Dead Line (7 page)

The kitchen was located at the rear of the property. Alain led Trent towards it via the entrance hall and a door that was set into the wall behind the sweeping staircase and the prancing horse statuettes. It was vast and impressive. The units looked to be handmade and they were fitted with white granite countertops that were conspicuously empty aside from a gleaming toaster and a designer kettle. There was a range cooker, an American-style fridge-freezer and numerous pans hanging on racks from the ceiling. Everything looked well ordered and spotlessly clean.

The only food Trent could see was a bowl of fruit on an island unit in the middle of the room. A stainless-steel sink was located there, along with a stylish tap fitted to an extendable hose.

Alain crossed towards a glass-fronted cupboard, his shoes squeaking on the white marble tiles. He selected a tall drinking glass and passed it to Trent.

Trent filled the glass from the tap. He drank greedily. Wiped his lips with the back of his hand when he was done.

He filled the glass a second time. Drained it. Poured a third.

‘What about food?’ he asked, smacking his lips.

‘What about it?’

‘Is there anything we could maybe heat up?’

‘Do I look like a chef to you?’

Alain stretched out his thickened neck, tilting his boulder-like head from side to side. He ran his finger around the back of his collar. Then he wet his hand from the tap and smeared water across his face.

Trent motioned towards the fridge-freezer. ‘Maybe I could take a look for myself?’

‘Maybe you couldn’t.’

Alain stood before him, water dripping from his flattened nose and dimpled chin onto his stained shirt. He looked haggard and knocked about. The water had moistened the thread of blood beneath his plaster and a diluted red streak was snaking across his cheek.

Trent reached out and grabbed an apple from the bowl. Squeezed it in his hand. He bit into it. Chewed. The skin was waxy, the flesh ripe and sweet and juicy.

‘You’re still suspicious,’ Trent said, a spray of apple accompanying his words.

‘It’s my job to be suspicious.’

Trent took another mouthful of apple. ‘And what else does your job involve?’

The bodyguard didn’t respond. Water gleamed on his face. The faint bloody track was forking its way through the pitted stubble on his cheek towards the corner of his mouth.

‘It just occurs to me,’ Trent said, ‘that you must have some level of involvement in Jérôme’s import–export business. Helping to make sure the shipments get in safely, maybe?’

Alain raised his arm and dried himself with the sleeve of his shirt. Trent could hear the
scritch
of his stubble against the cotton fabric.

‘Philippe exaggerates. You shouldn’t listen to him.’

‘Hard not to.’ Trent gestured around him with the hand holding the apple. ‘He seems like the only one who’s willing to open up to me.’

‘I thought you were a negotiator, not a therapist.’

Trent tore off another chunk of apple and looked idly round the rest of the kitchen. It really was immaculate. The only sign of any crumbs or spills was a light dusting of coffee grounds near the kettle. Alain must have scattered them when he was preparing the coffee for Philippe. Otherwise, the room was as sterile as an operating theatre.

‘So who does the cooking here?’ he asked.

‘There’s a housekeeper.’

‘Huh. And can she be trusted not to talk about what’s going on? Or do we need to come up with an explanation for Jérôme’s absence? A sudden business trip, maybe?’

Alain folded his arms across his chest, the Ruger riding up in his shoulder holster. He pinched his biceps with the fingers of his crossed hands. His eyes were hooded. A sign of fatigue or distrust? Maybe a combination of the two.

‘Not necessary,’ he said.

‘Why so sure?’

‘She’s worked for M. Moreau longer than anyone I know. She could have retired years ago but she prefers not to. She’s completely reliable.’

‘All staff gossip sometimes.’

‘She’s more like family than staff. And she has nobody to talk with. She lives here.’

‘Here? In the house?’

He motioned back towards the entrance hall with a jerk of his head. ‘She has a small place behind the garage.’

‘Does she have a phone? She might call somebody.’

‘No phone.’

‘You’re sure.’

He nodded. He was sure.

‘Doesn’t she have to go out for supplies?’ Trent asked.

‘We have deliveries.’

‘What if she needs something extra? Something unexpected?’

‘This never happens.’

‘But if it did?’

‘I would take her. She can’t drive.’

‘You’d take her? Not Jérôme’s chauffeur?’

Alain raised an eyebrow. His face framed a question.

‘It’s like I told you,’ Trent said. ‘I’ve been watching Jérôme. I’ve seen the guy who usually does the driving.’

‘For your surveillance,’ Alain said. His voice was low. It was measured. ‘For Jérôme’s protection.’

‘That’s right. Tell me about him.’

The muscles around Alain’s mouth twitched. His lip hitched up and Trent caught a glimpse of his canine tooth. ‘He doesn’t have a phone, either.’

‘He lives here, too?’

‘By the pool.’

‘And you?’

