Peter May - Extraordinary People

Enzo nodded. ‘But not any more.’

‘Not any more.’ She set down her cup. ‘Perhaps you could phone that taxi for me now.’

‘Of course.’ He retrieved his cell phone from a pocket in his cargos and began punching in a number.

‘Enzo….’ she said after he had ordered her car. It was as if she was trying the sound of it out for size. ‘What kind of name is that anyway?’

‘Short for Lorenzo. My mother was Italian. Married to a Scot. A lethal combination.’

‘It certainly is.’

When the taxi arrived and peeped its horn in the street below, Enzo went down to open the door for her. They lingered for a moment on the pavement, and he felt her slipping away like sand through his fingers.

‘Could I, you know, maybe take you to dinner sometime?’ He felt foolish, like a schoolboy asking a girl on a first date.

She avoided his eye. ‘I’ve just finished with Roger. I think maybe I need a little time to myself right now.’ She threw her bag of clothes into the back seat of the taxi and searched through her handbag, pulling out a discreetly embossed business card. ‘But if you ever feel the need of some professional psychological insights into the Gaillard case, give me a call. Thanks for the coffee, Monsieur Macleod.’

‘Enzo,’ Enzo said as she shut the door. And her taxi coughed diesel fumes into the night and turned into the Rue Mazarine.

Jacques Gaillard was dead. Enzo was certain of it.

He rubbed his eyes and looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was a little after three, and a party in one of the apartments opposite was still going strong. They had opened their windows wide, the musky aromatic smell of cannabis wafting its way across the narrow street, and the air was still vibrating to the monotonous rhythm of some endless Latin dance rap.

The party had begun around midnight, and Enzo had simply shut it out by reading through Raffin’s notes, and allowing himself to be absorbed into the arcane world of Jacques Gaillard.

JG, as he was known to his friends, had been the eldest son of a provincial lawyer in Angoulême. Early intellectual promise resulted in his being sent to the Henry IV Lycée in Paris, one of the best secondary schools in France. There, he rose to the top of his class, and won first prize in economics at the Concours Général . By this time he already knew that he wanted to go to ENA. The École Nationale d’Administration, the crème de la crème of the French system of Grand Écôles , accepted only the brightest intellects in the country, and turned out Prime Ministers and Presidents like a shark grows new teeth.

A degree from the Institut d’Études Politiques, popularly known as Sciences-Po, would have been the normally accepted route. But his father had insisted that he take a “proper” diploma first, and so he had enrolled at the Faculté de Droit et Sciences Économiques d’Assas. But such was the young Jacques’ genius, that this was not enough to keep him fully occupied. And so he had also enrolled at the Sorbonne, studying history.

By the time he graduated from both institutions, he had developed a good network of politically engaged friends. And had started his research into the history of early French cinema.

Acceptance to Science-Po was a formality, and given his previous academic record, his course there was reduced from four years to two. Such was his reputation for intellectual brilliance that by the time he sat the competitive exam for entry to ENA, he was already known to nearly half the members of the examination board. He sailed through the gruelling forty-five minute Grand Oral , during which prospective students are grilled, in public, on any subject chosen by a panel of five experts.

According to memoirs published later by some of that panel, and others who were there that day, Gaillard barely allowed them to get a word in.

Finishing in the top ten of his twenty-seven month course guaranteed him a pick of the top jobs in the Civil Service. Over the next twelve years his career went from strength to strength, and after a highly successful stint as principal advisor to the Minister of Finance, he was actively pursued by the Prime Minister’s office, eventually being appointed an advisor to the Prime Minister himself.

Which is when he published his book on the History of French Cinema, and his spectacular rise to prominence hit a brick wall.

Satirical cartoonists in the French media used him as a club with which to beat the Prime Minister. He was variously depicted as whispering advice into the premier’s ear on which of that week’s movie releases he should watch, or offering him tips on the most likely winner of best actress at the César Awards, or which film would take the Palm d’Or at Cannes. One particularly cruel cartoon in the satirical journal Le Canard Enchaîné conjured up an exceptionally gross-featured Prime Minister slipping JG a thick wad of two-hundred franc notes and asking if he could fix him up for the night with Sophie Marceau.

It seemed, however, that Jacques Gaillard was enjoying his new-found celebrity, and positively thrived on his increasingly frequent television appearances.

Then, between 1994 and 1996 he was “invited”—a clear euphemism for “instructed”—to direct students at ENA in an investigation into the history of French financial policies since the war. Perhaps an attempt by the government to lower his profile. But if that were the case, then it failed. For it was during that same period that Gaillard was asked by the French broadcaster TF1 to host his own cinema review show on television once a month, a chance he jumped at.

And then, that August, he vanished off the face of the earth. Enzo re-read Raffin’s account of it in the book.

He failed to return to his desk at the end of the August holidays. It caused a huge stir at the time. The papers were full of it for weeks. But the police made no progress at all. And, as always happens with these matters, the press found other things to write about, and the curious case of the disappearing Jacques Gaillard gradually slipped from public view. That was ten years ago. It still crops up from time to time. An article here, a feature piece there. But no one has ever shed new light on what happened to him.

Enzo had never seen Gaillard’s show, but when he looked through the various photographs in Raffin’s file, his face was very familiar. A cartoonist’s gift. Aged forty-nine when he disappeared, Gaillard had disguised his encroaching baldness by contriving an extraordinary bird’s nest of dyed and lacquered curls. He had also cultivated one of those excessive French moustaches which, after an initial droop, curled extravagantly up around his cheeks.

Also in the file was a copy of the page beneath the final entry in the desk diary found in Gaillard’s study. Enzo reflected that Raffin must have had good sources to get hold of material like this. The page containing the final entry itself had been torn out. But because of the impression it had left on the page below, the police scientifique had been able to treat the paper in the lab with electrostatic detection equipment to find and then visualise the fibres damaged by the abrasive pressure of the pen. Enzo looked at it carefully. Mad à minuit , it read. Evidently, Gaillard had spent some time on the entry, for he had gone over the letters several times, and then surrounded them with idle doodles and curlicues. The kind of doodles he might have engaged in absently during a lengthy telephone conversation. The police had secured phone records for the night before the date of the entry. They showed that there had been a phone call — about fifteen minutes long — shortly before ten o’clock. It was the last call registered to Gaillard’s phone, and it had been made from a public call box. In spite of extensive publicity, no one had ever admitted to making the call.