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Forcing determined vigour into his stride and carryingA Place of Greater Safetyunder his arm, Harry set off down the central path of the Tuileries Gardens and walked without stopping until he reached Place de la Concorde, previously Place de la Révolution, originally Place Louis XV. This was where the guillotine had stood. This was where Marie-Antoinette had paid the price for her diamonds and where the incorruptible Robespierre, in the end, had followed her footsteps. Harry had been reading all about it. Carts had carried the condemned along the path that he’d just walked, and so much human blood had spurted from their severed necks that the ground here had been sticky with it. Harry shook his head side to side to wipe the image; only, his head wasn’t as easily cleaned as an Etch A Sketch.
He walked as far as the Luxor Obelisk and watched cars gliding along the avenue des Champs-Elysées. What a fantastic location it would be for a car chase. He considered walking all the way to the Arc de Triomphe, just to survey the angles, then recalled his resolution to ditch theHot Sauce. He stood there, rooted to the spot, wondering what came next.
He let the phone call to Louis replay in his head, though he didn’t need to. He’d recognised her voice the instant he heard it. And his heart had contracted to something rock hard.
Nancy.
He watched a woman in high heels walking quickly past the fountains. She had a bunch of flowers cradled in her arms. An elderly couple, arm in arm, pushed through the gates to the gardens. A young man in tight jeans and a blazer, carrying a cake box by its ribbon, walked towards him. He imagined these people in a crowd scene, baying for human blood, cheering death. A nation so suspiciously well dressed, he thought, could not be entirely innocent.
On a whim, Harry adjusted his path so that he deliberately stepped in front of the irritatingly bare-ankled young man and pointed to the beribboned box.
‘Excusez-moi,’ he said, ‘où est la boulangerie?’
The man raised his nose in the air and twitched it. ‘La pâtisserie, monsieur.’
Harry resisted the urge to roll his eyes at the correction.
The man pointed with his nose towards rue de Rivoli. ‘Il y a une super pâtisserie là-bas, à vingt mètres.’ The super cake shop was just around the corner.
‘Merci beaucoup,’ said Harry, but the man was already striding away towards the obelisk.
Commissaire Cloutier’s Office
Commissaire Cloutier smashed the telephone into its cradle and threw her pen at the wall. She blew out a long, explosive sigh and then, shaking her head, she pushed back her chair, walked around her desk and bent to pick up the pen. It was none the worse for the abuse, and the commissaire felt marginally better.
Just for a minute there, she’d allowed her hopes to be raised. She’d thought they had, by total fluke, happened across a key to something big. The Ukrainian girl, completely illegal, not even registered in the country, wasobviouslybeing forced to work with, or for, Rénard Barreau, thattrou du culscumbag Clément had picked up at the train station. Possibly, the girl was being manipulated under threat of prostitution, or maybe she was trying to protect the little sister. Yeva Bortnik claimed complete innocence, but that was only natural.
Commissaire Cloutier had tried everything: good cop, bad cop and every in-between trick she could think of, but the girl stuck to her story, even providing a long-winded explanation for why they would, if they looked, find her fingerprints on Madame Delassus’s bag. How convenient. She claimed that Barreau was the thief. He insisted it was her.
And now, Cloutier’s useless underlings told her that Barreau’s record was as clean as the proverbial new penny. They had nothing on him other than her own conviction.
He was a player. She’d known it the minute she stepped into the room. Everything about him – his laid-back stance, his slick hair, his thin veneer of respectability – was like mustard up her nose.
He had stood up when she entered but narrowed his eyes at her, weighing her up. She was taller and broader than he was. He had lifted his chin, held it up to her, challenging her to beat him if she could.
Her eyes had travelled to his handcuffed wrists. He followed her gaze and smirked.
‘Donnez-moi votre montre, s’il vous plaît,’ she said, asking for his watch and signalling to Clément to release the handcuffs.
Barreau made a point of rubbing the skin of his sorely abused wrists. He slipped his thumb beneath the catch of the watch and opened it, but at the same moment he seemed to lose his balance. He stumbled forwards. The watch clattered to the tiles, and he stepped, hard, just one grinding footstep that shattered the glass and crushed the face of it.
‘Quel dommage,’ he said, regaining his footing. What a pity. The corners of his mouth turned down, but his eyes showed no sign of distress.
‘Pas incassable, alors,’ said Clément. Not unbreakable, then.
He bent to retrieve the pieces. ‘Probablement un faux,’ said Barreau conversationally. It must have been a fake.
‘Ça suffit,’ said Commissaire Cloutier. She’d had enough of him.
* * *
The wallet Commissaire Cloutier had procured by a quick and marginally illegal shaking-out of Barreau’s jacket pockets lay on her desk inside an evidence bag. It might not belong to Madame Delassus, but it was quite obviously stolen. Barreau claimed that he’d found it on the Métro. He’d had the audacity to smirk at the commissaire and propose that he had, in fact, been on his way to hand it in to the station security. There was no evidence to the contrary. Despite the fact that the creep made every hackle in her body rise to attention, the commissaire saw no option other than to send him on his way.
She gathered loose papers, tapping the page ends on the desktop to neaten the stack, then arranged her phone, her pen and her spectacles at neat right angles to her pile of paperwork. She leaned forwards. With her elbows on the desk and her hands clenched together, she banged the knuckle of her left forefinger rhythmically against her front teeth.
The prosecution of a sweet-faced refugee child wasn’t going to garner any positive headlines. Whether she chose to book the girl or not, she had two juvenile vagrants on her hands, one of them probably a petty thief, and nowhere to put them. She picked up the phone to call social services. They’d find an emergency placement, she hoped, for the younger girl at least. Even that would take a minor miracle.
A reticent knock sounded on the office door. Commissaire Cloutier put down the phone, pulled in her chair and straightened her back.
