The Guardian of Lies Page 6

‘I remember.’

  I spun around. André’s eyes were open and he was watching me, but his eyes were all wrong. The shining amber colour had gone and in its place was a dirty mud shade, tense with pain and exhaustion. I returned to his bedside.

  ‘André, how are you?’

  ‘What are you doing here, Eloïse?’

  Answer a question with a question. He was good at that.

  ‘I came because Papa summoned me,’ I said, keeping my voice steady. ‘And because I’ve been so worried about you.’

  ‘I’m all right. You’ve seen me. Now leave.’

  ‘Leave?’

  ‘Yes, go back to Paris. You are not wanted here.’

  ‘I want to look after you, André, to make sure you—’

  ‘I don’t need you to look after me. I have Mathilde. So go. Now.’

  He closed his eyes, thick sandy lashes on his thin cheeks, shutting me out. I rested my hand on the quilt on top of his arm.

  ‘Hear me out first, André. Please. Listen to what I have to say.’ I rushed on before he had a chance to say no. ‘First, I am sorry. Desperately sorry. I am to blame for . . .’ I gestured at the bed, ‘for this, but—’

  ‘Stop. Stop it, Eloïse. I don’t want your sorry.’

  I removed my hand from his arm.

  ‘Second,’ I continued, and sat down on the chair, going nowhere, ‘I am frightened that whoever did this to you will track you down to finish it. You need someone to guard you.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yes. Day and night. Till you are better. I saw no guards outside. I have your High Standard gun in my bag and can keep you safe. If you don’t wish to see me – which I understand – I will remain downstairs at all times. You won’t know I’m here.’

  He made a faint sound. Whether it was disgust or anger, I couldn’t tell. I watched the large tendon in his neck tighten.

  ‘Third,’ I continued quietly, ‘tell me who these people are who tried to murder you. Why did they do it?’

  ‘I cannot tell you that.’

  ‘André, you’re the one who taught me that knowledge is power. With that information I can help you. I can protect you better. I can even find the person behind the wheel of the van that—’

  ‘Eloïse, I trusted you before. Look what happened. Why would I trust you now?’ He turned his face to the wall.

  The air suddenly became too heavy to breathe. The shadows deepened and what little light was in the room seemed to seep out under the door. I sat there in silence, but my lungs betrayed me, pumping as fast as if I’d been running. Minute after minute ticked past until finally I rose to my feet and walked to the door, but before I could open it, André spoke.

  ‘Do you have my wallet?’

  ‘Your wallet?’

  ‘You took it away from the hospital.’

  ‘Yes. I have it.’

  I had ransacked the wallet a hundred times looking for clues.

  ‘Burn it,’ he ordered.

  I nodded and walked out.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The reason I knew André was a spy was that one day I saw him in action. I saw him execute a brush-pass in the street. It was soon after I’d gone to Paris, a stifling summer day, and André and I had enjoyed a drink in a bar on Rue Gabrielle. When he left I tried to follow him to discover where he lived – I’d tried before but he’d always lost me. This time he was distracted. The pavements were busy and I was getting better at it, so he didn’t spot me.

  I saw him suddenly slow his pace. His shoulders dropped, his arms hung loose at his sides, the fingers of one hand folded over. Instantly I knew what was coming. I’d seen it a thousand times. We used to do brush-passes all the time as children, first when we played at being spies and then for real when we helped the Resistance pass messages under the noses of the Nazis during the war.

  But there on the streets of Paris on Rue de la Goutte d’Or, I was stunned. I watched his hand brush innocently against the hand of a tall fair-haired man wearing a pale linen suit and spectacles. Neither looked at the other or broke their stride. If I hadn’t been watching for it, I’d never have spotted it. Blink and I’d have missed it. This time it wasn’t a game. I knew my brother worked in the Ministry of Defence and I couldn’t help wondering why he would be passing information in such a secretive manner.

  ‘Are you a spy?’ I asked outright the next time we met.

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘I saw you do a brush-pass.’

