couldn’t be sure. That’s where he would have taken her. You see, he wanted you, your husband, the poor carer involved… everyone to suffer for as much as possible, for as long as possible.’ She began to weep. ‘He made me go along with it, Madame. I was scared. I couldn’t get away from him. He controlled everything I did. But now the nightmare is over, I’ll say all this in court. I will.’
‘That is duly noted.’ Feeling exhausted, suddenly, Frankie gave Flaco a beckoning nod. ‘Thank you, Cassie.’
‘Madame, just once, may I see your baby close to?’
She thought about it. And turned Lily momentarily towards her.
Cassie smiled. ‘Thank you.’
‘Off you go now. We’ll see you later.’
On the street, Darac waited until a raving Malraux was thrown into the cell van before he turned to embrace Granot. Unable to hold back tears, his words emerged in a barely intelligible slosh of syllables. A transcript would have read: ‘Thank you, man. Thank you. But for you, this would have ended very differently. We can never repay you. Never.’
‘You could start by relaxing your hold,’ Granot said, his words emerging in a constricted croak. ‘You’re crushing my windpipe.’
SEVENTY-ONE
The Babazouk night was a wondrous thing. From comedy to tragedy, all human life was there. Following the dramas Darac and Frankie had been part of earlier, the evening had brought everything from profound reflections on life, death and the supernatural to heightened emotional outpourings. With Lily safely asleep in her cot, the couple had curled up on the sofa to put the last remaining touches to the picture of their day.
‘We must review our security arrangements for Lily,’ Frankie said, her contralto tones sounding silkier that ever in Darac’s ear. ‘Without allowing a maniac like Malraux to dictate how we live, and without making everyone involved with her care paranoid, we must tighten things up.’
‘Absolutely agree. It won’t take much, you know.’
‘Lord, we were so lucky, weren’t we? I believe Cassie when she says she deliberately left the photos, the roster and the prescription. Do you?’
‘I’d like to think so. Of course, she could have had no idea how long it would take us to discover her handiwork.’
‘But thank God she did leave it all. And thank God dear Granot found it when he did and realised so quickly what it all meant.’
‘And when he called it in on his phone, consider the importance of the very first thing he said. I’m paraphrasing but it went something like: “Before we go any further, it is absolutely crucial that we maintain radio silence about this.” He couldn’t have known Malraux was able to listen in to part of our comms network; he just thought that he might be able to. And sure enough, that proved to be the case. Malraux could have heard the control unit mobilising everyone to the scene, Frankie.’
‘It doesn’t bear thinking about.’ She pursed her lips. ‘Considering Cassie’s part in preventing the abduction, and her enforced subjection to a raving lunatic, what sort of sentence do you think she’s likely to get?’
‘There’s mitigation, certainly, but there’ll be a deterrent aspect to the sentencing as well, you would think. I don’t know. Something else I don’t know, or rather don’t understand…’
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t you think Malraux took a hell of a risk leaving poor old Terrevaste where he did? He’d dumped the bodies of his two previous victims nowhere near where he’d killed them.’
‘It would have been a bigger risk trying to get a body with its throat cut out of the building in broad daylight. He couldn’t draw any kind of vehicle up to the place, remember. The ruelle outside is too narrow.’
‘Is it? Ah, I hadn’t realised that.’ The image conjured thoughts of Zoë Laborde pushing her bike along the hidden path to the Stade, Samira’s bleeding body entombed in a Gianluigi Vera garment bag slumped over the handlebars. Darac exhaled deeply and, as he often experienced in the aftermath to a murder investigation, became acutely aware of his own life breath. And Frankie’s, too. In celebration of it, he kissed the corner of her mouth and nothing was said for some minutes.
‘Zoë and Samira, Paul. Talk about them.’
‘Zoë’s confession interview, Frankie.’ He shook his head. ‘I almost lost it when she said it was Samira’s pity for her that had pushed her over the edge. Gilles Laborde is a shallow, controlling, mendacious, hypocrite, right? And though he went through a tough time during interrogation, it’s difficult to feel much sympathy for a tosser like him.’
‘With you all the way.’
‘So what do I think?’ He took a moment. ‘Put it this way. If Zoë’s reaction to everything she’d seen and heard had been to take a pair of scissors to the designer suit she’d given Laborde a couple of days earlier – I would probably have cheered. If she had opted to assault, or even kill him, I may not have countenanced it but I would at least have understood. Alright, Samira may not have been a saint in this thing but bludgeoning her death for a liaison she tried desperately to end and about which she expressed a deal of sympathy for Zoë? No.’
‘Actually, Zoë’s anniversary gift did play a part, didn’t it? There’s something particularly horrible about her using the garment bag to transport Samira’s body to the dumping site.’
‘Absolutely. But Samira’s murder wasn’t just hideous and undeserved. It’s difficult to square it with the perpetrator. Think of the chapter Zoë contributed to Boss Women. She writes that from shop floor to boardroom, a pervasive culture of misogyny flourished in the company she used to work for. She felt powerless to counter it, she says, and that was one of the principal reasons she wanted to strike out on her own.
‘Now look at Samira. Here was a young woman who spent her entire life battling more extreme forms of the same malady. Her earliest misfortune was to have been born into a family who recognised that her burgeoning beauty could be exploited for gain. Theirs, not hers. And why did the Padars perceive the need? Perand managed to get out of Dilip that for years, the family business has been ill-served by its boss men – the elders pulling the strings.’
‘What about its women? I always thought a powerful matriarchy was a feature of life in that country.’
‘Samira aside, the power of the women appears to have been confined exclusively to the domestic sphere.’
‘I can see where you’re going with this. Knowing and believing all she did, why didn’t Zoë feel a deep enough connection with Samira to at least spare her life?’
