Tess Gerritsen - In Their Footsteps

The crowd was dispersing. It was time to leave.

He edged toward the curb. Quietly he dropped his pistol in the gutter and kicked it down the storm drain. The weapon was stolen, untraceable; better to have it found near the scene of the crime. It would cement the case against Jordan Tavistock.

Several blocks away, he found a telephone. He dialed his client.

“Jordan Tavistock has been arrested for murder,” said Foch.

“Whose murder?” came the sharp reply.

“One of Daumier’s agents. A woman.”

“Did Tavistock do it?”

“No. I did.”

There was a sudden burst of laughter from his client. “This is priceless! Absolutely priceless! I ask you to follow Jordan, and you have him framed for murder. I can’t wait to see what you do with his sister.”

“What do you wish me to do?” asked Foch.

There was a pause. “I think it’s time to resolve this mess,” he said. “Finish it.”

“The woman is no problem. But her brother will be difficult to reach, unless I can find a way into the prison.”

“You could always get yourself arrested.”

“And when they identify my fingerprints?” Foch shook his head. “I need someone else for that job.”

“Then I’ll find you someone,” came the reply. “For now, let’s work on one thing at a time. Beryl Tavistock.”

A Turkish man now owned the building on Rue Myrha. He’d tried to improve it. He’d painted the exterior walls, shored up the crumbling balconies, replaced the missing roof slates, but the building, and the street on which it stood, seemed beyond rehabilitation. It was the fault of the tenants, explained Mr. Zamir, as he led them up two flights of stairs to the attic flat. What could one do with tenants who let their children run wild? By all appearances, Mr. Zamir was a successful businessman, a man whose tailored suit and excellent English bespoke prosperous roots. There were four families in the building, he said, all of them reliable enough with the rent. But no one lived in the attic flat-he’d always had difficulty renting that one out. People had come to inspect the place, of course, but when they heard of the murder, they quickly backed out. These silly superstitions! Oh, people claim they do not believe in ghosts, but when they visit a room where two people have died…

“How long has the flat been empty?” asked Beryl.

“A year now. Ever since I have owned the building. And before that-” he shrugged “-I do not know. It may have been empty for many years.” He unlocked the door. “You may look around if you wish.”

A puff of stale air greeted them as they pushed open the door-the smell of a room too long shut away from the world. It was not an unpleasant room. Sunshine washed in through a large, dirt-streaked window. The view looked down over Rue Myrha, and Beryl could see children kicking a soccer ball in the street. The flat was completely empty of furniture; there were only bare walls and floor. Through an open door, she glimpsed the bathroom with its chipped sink and tarnished fixtures.

In silence Beryl circled the flat, her gaze moving across the wood floor. Beside the window, she came to a halt. The stain was barely visible, just a faint brown blot in the oak planks. Whose blood? she wondered. Mum’s? Dad’s? Or is it both of theirs, eternally mingled?

“I have tried to sand the stain away,” said Mr. Zamir. “But it goes very deep into the wood. Even when I think I have erased it, in a few weeks the stain seems to reappear.” He sighed. “It frightens them away, you know. The tenants, they do not like to see such reminders on their floor.”

Beryl swallowed hard and turned to look out the window. Why on this street? she wondered. In this room? Of all the places in Paris, why did they die here?

She asked quietly, “Who owned this building, Mr. Zamir? Before you did?”

“There were many owners. Before me, it was a M. Rosenthal. And before him, a M. Dudoit.”

“At the time of the murder,” said Richard, “the landlord was a man named Jacques Rideau. Did you know him?”

“I am sorry, I do not. That would have been many years ago.”

“Twenty.”

“Then I would not have met him.” Mr. Zamir turned to the door. “I will leave you alone. If you have questions, I will be down in number three for a while.”

Beryl heard the man’s footsteps creak down the stairs. She looked at Richard and saw that he was standing off in a corner, frowning at the floor. “What are you thinking?” she asked.

“About Inspector Broussard. How he kept trying to point at that photo. The spot he was pointing to would be somewhere around here. Just to the left of the door.”

“There’s nothing to look at. And there was nothing in the photo, either.”

“That’s what bothers me. He seemed so troubled by it. And there was something about a briefcase…”

“The NATO file,” she said softly.

He looked at her. “How much have you been told about Delphi?”

“I know it wasn’t Mum or Dad. They would never have gone to the other side.”

“People go over for different reasons.”

“But not them. They certainly didn’t need the money.”

“Communist sympathies?”

“Not the Tavistocks!”

He moved toward her. With every step he took, her pulse seemed to leap faster. He came close enough to make her feel threatened. And tempted. Quietly he said, “There’s always blackmail.”

“Meaning they had secrets to hide?”

“Everyone does.”

“Not everyone turns traitor.”

“It depends on the secret, doesn’t it? And how much one stands to lose because of it.”

In silence they gazed at each other, and she found herself wondering how much he really did know about her parents. How much he wasn’t admitting to. She sensed he knew a lot more than he was letting on, and that suspicion loomed like a barrier between them. Those secrets again. Those unspoken truths. She had grown up in a household where certain conversational doors were always kept locked. I refuse to live my life that way. Ever again.

She turned away. “They had no reason to be vulnerable to blackmail.”

“You were just a child, eight years old. Away at boarding school in England. What did you really know about them? About their marriage, their secrets? What if it was your mother who rented this flat? Met her lover here?”

“I don’t believe it. I won’t.”

“Is it so difficult to accept? That she was human, that she might have had a lover?” He took her by the shoulders, willing her to meet his gaze. “She was a beautiful woman, Beryl. If she’d wanted to, she could have had any number of lovers.”

“You’re making her out to be a tramp!”

“I’m considering all the possibilities.”

“That she sold out Queen and country? To keep some vile little secret from surfacing?” Angrily she wrenched away from him. “Sorry, Richard, but my faith runs a little deeper than that. And if you’d known them, really known them, you’d never consider such a thing.” She pivoted away and walked to the door.

“I did know them,” he said. “I knew them rather well.”

She stopped, turned to face him. “What do you mean by ‘rather well’?”

“We…moved in the same circles. Not the same team, exactly. But we worked at similar purposes.”

“You never told me.”

“I didn’t know how much I should tell you. How much you should know.” He began to slowly circle the room, carefully considering each word before he spoke. “It was my first assignment. I’d just completed my training at Langley -”

“CIA?”

He nodded. “I was recruited straight out of the university. Not exactly my first career choice. But somehow they’d gotten hold of my master’s thesis, an analysis of Libyan arms capabilities. It turned out to be amazingly close to the mark. They knew I was fluent in a few languages. And that I had taken out quite a large sum in student loans. That was the carrot, you see-the loan payoff. The foreign travel. And, I have to admit, the idea intrigued me, the chance to work as an Intelligence analyst…”