The Ben Hope Collection

27

Two hours earlier

During the Nazi occupation of Paris the sprawling honeycomb of austere rooms and dark corridors had been used as a Gestapo prison and interrogation centre. Nowadays the enormous basement beneath the police HQ housed, among other things, the forensic lab and morgue. It was as though the place couldn’t shake off its gruesome heritage.

Luc Simon was standing with the forensic pathologist, the tall thin white-haired Georges Rudel, in a stark neon-lit examination room. On the slab in front of them, a corpse lay covered in a white sheet. Only the feet were visible, protruding from underneath, pallid and cold. A label dangled from one toe. Simon wasn’t a squeamish man but he fought the urge to look away as Rudel casually peeled back the sheet far enough to uncover the corpse’s head, neck and chest.

They’d cleaned Michel up since the last time Simon had seen him, but he still wasn’t a pretty sight. The bullet had entered under the chin, carved its wound channel up behind the face, taking most of it away before exiting through the top of the head. Just one eye remained, sitting in its socket like a hard-boiled egg with a pupil that seemed to stare right at them.

‘What’ve you got for me?’ Simon asked Rudel.

The pathologist pointed at the mess of Michel’s face. ‘Damage here is all consistent with the bullet found in the ceiling,’ he said, speaking mechanically as though dictating a report. ‘Entry wound here. Weapon was held against the upper chest with the muzzle in loose contact with the lower jaw. Edges of the entry wound are burned from combustion gases and blacked with soot. The weapon was a Smith and Wesson revolver, three inch barrel, .44 Remington Magnum. The powerful calibre accounts for the amount of bone and tissue damage.’

Simon tapped his foot impatiently. He hoped that this was leading somewhere.

‘Typically that calibre uses much slower-burning powder than you get with semi-auto rounds like the nine millimetre,’ Rudel went on matter-of-factly ‘That means you get a lot of unburnt residue, especially with a short barrel. Doesn’t burn so clean.’ He pointed. ‘You can see it all here, embedded in the skin. Also here down the neck.’

Simon nodded. ‘OK, so what are you telling me?’

Rudel turned to look at him with bleary eyes. ‘The victim’s prints are on the stocks and the trigger of the weapon. So we know he fired the shot without gloves.’

‘He was found still clutching the gun. No gloves. We know that. Are you going to cut to the chase before one of us dies?’

Rudel ignored the sarcasm. ‘Well, this is what I find perplexing. With all this mess of unburnt powder I’d expect to find a lot of it on the gun hand, as well as the normal chemical discharge that blows back when the weapon is fired. But this man’s hands are clean.’

‘You’re sure about this?’

‘Quite sure–it’s a simple swab test for residue.’ Rudel reached down and lifted a pale lifeless arm out from under the sheet. ‘See for yourself.’

‘You’re saying he didn’t fire the shot.’

Rudel shrugged, and let the dead hand flop back down by the corpse’s side. ‘Only thing on this man’s hands, apart from the usual sweat and grease, are some traces of oily fish. Pilchard, to be precise.’

It struck Simon as absurd, and he laughed. ‘You ran a test for pilchard?’

Rudel looked at him coldly. ‘No, there was a half-opened tin of it on his kitchen table, next to a cat’s feeding dish. Now, all I’m saying is, who would blow their brains out in the middle of feeding their cat?’

The boy was jerked semi-conscious as they dragged him off the hard bunk. He heard voices around him, the clang of metal doors and the jangling of keys. Sounds echoed in the empty space. A swirl of lights blinded him through his confusion. A sudden lancing pain in his arm made him wince.

It might have been minutes later, or it might have been hours–everything was hazy, unreal. He was vaguely aware of not being able to move, arms pinned behind him. The white light was burning into his head, making him blink and twist his head away as he sat tied in the chair.

He wasn’t alone. Two men were in the cellar with him, watching him.

‘Shall I dispose of him?’ said one voice.

‘No, keep him alive for the moment. He may be useful to us.’

28

The warm water trickled over her head and tinkled against the side of the bath where she was bent over. The foam running into the plughole was tinged with red as he carefully washed the blood out of her hair.

‘Ouch.’

‘Sorry. You’ve got dried bits stuck in here.’

‘I don’t want to know, Ben.’

He hung the shower head up on its wall hook and squeezed more shampoo into his hand, lathering it into her hair.

