Orders issued, Lerens escorted each boy to a separate police car, helping them into the back seat and lingering a moment to talk to them. Then Lerens turned to the uniformed officers and told them to put on gloves and find Tourville’s phone, with minimal disturbance to the body’s position. Good idea, Hugo thought, it may contain recorded or photographed information related to her crimes or, of more immediate interest, evidence of her killer.
Hugo almost jumped when his phone buzzed and he saw it was a text from Tom.
Took your advice. On a helicopter. Got your VM but can’t talk. Obviously.
Hugo smiled and wondered just how close Tom was to the ship, whether it had set sail and if so, how far it had gotten.
Lieutenant Lerens caught him smiling at the phone. “Something funny at last?”
“Tom. Always funny, even when he shouldn’t be.”
“Ah. So, you want to tell me what’s going on?”
“Sure,” said Hugo. “But let’s sit in the car, this could take a while.”
“Bien sûr.” They settled into their seats in her car and Lerens half-turned and looked at him. “Now go.”
“D’accord. But I’d ask you to remember that some of this is fact, and some is … well, let’s call it deduction. Or guesswork, if you prefer. I think we can prove most of it, eventually, but for now—”
“Hugo,” she interrupted. “Just tell me.”
“Right, sorry. I’ll start with Alexandra Tourville. Obviously we all know about her past. I think that all of this has happened because she was trying to resurrect her career. Not so much make a name for herself — that door closed a while back — but I think she was seeking enough money to become independent from her brother and maybe grab a little power to go with it.”
“What kind of power?”
“Political. The power thing may have been an afterthought, but I think she stumbled across her chance and decided to take it. If I had to bet, I think she started down a path without knowing exactly where it would end up, or how, and it all snowballed. Became one of those things that once you start, you can’t stop or back out of.”
“Well,” Lerens said, “I’d know a little something about that, wouldn’t I?”
Hugo laughed softly. “I suppose you would. Anyway, she’d started her genealogy business. She was working for a client in the United States, she told us that. My friend in England, she’s tapped into that community and found out who. A political rival of our good Senator Charles Lake.”
“Why would a political rival hire a genealogist?”
Hugo shrugged. “These days rivals will dig up any dirt they can. Maybe they were hoping to link him to a mobster, a child molester, Adolf Hitler. Don’t ask me to explain the devious mind of a politician. Point is, she dug into Lake’s background and obviously found something. I’m willing to bet that she found a dead end.”
“What do you mean, ‘dead end’?”
“That his family tree was stunted. No more information.” Hugo held up a finger. “That would have told her to check immigration records. Merlyn said that’s the obvious move when a trail dies, especially if it’s between 1800 and 1900. She also told me that a lot of those records have long since been lost, but a lot still remain.”
“So she found out Lake’s family were immigrants, big deal.”
“Correct, on both counts. Everyone in America is an immigrant, right? But Alexie Tourville had a few suspicions, given her knowledge of history, the timing of the immigration, and the names on the immigration paperwork.”
“Suspicions? About what?”
“I’m not sure, not entirely. I’m coming at this from the opposite end, unraveling what she created so it’s hard for me to know what she knew, and when. But at some point she figured out what I did at Père Lachaise today.”
“Which is?”
“That when people want to hide their past, when they want to bury some part of themselves, one of the first things they do is change their name. Oscar Wilde did it: he even had business cards made up with his new name of Sebastian Melmoth. But, like Oscar Wilde and pretty much everyone else who changes their name, they hang on to some variant of their old one. In Wilde’s case, he picked the names Sebastian and Melmoth after Saint Sebastian and the titular character of Melmoth the Wanderer; a Gothic novel by his great-uncle. But it’s the same for everyone, Martin Smith will call himself Mark Simons. Julie-Ann Jones will call herself Anne Johnson. I’ve seen it time and again.” He smiled. “Look at you, Christophe became Camille.”
“That’s true.” She nodded slowly. “But I still don’t get it. Who changed their name?”
“That’s where Merlyn worked her magic. She told me that a family called Fontaine moved to America a couple of hundred years ago. In 1796, I think she said.”
“So?”
“Think about the names,” Hugo said.
Lerens rolled her eyes. “Tom said you did this. Fine, the names. Fontaine, Tourville—”
“Forget Tourville. The other players.”
“Fontaine,” Lerens tried again, “Bassin, and … oh my goodness, Lake.”
“Wrong order but otherwise right. A ‘bassin’ can be an ornamental pond, right?”
“Yes, of course …”
“Pond, Fountain, and Lake. Same family from start to finish, from then until now.”
“So … Senator Lake is descended from the Bassin family?” She thought for a moment. “You know, that would be pretty embarrassing for him. I mean, the man hates foreigners, especially the French.”
“True, although like I said, pretty much everyone in America is descended from somewhere in Europe. But yes, he’d look a little silly if someone proved he was of French descent.”
“Someone like … Alexie Tourville.”
“Right.”
“She was blackmailing him?”
“Not about that. Not just about that, anyway. But along those lines, because that first night at the chateau she was pressing Lake about his rich donors, asking what would happen if they suddenly didn’t like him anymore. I thought at the time she was referencing her own past, but I think she was testing him, consciously or not she was showing her hand or obliquely pointing to the writing on the wall.”
“Which said what?”
“That there might come a point where his wealthy isolationist friends would turn their backs on him. And I think that’s where the robbery at the Bassin house comes in.”
“Explain it to me.”
“I can’t,” Hugo said apologetically. “Not entirely, anyway. And without proof, my little theory is going to sound … far-fetched. But it has to do with the lock of hair we found in the chest.”
“Hugo, this whole thing is far-fetched. Every step of it has been insane, so try me. And how many times do I have to point out that life has taught me to be a little more open-minded than some people?”
“I keep forgetting, sorry. But since you insist, Merlyn used the family tree and the notes I sent her and saw that one branch of the Bassin family left that house around the time we’re talking about, and some others moved in. Siblings, cousins, I don’t know. But Georges Bassin had mentioned something similar. My theory is that whoever moved out headed to Marseilles where they changed their names to Fontaine, and then moved to America where they, like so many who came, changed their name again. A twofold attempt to cover their tracks. The husband, wife, and their son. I also think they weren’t so much emigrating as escaping.”
“Explain that.”
“Because they didn’t need to emigrate. These were people with a big house, money, and who lived far enough from Paris and politics that the craziness of the revolution had passed them by.”