This is the Night They Come For You, page 19
Stephen has already finished his coffee. He sets the mug down. ‘I’m thinking of going up to Litster’s now,’ he announces.
‘I’m not ready,’ Wendy objects. ‘I need a shower. And I have to give Oliver his breakfast.’
‘Actually, I thought I’d walk. It’s a fine morning.’
‘You’re going to walk all that way?’
‘I need some air, Wendy. You can join me when you’re done here.’ He smiles, hoping no doubt to reassure her. Which he utterly fails to do. ‘There’s no hurry.’
Suzette paces her room at Tylney Hall, turning over in her mind the choices that confront her. She slept badly, unable to stop thinking about what the fire at Litster’s Cot means. An electrical fault, as Gray desperately suggested? She doesn’t believe that for a moment. And she doubts he does either. It’s just too big a coincidence that this should follow her reluctance to give Monsieur Saidi what he obviously wants.
What troubles her even more than the suspicion that burning down the cottage is intended as a warning is the thought that she’s been followed to England. It’s hard to see otherwise how anyone could have made the connection with Litster’s Cot. But, if that’s true, then they know she’s staying at Tylney Hall as well. And probably that she and Gray went to see Nedjar yesterday. They know altogether too much for her to feel remotely safe.
Which makes her wonder if she should have sent the email to Coqblin & Baudouin after all.
There was something comfortingly theoretical about her discussions with Gray and Nedjar. Laloul’s record as a dangerous man is undeniable, but somehow it never occurred to her he could still be dangerous – to her, in the here and now. But staring at the smoke and flames that consumed Litster’s Cot last night changed everything. She suddenly realized her misgivings about saying her father could ever have written J’avoue counted for very little compared with ensuring her safety – and that of her children.
Thinking about Timothée and Élodie only alarmed her further. If Laloul could have her followed to England, he’s quite capable of discovering her children’s whereabouts. She texted them both early this morning and has so far received an answer only from Élodie, who’s continuing to enjoy her holiday on Mykonos in carefree fashion. Timothée hasn’t responded. That isn’t surprising in itself, considering how badly they’ve been getting on recently. But Suzette’s finding it difficult to convince herself there’s nothing more to be made of his silence.
She goes into the bathroom and douches her face with cold water. She clasps the rim of the basin and stares at herself in the mirror. The strain she’s under is apparent in the hollowness of her eyes. This can’t go on. That much is obvious. She’s starting to believe things are actually worse than they really are. Timothée and Élodie aren’t in any danger. Nor is she, if she follows the line of least resistance. That’s all she has to do.
The decision is made. She’ll go and see Stephen Gray. They’ll talk this through until the nonsense about electrical faults is stripped away and they can reach an agreement about what has to be done, like it or not, to let them both get on with their lives safely and securely. It’s the only course of action open to them. And the sooner they embark on it the better.
Taleb reaches Police HQ with about forty minutes to spare before he and Hidouchi are due to question Abderrahmane. He checks with Slimani on the desk that all is well with the prisoner, as indeed it is, which is a relief but no great surprise: Abderrahmane is made of sterner stuff than Bahlouli. Then he heads down to Archives, where the lugubrious Azzi greets him with an unfounded complaint that he left the records in chaos after his visit of the previous afternoon.
This Taleb ignores. He literally has no time to waste arguing with Azzi. He’s interested only in seeing whatever the files hold on the murder of Nigel Dalby, proprietor of Le Chélifère bookshop, and Azzi, much as he’d like to, can’t stop him.
His search reveals that Dalby was shot through the head on the balcony of his apartment some time on Monday 21 February 1994. His body was discovered late that afternoon by his former employee at the bookshop, Riad Nedjar, who regularly delivered food and supplies to him. Ballistic evidence suggested a rifle shot from a neighbouring apartment block. The investigating officer was a notorious slacker called Djillali, who concluded it was probably an Islamist killing, despite the fact that a murder such as this required planning, patience and precision, none of which was the norm for Islamist groups in those days. The question Taleb would have asked was why anyone should have gone to such lengths to kill Dalby. And he finds himself asking the question still, twenty-six years later.