Her nerves were steadier now–the nausea had left her and her hands weren’t shaking any more. She relaxed against his touch, thinking how tender and gentle it was. She could feel the warmth of his body pressing up behind her as he rinsed the foam away from her hair and neck.

‘I think it’s all gone now.’

‘Thanks,’ she murmured, wrapping a towel around her head.

He gave her a spare shirt to wear, and then left her alone to clean the rest of herself up. While she showered, he quickly field-stripped, cleaned and reassembled his Browning. As he went through these fluid, automatic motions, as deeply instilled in him as tying a shoelace or brushing his teeth, his mind was far away.

She emerged from the bathroom, wearing his oversize shirt knotted at the waist, her long dark red hair still damp and gleaming. He poured her a glass of wine. ‘You OK?’

‘Yeah, I’m OK.’

‘Roberta…I haven’t been totally straight with you. There are some things you should know.’

‘This is about the gun?’

He nodded. ‘And other things.’

She sat looking down at the floor and sipped her wine as he told her everything. He told her about Fairfax, about his quest, about the dying little girl. ‘And that’s basically all there is. Now you know everything.’ He watched her for a reaction.

She was quiet for a while, her face still and thoughtful. ‘So, is that what you do, Ben? Save kids?’ she asked softly.

He looked at his watch. ‘It’s late. You need to get some sleep.’

That night he let her use the bed while he slept on the floor in the other room. She was woken at dawn by the sound of him moving about. She came sleepily out of the bedroom to see him packing up his green canvas bag. ‘What’s happening?’ ‘I’m leaving Paris.’

‘You’re leaving? What about me?’

‘After last night, do you still want to come along with me?’

‘Yes, I do. Where are we going?’

‘South,’ he said, slipping Fulcanelli’s Journal carefully into the bag and wishing he had more time to read it. Then he opened a drawer of his desk and took out the passport he kept in there. He’d had it made for him in London, and it was indistinguishable from the real thing. The picture on it was his, but the name was Paul Harris. He slid it in the inside pocket of his jacket.

‘But Ben, there’s just one thing,’ she remembered. ‘I have to go back to my place first.’

He shook his head. ‘Sorry No chance.’

‘I have to.’

‘What for? If you need clothes and things, that’s all right–we’ll go and buy you whatever you want.’

‘No, it’s something else. These people who are after us–if they get into my apartment again they could find my address book. Everything’s in that book, all my friends and family in the States. What if they did something to my family to try to get to me?’

When Luc Simon returned to his office, he found the whole police station in an uproar as news came in about the quayside shooting. Violent crime was a normal thing in Paris, part of life. But when there was a bloodbath like this, with two cops gunned down and five more bodies littering the banks of the Seine, guns and spent cartridges everywhere, the police force was coming out en masse.

Simon found a brown envelope on his desk. The report inside was from handwriting analysis. The writing on the Zardi suicide note was a mismatch with other samples of his handwriting found in his apartment, shopping lists, memos and a half-written letter to his mother. It was pretty close, but it was definitely a forgery. And fake suicide notes pointed in one direction only. Especially when you already knew the victim wasn’t the shooter.

If it was a murder case after all, he’d really dropped the ball. He hadn’t paid enough attention to the Ryder woman. Too much on his mind, maybe, with his and Hélène’s relationship problems hanging over him on top of everything else. Trying to refloat a sunken marriage while trying to stop the whole of Paris from killing each other–the two just weren’t compatible.

But no excuses. The fact was, he’d fucked up. Roberta Ryder wasn’t just some crank. She was involved in something. What it was, and how she was connected, he’d have to find out.

But it was all questions, no answers. Who was the guy she’d turned up with on the night of Zardi’s death? Something odd about the way they were acting together. It had been as though the man was trying to stop her saying too much. Hadn’t he said she was his fiancée? They didn’t look that close. And hadn’t Roberta Ryder told him, just hours earlier, that she was single?

The guy was important, somehow. What was his name? If Simon remembered rightly, he hadn’t seemed too keen to give it and hadn’t looked too pleased when Ryder gave it for him. He opened up the file on his desk. Ben Hope, that was it. British, despite his near-perfect French. He’d need to check him out. Then search the Ryder woman’s apartment. He could easily get a warrant now.

Simon ran into his colleague Detective Bonnard and they walked down the busy corridor together. Bonnard looked serious, grey and haggard. ‘Just got the latest on this multiple homicide and cop-killing,’ he said.

