Peter May - Extraordinary People

Enzo frowned and read and re-read the entry. Mad à minuit . Many before him had puzzled over it and, in the end, failed to make sense of it. Mad at midnight. Except that there was no such word as mad in the French language. And why would he have mixed English and French? It had to be a shortening of another word. Enzo pulled a French dictionary from the bookcase and looked up words beginning with mad . There were not many. Madame, mademoiselle , and Madeleine , the French for Magdalene. Madagascar and Madeira, Madras and Madrid. Madalopam , a strong calico. Madéfier , the verb to wet or moisten. Madone , the Madonna. Madriér , a thick plank of wood. Madrure , a mottle on wood or porcelain. A few others. But nothing that chimed.

The date of the entry was Friday, August 23rd, 1996. So presumably it referred to a rendezvous somewhere at midnight that night. The speculation was that the entry had been made in the course of that final phone call registered to his number the night before. But there was no way to prove it.

Enzo turned his attention, then, to photographs taken of Gaillard’s apartment, and wondered again how Raffin had managed to get copies. Then he noticed a tiny sequence of figures printed in red in the bottom corner of the prints. 2906’03. A date. These pictures had been taken just a little over three years ago. He frowned. How was that possible? It was ten years since Gaillard had disappeared. He dug into the thigh pocket of his cargos and found his cell phone. He tracked down Raffin’s number and pressed dial.

Raffin managed to convey sleepy and irritated in a single word. ‘ Oui ?’

‘Roger, it’s Enzo.’

There was a splutter of indignation from the other end. ‘Jesus Christ, Macleod, do you have any idea what time it is?’

‘How did you manage to take photographs of Gaillard’s apartment seven years after he’d disappeared?’

‘What?’ Raffin was now transmitting a mixture of incomprehension and anger.

‘Did you take these photographs of Gaillard’s apartment?’

‘Yes.’

‘How?’

‘Because the place hasn’t been touched since he vanished. His mother has preserved it. Like a shrine. Except that she refuses to believe he’s dead. She wants it to be there for him, just as he left it, the day he returns.’

Enzo could hardly believe his luck. A potential crime scene, preserved as in aspic, available for re-examination after ten years. ‘I want to see it.’

‘Talk to me tomorrow.’

‘No, I want to see it tomorrow. As early as possible. Can you arrange it?’

He heard Raffin sigh. ‘Call me in the morning.’ He paused. ‘At a civilised hour.’ And he hung up.

Enzo sat for several minutes contemplating the prospect of being able to revisit Gaillard’s apartment after all these years. No doubt it had been cleaned after forensics had finished with it. But there was so much you could learn about a man from the space he inhabited. And there was always the possibility that Enzo might see something others had missed.

The party across the street continued relentlessly. God, did these people not have homes to go to? Enzo adjusted the desk lamp and rubbed his eyes again in the bright light it spilled across the papers strewn over the desktop. He stretched and thought about bed. But his mind was still full of Gaillard, and his eye lighted again on the photocopy of the diary page treated by forensics. He stared at it for a long time, and then screwed up his eyes, inclining his head, and became aware that his heart-rate had suddenly increased. He looked around the apartment, frustrated that it was unlikely to provide the tracing paper he needed. And then he had a thought and crossed to the small, open-plan kitchen where he began going through the drawers. The third one turned up what he was looking for. A roll of greaseproof paper. He tore off a good twelve inches, and took it back to the desk, smoothing it out over the top of the photocopy. Crisp, opaque paper, but thin enough for the lines beneath to show through. Ideal. He reached for a pencil and immediately began the careful process of retracing Gaillard’s final doodles.

Passy is on the green métro line No. 6, which loops right across Paris from Nation in the east to Place Charles de Gaulle and the Arc de Triomphe in the West. It is a short walk up a steep hill from the station to the Place Costa Rica.

It was a misty morning, cool after the heat of the night before, and Raffin had the collar of his jacket turned up as if he were cold. But he had chosen to sit at a table on the pavement outside the Brasserie Le Franklin. The dregs of a grande crème stained his cup, and the crumbs of a croissant littered the tiny table in front of him. He was reading that day’s edition of Libération, the left-wing daily to which he most often contributed as a freelance. He looked up and frowned as Enzo slumped into the seat beside him. From here they had a view back down the Rue de l’Alboni to where the métro line stretched away above ground, disappearing into the mist over the Pont de Bir-Hakeim.

‘You’re late,’ Raffin said. It was all of five minutes beyond their agreed meeting time.

‘It happens,’ Enzo said without guilt, remembering the more than twenty minutes Raffin had kept him waiting the night before. ‘Is it all fixed?’

‘Of course. She’s waiting for us in the apartment.’

The elegant stone façade of Gaillard’s five-storey apartment block was in the Rue Vineuse. Raffin entered the code that unlocked the wrought-iron gate and pushed it open. Through a passage they walked into a small courtyard, glass doors leading to a wood-panelled lobby, where polished brass stair-rods held in place a thick-piled red carpet dressing a marble staircase. Beyond, Enzo could see another, bigger, courtyard, a garden with manicured lawn and shady trees. Everything about the place reeked of wealth.

Raffin said, ‘Gaillard achieved the aspiration of every ambitious Parisian to be entre le court et le jardin .’ Enzo had heard the phrase before. To be between the courtyard and the garden was Paris-speak for having made it. To live almost anywhere in this prestigious sixteenth arrondissement was to have made it. It was an area populated by politicians and film stars, TV celebrities and pop idols.

They took the elevator to the fifth floor, and Madame Gaillard opened tall mahogany doors to let them into her son’s long-empty apartment. She was a surprisingly small woman, shrunken by age, a little unsteady on her feet. Raffin had told Enzo on the way up that she was nearly ninety. As they shook hands, Enzo’s big fingers enveloped hers, and he was afraid to grasp her hand too firmly in case it broke.

‘Monsieur Raffin tells me you’re going to find my son,’ she said. And suddenly Enzo felt burdened by that responsibility. This was about more than just a bet entered into lightly over dinner. It was about a man’s life, a woman’s son. An almost certain tragedy.

‘I’m going to do my best.’

The old lady left them to wander through the apartment as they wished, while she went and sat by the window in the front room, staring out across the sea of mist that washed over the city below. Beautifully polished parquet flooring, liberally littered with expensive oriental rugs, led them from room to room. Antique furniture stood against cream-painted walls. A Louis Quinze armoire , a nineteenth-century chaise longue , an ancient, carved wooden trunk inlaid with silver and mother of pearl. All the furniture seemed to have been bought for effect. Chairs looked stiff and uncomfortable, the four-poster bed in Gaillard’s bedroom was unyieldingly hard. Heavy curtains were draped around all the windows, tied back by gold silk cord, but still obscuring much of the light. There was an oddly gloomy feel to this top-floor apartment with its large French windows leading to ornate wrought-iron balconies. Enzo had an urge to throw back all the curtains and let the light in. But this was how Gaillard had lived. This was how he liked it.