Dead Line (9 page)

‘It’s Moreau,’ Girard said, speaking around the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He pushed past Trent with a brown paper grocery bag clutched beneath his arm.

Trent lingered by the open front door to his apartment. He’d been waiting to hear Girard’s verdict for close to a fortnight. They’d started by working together to draw up a pool of suspects. The list wasn’t long. Trent and Aimée didn’t have a large social circle in Marseilles, a consequence of moving from Paris only three years ago, combined with the secretive nature of their business. There was always the possibility that she’d run into someone random, a figure they couldn’t account for, but Girard had made it clear that the statistics went against it. If she’d been attacked in some way, the strongest likelihood was that the culprit was an acquaintance or one of the clients Aimée had met with in the weeks running up to her disappearance.

A wedge of sunlight slashed Trent’s face. The irregular concrete plaza of Place de Moulins was silent and deserted. It was ringed by dirt-smeared cars parked bumper to bumper, unoccupied benches and crooked pastel townhouses showing no sign of habitation. A laundered sheet draped over the ironwork balcony across from him might have been drying for hours or days. There were bins that needed emptying and wilting palms gasping for water. The entire area could have been evacuated for all Trent knew. He hadn’t ventured outside in more than a week.

He closed the door and pressed his forehead against the smooth timber. Hope seeped out of him like blood from a wound. He turned in a strange kind of daze – as if his body was somehow disconnected from his mind, or as if every bone had been secretly removed and replaced in completely the wrong order – and shuffled, slump-shouldered, along a hallway that seemed as dark and airless as a subway tunnel.

He found Girard standing behind the breakfast counter, shifting the scree of litter and dirty crockery to one side with his arm. Today, the polo shirt he had on was pale blue, his trousers tan. He set his grocery bag down in the space he’d cleared, like an explorer planting a flag and claiming new territory.

‘Clean plates,’ he said, and removed a pack of white paper plates. ‘And something to drink from.’ He showed Trent a tube of clear plastic cups.

Trent stared at him blankly and collapsed onto his couch. Magazines and newspapers crinkled beneath his weight. He was wearing a white T-shirt that was yellowed with age over a pair of blue cotton boxer shorts. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d dressed properly.

Cigarette dangling from his mouth, Girard pulled food from the bag like a magician performing an astounding illusion. A crusty baguette, a rounded cheese wrapped in wax paper, some grapes, some olives, a bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice and a clear plastic tub loaded with steaming paella. He delved inside the bag one final time for a plastic fork and paper napkins.

‘Eat,’ he said, and prodded the paella across the counter.

Trent let his head fall slackly to one side. He stared at the silent telephone. The inert recording equipment.

‘Tell me,’ he said.

Girard’s pouched eyes were wet, the whites tinged yellow, as though stained by nicotine. Whatever he saw in Trent seemed neither to impress nor surprise him. He plucked the cigarette from his lips and set it to rest on the wrapped cheese, then prised open the plastic tub and scooped a forkful of perfumed yellow rice into his mouth.

‘Tell me,’ Trent said again. ‘Why Moreau?’

‘Many reasons,’ Girard replied, rice tumbling from his lips.

‘Such as?’

Girard lifted the plastic tub to his chin. He shovelled paella into his mouth.

‘Aimée’s appointment diary shows she met with him three times.’

‘That’s not so unusual.’ Trent’s voice was flat and emotionless. To his bemusement, he felt the same way. It was like he was watching the scene unravel before his eyes. He pictured himself sitting alone in a darkened cinema, scooping popcorn into his gormless mouth as the Trent on the big screen said, ‘Some clients need reassuring about our policies. They don’t like to face up to the idea that a kidnap could happen to them.’

And, he thought to himself, a lot of their male clients liked to spend as much time with Aimée as they could possibly justify, perhaps kidding themselves that she was there for reasons other than business. He’d never had any problem with that. He understood her appeal better than anyone. She was very beautiful. Strikingly so. She was given to flirtation and she was funny and sweet. On a couple of occasions, clients had misread her signals. One time, Trent had been forced to step in and insist that a client cool his advances. But it was a risk they were prepared to run. The market they were in was tough. Much bigger firms were often wooing their prospective clients. If Aimée’s allure gave them a competitive edge, it was one they were willing to exploit.

