Peter May - Extraordinary People

‘Why did you do that?’

‘I’d just gone to university. I was starting to try to figure out who I was. Or, at least, who the adult me was. It’s funny. There’s always this thing inside you that needs to know where you came from. No matter how happy, or how settled you are.’ She shook her head and took the bowls to the table. ‘Hardly ever works out well.’

‘How did it work out for you?’

‘It didn’t. All I managed to do was hurt my parents. Stupid, thoughtless, selfish….’ Enzo saw, with a slight shock, that she had tears in her eyes, and she turned quickly to get cutlery and wipe them discreetly away.

He didn’t want to embarrass her and focused his attention, then, on the contents of the bookcase. The top shelf was lined with children’s editions of famous books. Reading for the young Charlotte. La Petite Dorrit, Le Tour du Monde en 80 Jours, Les Misérables (Tome II) . Enzo picked out a book he remembered buying for Sophie when she was young. Le Père Tranquille . He opened it up and read the handwritten inscription on the title page. It was a gift for Madeleine on the occasion of her seventh birthday, from Mama and Papa. ‘Who’s Madeleine?’

She sat at the table and put a spoon beside each bowl. ‘Come and get your soup.’

He slipped the book back on the shelf and went to sit opposite her. The soup was a thick vegetable and lentil mix. Comfort food in an uncertain world. He took several mouthfuls, and Charlotte opened a bottle of red wine and poured them each a glass. Enzo took a sip. ‘So who is she?’

‘Who?’

‘Madeleine.’

Charlotte shrugged. ‘No one special.’

Enzo was intrigued by her evasion. ‘Why won’t you tell me?’

She sighed. ‘She’s me. All right? I’m Madeleine. Charlotte’s my middle name. There were two other Madeleines in my class at school, so they called me Charlotte to avoid confusion. The only people who still call me Madeleine are my parents, and….’ She stopped. ‘Well, just my parents.’

‘It’s a nice name,’ Enzo said. ‘Maybe I’ll call you Madeleine.’

‘No!’ she said sharply. Then, more softly, ‘I don’t want to be Madeleine. If you want to call me anything, call me Charly.’ She pronounced it Sharlee . ‘It’s what my friends call me.’

‘Is that what Roger calls you?’

Charlotte laughed. ‘Oh, no. Not Roger. That was far too common for him. He always called me Charlotte.’

Enzo liked the way she spoke of him in the past tense.

Charlotte cleared away the empty soup bowls and went in search of a cable to connect her laptop to the telephone line. Once connected she pulled the Google search page up on screen, and refilled both their wine glasses. She watched as Enzo wrote Africa in the centre of his makeshift whiteboard, circled it and drew an arrow to it from the lion’s head. Neither of them felt tired. There was still adrenaline flowing through their veins from the incident on the autoroute , and the soup and wine had infused flagging spirits with new energy.

Enzo stared at the board for a long time. The previous clues had taken him to an uncomfortable place, inside the heads of Gaillard’s killers. He needed to get back there now. To think the way they thought, to follow the same processes. Make the same connections. He heard Charlotte tapping at the keyboard behind him, and he let his gaze drift to the lapel pin. ‘We need to figure out what flag that is,’ he said. ‘There must be something on the net that would make it easier for us to identify it.’

‘I’ll have a look.’

Enzo’s eyes wandered back to the lion’s head. ‘What about Ethiopia? Haile Salassie was known as the Lion of Judah, and he was the last emperor of Ethiopia.’

‘Wasn’t a French colony,’ Charlotte said. ‘Wait a minute. Here’s what you wanted.’ She tapped some more, then read, ‘ Ivan Sarajcic’s flag finder . This is amazing. You can select from a choice of flag types, colours, and what he calls devices —objects that appear on the flag.’

Enzo came to stand behind her and look at the screen.

‘Flag type. Three stripes vertical.’ She selected a black and white flag with three vertical stripes. The image was highlighted in white. ‘Colours are green, yellow, and red.’ And she selected them from a choice of eleven colours. Again, they were highlighted in white. She moved the cursor to a pull-down menu listing devices that might appear on the flag and scrolled down the choices until she came to star . She selected it and moved to a choice of colours, picking green. Then she clicked on a button which read Find the Flag . Within seconds, a large scale image of the flag appeared. ‘ Senegal ,’ Charlotte read from the caption. ‘It’s the Senegalese flag.’

‘Was Senegal a French colony?’

‘Yes, it was.’ Charlotte entered Senegal into the search engine and came up with a World Factbook site. She read, ‘Senegal. West African state bordering the North Atlantic Ocean between Guinea-Bissau and Mauritania. Gained its independence from France in 1960.’

‘1960,’ Enzo said. ‘That’s the second of the two dates engraved on the salamander.’

‘What about the other date?’

‘1927.’

‘Maybe it’s significant in Senegalese history.’ Charlotte typed Senegal and 1927 into the search engine and then groaned. ‘Two hundred and six thousand results. We could be here for a month wading through these.’

But Enzo was still excited. He went back to the board and wrote up Senegal , circled it and drew arrows to it from the flag and from Africa . ‘Let’s leave the dates for the moment,’ he said. ‘What about the salamander itself? You said it was the emblem of François Premier. Let’s see what we can find out about him.’

Charlotte’s fingers rattled quickly across the keyboard. ‘There’s a mountain of stuff about François.’ She scanned yards of text as she scrolled down the screen. ‘A champion of the Renaissance. His motto was, I am nourished and I die in fire , which seems to be why he chose the salamander as his emblem. It’s supposed to be so cold, it will extinguish all fire on contact. Even his hat was fastened with a jewelled salamander.’ She looked up. ‘Just like the one in the trunk.’

Enzo shook his head. ‘It’s not doing anything for me.’

‘Wait a minute.’ Charlotte typed some more. ‘Apparently François Premier was also known as François d’Angoulême.’

Enzo raised an eyebrow. ‘Your home town.’

‘It seems that’s where his family came from. The Valois Angoulême. His son and grandson were the last of the line.’ She looked up. ‘Maybe Angoulême is a clue. Maybe that’s where we should be looking for the rest of the body.’

Enzo looked doubtful. ‘I’m not seeing any connections here. Except…Gaillard’s family came from Angoulême.’ He thought briefly. ‘I’ll write it up for the moment.’ And he turned and wrote François Premier (Angoulême) in a circle and drew an arrow to it from the salamander. He faced Charlotte again. ‘What other symbolic meaning might a salamander have?’

Charlotte initiated another search and came up with an article on salamanders and symbolism. ‘Fire,’ she said simply. ‘There was a fifteenth century Swiss physician who dubbed the salamander as the symbol of fire. And a famous Australian explorer who wrote of the aborigines, The natives were about burning, burning, ever burning; one would think they were of the fabled salamander race and lived on fire instead of water .’ She scrolled down more of the article and shook her head. ‘Fire. That’s it. Apparently salamander is derived from an Arab-Persian word meaning, lives in fire .’