  André was shocked and annoyed to be caught out by his little sister, but he didn’t deny it. In the end, after I applied thumbscrews, he admitted he worked undercover for the CIA – the American Central Intelligence Agency – to help save France from falling under Communist domination.

  ‘France is sleep-walking right into the Soviet Union’s open arms,’ he warned me. ‘Our country needs to wake up. Vite. And the only ones who have the firepower to protect the whole of Europe from the Communist threat are the Americans.’

  What I’d seen him do on the street that day was pass information on a new Soviet sleeper about whom he had suspicions to another CIA agent. When I asked the obvious – ‘Why don’t you just hand it to him over a drink at Maxime’s?’ – he’d just laughed and told me I had a lot to learn.

  ‘So teach me,’ I’d said.

  That’s when I learned to pick locks, work a daylight and night-time trace on foot and on wheels, to decipher different kinds of codes and to use a spy camera. By the time I left the Sorbonne, I was a cherry waiting to be picked.

  *

  After leaving André’s room, I went straight to mine and pulled my suitcase from under my bed. I opened it and from the bottom I dug out his wallet.

  Why burn it?

  I had scoured every inch of its black leather and discovered no hidden messages. What was it he wanted destroyed, what secret did it hold? I removed the banknotes – about one hundred thousand francs in various denominations. Since the war our money had gone crazy with the devaluation of the franc, so a hundred thousand francs sounds far more than it actually was – in real money it was a bit less than one hundred British pounds, or around three hundred American dollars.

  That was still a lot to carry around. Don’t think I hadn’t already examined every one of the banknotes with a magnifying glass, because I had. Nothing. Just banknotes. Also in the case sat a roll of black felt, bound with tape. I removed it and unrolled it on the floor. Nestled within were my tools. I picked up the scalpel which lay beside the lock-pick, and sat down on the floor with the wallet. Neatly and carefully, the scalpel blade sliced open every stitch and prised apart the areas glued together. When it was all in pieces I examined the leather spread out in front of me and at first I saw nothing. I fingered the raw underside of the dark leather that I’d not seen before until my fingertip suddenly found the slightest of indentations. I peered closer. Something. What was it?

  Then I spotted it. Numbers in black ink. Three of them. I fetched a torch.

  511609

  271314

  901906

  It was a code. This was a message from André to someone.

  But to whom?

  To me? No, he had no need to send a message to me because I was right there at his side on the day of the crash.

  Part of a telephone number?

  A security box access code?

  I knew of course that it was neither. On my bedside table lay my copy of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. It was old and dog-eared, its pages well-thumbed and soft as peach-skin. I sat cross-legged on the bed with it on my lap, as I had hundreds of times before as a child, and opened its pages.

  The first number on the raw leather of the wallet was 511609. I split it up into pairs and turned quickly to page 51. Line 16. The ninth word. It was TAKE.

  The second number was 271314. My fingers retraced their steps to page 27. I counted down to line 13. Across to the fourteenth word. It was ME.

  TAKE ME.

  Take me where?

&n
bsp; When André and I were children, Les Misérables had been our cipher book. André had taught me how to use a simple cipher code and we had left secret messages for each other all over the house and barns. To say where we were hiding. Where we were going. What mood we were in. The key to it all had been Les Misérables. Now he had used it again with someone else. Old habits die hard.

  901906 was the third number.

  I skipped forward to page 90. Familiar names flashing past my eyes – Jean Valjean, Madeleine, Javert, Fantine. A powerful tale that examines the nature of good and evil. As a child I was screwed up in knots by it but I’d clung to its final offer of redemption like a life raft. Now I clung to its pages again. Page 90. Line 19. Sixth word.

  OUT. The word was out.

  Take. Me. Out.

  Who was the message meant for and what did it mean? It had been written before his stay in hospital when he was well, I reminded myself. Was the message incomplete?

  Take me out – but out of where?

