“This can’t be happening,” Auger said. She felt like a spectator to her own conversation. “It was just a field trip. No one was supposed to die.”
“Easy to say now.” He leaned in closer, so that she could smell his breath. “Do you honestly think we can keep a lid on this kind of thing? We’ve already got the Transgressions Board breathing down our necks. There’ve been a lot of screw-ups down on Earth lately, and word is they feel it’s about time they made an example of someone, before something really stupid happens.”
“I’m sorry about the boy,” she said.
“Is that an admission of culpability, Auger? If so, it’s going to make things a lot easier all round.”
“No,” she said, her voice faltering, “it’s not an admission of anything. I’m just saying that I’m sorry. Look, can I speak to the parents?”
“Right now, Auger, I’d think you are about the last person in the solar system they’ll want to talk to.”
“I just want them to know I care.”
“The time to care,” Da Silva said, “was before you risked everything for a single useless artefact.”
“The artefact isn’t useless,” she snapped. “No matter what happened down there, it was still a risk worth taking. You talk to anyone in Antiquities and they’ll tell you the same thing.”
“Shall I show you the newspaper, Auger? Would you like that?”
Da Silva had it stuffed into his jacket. He pulled it out and handed it to her. She took it with trembling fingers, feeling all her hopes vanish in one instant of crushing disappointment. Like the boy, the newspaper had died as well. The newsprint had blurred, lines of text running into each other like icing patterns melting on a cake. It was already completely illegible. The illustrations and advertisements had become static, their colours bleeding together until they looked like splodges of abstract art. The tiny motor that supplied power to the smart paper must have been down to its last trickle of energy when she pulled it from the car.
She handed him back the useless, mocking thing.
“I’m in trouble, aren’t I?”
THREE
Floyd swung the Mathis into a narrow street between tall-sided tenements. It was years since he had been on rue des Peupliers, and his memory was of broken cobbles, boardedup premises and shabby pawnbrokers. The road was smoothly asphalted now and the parked autos were all gleaming nineteen-fifties models, low and muscular like crouched panthers. The posts of the electric street lamps gleamed with new paint. The street-level establishments were all discreet, high-class affairs: clockmakers, antiquarian booksellers, exclusive jewellers, a shop selling maps and globes, another specialising in fountain pens. As afternoon turned to evening, the storefronts threw welcoming rectangles of light on to the darkening sidewalk.
“There’s number twenty-three,” Floyd said, easing the car into a space next to the apartment building Blanchard had given as his address. “That’s where she must have fallen,” he added, nodding towards a patch of sidewalk that showed every sign of having been recently scrubbed. “Must have been from one of those balconies above us.”
Custine looked out of the side window. “No sign of damaged railings on any of them. Doesn’t look as though any of them have been replaced and repainted lately, either.”
Floyd reached back and Custine passed him his notebook and fedora. “We’ll see.”
As they got out of the car, a small girl wearing scuffed black shoes and a stained dress emerged from the building and walked out on to the street. Floyd was about to call out to her before she allowed the door to close, but the words stalled in his throat when he saw her face: even in the fading light, some suggestion of disfigurement or strangeness was apparent. He watched her skip down the street, finally disappearing into the shadows between the lights. Resignedly, Floyd tried the glass-fronted door that the girl had just come through and found it locked. Next to it was a panel of buzzers accompanied by the names of the tenants. He found Blanchard’s and pressed it.
A voice crackled through the grille immediately. “You are late, Monsieur Floyd.”
“Does that mean the appointment is off?”
In place of an answer there was a buzz from the door. Custine pushed it experimentally and the door opened a crack.
“Let’s see how this plays out,” Floyd said. “Usual drilclass="underline" I’ll do most of the talking; you sit and observe.”
That was the way they normally worked. Floyd had long ago found that his not-quite-perfect French lulled people into a false sense of security, often encouraging them to blurt out things that they might otherwise have held back.
The hallway led immediately to a carpeted flight of stairs, which they took to the third-floor landing, both of them wheezing from the climb when they arrived. Three of the doors were shut, but the fourth was slightly ajar, a crack of electric light spilling on to the well-worn carpet. An eye loomed in the gap. “This way, Monsieur Floyd. Please!”
The crack widened enough to admit Floyd and Custine into a living room, where the curtains had already been drawn against the advancing gloom of evening.
“This is my associate, André Custine,” Floyd said. “This being a homicide investigation, I thought two pairs of eyes and ears might be better than one.”
Blanchard nodded courteously towards each of them. “Would you care for some tea? The kettle is still warm.”
Custine started to say something, but Floyd was already thinking about how little time he had before his meeting with Greta and got in first. “Very kind of you, monsieur, but we’d best be getting on with the investigation.” He removed his fedora and placed it on an empty chess table. “Where do you want to begin?”
“I rather expected you to take the lead,” Blanchard said, moving to close the door behind them.
Floyd’s mental image of the caller on the telephone had turned out to be reassuringly close to the mark. Blanchard was a thin, old gentleman in his seventies with a crook of a nose upon which balanced a pair of half-moon spectacles. He wore a kind of fez or nightcap that resisted precise identification; a quilted nightgown covered striped pyjamas, thick slippers his feet.
“Maybe you should go back to the beginning,” Floyd said. “Tell me about the American girl. How much did you know about her?”
“She was a tenant, and she paid her rent on time.” For a moment Blanchard fussed with a fire iron, poking away at the ashes in the room’s enormous Art Deco fireplace. On the mantelpiece, two bookend owls surveyed the proceedings with jewelled eyes. Floyd and Custine squeezed in next to each other on the sofa, shuffling awkwardly.
“That’s all?” Floyd prompted.
Blanchard turned from the fireplace. “She stayed here for three months, until her death. She kept the room two floors above this one. She would rather have had one a little lower—as I think I mentioned, she did not like heights—but none was available.”
“Did she complain to you about that?” Floyd asked. His eyes wandered over the walls, taking in an array of African masks and hunting trophies, none of which looked as if they had been dusted in recent memory. A portrait photograph hung next to the door, showing a handsome young couple in front of the Eiffel Tower. Their clothing and slightly stiff expressions suggested a picture taken at least fifty years earlier. Floyd studied the young man’s face and measured it against the old gentleman who was their host.
“She complained to me, yes,” Blanchard said, easing himself into a chair. “To her landlord, no.”
“I thought you were—” Floyd began.
“I was her landlord, yes, but she did not know that. None of the tenants are aware that I am anything more than another tenant. They pay their rent through an intermediary.”