‘She met with him for dinner once,’ Girard said. ‘Another time was drinks, on the terrace of the Intercontinental.’

The Trent in the movie continued the dialogue, even as it rang tinny and untrue in his ears.‘She’s never worked set hours. It’s the nature of the business. She meets clients when and where they choose. We don’t have a separate office. And we don’t bring clients here.’

In truth, Trent rarely met their clients at all unless something went wrong for them. He was good at crisis management, bad at small talk. Aimée was different. She excelled at client liaison. She was courteous and patient and charming. She was willing to spend hours going over the small print of an insurance policy. She was prepared to court clients for as long as it took for them to sign on the dotted line. Complementary skills. A strong partnership. Aimée was the public face of their operation, and for most clients – the lucky ones – she was the only representative they’d ever meet. Trent was the guy in the background, in the shadows. His natural habitat.

K & R was an industry they’d found themselves operating in via separate routes and one that had brought them together when Trent had first been assigned to Paris. Aimée was the local insurance specialist, Trent the trained negotiator. They’d been colleagues for almost a year without acknowledging the attraction between them. It was a small office with a close-knit team. The work was highly stressful. Added complications, no matter how tempting, were to be avoided at all costs.

Then Athens happened. The wife of the CEO of a metal trading conglomerate was abducted. The scenario became a long-drawn-out affair. The client was a flake who kept flip-flopping on Trent’s advice. Eventually, Trent’s boss took the unprecedented step of flying Aimée over to assist. It became her job to encourage the CEO to view Trent’s advice with twenty–twenty vision, rather than through the prism of his own fear and paranoia. Aimée’s involvement didn’t sit comfortably with Trent. He’d never required anyone’s help before. But he had to admit that her input turned things around. The client began to listen to him. After a seven-week marathon of high-wire negotiation, Trent and Aimée secured the wife’s release. They returned to Paris as lovers.

From the first moment, Trent prepared himself for the worst. He was a guy who’d built his career by doing precisely that. But to his surprise and consternation, their relationship deepened. The foundations were strong. They had a shared bond. A mutual understanding of the darkness that lurked behind everyday life. An awareness of how easily the facade of safety and security could be punctured by a group of people with the means and the motivation to cause devastating harm.

People not unlike the man who Girard claimed had wrenched his fiancée from him.

Girard said, ‘Aimée listed the locations for her first two meetings with Moreau in her diary. But for the third, she had only a time and Moreau’s name.’

‘Then perhaps the name and the time was enough for her. Or perhaps the location hadn’t been fixed.’

‘Perhaps.’ Girard brushed the rice free from his beard. He smoothed his hair back from his eyes with the hand holding the fork. ‘The meeting was at four o’clock on the day before you called me from Naples.’

‘We’ve been through this already. She had other appointments that day.’

Girard nodded. ‘And it took time for me to clear them. I couldn’t just call these people up, you understand.’

‘But you did clear them?’

‘All except Jérôme Moreau. Tell me, how much do you know about him?’

The Trent in the room lay inert on the couch. He was sinking down into the cushions. His nerves seemed to be growing more numb with every passing second, like he’d been injected with a dose of anaesthetic and now his entire body was shutting down, fibre by fibre, cell by cell.

‘Aimée researches all our clients,’ he said. ‘But some of it we knew already.’ Trent summoned all his concentration and managed to roll out his bottom lip. He guessed it’d look good up there on the silver screen. ‘He’s very wealthy. Operates a yachting concern.’

Girard swallowed more paella, nodding for Trent to go on.

‘At least,’ Trent said, ‘the yacht trading is the public side of his business.’

‘So then you do know.’ Girard lifted an oily shrimp from the rice. He sucked the juices from it. Slipped it into his mouth and licked his fingers clean.

Trent would have shrugged if he could, but his body felt heavy as lead. ‘A lot of our wealthier clients want the protection we can offer them because they have income streams that aren’t entirely legitimate. They mix with different levels of society.’

‘Criminal levels.’ Girard dropped the tub of paella onto the counter and nudged it aside. He mopped his lips with one of the napkins. Picked up his cigarette and plugged it back into his mouth. ‘Moreau is a smuggler. Mostly it’s drugs from North Africa. Sometimes firearms.’ He drew hard on the cigarette. ‘Sometimes it’s women. Or children.’

‘We don’t judge our clients. We can’t afford to.’