  I walked over to the window and focused my attention on the yard, on the white horses being saddled up for their day’s work. I thought about the person who had driven the van that smashed into my brother. Was he preparing for his day’s work? I tried to conjure up a picture of him. Are you lazing in bed, curled around your wife’s warm buttocks, no thought in your head for the man whose life you ruined? Or sipping your first coffee? Smoking a cigarette? Walking your dog through the cool morning shadows of the statuary in the Tuileries Garden?

  You think you are safe.

  But you are wrong. Wherever you are hiding, whatever plans you are hatching, I promise you this. I will find you.

  *

  I could hear men’s voices, a deep rumble, low and respectful. I found Papa outside the barn handing out large purposeful shovels to five of his gardians, each one of whom wore a black neckerchief around his throat in memory of the butchered bull. All of the gardians had known Goliath like an old cantankerous friend and at some time each of them had been one of the local razeteurs who had risked the animal’s wrath by snatching cockades from his horns in the ring.

  A string of crows sat on the barn ridge and watched us in the thin morning light. The day was just beginning to heat up and the sky now stretched white as a shroud over us and the flat landscape shimmered silver instead of green. All colour had drained from my father’s manade, the way it does from a corpse. I too was dressed in a black sheath dress, my dark hair tied back from my face by a black silk ribbon, sleek as a seal. In Paris it would look chic. Here it looked like I was treading in the footsteps of death.

  ‘Eloïse,’ my father called out.

  Everyone turned to watch me approach, even the crows. In the past I had ridden many times with these men, herding the bulls to new pastures on my father’s farm, swatting at the dense clouds of black flies, each of us with a guiding pole in one hand, reins in the other, a black felt-brimmed hat on our head to keep off the sun. Yet now, I looked at their eyes, and I could see that I was a stranger to them in my Rue Saint-Honoré dress. Worse. I was a stranger who had crippled their patron’s eldest son.

  I smiled broadly at them. ‘Bonjour, mes amis.’

  Only Louis smiled back, the one who had been in the stable last night. A wide smile crossed his leathery cheeks and he touched the brim of his hat. ‘Bonjour, Mademoiselle Eloïse.’

  The others said nothing. My father was wearing his brown work cords and a grey collarless shirt. His white beard was in need of a trim, a task I used to perform every fourth Sunday when I lived at home, and his dark eyes were in need of comfort. Neither job was I fit for now.

  ‘Here,’ my father said, and held out a spare shovel to me. The sinews under the skin of his arm were thick as serpents, muscles that could bring down a bull by the horns.

  I looked at the proffered shovel and I knew what it was intended for. Goliath would be granted an honourable resting place; he deserved such respect.

  ‘No, Papa, you and Goliath don’t need me for that. I am driving into town to do my own kind of digging.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Serriac was the kind of town that threw a net over you the moment you set foot on its dusty main street. An invisible net, but still a net. A net of watchful eyes. Don’t expect to escape it, because you won’t. You can’t. So when I climbed out of my car, I paused, stared boldly at the windows along the tree-lined thoroughfare and smiled back at them. It is the same as when you face a bull. Show fear and you will be trampled.

  Serriac was a pretty town. Tubs of geraniums and zinnias splashed scarlet and buttery yellow over the ancient stone buildings, with their wrought-iron balconies and roofs the colour of freckles in the sun. Cafés and bars spilled on to the pavements, where old men in caps sat and smoked with yellow fingers. Off behind the single main road, narrow streets darted and dived in unexpected directions to confuse the unwary.

  Above it all soared the imposing bell tower of L’Église Saint-Joseph. It was a church built in the Romanesque style so beloved by medieval France, with sturdy pillars, massive rounded arches and barrel vaults. It was a church you didn’t argue with. I knew. I’d tried.

  Ahead of me lay the Hôtel de Ville. The town hall. It looked old and lazy with a pockmarked façade, dozing in the morning sunshine, eyes half shuttered. I wasn’t fooled.

  *

  ‘I wish to speak to Monsieur le Maire, please.’

  ‘The mayor is occupied at the moment.’