‘I have a room in the house.’

‘Seniority.’ Trent nodded. ‘Good for you. Must be cosy having Stephanie around. When Jérôme’s busy, say.’

Alain squeezed his biceps some more. ‘I told you already. You shouldn’t listen to Philippe.’

Trent stuffed the apple in his mouth and clenched it between his teeth. He made a show of checking his watch. It was 3.20 a.m. He wrenched another bite.

‘We should go and wake the chauffeur up,’ he said, chewing with his mouth open.

‘Why would we do that?’

‘To ask him what he knows.’

‘Knows?’

‘It’s Saturday morning,’ Trent said. ‘Friday night last night. Not many chauffeurs get weekends off. ’

‘He’s ill. It’s why I was driving.’

‘Maybe that’s what he told you.’ Trent worked his jaw to clear some apple from his teeth. ‘But seriously, aren’t you the least bit suspicious that Jérôme’s driver happened to be off duty on the night his car was run off the road and he was abducted?’

It was cool and still and quiet outside. The sky was dark and distant beyond the halogen glare. Trent followed Alain around the perimeter of the house, their feet crunching along a pea-gravel pathway. The light from the security lamps was harsh and unrelenting. It pinned them against the wall. Two big men, walking one behind the other. Their shadows loomed over them like ogres.

‘So what’s your story?’ Trent asked. ‘What was your background before Jérôme hired you? Were you army?’

Alain grunted. He let go of the limb of a tropical plant that he’d cleared from his path. It sprang back and slapped Trent in the face.

‘Police?’

‘No,’ Alain muttered.

‘Then what?’

Alain’s shoulders slumped. ‘The truth? I was a squeegee punk.’

‘Seriously?’

Squeegee punks were street kids who swarmed around traffic whenever it got snarled up at busy junctions in Marseilles. They’d wash your windscreen whether you wanted them to or not. Some people tipped them. Some didn’t. Some found that they happened to get robbed at knifepoint if they had their windows open or their doors unlocked.

Alain marched on. He didn’t turn. Didn’t look back.

‘Not exactly your standard route into this kind of work,’ Trent said.

Still Alain didn’t say anything.

‘How did it happen? Did you respond to an ad in the paper? Retrain in close protection skills?’

Alain hesitated, then finally answered. ‘I pulled a gun on M. Moreau. I told him to give me his watch. It was a Rolex. Very expensive.’

Trent whistled. ‘And did he?’

‘No. He offered me a job instead.’

‘Wait.’ Trent listened to the tread of their feet on the path. ‘He offered you a job right there and then? By the side of the road?’

Alain nodded, his long shadow dipping and rising on the wall alongside him.

‘This is what he does. It’s why he’s rich. He judges people. He does it very fast. He did it to me. He saw something in me. He told me I could be useful to him. That he could teach me. And I believed him.’

‘You’ve worked for him ever since?’

‘Eleven years.’

‘And he’s been good to you?’

‘The best.’

Trent fell silent. The cicadas were loud in the shrubs by their side. Gnats and flies and moths swirled around them, drawn by the ceaseless, blinding light and their body warmth.

So Alain was a contented employee. Eleven years’ service. Plucked from a life on the streets. Given a fresh start. A rewarding salary and a place to stay in a luxury home, high in the hills of Provence. Invited to become a trusted member of the Moreau family.

It was the kind of background that built fierce loyalty. And in Trent’s experience loyalty could compensate for many things. It could lead people to overlook certain character flaws. It could even, on occasion, cause them to participate in something terrible.

Had Alain been involved, he wondered?

And if so, then was Trent walking behind a guy who knew what had become of Aimée?

They rounded the corner of the villa and the thin gravel path opened up into a landscaped garden. It was well stocked with palms and other exotics, screened by pines and poplars and olive trees. Immediately to their left was a terraced area shaded by vines.

An oval swimming pool dominated the centre of the space. It was lit, like everything else, by the dazzling security lights embedded in the shrubbery. But it was also illuminated by a series of submerged bulbs that tinged the water a murky green. A cloud of midges skimmed the surface. Trent could almost taste the chlorine tang.

Behind the pool was a timber outbuilding with glass doors. It had a pitched roof with a circular window in the eaves. A blind had been pulled down behind the window.

The hut was unlit on the inside but the blazing floodlights revealed the interior. Trent could see a modest sitting area with a wicker couch and chair arranged around a low coffee table and a television. Kitchen units were fitted along the rear. On the left was a ladder leading up to a mezzanine platform. A corner of the ground floor was boxed off beneath it. The bathroom, Trent guessed.

Alain rapped a knuckle on the glass doors.

No answer.

He knocked again, then turned and looked at Trent, his skin wan in the pitiless glare of the security lights, the dried track of blood glimmering on his face like an old scar.