‘You’re going to put that file back properly, aren’t you?’ shouts Azzi from his desk. ‘I don’t like having to clear up after you and your DSS houri.’
Taleb doesn’t give Azzi the encouragement of a reply. He jots down Riad Nedjar’s address as it was in 1994 with no great optimism that he’ll still be living there and closes the file. He already doubts Dalby was murdered by Islamists. Even in Djillali’s slapdash account it reads more like a professional hit. Ordered by Zarbi, maybe? It’s possible Nedjar knows.
Taleb returns the file to the shelf and sets off for the door, determinedly avoiding Azzi’s gaze. Still he says nothing. He’s actually quite proud of his self-restraint.
‘They tell me you lost a suspect last night, Taleb. Did he fall? Or did you push him to save—’
The door closes. And Taleb starts up the stairs, relieved he has to hear no more. Until the next time.
‘Delightful though it is to be served breakfast in bed,’ says Oliver as he sits up, ‘I think I’m beginning to feel equal to eating it down in the kitchen.’
‘That’s really good news,’ says Wendy. She smiles broadly and sets the tray down on the bedside table, then kisses him on the forehead.
‘You haven’t brought any coffee for yourself?’ Oliver asks as he picks up his glass of orange juice.
‘No. I have to be off shortly.’
Oliver sighs. ‘Ah yes. Litster’s Cot. It’s not going to be a pretty sight. Stephen’s impatient to leave, I imagine.’
‘Actually, he’s already gone.’
‘He has?’
‘Yes. On foot. I’ll drive him back, obviously.’
‘Do you want me to come with you?’
‘No, no. There’s no need for that.’
He gives her a concerned frown. ‘It could be quite a shock for you, Wen.’
‘It’ll be a blackened, smoking ruin,’ she says briskly. ‘I’m prepared for that.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Don’t worry, darling. I’ll cope.’
‘As you always do. By the way, was there something wrong with the wiring?’ Oliver seems to have placed more reliance on Stephen’s theory than she has. ‘Did your father ever report any problems?’
‘Not that I can recall. But that’ll be for the insurance company to work out. I must dash.’
‘I’ll see you later, then.’
Wendy reaches the doorway, where she pauses and looks back at her husband. ‘I’m sorry my brother keeps complicating our lives, darling, really I am.’
‘It’s not your fault, Wen.’ Oliver smiles. ‘It’s not really his either.’
Not Stephen’s fault? Wendy isn’t sure. Oliver doesn’t know about the box he stowed in their garage yesterday. She decided not to worry him with the information. But she knows. And she can’t help suspecting a connection with the fire, though what the connection might be she can’t imagine.
A few minutes later, she calls a goodbye to Oliver up the stairs and heads out to the garage. She opens the door, climbs into the Subaru and starts up.
At that moment her eye is taken once again by the box Stephen added to one of the piles of his boxed-up possessions. She’d like very much to open it and see what’s inside, but she knows she can’t do that without his discovering it’s been tampered with, because he’s written his name across the tape sealing the lid.
Suddenly, an idea occurs to her that appeals to her instantly, so much so that she acts on it without further thought. Stephen would be justified in reproaching her if she opened the box without his permission, but if the box opened accidentally – if it opened itself, as it were – that would be a different matter.
She engages forward rather than reverse and presses down on the accelerator.
The car nudges into the stacks of boxes, dislodging several of them, including the one she’s interested in, which lands on the floor with a heavy thump.
Wendy turns off the engine and jumps out. The box is lying on its side, but is annoyingly intact, though the contents – whatever they are – have pushed out a bulge in the lid. The tape is still holding it closed. But that doesn’t trouble her. It’ll be easy to claim it didn’t hold when she explains what happened. She crouches by the box and prises the tape free, releasing one flap of the lid and pulling it down flat with the floor.
Some sheets of paper, some covered with type, some blank, slide out. Something else, dark and metallic, is wedged inside the box. Wendy yanks it out, unconcerned for niceties now.
