Peter May - Extraordinary People

Enzo looked at her and felt his own emotions well up inside. However hard he might have tried, and for all the love he had given her over all these years, there were still things she had missed out on. Things that only a mother and daughter can share. And now he had let her down, exposed her to danger. It had been his duty as a parent to protect her, and he had failed in that, too. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, and he heard the crack in his voice.

‘Madeleine cakes,’ Nicole said. ‘As every little French girl would tell you, that’s what the seashell moulds in the baking tray are for. Making Madeleine cakes.’

‘Madeleine Boucher.’ Bertrand tried the name out for size. ‘I suppose it’s possible.’

Sophie looked to her father for his approval. But it was as if he had set eyes on the face of the gorgon and turned to stone.

If Enzo had believed it possible for his heart to stop, then he would have said it had done so. And for the first time in his life he understood how it might feel if his blood were to turn to ice. He remembered the handwritten inscription in the book so very clearly. For Madeleine, aged seven. Happy Birthday, darling . And he remembered how evasive she had been. Why won’t you tell me? he had asked her. And finally she had sighed and told him, She’s me. All right? I’m Madeleine . He remembered, too, how strongly she had reacted against his suggestion that he call her that. No! I don’t want to be Madeleine!

‘Papa?’ Sophie had risen from the bed and crossed to touch his face with her fingertips, leaving a little trail of mud flakes in her wake. ‘Papa, what’s wrong?’

‘ Mad à minuit ,’ Enzo said. ‘Madeleine at midnight. That’s who he was meeting in St. Étienne du Mont.’

Bertrand was watching him closely. ‘Do you know her?’

Enzo pulled himself back from the brink of an abyss he dared not peer over. ‘Maybe.’

Sophie frowned. ‘Do we ?’

‘You met her last night. Charlotte’s her middle name. Her given name is Madeleine.’

‘Papa, I don’t believe it!’

Enzo did not want to. It was almost impossible for him to think of those dark, smiling eyes as the eyes of a killer. He remembered the tenderness of her touch, the softness of her lips, the sweet taste of her on his. He closed his eyes and drew a deep breath.

‘I mean, how many Madeleines must there be in France?’ Sophie persisted. ‘Thousands, tens of thousands. And, anyway, Boucher isn’t her second name, is it?’

Enzo shook his head. ‘It’s Roux.’

‘There you are, then.’

‘We don’t know that Boucher is the right name. But, in any case, she was adopted, Sophie. She told me herself that she tracked down her birth parents when she went to university. It’s quite possible that her mother, or her father, was called Boucher. Or something else that we haven’t figured out yet.’

Sophie threw a defiant hand in his direction. ‘Well, there’s another thing. When she went to university, you said. That was the Sorbonne, right? She told me that last night.’ Enzo tipped his head in reluctant acknowledgement. ‘And you told us that all the other killers were students of Jacques Gaillard’s at ENA. Well, Charlotte wasn’t at ENA, was she?’

‘We don’t know that,’ Enzo insisted. ‘We only know what she’s told us.’ He was playing devil’s advocate to his own feelings. ‘But we do know that she was Gaillard’s niece. And most murders are committed by people known to the victim. Usually a member of their own family. God knows what kind of motive she might have had for hating him. For wanting him dead. Maybe he abused her as a child.’

‘Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Papa!’

‘Sophie, she tried to conceal from me that he was her uncle, that her real name was Madeleine. Why?’ And then he answered his own question. ‘She must have known that in the end I was going to get to these clues in Auxerre.’ The voice of his rational self was fighting to be heard above the emotional one in his head. A voice that screamed down everything he was saying. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. She was the gentlest, loveliest creature he had met in the twenty years since Pascale’s death. She had issues, yes, and dark places in her head that she guarded closely. But there was a spiritual centre to her that was as still and beautiful as her smile.

He tried to picture again all the faces in the photograph of the Schoelcher Promotion, all the students who had flitted across the screen in the video record of the Class of ’96. Had she really been somewhere there amongst them? Ten years younger — hair a different cut perhaps, a different colour? If Charlotte really was Madeleine, then she must have been supremely confident that he would not recognise her. It had been her idea to watch the video. Maybe she had just been playing with him. For wasn’t this, after all, really just a game? An extreme IQ test where the cracking of clues was rewarded with the pieces of a murdered man?

But why? It’s what he kept coming back to. What was the point of it all? He knew now that there had been four killers. But three of them were dead, and so there was only one person left alive who could answer that question. And her name was Madeleine.

The four of them spent the next hour in reflective silence until Bertrand said, ‘Don’t we have the right to make a phone call?’

‘Yes,’ Sophie said immediately. ‘And they can only hold us for twenty-four hours without charging us. But there’s some stupid clause that says if they think it would be against the interests of the investigation, they can withhold the right to the call. Which means we don’t have the right to one at all. It’s ridiculous!’

Enzo never ceased to be amazed by how much kids knew about their rights. Things that had never crossed his mind as a young man. Perhaps it was a sign of the times, that young people had higher expectations of conflict with the authorities.

The cold in the cell was getting into his bones now, and like Bertrand, he pulled his legs up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them for warmth. He felt the bulge of something hard in the knee pocket of his cargos. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he said suddenly, startling the others.

‘Papa, what is it?’

‘I’ve still got my phone. They never took my portable .’ They had removed rings and watches and piercings, and made them empty their pockets. But Enzo had forgotten about the leg pockets of his cargos, and in their hurry to lock them up, so had the police. Perhaps they had been obscured by mud.

He squeezed fingers into the pocket and pulled out his cell phone. He pressed the on-button. The screen lit up and the phone beeped loudly. They all froze, listening for any indication that someone out there might have heard it. But there was nothing, except the same interminable silence. Enzo looked at the indicator and saw that the battery was low. But there was a strong signal. He hesitated. Who would he call?

Then, to his horror, it started ringing. He was so startled by the electronic rendition of Scotland the Brave that echoed thunderously around the cell that he almost dropped it.

‘For goodness’ sake, Papa, answer it!’

He fumbled for the answer button and pressed the phone to his ear. ‘Jesus Christ, Magpie, where the bloody hell are you?’ It was Simon. In spite of years in London, his Scottish brogue was always particularly strong when he was stressed. Enzo started telling him that he was in a police cell in Auxerre, when the voice cut over him, and he realised it was a recording on his messaging service. ‘Call me when you pick this up. It’s important.’ And the line went dead. There was something in Simon’s voice that sent a strange chill of premonition through Enzo. He hung up on the soporific voice telling him that he had no more messages.