Peter May - Extraordinary People

Raffin looked at the screen thoughtfully. ‘When?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘When have you to meet her? You might know the where, but not the when.’

‘Yes, we do.’ Everyone turned in surprise to see Sophie standing at the table. She was holding the box of Madeleine cakes. She folded back the lid and held it out, as if offering them one. ‘It’s written on the inside of the lid.’

There was a series of numbers scrawled on the white card. 19070230 . And they were followed by two words. Toute seule .

Enzo got up and crossed the room to take the box from her. He looked at the numbers, and knew at once what they were. The 19th of the 7th at 02.30 hours. He checked his watch. Today was July 18th. Madeleine was making a rendezvous to meet him alone in the Salle des Fresques in a long-abandoned German bunker twenty meters below the streets of Paris, at two-thirty tomorrow morning.

The rain beat a constant rhythm on the taut canvas of the maroon awning overhead, filtered daylight casting red shadows on all of their faces. Enzo sat hunched over their table watching tourists in brightly coloured plastic raincoats hurry by. They sat in silence, waiting for Raffin, who was still inside speaking on the telephone. Simon had ordered a whisky and told Enzo that he should have one, too. But Enzo wanted to keep his head clear. As clear as it could be after a night without sleep, and only twelve hours to prepare for a meeting with the woman who had kidnapped his daughter. A woman who had killed at least four times. As it was, his head was aching. There was a loud tinnitis ringing in his ears, and his eyes were burning. Sophie sat silently sipping a tisane, and Nicole was leafing through a pile of papers and photographs she had taken from Enzo’s satchel. Bertrand stared gloomily across the bridge opposite, towards the ële de la Cité.

It was the same bridge from which, just over a week earlier, Enzo had thrown himself into a passing barge. He sat now watching the rain mist as it thrashed down on the swollen waters of the Seine, and he found it hard to believe he had done something so stupid. He had been someone else then, in another lifetime. So much had happened since that evening in Cahors when he had accepted the Préfet’s wager. But he could never have foreseen that it would lead to this.

He turned and looked through the window, beyond the reflections of Notre Dame, into the brasserie. Waiters in black waistcoats and long white aprons were clearing debris from tables. He could see Raffin speaking animatedly on a telephone by the bar, a poster on the wall behind him of an Alsatian Frenchman feasting on German sausage courtesy of Produits Shmid . Raffin hung up and walked briskly to the door, emerging from the restaurant on to the terrasse . For once he seemed less than stylish. His raincoat hung damply from his shoulders, and his wet hair had fallen forward across his forehead. He swept it out of his eyes and lit a cigarette.

‘He’s coming to the apartment at midnight.’

‘Do you trust him?’ Enzo asked.

Raffin pulled up a seat. ‘When he took me down to do that piece for Libé I could not have been more completely in his hands. Frankly, Macleod, I doubt if there’s anyone who knows the catacombes better. He has his own maps and charts, meticulously accumulated during years of personal exploration. It’s his life’s work.’

‘And he makes a living at it?’ Bertrand asked. ‘I mean, taking people down there illegally?’

‘A very good living from all accounts.’

‘I don’t want him to take me down,’ Enzo said. ‘All I need him to do is get me in, and provide me with enough information to get me where I need to be.’

‘Papa, you can’t go down there on your own.’ Sophie’s eyes were red from tears already spilled as a result of her father’s stubbornness.

‘She’s right, Magpie,’ Simon said. ‘I mean, think about it. Why does this Madeleine woman want you to go down there in the first place. So she can can hand Kirsty back and tell you to be a good boy? I don’t think so. I think she’s using Kirsty as bait to lure you down there so that she can kill you to stop you from revealing her identity.’

‘We already know who she is,’ Nicole said. Enzo flashed quick eyes at her, and she held up the list of Schoelcher students that she had dug out from amongst his papers. ‘And Sophie was right about the butcher’s cleaver.’ She handed the list to Enzo. ‘Marie-Madeleine Boucher. Right after Marie Bonnet and before Hervé Boullanger.’

Enzo ran his eye down the list, and there it was in black and white. MARIE-MADELEINE BOUCHER.

Raffin said, ‘And it’s not Charlotte, Enzo.’ He had been shocked on the drive from Auxerre to learn of Enzo’s fears. ‘I’d stake my life on it.’

‘You don’t have to,’ Sophie said. ‘My Papa does.’

‘Marie, Madeleine, Charlotte, whoever the hell she might be,’ Simon said, ‘even if you knew for sure, she doesn’t know that.’ He took a long, deep breath, and Enzo heard the tremor in it. ‘And I hate to say this, Enzo, but it’s possible that Kirsty’s already….’

‘Don’t!’ Enzo cut him off. ‘Don’t even think it!’ He took a moment to compose himself. ‘I have to go alone. Because that’s what Marie-Madeleine Boucher wants me to do. I can’t just do nothing. And I can’t go to the police. I have to believe that Kirsty’s okay, so I’m not going to do anything to put her in more danger than she’s already in. I’ll keep the appointment, and I’ll take my chances. Because there’s nothing else I can do.’

Nicole had spent several hours during the afternoon trying to track down Marie-Madeleine Boucher on the internet. But there were nearly a thousand references to the name, in both France and Canada, and not one of them linked directly to ENA. It could take days to find out who she really was.

Enzo had passed the remains of the day in something close to a trance. Now, in the glare of a desk lamp, the maps spread across Raffin’s desk burned themselves on to his retinas. It was pitch outside, and still the rain fell. Dense, slow-moving storm cloud had been dumping its precipitation on the city for nearly twenty-four hours. The television news was reporting that the Seine had burst its banks in several places. There had been flash floods all across Paris. But it was a warm, summer rain, the air sticky and breathless, and several times Enzo had found himself wiping a fine film of cold sweat from his forehead. A black cloud of swallows was swooping and diving around inside his stomach. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly a quarter past midnight.

The smoke from Samu’s constant roll-ups hung still and blue in the lamplight. Raffin said that the tunnel rat was reputed to have got his nickname because in another life he had been a medic with the SAMU, the Service d’Aide Médicale Urgente. But he did not know if that was true. Samu’s real identity was a secret he guarded closely.

He was a tall, thin, nervous man in his middle forties. He grew greying hair to collar length and gelled it back from his face. He had the pallor of a man who spent his life below ground, his complexion grey and pasty and scarred by adolescent acne. The thumb, index and middle fingers of his right hand were nicotine orange. His jeans and tee-shirt hung loosely from a skeletal frame, and he seemed incapable of staying still for two minutes. His very presence was unsettling. He circled the desk slowly like an animal stalking prey.

‘You really don’t want to go down there on your own,’ he said to Enzo. It was the obligatory health warning, like the caution on a cigarette pack that smoking will kill you. ‘If you get lost you’re fucked. You could be wandering those tunnels forever. And then again, you might encounter some of the undesirables. Most of the folks who do the catacombes are all right. It’s a bit of fun, a bit of excitement. Something different. You find a room down there, you light some candles, you smoke some dope, you play some music. The graffiti artists are okay, too. Dedicated boys and girls. Like pigs in shit with all those virgin walls. But there’s some bad dudes, too. Drug dealers, junkies. Guys who’d slit your throat for ten centimes and not think twice about it. And that’s not to mention the tunnel cops. They’ll lock you up and fine you a fucking fortune.’ He pulled on the last of his current roll-up and drew his lips back in a grin. Smoke seeped through brown-stained teeth. ‘So you really don’t want to go down there on your own.’