‘How long has he worked as Jérôme’s driver?’ Trent asked.

‘A year, maybe.’

‘And before that?’

‘He was a deckhand on a yacht that Jérôme chartered.’

Not another street kid, then. But someone Jérôme had judged and assessed and offered a new opportunity to, just like he’d done for Alain. More loyalty. Maybe.

Trent cupped his hands to the glass. He peered inside. There was no sign of the driver. He thumped the frame. Felt the panel shake.

Still no response.

‘Heavy sleeper?’ Trent asked.

Alain grunted and reached inside his trouser pocket. His hand emerged with his ring of keys. He began sorting through them.

Trent went ahead and tried the door handle. It opened right away. The door swung outwards against his toes.

Silence inside.

Trent stepped in. He listened hard. A fridge burbled and hummed.

He scanned the cramped interior. It was sparse and uninviting. The furniture was functional but dated. There were unwashed dishes in the sink. A kitchen bin in need of emptying. The chemical odour of a toilet.

‘Serge?’ Alain called.

There was no response. No rumblings or stirrings from upstairs.

Alain moved around the wicker couch towards the ladder. He hauled himself up the treads and climbed onto the mezzanine platform. He hit a wall switch and light flooded the sloping timber ceiling. Alain paced around up there, dust sprinkling down from the boards.

‘Come,’ he said, his voice gruff.

Trent mounted the ladder until his head cleared the platform. Alain was crouched low, his back pressed against the angled ceiling boards, his legs straddling a mattress down on the floor. Tousled sheets were thrown back. The bed was empty. A series of low cupboards were fitted into the eaves beneath the lowered window blind. The cupboard doors were open. They were completely bare.

The modest apartment that Trent shared with Aimée in the Panier district of Marseilles felt emptier every day. There was plenty of
stuff
lying around. Teetering piles of DVDs and old CDs. Stacks of newspapers and magazines. Dirty clothes strewn across the floor and trash on every available surface.

But there was no conversation. No laughter. No knowing glances. No hurried, clumsy shedding of clothes and fumbling with clasps. No warm, twisted sheets.

She was gone. Had been missing for one month already. Without word. Without contact. And as each day passed, Trent experienced a creeping dread. What if he’d made a mistake? What if she hadn’t been kidnapped? What if something else had happened? Something worse?

He couldn’t contact the police. What would he say? That his fiancée had vanished more than four weeks ago and he hadn’t reported it until now because he’d been sure that it was a kidnapping for ransom?

And what if he’d been right the first time around? Maybe it
was
still an abduction and the people behind it were biding their time, making him sweat, making him doubt himself?

The phone wouldn’t ring. It never made a sound. It perched silently on the kitchen counter, wired up to some digital recording equipment that had grown dusty with disuse.

How many times a day did he check the line? Two, maybe three to begin with. Then it got worse. He found himself checking all the time. And that was a problem. Because what if they called when the phone was off the hook? What if they waited a day or more before calling again?

He was losing control. He was losing his capacity to
think
.

He’d witnessed this kind of destructive spiral in his clients many times. Watched people crumble before his eyes. Usually he was the one holding everything together. But right now he needed help. An objective assessment of the facts from someone whose judgement he trusted.

He flipped open his mobile and dialled the same guy he’d contacted from Naples.

Luc Girard arrived within two hours. Trent led him inside and watched as Girard scanned the living room like he was the first responder to a crime scene. Girard’s head turned slowly. He sniffed the air. His bulbous nose wrinkled and he walked across and pushed open a window looking over the shabby square that Trent’s apartment fronted onto. There were threadbare trees out there, and splintered park benches, and an old, neglected fountain that was empty of water. Across from Trent’s home was a children’s nursery with a fenced-in playground. Trent could hear the giddy shouts and howls of the children, their cries piercing and shrill, like a twisted rebuke.

‘You look like hell,’ Girard said.

Trent gazed down at himself. He was wearing an old pair of jogging trousers and a sleeveless blue vest. The vest was stained with last night’s takeaway. He could smell his own odour. A musty fug of dirt and sweat.

‘And your apartment is a dump.’

Trent could have told him that he and Aimée had opted to live somewhere unassuming because they preferred not to flaunt their success and aggravate any of the regional kidnap gangs. But then he realised Girard was talking about the mess.

Girard moved across to the breakfast bar that separated the living room from the kitchen. He prodded an empty fast food container.

‘Do you have any real food in your apartment?’

Trent stared back. Healthy eating was the last thing on his mind right now.

Girard shrugged and withdrew a crumpled cigarette packet from his back pocket. He clamped a cigarette between his lips and sparked a lighter. He took a swift draw, then gestured phlegmatically with the lit end. Look at us, he seemed to be saying. Look at where we find ourselves now.