It’s an old manual Olivetti typewriter. How old Wendy wouldn’t like to say. It looks to her as if it dates from the middle of the previous century. And it’s had a lot of use, judging by the chips to the paintwork and some of the keys. She’s never seen it before. It certainly didn’t belong to her father.
A shadow falls across her as she crouches by the box, holding the typewriter in her hands. She looks round and sees Suzette Fontaine standing a few feet away.
‘I called, but you didn’t hear,’ Suzette explains. ‘I’m—’ Then she stops. And stares in obvious amazement at the typewriter.
‘What’s wrong?’ asks Wendy, standing up slowly, still holding the typewriter.
‘Mon Dieu,’ Suzette gasps. ‘La machine à écrire.’
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’ For once this is literally true. That’s exactly how Suzette looks. Like she’s seen a ghost.
‘The typewriter.’ Suzette points a wavering finger at the machine.
‘Yes? What about it?’
‘It’s my father’s.’
SEVENTEEN
THE WALLS OF LITSTER’S COT STILL STAND, BLACKENED AND BATTERED. But the rest of the cottage and its contents are a jumble of sodden ashes. It’s hard to distinguish between roof trusses, floorboards, carpets and furniture. The larger objects – oven, fridge, washing machine – are carbonized hulks. The smell of smoke still hangs in the air. The garden is a scorched blank, the bushes and shrubs reduced to stumps, the oak tree a skeleton, the wrought-iron table and chairs standing so thin that the slightest touch would surely see them crumble to dust.
Gray walks solemnly round the taped-off perimeter of the property, passing at one corner the tiles he had yet to put on the roof, coated in soot. He doesn’t know what the fire brigade are ultimately going to determine as the cause of the blaze, but he hasn’t much doubt in his own mind that it wasn’t an accident, or the work of local youths. He wonders whether, if he sifted through the debris, he’d find his laptop anywhere, or whether that was removed by those who did this.
He walks back out to the lane past the wreck of his car and leans against the bank on the opposite side. A few branch-ends on the tree above him are burnt, but otherwise the damage is confined to Litster’s Cot itself. And there the damage amounts to complete destruction.
Laloul must have had Suzette followed when she travelled here from France, he reasons. It was what he feared as soon as she turned up, though there was nothing he could do then to deflect the threat. They must have waited until the cottage was empty before breaking in under cover of darkness. What were they looking for? The typewriter? The original of the confession? Well, at least they didn’t find either of those. And Gray took extreme care when he drove to Wendy and Oliver’s yesterday to ensure no one was tailing him.
He was worried at first about a physical attack. He supposes he should be grateful, in a way, that they preferred to strike when he wasn’t there. He needs to alert Nedjar to what’s happened, of course. He knows he does. He hasn’t quite brought himself to do so yet, largely because Nedjar warned him moving against Laloul was dangerous. But he can’t delay much longer. When his phone pings, he wonders if it might be him. Then he realizes it’s his A phone, as he calls it, not his B phone – the one Nedjar insisted he buy and use exclusively for communications between them and with Zarbi’s intermediary.
As he pulls the phone out of his pocket, he sees the message-received alert. A message from Wendy, maybe, telling him she’s set off. No. It’s from an unknown number. That instantly troubles him. He opens it.
And sees only an array of Arabic characters:
That troubles him even more. He needs to speak to Nedjar, no question about it.
He swaps phones and makes the call.
No reply. Gray curses silently and leaves a voicemail message. He can do nothing now. Except wait.
Oliver enters the kitchen to find Wendy sitting at the table, staring bemusedly at Suzette Fontaine, who’s sitting opposite her. On the table between them stands an old and somewhat battered manual typewriter and a strew of sheets of paper, some typed on, some blank.
Neither of them reacts to his arrival at first. Then Wendy looks up at him. ‘Oh, darling, there you are,’ she says. ‘You remember Suzette?’
‘Of course.’
‘Hello again,’ says Suzette, nodding to him. She sounds slightly dazed.
‘What’s going on?’ he asks, pointing to the table.
‘You should sit down,’ says Wendy. ‘This has been … quite a shock.’