Girard smoked some more. He tapped ash into the paella. His gaze didn’t shift from Trent’s face.

‘So you’re an idealist now,’ Trent said.

‘His operation is sophisticated,’ Girard replied, as if there’d been no interruption to his explanation. ‘And his approach is sophisticated, too. He never touches the merchandise. He simply puts his yachts at the disposal of others. This is all.’

‘So he’s a facilitator.’

Girard nodded.

‘For bad men,’ Trent said.

‘Very bad men. Plus, he knows who to pay and he pays very generously.’

‘The police?’ Trent asked.

Girard inhaled from his cigarette, raising his eyebrows in a lazy fashion, as if it went without saying.

‘Who else?’

‘Customs officials.’ His voice was husky with smoke. ‘Port employees. Local government workers. Some judiciary.’

‘Quite a list.’

‘He makes public donations, too. He’s a patron of the Ballet National de Marseille. His wife is a former dancer. Retired early.’

Trent felt his jaw begin to lock. The deadening had reached his neck. His throat. He could barely swallow. ‘Get to the point, Girard.’

Girard scratched his eyebrow, cigarette burning close to his looping fringe. ‘I have a friend. An old colleague. His niece dances with the Ballet National. He arranged it so I could speak with her.’

Trent’s body seemed to pivot and tilt without his say-so. Magazines and newspapers crackled beneath him.

‘I met with her at the Gare St Charles. She was nervous. She made me promise that Moreau would never know that she’d talked with me.’

‘Go on.’

‘She told me that Moreau pays some of the girls to perform for him. In private, at a villa he keeps in Cassis. He has a thing for ballet dancers.’ He gestured with his cigarette, rolling his hand at the wrist, tracing circles with the lit end. ‘This girl, the niece of my friend, she tells me she will never go.’

‘Because he expects the girls to do more than just dance?’

‘For sure. Of course.’

‘So he’s a rich guy who likes to cheat on his wife with young women. That’s not so unusual.’

‘Perhaps.’ Girard bunched his fists on the kitchen counter, smoke rising up from the cigarette wedged between his knuckles. ‘There are just a few girls who dance for him often. They joke about it sometimes. About him. They told my friend’s niece that she should do it. That she could make good money. They told her flatmate, too. A girl from Grenoble. She was new to Marseilles. New to the dance company.’

‘She went along with it?’

Girard leaned forward over the counter, dead-eyed. ‘She danced for him. He complimented her. Told her how well she moved and how fine her body was. He asked to see it. Asked her to dance naked.’

‘She refused?’

Girard barely shook his head, like he didn’t want to break the spell he’d fallen into. ‘She’s a dancer. Her body is her life. What does she have to be ashamed of? So she agreed. But naturally, he wanted her to do more than just dance.’

‘He slept with her.’

‘He tried. She said no.’ Girard blinked. ‘So he hurt her,’ he said, with a sigh of regret. ‘Very badly. To begin with, she would not talk about it when she returned home. But she was crying, upset. And she was bruised. Her torso. Her waist. She could not dance. For a month, at least. Then, when she healed, she went back to Grenoble. She refused to speak with anyone at the ballet.’

‘Because he’s a patron. He threatened her in some way.’

‘Of course. But she talked just a little to my friend’s niece. She warned her never to go. She said he had a terrible temper. Told her that he was dangerous.’ He paused. His voice dropped an octave. ‘She believed he might have killed her.’

Trent’s mouth was dry. His tongue flaccid and limp. He wondered if this was how it felt to suffer a stroke. This drip-drip paralysis. ‘But what does this have to do with Aimée?’ he whispered, hoarsely.

‘Before he was finished attacking her, this girl broke free from him. She locked herself inside a bathroom. She was very scared. He tried to get in. He was in a rage and it terrified her. He made many threats.’ Girard’s mouth drooped at the corners. ‘So she escaped. She climbed out through the window.’

‘OK.’

‘But as she was running away from his villa, a car turned into the entrance. The driver braked hard but still the car hit her a little. The girl fell onto the bonnet. She stumbled but she didn’t stop. She kept running. But she saw the driver. It was a woman. And seeing this is what she cannot forget. Because Moreau had been angry already. And she feared how he would react when he found that she was gone. She was afraid that he would take revenge on this woman in the car.’