Girard had a craggy, deeply tanned face. His worn skin was bunched heavily beneath his eyes into weary pouches and sagged loosely around his drooping mouth and fatty jaw. He’d tried to camouflage his hangdog expression by cultivating a neat goatee beard, but his true salvation was a leonine mane of fine grey hair. It was long at the front and curled in towards his eyes, habitually blocking his vision until he smoothed it back with a practised sweep of his hand.

Today he had on a yellow sports shirt over grey chinos. Back when Trent had known him as a police detective, heading up a specialist anti-kidnap unit based in Nice, he’d favoured a blue blazer over a shirt and tie. Always the same blazer, worn shiny at the elbows. Always the same tie, blue with diagonal red stripes.

‘How’s the investigation?’ Trent asked.

These days, there was only one investigation. It was the same case Girard had been running all by himself for close to eighteen months.

Girard’s lips crinkled around his cigarette. Smoke drifted up past his pouched eyes.

No response. Trent wasn’t surprised. In all probability, he was the last person in France Girard would tell.

‘No progress?’ Trent pressed.

Girard pinched the cigarette between his finger and thumb and plucked it from his mouth. He stared at the burning embers like a guy contemplating setting light to something explosive.

‘You’ve heard nothing?’ he asked, circling close to Trent’s telephone and bending down to study the recording equipment. Ash tumbled from his cigarette onto the machine and Trent tried not to let it bother him.

‘There’s been no contact,’ he conceded.

‘It’s been a month already?’

‘Four weeks, two days.’

‘And her mobile?’

‘I still can’t get through.’

Girard nodded, venting smoke through his nostrils. He straightened and smoothed back his hair, then strolled behind the kitchen counter and grimaced at the mound of dirty crockery in the sink.

‘You understand, I know,’ he said, ‘that there is a question I must ask.’

‘She didn’t leave me,’ Trent replied.

And right then –
bam
– that precious image of Aimée filled his mind. Sunlight on white sheets and freckled skin. The impish smile on her lips. In her eyes. The hint of a secret about to be revealed. A good one. Long cherished. The fan of auburn hair on her pillow. Her hands clenched slackly above her head. An object in her right fist. Held back from him but familiar all the same.

He blinked and saw that Girard was staring at him. His sunken eyes were damp, pupils jinking left and right, like he could see inside Trent’s mind. Could watch the scene play out for himself.

Trent banished the memory. Buried it deep. He nodded for Girard to continue.

‘Forgive me,’ Girard said, and the wavering note in his voice was almost more than Trent could bear. ‘But you know that I’ve seen it before. A husband, convinced that it’s an abduction . . .’ His words floated away with the cigarette fumes.

‘That isn’t what’s happened. All her things are still here. Her clothes. Her passport.’ He bit hard on the side of his mouth. ‘We were happy.’

Deliriously happy, but scarily happy, too. Because from early on in their relationship, even as Trent had marvelled at how perfectly they seemed to fit and how wonderful their life together could be, he’d been unable to escape the lurking dread of the pain he’d experience if someone ever took her from him. Their love had made him vulnerable. Made him fearful. Transformed him into the muddle-headed dope he’d become today.

Girard let the moment spool out. He stood there, unmoving, in his canary yellow shirt and his dumb pleated trousers, smoke weaving up from the cigarette in his hand.

‘You’ve heard nothing about her car?’ he asked, finally.

‘I’ve heard nothing about anything.’

‘And her friends?’

‘There are none I can trust not to go to the police.’

Girard remained impassive. Maybe his retirement had changed things. Maybe the implied barb didn’t sting any more.

He plugged the cigarette into the corner of his mouth. Palmed back his hair.

‘Nobody threatened you?’

‘Plenty of people have threatened me.’

‘Anyone in particular? A specific gang?’

‘Not lately.’

Girard nodded, the cigarette jerking up and down in his mouth, threads of ash drifting into his beard.

‘Who knew that you were in Italy?’

‘Anyone could know. I was listed as a speaker on the website for the convention.’

Trent was growing impatient. He shifted his weight between his feet.

Girard held up a palm. He pulled free his cigarette and extinguished it on one of the plates in the sink.

‘You ask my opinion?’ He exhaled the last of the fumes. ‘OK, my opinion is that your fiancée was not kidnapped. And you say she did not leave you. What, then, could have happened to her?’

Trent gaped at Girard like a man staring cruel death in the face. He’d asked for this. Invited it into his home. A second opinion. Only now that opinion was rushing at him too fast. Was too hard and uncompromising. He could taste something foul in his mouth. Like dirty water. Like decay.

‘We need to begin by retracing Aimée’s movements in the days before she disappeared,’ Girard said. ‘Who did she meet? Where did she go? I’m sorry, but this is the best way – maybe the only way – to find out who may have harmed her, and why.’