Oliver’s worried now. Since his illness, he finds he craves tranquillity. Shocks have never been less welcome.
‘Why don’t you explain, Suzette?’ Wendy asks, looking towards her. ‘I think I’d like to hear it again myself anyway.’
‘I am sorry for it all,’ Suzette says quietly, her eyes downcast. She picks at a thread on the sleeve of her top.
‘We’re past that,’ says Wendy, reaching out and patting her on the wrist. ‘Just tell Oliver what you know.’
‘Yes.’ Suzette sighs. ‘I will.’ She swallows hard and begins. ‘My father wrote a memoir he called “J’avoue” during his last months alone in Algiers. In it he confessed to involvement in the murder in Paris of a presidential aide, Guy Tournier, while he and Harriet were working at Tativille in the spring of 1965. The murder was carried out by two Algerians, Wassim Zarbi and Nadir Laloul, in revenge for Tournier’s part in a massacre of Algerian demonstrators in Paris in 1961. Papa witnessed that massacre, which is what led him to help them. Zarbi also worked at Tativille. That’s how they met. Harriet discovered what they’d done and told Zarbi she’d go to the police unless he left Paris straight away. He was a hardened FLN fighter: the last man she should have threatened in such a way. He killed her. Or Laloul did. Or both of them. I am sorry, but that is how her life ended. He and Laloul disposed of her body and took Papa back to Algeria with them. And so …’
She sighs again. ‘He never left. He ran a bookshop. He married my mother. I was born. Zarbi became something big in the Sécurité Militaire. He used Papa as an informant about members of the intelligentsia who bought books from him. It is not a happy story. Not much from those days in Algeria is. Stephen visited him several times, looking for information about what had happened to Harriet. Papa did his best to block his investigations. Eventually, after Stephen’s visit in 1993, Zarbi decided – I think – to have Papa killed. And that is what happened, early in 1994.’
She falls silent. ‘Tell Oliver about the confession, Suzette,’ Wendy prompts her. ‘Explain how it reached you.’
‘A man calling himself Saidi contacted me recently through a firm of Swiss lawyers, claiming the confession had been discovered hidden in our old apartment in Algiers. He wanted me to say, based on an extract he sent me, whether I thought it was genuine before exploring the possibility of having it published as some kind of … document of the period. That is why I came to see Stephen. To ask his opinion before I gave an answer. But I didn’t understand what was really going on. I didn’t understand that this was all … part of a battle.’
Oliver frowns at her. ‘A battle?’
‘I believe Saidi is actually Nadir Laloul. He left Algeria in 1999 with a fortune embezzled from the national oil and gas company. Zarbi was arrested and imprisoned for corruption shortly afterwards. He was given a thirty-year sentence. I don’t know whether he’s been released or not. But I believe Stephen found out where Laloul has been living and sent him a copy of the confession in order to … I’m not exactly sure … blackmail him, I guess, into admitting the truth about Harriet’s murder.’
‘So, Stephen … knew all about this before you contacted him?’
‘Yes. He and Riad Nedjar, who used to work for Papa and now runs a shop in London. Stephen took me to see him yesterday. He gave me a complete copy of the confession: a carbon copy, entrusted to him by Papa. That showed Laloul’s name had been changed to Haddad in the extract Saidi sent me. Saidi is also Laloul, of course. That seems obvious. He altered his name to Haddad in the extract to conceal his role in Harriet’s death. His lawyers offered me money – a lot of it – if I would say the confession was a fake. I guess that would mean it couldn’t be used to blackmail him. And I guess Stephen and Riad showed me the carbon copy so I’d be convinced it really was Papa’s work and would be less inclined to … take the money. It worked. But now …’
‘Now what?’
‘This is my father’s typewriter, Oliver. And these papers … are the original confession. Hidden in your garage yesterday by Stephen, Wendy tells me.’
‘I didn’t want to worry you, darling.’ Wendy smiles apologetically at him. ‘He didn’t come here to look for something. He came to hide something. I think Suzette’s visit made him question whether it was safe to keep the typewriter and the confession at Litster’s Cot.’