  The middle-aged secretary behind the desk tapped the end of her pen on the form she was filling out and raised her gaze to me at a snail’s pace that was designed to irritate. I was half inclined to lean across the desk and snatch her pen away to ensure her full attention, but I had no need. The moment she caught sight of my face, I had her full attention. I saw the pity flow into her pretty blue eyes and turn her cheeks a dusky pink, but I was used to it. Pity and I were old friends these days.

  ‘When will Mayor Durand be free?’

  She dragged her gaze off my face and made a fuss of consulting the large maroon leather diary on her side of the desk. ‘In forty-five minutes,’ she announced precisely, looking up at the ornate clock on the wall. It had no scars. Its face was unblemished.

  ‘I’ll wait. My name is Eloïse Caussade.’

  She made a note of the fact on a sheet of paper that already contained a long list of names. I retreated to join other supplicants on a row of seats along one wall of the echoing space of marble and pillars that was the reception area of the town hall. The clock ticked away while we waited on the mayor’s convenience. Men in important positions often like to play games with time, and I hoped Monsieur le Maire was not one of them or I could be here all day. I pictured my father’s gardians digging down into the black earth while I sat staring at my white sandals.

  But in exactly forty-five minutes the secretary walked over, the heels of her brown pre-war shoes tapping on the veined marble floor and, without actually looking at me, led me to a pair of large double doors. An official crest at the top and a doorknob that looked more like a cannonball announced the importance of the man behind the oak panels. The secretary knocked discreetly.

  ‘Enter,’ came a man’s voice.

  She opened the door. I entered and she shut the door silently behind me. I was in a beautiful room, the kind of room that makes your thoughts grow into something bigger than you expected, with its high ceiling, cornices and gilded curlicues, and tall elegant windows of perfect proportions. No wonder they put the mayor in it. He certainly needed his thoughts to be big and elegant and in proportion. But it pained me that the furniture was so ugly.

  ‘Bonjour, Eloïse.’

  The man behind the black desk rose to his feet, strode across the room with arm outstretched and shook my hand with sufficient force to impress on me how important he had become since I’d last seen him.

  ‘Bonjour, Monsieur le Maire.’

  There. His full title. He could release my hand now. Under the cover of smiles, we studied
each other. He was still a handsome man, in his fifties now, but lean and upright with a bearing that hinted at a military background. His hair was dark with silvery threads but a little too carefully groomed for my liking. His smile was a politician’s, broad and welcoming, but could not erase the permanent crease of irritation that crossed his high forehead. His suit was exquisite.

  He paid my scar no more attention than he would a bramble scratch. I asked myself why he had agreed to see me, this busy man, with a queue of people outside his office waiting for his attention. The answer came easily – it was because I was the daughter of Aristide Caussade.

  What did he want from me?

  He stepped back with a light laugh. ‘I remember a time when you ran round in grubby riding trousers and a black gardian hat, but now look at you. Très chic.’

  He took my elbow, steered me to the seat in front of his desk and resumed his own chair behind it, sitting back as if relaxed, but I could feel the sharp point of his attention like a needle tip at my forehead. I had known Charles Durand since I was eight years old. He was the father of my best friend at school, though he was one of those fathers who breezed in and out, rarely around, always preoccupied with his property business and his part-ownership of the local newspaper, La Voix de la Camargue.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘what can I do for you, Eloïse?’

  ‘I’m sure you know why I’m here.’

  ‘The death of the bull.’

  ‘The brutal butchery of the Caussade champion bull, Goliath, yes.’

  He released a sigh. That is how men like Charles Durand deal with difficult women. They sigh. And when the sighing doesn’t work, they laugh. To tell you that you are wrong. But he didn’t laugh. Not yet. He gave me a serious regretful frown and shook his head without dislodging a hair.

  ‘I am sorry, Eloïse. Please convey my regret to your father.’

  ‘Monsieur le Maire, we want more than regret.’

  In the silence that followed, we both counted to ten.

  ‘It is in the hands of the police,’ he pointed out.

  ‘No one knows this town like you do, monsieur,’ I said quietly. ‘You have eyes and ears on every street corner.’