Seven Nights in Paris, page 11
Throwing her jacket and bag across a chaise longue, Mimi slid behind her desk and flipped open her laptop.
‘Mike Green,’ she said out loud, tapping his name into a search engine, adding the various snippets of information she had gleaned from Lucas and Zoe: London, Voran Cars, L’Hôtel Éclat.
It didn’t yield much. Mike wasn’t senior enough to have his bland smile in the ‘meet the board’ section on the Voran website, there were no news stories, no mention in car industry magazine articles, and Mike had almost no social media presence. None of this was very unusual for a man of his age – guys just didn’t feel the need to get involved – but it was frustrating if you were trying to stalk him.
‘Ah. There you are…’ she muttered, finding a profile on a career networking site. Now Mimi was looking at a picture of Zoe’s husband. Dark hair and eyes, unsmiling as you’d expect for a professional picture. Qualified accountant, middle-management working in sustainability. Dull, dull, dull. He was a good-looking man, but even so, Mike Green didn’t look like the sort of person who stayed at L’Hôtel Éclat. Neither did Zoe, come to that. Zoe was a pretty girl but without much sparkle. High street clothes, a department store handbag, not the sort of woman who usually married captains of industry. And yet there they were in one of the most expensive hotels in one of the most expensive cities on earth. Why? They were on honeymoon, sure – people splashed out – but even so, why there? The Ritz was a bigger name, the Plaza Athénée was nearer to the river. The Éclat was chic, exclusive and the most expensive of the lot. Long experience told Mimi that people always had a motive, a solid reason for making a choice, especially when that choice involved money.
‘Why did you choose l’Éclat, Mike?’ she whispered. ‘And where did you go?’
Mimi ran through the possibilities. A mistress? On his wedding day? Pfft – non. Drunk in a gutter? He’d be back by now, begging forgiveness. Cold feet? Mike Green worked for an international conglomerate; okay, he wasn’t a corporate raider, but Mimi seriously doubted he was the type to suddenly get scared.
So what? An accident? He might not have turned up at any hospital, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been hurt. Hit by a car? Someone would have seen. A mugging? Murder? It was possible of course. At any one time, there were hundreds of unidentified bodies lying in mortuaries around Europe. Paris, like most big cities, had a dark and vicious underbelly – gangs, drug wars, prostitution and sex-trafficking rings – they were all there, giving police and intelligence a daily headache and catching innocents in their cross-fire.
But…
It was much more likely that Mike was somewhere close by – he’d told Zoe he’d be back for dinner, hadn’t he? – but wherever he’d ended up, there was some reason he couldn’t leave. This wasn’t random, Mimi was sure of it – her instincts were jangling. She could feel the flurry of excitement, the familiar certainty that there was a juicy story connected to this. She picked up her phone and scrolled to a familiar number.
‘Antoine, it’s me. I need a favour.’
There was a pause, then the rustle of a handset being covered.
‘Mimi, I told you before, I can’t keep doing this.’
‘Nothing difficult,’ she purred, ‘Just a simple missing person case. I need you to monitor the wires, give me a shout if anything pops up.’
A sigh.
‘Alright. What is it?’
‘I’ll send you the details – let me know if anyone fitting the description comes across your desk. Alive or dead, okay? Kiss kiss.’
She hung up, still thinking. Who else could she put on alert? Mimi had a tame contact in the Ministry of the Interior who had the inside track to the DCRI, the French equivalent of MI5, but that seemed like overkill at this point. Mimi’s guess was that whatever had caused Mike Green to disappear was something much more mundane: money, lust, shame, the holy trinity that led to the poor decisions that usually brought people’s lives crashing down.
She looked back at the picture of Mike.
‘Qui êtes vous maintenant, Monsieur Green?’
This was Paris, a population of eleven million; someone had to have seen him leave the hotel. And if not, Mimi had once tracked a politician three kilometres across Paris using CCTV footage, bouncing from camera to camera until she had found the love nest he’d crawled into. Mike Green was a similar story, Mimi was sure of it. But what was Mike Green’s secret? Everyone had one. Even Mimi. Especially her. She would find out.
