Питер Мэй - I'll Keep You Safe

She waved a warrant. ‘Better break it down, then.’ The officer smiled. A chance to do some damage.

‘Hang on,’ Cabrel said. ‘No need for that.’ He knelt down and took a keyring full of slender steel instruments from his wallet, and choosing the right one expertly picked the lock. The door swung open. ‘There we are. No need to wake the neighbours.’

The uniform looked disappointed.

As they climbed the stairs to the apartment itself Braque said, ‘Where did you learn that little trick?’

He grinned. ‘When you’ve spent as much time undercover as I have, Sylvie, you pick up a thing or two.’

At the door of the apartment he repeated the process then pushed it open into a narrow hallway, reaching in to switch on a light before stepping aside to let the forensics team in their Tyvec suits and bootees go in first. He picked up on his earlier theme.

‘So, are you going to tell me about this date or not?’

‘No.’

He tutted and raised his eyes towards the ceiling. ‘Why not?’

‘Because it never happened.’

He looked surprised. ‘How’s that?’

She sighed and realized she was going to have to come clean. ‘It was a blind date.’ Then qualified herself. ‘Well, not exactly blind. I’d seen photographs of him.’

‘A dating website?’

‘Yes.’ She was glad that there was so little light spilling from the apartment on to the landing and he couldn’t see her embarrassment. ‘I was supposed to meet him in a Korean restaurant in the Rue Amelot. But the bomb went off in the square before I got there and, well... I never did get there.’

‘He’s going to think you stood him up. Could you not have phoned?’

‘I didn’t have a number. And anyway...’ She gave him a look. ‘I was busy .’

‘Yeah, me too.’ He grinned. Then, ‘I don’t suppose that’ll do your standing on the website much good.’

‘No it won’t.’ She pursed her lips in annoyance. Another dead end in her search for a relationship to replace her marriage. It was a constant source of irritation to her how quickly her ex had been able to replace her .

‘Who’s looking after the kids?’

‘They’ve been with their dad this week.’

She saw the mischievous twinkle in Cabrel’s eye when he said, ‘He still with that new girl?’

‘Yes.’ She almost spat it at him.

The senior forensics officer called from the other end of the hall. ‘Okay guys, you can come in now. Gloves on.’

They each pulled on latex gloves and walked into the apartment. It was bigger than it seemed from the outside. Three bedrooms, a large open-plan lounge and kitchen with views from windows on two walls that looked out over the city. Lights twinkled below them into a misted distance. The furniture was Scandinavian. White walls were hung with original artwork. Cabrel examined the tableaux briefly, reeling off the names of the artists. Martin Barré, Turner Prize winner Laure Prouvost, Mickalene Thomas, Enoc Perez. Art theft was one of his specialities. ‘Expensive,’ he said.

A laptop computer sat open on the dining table, amidst a scatter of papers and books. A MacBook Pro. Braque sat down at it and tapped the space key. The screen lit up. She went straight to system preferences and brought up Users and Groups. Current user and administrator was Georgy Vetrov. This would have to go back to HQ for forensic examination by a computer expert. But before she closed and bagged it she checked his mailer to see if he, too, had received an email from ‘a.well.wisher.xx@gmail.com’. Nothing.

‘Hey Sylvie,’ Cabrel called from down the hall. ‘We got a staircase here leading down to what looks like her workshop. Want to take a look?’

Irina’s workshop was spread across a mezzanine level above her boutique. There was a draftsman’s desk, a workbench strewn with scissors and clips and needles and dozens of offcuts, several tailor’s dummies, and racks and racks of hanging clothes. Jackets and trousers and capes and skirts, and any number of tops in a range of colours and styles. The place smelled faintly of incense. Musky, like sandalwood.

A laptop on a stand beside the draftsman’s desk woke from sleep at Braque’s touch, its screen filled with diagrams and patterns in a complex piece of dressmaker’s software. Braque supposed that it, too, should go back for examination.

She looked around. Here was Irina Vetrov’s creative soul. Everything had come out of her imagination. A reflection of who she was, or rather who she had been. There was a dress under construction on one of the tailor’s dummies. Eighties retro, with subtly padded shoulders and short sleeves. A dress designed for a slender figure, with a daring slash at the cleavage, and another at one thigh. It was cut from a soft, textured fabric whose weave of a dozen or more coloured threads created the illusion of pale mauve verging on blue. Braque wondered how much a dress like that might cost. Thousands probably. Well beyond her pay scale. But she fancied that it might well fit her, and that if it did she would look like a million euros in it.

The chief forensics officer came down the stairs. ‘We’ll get DNA from his razor, and hers from the hair in her hairbrush. Looks like he might have left in a hurry. If he’s packed anything at all it must have been in an overnight bag.’ And Braque knew that she was unlikely to get any sleep tonight.

It was now a little after 4 a.m. Niamh only knew because Dimitri kept looking at his watch, delivering a running commentary on the passage of time as his frustration grew. She was still endeavouring to keep her mind a blank.

Then the near door pushed open, crashing into their separate worlds of pain and silence, and Martinez stood holding it wide with one arm. Under the other, he grasped an untidy folder bulging with papers. If it was the same one he had brought with him into the interview room earlier, Niamh thought, then it had grown considerably fatter. There were shadows beneath his eyes, and his skin was a putty grey. ‘You can go now,’ he said curtly. And as Dimitri stood up he said to him, ‘Come tomorrow at eleven. We’ll take a full statement.’ He turned to Niamh, wedging the door open with his foot, and held out his free hand. ‘Your passport, please, Madame. You are not free to leave Paris until I say so. Everything will be returned to you then.’

‘Am I still a suspect?’

‘You are a material witness. And, anyway, I am assuming you will not want to leave without your husband’s remains.’

Niamh had often heard bodies referred to as remains . But in this very personal context, in the aftermath of a car bomb, the word took on sickeningly macabre connotations. She felt a wave of nausea rise through her body, and a sudden weakness in her legs caused her to stagger slightly. Dimitri caught her arm and glared at Martinez. ‘Not a very clever choice of words, Commandant. Perhaps you were absent the day they taught tact at the police academy.’

Martinez looked fleetingly uncomfortable. He was still holding out his hand. ‘Madame?’ Niamh took her passport from her bag and placed it in his hand. He jerked his head towards the corridor behind him. ‘Along the hall and down the stairs.’ And she was glad of Dimitri’s support as he led her towards the staircase.

Outside, the early morning had leached all warmth from the preceding day and there was a penetrating chill in the air. The lights of the city reflected on the dark flow of the Seine, and at the far end of the Île de la Cité the floodlit Notre-Dame infused the night sky with light, obliterating the stars. Police vehicles were lined up all along the Quai des Orfèvres. Traffic still criss-crossed the Pont Saint-Michel. Niamh found something painful in the prosaic sense of life continuing as usual. Other people’s lives. Not hers. Not Ruairidh’s. And she was overwhelmed by a sense of desolation. What on earth to do now? About anything. Nothing mattered any more. Without Ruairidh, what point was there in even putting one foot in front of the other? And yet here she was, tipped out by police into the city in the middle of the night. Thoughts to be gathered, decisions to be made. Dimitri saved her from having to address either for the moment. ‘I need a drink,’ he said. He buttoned his shirt at the neck and turned up the collar of his jacket. ‘What about you?’