‘Exactly. Where was the sisterhood? That Samira was regarded as no more than a bargaining chip by her family was cynical enough. To beat her to death as a way of getting even with a philandering husband? Even to a woman like Zoë, Samira still had no value of her own. I find that very difficult to fathom.’
They talked things over for another half-hour or so.
‘Bedtime,’ Frankie said. ‘Come on.’
They set off hand-in-hand. ‘Oh, I nearly forgot again – what did Agnès want to see you about after the team meeting?’
‘Oh, she asked me what I thought about succeeding her as commissaire.’
Darac stopped in his tracks. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said how sincerely flattered I was to have the endorsement of a woman for whom I have the greatest respect, admiration and love. But that we had plans which rather ruled out my accepting such a full-time role. For a few years, anyway.’
‘Ah.’
Looking in on Lily was always a beautiful thing for her parents. Tonight, it was loaded with such an acute awareness of her preciousness that neither could say a word.
In her cot, Lily kicked out a foot and slept soundly on.
Thursday, May 1st
SEVENTY-TWO
The seven members of the Didier Musso Quintet rolled into Cambridge in a buoyant mood. The two UK dates they had played so far had been an unqualified success and everyone appreciated that Ridge had had the band’s welfare uppermost in his mind when he’d organised the tour on such a travel-friendly basis. Less time spent on the road meant more time for rest and recovery and, practically unheard of on tour, the prospect of a spot of sightseeing. For Darac though, the Cambridge gig presented an altogether different prospect.
He had arranged to meet Inès Laborde in her apartment.
The minibus set them down alongside a broad greensward right in the heart of the city.
‘I take it the palace with the pepper pot domes is our hotel, Ridge?’ Didier said, flashing drummer Maxine Walda a crafty wink as they began unloading the luggage and instrument cases. ‘Right?’
‘Let me see.’ Ridge’s gravity of mien was never more apparent than when considering a question. ‘You’re getting a grand between you for tonight’s gig, right? Taking into account the hire of the bus, your et ceteras and your je n’ sais pas quois … No, Monsieur Tête Aérienne, it’s not. We’re along the way there.’
‘Just checking. Where are you staying, by the way?’
‘With your fans from the Marsden gig a few years ago – Steve Randall and his wife. He’s one of the guys who runs the club.’
‘Sweet. How many CDs have we sold on the tour so far, by the way?’
‘Our cup runneth over.’
‘Which comes to?’
‘Plenty.’
‘One helluva expanse of grass, huh?’ observed trumpeter Jacques Quille, surveying the sward as if worried he might suddenly be called upon to mow it. ‘Grass and cyclists.’
‘They call it Parker’s Piece,’ Englishman Dave Blackstock said, swinging his sax case on to his shoulder.
Luc Gabron seemed impressed. ‘They named this after Bird? Cool.’
Darac was ready to head off to his appointment but first, he took Ridge to one side. ‘The Vault,’ he said. ‘When’s the sound check?’
‘Six o’clock.’ He knew all about Darac’s other gig. ‘Go carefully, now. But be on time, Garfield.’
SEVENTY-THREE
Inès and Sue Talbot’s flat was on the first-floor of a modernist housing block no more than a ten-minute walk away. Introductions made and remade, the first thing Darac noticed on being shown into to the sitting room was the piano, a hand-annotated score of a piece he knew well – Erik Satie’s first ‘Gnossienne’ – open on the stand. He glanced at the opening phrases, intrigued at the imposition of tempo markings, bar lines and other instructions on what had been written in free time by the composer. And then he realised Sue was re-imagining the piece for a small chamber group, musicians possibly less used to such liberties than say, the DMQ would have been. It didn’t seem the appropriate moment to comment.
His Francophone tones to the fore, Darac began lightly, if fatuously, in English. ‘This corner position is nice. Although the view is not… classic Cambridge, I suppose. Not what one imagines, I mean.’
‘Actually, pet,’ Sue said. ‘It’s a famous street in Cambridge folklore is this. Mainly for the number of boozers it used to have. Pubs, that is. Oh, please sit wherever you want.’
Darac gave Inès an enquiring look. Whatever Sue had just said, he had understood about as much of it as he would one of Inès’s scientific papers. No translation was forthcoming but Inès told Sue to “lose the Geordie” – whatever that meant – and to think “received pronunciation” – whatever that was.
‘This any better for you, Captain?’ Sue said, enunciating her words more clearly.
‘Much. Thank you.’
Holding hands, the couple sat down on the sofa.
Inès made a show of their intertwined fingers. ‘This doesn’t disturb you?’
‘Expressing the love and support you feel for each other? Not at all.’
‘Paul,’ Sue said, ‘if I may call you that? I should warn you that I’ve become quite a fan of your band and I shall be at The Vault this evening. Is that alright with you?’
‘Yes you can call me Paul and yes it is alright to come this evening. I’d be delighted, in fact.’
‘Good, because apart from looking forward to the music itself, I want to pick your bandleader’s brains about a few things.’
‘He has only the one brain but he will do his best.’
‘I’ll go back to Geordie if you’re going to be cheeky, pet.’
Darac smiled. ‘We do the sound check at 6 o’clock so come then by the means… by all means but if you are free this afternoon, Didier will probably be free, too. May I take your number?’
‘You alright with this, Innie?’
‘Sure. I’ve got some work to be catching up on, anyway.’
‘Does Didier speak English?’
‘If you talk only music, he speaks it quite well. Our tenor player, Dave Blackstock, he is totally bi-lingual and he will be happy to translate if he is present. In a crisis, our manager, Ridge Clay, is fluent but difficult to understand in either language. In a bigger crisis, if I am present, I will try, also.’