But first, they needed publicity. She picked up the phone and called Gabi, her PR. If Mike Green had been a pretty, white, twelve-year-old English girl lost in Paris, he would be on the front page of every newspaper by the next morning. But Mike Green was an unremarkable thirty-something man. They needed an angle.
‘Gabi, I’m sending you a photo,’ said Mimi, without preamble. ‘He’s missing and we need to find him. Get his face everywhere, tout suite.’
Mimi hung up, opened her laptop and sent over the facts to Gabi. That would get things moving, but Mimi wasn’t the kind of woman who left anything to chance. If Mike had slipped through the cracks into the dark side of Paris she would need the most specific kind of help. Set a thief to catch a thief, to coin another phrase. Lucas had flinched when Mimi had used Stefan’s name, but this was no time for half-measures.
She leant back and opened her desk drawer, pulling out a battered address book. This kind of number she didn't keep in her phone. Tapping it in, Mimi let it ring twice, then killed the call.
She stood up, stretched, and then walked across to pour herself an espresso. She might need it: there was a good chance it would be a while before she got to sleep. Her phone buzzed as she was stirring in the sugar. Fast, she thought, reaching for the mobile. He must smell blood.
‘Stefan?’ she said. ‘We need to meet. Off the reservation this time.’
She listened smiling.
‘Sure. And bring your waterproofs.’
Chapter 15
Lucas sat at the desk in Zoe’s suite and tried to concentrate. He’d spent the last hour on fruitless research, trying his very best to think about ‘the Mike Green Story’ as if it were a newspaper investigation. But the truth was, there was nothing particularly sinister about Mike Green. He was an everyday man, a face in the crowd, another grey suit on the commuter train. Neither was there anything particularly strange about wanting to come to Paris for his honeymoon. Paris was the Capital City of Romance and although the Éclat was expensive, Lucas didn’t blame Mike for wanting to splash out on his beautiful new wife. The only thing slightly odd about the events prior to Mike’s disappearance was the speed of his relationship with Zoe. Then again, Lucas and Zoe had moved in together pretty fast too - he’d known almost immediately that Zoe was his soul-mate. Perhaps if he had been a little braver, perhaps if he hadn’t arrived in London feeling so damaged, perhaps he would have chosen love and joy and proposed to her quickly too. But that was all just wishful thinking, wasn’t it?
Lucas pushed away from the desk, rolling his shoulders as he walked over to the bar and switched on the little silver kettle. Mike’s kettle, technically. And Lucas knew that was another of the reasons he had been finding it so hard to focus on the problem. After all, Lucas was sleeping in Mike Green’s wedding suite, drinking his tea, and using his soap. Admittedly there wasn't much choice, given Lucas could barely afford a backpacker’s hostel on his salary, but right now, he felt like a cuckoo in the nest.
Taking his coffee, Lucas walked across to the window, enjoying the simple sounds of the night. The faint buzz of the air-con, the distant growling of traffic. Ahead of him, the endless lights shimmered like gold, the sky was a bruised purple, and the Eiffel Tower lit up like a Christmas tree; at 1am, it was the last sparkle of the night until the next day.
He wondered idly how much it added to the cost of the room to have a view of the Eiffel Tower. Double, probably, maybe triple. Maybe even more if you had a suite like this. It wasn’t that Lucas hadn’t stayed in these sorts of rooms before, he just had never paid for them. Some of the rooms they’d had on family holidays had been just as impressive; his mother had liked the big names: Four Seasons, Park Hyatt, St Regis. But he hadn’t stayed anywhere like this for a very long time.
‘Couldn’t sleep either?’
He turned towards the voice. Zoe standing framed by the bedroom door, wrapped in a hotel bathrobe.
‘I was working. Thinking,’ he corrected himself. ‘I’ve just made coffee. Do you want some?’
‘Please,’ she said, tightening the belt of her white dressing gown as she walked over, her feet scuffing as she walked across the thick carpet.
