Mario Reading - The Mayan Codex

He cleared his throat, measuring the level of his tone against the distant sound of the sea. ‘You were tied up and doped when my associate found you. Am I right in assuming that my admission about bugging your mother and your siblings has not distressed you quite as much as it might have done under other circumstances? That you might even…’ and here Calque felt perversely tempted to burst out laughing ‘…be alienated in some way from the rest of your family?’

Lamia gave Calque his jacket back. ‘Could we discuss this someplace else, do you think? Over a coffee and a croissant perhaps? I haven’t eaten anything in fifteen hours.’

Calque shrugged on his jacket. He could smell the woman’s scent on his collar, and it disturbed him. ‘Of course.’

‘And my name is Lamia.’

The sudden volte-face wrong-footed Calque. ‘Lamia? That is certainly an uncommon name.’ He vainly tried to conjure up who or what Lamia had represented in Classical mythology. Had she been the one whose tongue Jupiter had torn out in a fit of pique to prevent her giving the game away to Hera about one of his many affairs? No, that had been Lara. Or was that Laodice? So it was true, then. His brain was definitely going. ‘My name is Calque. Joris Calque. Ex-Captain in the Police Nationale.’

‘Well, Ex-Captain Calque, do you have any aspirin on you? I have a splitting headache. And your associate – for you mentioned an associate, didn’t you? – appears to have overlooked my handbag in his headlong rush to kidnap me.’

Lamia emerged from the unisex washroom at the back of the fisherman’s cafe near the Pointe de la Pinede. She had scrubbed her face and fluffed out her hair with her fingers, but the corrugations in her slacks were more terminal. She bent down, yanked at the slacks one final time, and then gave up.

Calque saw some of the early morning regulars watching her. Despite the catastrophic blemish on the side of her face, she was still a self-evidently handsome young woman.

Calque stood up as she approached his table. ‘I thought you might have run away. Or gone to call the police. You would have been perfectly within your rights to do so.’

‘I know that.’

‘So why didn’t you?’

Lamia sat down. She stared at Calque, her eyes unwavering. ‘Because you offered me your jacket when you thought I might be cold.’

The waiter interrupted to bring them their cafe-cremes and a metal basket of croissants.

Lamia looked up at him. ‘Do you have any aspirin?’

‘Yes, Madame.’

She pinched two of her fingers together. ‘Two? With a glass of water? I’d be eternally grateful.’

Calque saw the waiter’s eyes hovering anywhere but on the woman’s strawberry birthmark. He felt an unexpected rush of pity for her – almost as if she were his daughter, instead of the pathetic, alienated girl who truly fulfilled that role, and who, terminally brainwashed by her termagant of a mother, hadn’t been able to bring herself to speak to him for the past fifteen years.

Lamia pecked at her coffee. ‘I suppose you’ve got everything on that tape machine of yours? The full record of what took place in the Corpus chamber? Or did you hide your recorder in the kitchen by mistake?’

Calque thrust his sentimental nature resolutely to the back of his mind, where it belonged. He took a preparatory breath – something he always did when he was about to tell an untruth to someone he was questioning. ‘To answer your questions in reverse order, Mademoiselle – no I did not leave my recorder in the kitchen. And yes I do have a full record of what went on.’ The lie sat uneasily with him for some reason, and he could feel the strain telling on the muscles below his eyes.

For Joris Calque had always been susceptible to women – it was a fact that he had been obliged to live with during his thirty years as a police officer. But he was not so naive that he didn’t realize that women, at their worst, could be just as lethal as men. Look at the Countess. And here he was, calmly chatting away to the woman’s daughter as if she were a work colleague – or his next-door neighbour.

He forced himself to remember that he was still dealing with a potential accessory before the fact. A woman who might even be a joint principal in the actus reus committed by Achor Bale against his subordinate, Paul Macron.

‘So I’ve no need to explain anything to you, Captain?’

‘No.’

Lamia prodded at her croissant, but didn’t make any further stab at eating it. ‘So what are you planning to do about it?’

Calque dipped his croissant in his coffee and transported it to his mouth, one hand automatically protecting his shirt from drips. ‘What do you suggest?’

Lamia took the glass of water and the two aspirin from the saucer the waiter was offering her. Still watching Calque, she tossed back the pills and swallowed the water. ‘You could alert the police, for a start.’

The waiter flinched, then backed away, as if he had inadvertently wandered too close to an open fire. Lamia gave him an absent-minded smile of thanks.

‘The police?’ Calque laughed. ‘I’m something of a persona non grata with my ex-colleagues at the moment. And you must know that tape recordings do not constitute evidence. They can be doctored too easily.’

Lamia massaged her temples, as if she felt that this might serve to speed up the aspirin’s effects. ‘But you knew that before you started, Captain Calque. You must have made some contingency plans?’

Calque sat up straighter in his chair. ‘Contingency plans? How could I make contingency plans when I didn’t know what I was about to hear?’

Lamia stared at him quizzically. ‘And Adam Sabir? What are you going to do about him?’

Calque could feel his fragile house of cards beginning to topple. ‘I’m going to phone him up, of course, and bring him up to date.’

‘Phone him up? Bring him up to date? Are you quite mad? Bring him up to date about what?’

Calque tipped back his head and closed his eyes.

Lamia sighed. ‘You don’t know anything, do you, Captain? You’re merely grasping at straws. Was there anything on that tape of yours at all?’

Calque allowed his head to snap forward. ‘Oh yes. I have a good hour-and-a-half’s worth of material.’

‘Material? What sort of material?’

‘Your meeting. Two days ago.’

‘Then you know what I was doing in the room where your mystery associate found me? Why I was doped and tied up?’

Calque felt as if he were sucking on a lemon and trying to blow through a trumpet at the same time. ‘Of course.’

Lamia stood up. ‘Then you don’t need anything from me, do you, Captain? I thank you for your frankness. Would you kindly do me a further favour and call me a taxi? And I would appreciate the loan of a few sous until my bank opens and I am able to inform them about the loss of my cards. I will write you an IOU if you so desire.’

Calque followed Lamia out onto the street. The early morning rush hour had started, and the buzz and swish of passing traffic merely added to his sense of frustration. ‘What are you going to do, Mademoiselle? Where are you going to go?’

‘What possible concern can that be of yours?’

Calque was briefly tempted to come clean and admit that his tape recording was useless. To follow his hunch that the woman was genuine. Perhaps she really had rebelled against her mother and all that she stood for? But thirty years of ingrained caution, in which Calque had lived by the rule that you never, ever, offer information to your opponent that he might one day use against you, overrode his better instincts. ‘Please let me drop you off somewhere. It’s the least I can do in the circumstances.’