‘Are you sure that sofa is comfy?’
‘I’ve slept in worse places.’
She came and sat on the chair nearest to him and Lucas felt his heart squeeze. Zoe had always been at her loveliest at times like this. Unadorned, pure. Her cool, natural beauty glowed when her hair fell loose and her face was free of makeup.
‘So what have you been thinking?’
Lucas almost smiled at that. Zoe didn’t want to know what he had been thinking, not really. That he was disappointed that Zoe had ended up with someone like Mike Green, someone so sensible and unremarkable. No, Zoe was special, a bright light in a dark world and, well, she deserved more. The only thing Zoe’s new husband seemed to have going for him was money. But that was just sour grapes, wasn’t it? And it was none of his business, not any more. He cleared his throat, trying to be more professional.
‘We need to find out where Mike went after he left the hotel,’ he said. ‘Did he turn left or right? Did he get into a cab? There’s a restaurant, a sandwich bar and some apartment buildings on the Rue d’Aster opposite the exit Mike used.’
‘Can we use CCTV?’
‘Maybe,’ said Lucas, putting down his coffee mug. ‘Maybe not. Some cities are heavily surveilled, like the big Chinese and Indian cities. Paris not so much; Liberté, egalité, fraternité, all that – especially the first one.’
She hooked her arms over her knees and Lucas tried not to look at her slim, toned leg.
‘Who’s Stefan?’ she asked.
Lucas had been expecting the question. He didn't meet her gaze. ‘Stefan is another of Mimi’s people,’ he said.
‘You didn't seem to react well when she mentioned him. Why?’
‘Stefan and I… we didn’t see eye to eye.’
He was ducking the question, but for once, Zoe wouldn’t let it go.
‘Luc, please,’ she said. ‘If Mimi is sending this guy Stefan to find Mike, I need to know who he is and what he does.’
Lucas hesitated. When they had been together, he’d always deflected Zoe’s questions about working as a paparazzi. The job already had enough of a grubby reputation, he didn’t want to tell her the truth: that at times, it was even darker than she could ever imagine.
‘Stefan was a fixer,’ he said finally. ‘If you needed to find out where someone was or what they were doing, that’s who Mimi turned to.’
‘He’s a criminal?’
‘Not really, although no doubt some of the methods he used were. Bribes, incentives, people will do pretty much anything for money.’
‘You didn’t like him.’
‘No, but I could see he was necessary.’
Lucas took a deep breath.
‘Okay. Look, when I was a foreign correspondent, I would often meet people in the warzone who were there because they liked it. Some people get addicted to the adrenaline and the madness. Stefan was like that.’
‘Was he a foreign correspondent?’
‘No, the other side – he started in the military - but actually, Stefan would have made a good journalist. You have to be a little bit ruthless.’
‘So what is he now?’
‘In theory, Stef is a paparazzo, but he was more like a private investigator.’
‘He sounds like the ideal man to send after Mike.’
‘But Stefan lives in the dark side of Paris, Zoe. He knows gangsters, drug dealers and… worse. He's part of that world.’
Lucas could see Zoe was beginning to understand.
‘So if Mimi needs to send somebody into the dark to find Mike,’ she said slowly, ‘She must have a fairly good idea that’s where he’ll be.’
She looked at Lucas, alarm written on her face.
‘Mimi will have her own theories,’ he said, trying to reassure her. ‘Right now, she’ll want to test a few of them out.’
Lucas watched her rubbing both hands over her face, trying to hold onto herself, trying not to fall apart. He so wanted to take her in his arms, hold her, and tell her it was all going to be alright. But deep down, Lucas didn’t think it would be – not for Mike, anyway. Lucas had a feeling that whatever Mike was involved with, he’d got way out of his depth. Which meant that Zoe was going to be swept up in it, however much Lucas did his best to spare her.
‘I know it was hard for you,’ she said softly.
‘What was?’
‘Coming back here.’
Lucas had told her fairly soon into their relationship the reason he’d left Paris. The dead girl, the tragedy, the scandal – and the subsequent fall out with his family, his father most of all. Zoe had always been understanding but still, he knew it had disappointed her; dating a Frenchman who didn’t ever want to go to Paris.
‘And I’m sorry about how it ended between us,’ she continued. ‘I should have supported you more; I knew what you were going through. But I just ran away.’
Lucas shook his head.
‘I told you, you don’t have anything to be sorry for,’ he said, but in this intimate moment, he felt the sting of their parting as if it was only yesterday. Not that he’d been surprised. By then he was drinking heavily, barely clinging onto his job as a picture researcher at a Soho photo agency, coming home angry and sullen. And his nightmares featuring blood and screaming or silent, accusing faces – and the creeping feeling that he deserved all of it.
‘Zoe, you left me,’ he said, ‘I don’t blame you.’
She’d tried, of course she had. Holding him when he woke up shaking, offering to arrange counselling, asking Rick to cheer him up. But care had turned to frustration and frustration to anger. ‘I can’t live like this anymore!’ she had screamed one night. And the next day, she was gone.
Lucas closed his eyes, not wanting to go back there. Graham had been right: he’d got past it – some of it anyway – what good did it do to relive it all?
‘So are you still living in Parsons Green?’
He shook his head.
‘Islington. I didn’t stay at our flat long after, you know. After you’d gone.’
He saw her swallow.
‘Islington’s nice.’
‘Yes. And I’ve stopped drinking.’
He saw her eyes glitter.
‘You have? Good for you.’
This small talk was torturous. He should just have found a room in a hostel somewhere.
‘And are you still working at the picture place?’
‘No, I work in a bar.’
There was a pause, and then they both burst out laughing.
‘I know, I know,’ said Lucas. ‘Maybe not the ideal career path for a recovering alcoholic.’
‘Luc, you were never…’
He shook his head.
‘An alcoholic? Near enough. But…when you spend every night watching people get drunk, it’s better than the Twelve Steps: you get to see exactly how you used to behave and it’s sobering in every sense.’
‘So you’re doing okay?’
‘Yeah, it’s on Upper Street so it’s a great location. The team are fun, my boss is a good guy.’
Lucas was aware he sounded like someone at a job interview.
‘Sounds nice. You deserve it.’
Lucas shook his head. ‘I’m not too sure about that, but I’m doing my best. And I’m glad you’re happy.’
There was silence for a few moments.
‘There have been lots of times I’ve been happy, Luc. It was just…’
‘What?’
When she looked up, her eyes were full of tears.
‘I couldn’t make you happy with me.’
‘You could – you did.’
She shook her head.
‘It didn’t feel that way. It felt like I wasn’t enough for you.’
‘No,’ he whispered urgently. ‘It wasn’t you. You were always enough. But I wasn't enough – for myself. I didn't believe that I was worthy of you.’
And that was why he drank. Partly because he’d always felt that way: a family who disapproved, the guilt of not following their rigid path to success, and partly because it came with the job. Drinking to feel less scared when there were bullets in the air, drinking to bond with rebel soldiers who might otherwise cut your throat, drinking to celebrate you hadn’t died. And then Lucas had drunk to forget. To blot out that indelible scene as the missile had hissed into the square, blowing his friends to atoms. To erase the terrible guilt of knowing – knowing – that he had pushed a beautiful young girl to take her own life. And finally, Lucas drank to hide from the fact he was screwing up the best thing he’d ever had.
Zoe looked up at him, her eyes wet.
‘Luc, I could see you were hurting and I wanted to help. But you wouldn’t let me.’
Lucas shook his head. ‘Sometimes people just don't think they can be fixed.’
‘You thought you were broken?’
‘Yes. I felt that the airstrike was my fault and I knew the girl dying was down to me. And I thought that all that shit was what I deserved because I was flawed somehow.’
He gave her a sad smile.
‘And then along comes this beautiful girl full of love – and I didn’t feel I deserved it. So I pushed you away. Little by little, I became the thing I despised.’