‘Fill me in.’

‘We’ve got a witness. Motorist reported two people running from the scene of the incident, just around the time it was happening. Male and female Caucasian. Woman young, we think red hair, maybe early thirties. Male possibly a little older, taller, fair-haired. Looked as if the woman was struggling, trying to get away. Witness says she was covered in blood.’

‘A blond man and a red-haired woman?’ Simon repeated. ‘Was the woman injured?’

‘Doesn’t look like it. We think she’s the same woman our officers picked up just before they were killed. She left some blood traces on the back seat of the car, but it belonged to one of the bodies we found under the bridge, guy with his brains blown out by a rifle bullet. Pretty pictures all over the wall.’

‘So where did she go?’

Bonnard made a helpless gesture. ‘No idea. Looks like she just vanished. Either she got away on her own or someone took her away pretty damn quick before our boys got to the scene.’

‘Great. What else do we have?’

Bonnard shook his head. ‘It’s a mess. We recovered the rifle. Military weapon, untraceable and not a print on it anywhere. Same with the pistols we found. A couple of the victims we know–stints for armed robbery and so on. Usual suspects, won’t be missed. But we haven’t much of a clue what the hell this is about. Drug-related, maybe.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Simon said.

‘One thing we do know is that we’re missing at least one shooter. Nine-mil slugs were found in three of the bodies. Looks like they all came from the same gun, which the forensic guys tells us from the rifling pattern is a Browning type pistol. It’s the only gun we haven’t recovered.’

‘Right,’ Simon said, nodding, thinking hard.

‘There is one more thing,’ Bonnard went on. ‘Based on what we can figure out, the mystery nine-mil shooter isn’t your typical low-life crim. Whoever it is can hit high-speed one-inch groups on moving targets at twenty-five metres in the dark. Can you do that? I sure as hell can’t do that…We’re dealing with a serious pro.’

29

‘You’re sure it’s on the bedside table?’ Ben was saying as he parked the dented Peugeot a discreet distance from Roberta’s building.

She was wearing the baseball cap he’d bought her at a market earlier that morning, her hair tucked into it. With that and the shades she was unrecognizable. ‘Bedside table, little red book,’ she repeated.

‘You wait here,’ he said. ‘Key’s in the ignition. Any sign of trouble, get out of here. Drive slowly, don’t rush. Call me first chance you get, and I’ll meet you.’

She nodded. He got out of the car and put on the sunglasses. She watched with trepidation as he walked briskly up the street and disappeared into the doorway of her building.

Luc Simon had had enough of hanging around Roberta Ryder’s place. He’d been here half an hour now, waiting with his two agents for the forensic team to arrive. His impatient rage was giving him another one of his killer headaches. As usual, the forensic guys were keeping him hanging around waiting. Undisciplined bunch of bastards–he’d give them hell when they got here.

He thought about sending one of his uniforms out to get coffee. Fuck it. He’d do it himself–Christ knew what kind of shit they’d bring back. There was a bar across the street, Le Chien Bleu; stupid name but the coffee might not be too bad.

He thundered down the spiralling flights of stairs, trotted through the cool hallway and out into the sunshine, deep in thought. He was too preoccupied to notice the tall blond man in sunglasses and a black jacket coming the other way. The man didn’t slacken his stride but recognized the police inspector immediately, and knew there’d be other cops waiting upstairs.

‘That was quick,’ the two officers thought when they heard the doorbell of Ryder’s apartment. They opened the door, expecting Simon. If they were lucky, he’d have brought them a coffee and a bite to eat–though that was almost certainly wishing for too much considering that the chief was in an even fouler mood than usual.

But the man at the door was a tall blond stranger. He didn’t seem surprised to find two policemen in the apartment. He leaned casually against the doorway, smiling at them. ‘Hi,’ he said, taking off his sunglasses. ‘Wondered if you could help me…’

Simon returned to Ryder’s apartment, sipping his paper cup of scalding espresso. Thank Christ, it was taking the headache away already. He hurried back up the stairs to the third floor, banged on the door and waited to be let in. After three minutes, he thumped harder and yelled through the door. What the hell were they doing in there? Another minute passed, and it was clear that something was wrong.

‘Police,’ he said to the neighbour, flashing his ID. The little old man craned his head on a shrivelled, tortoise-like neck and peered bemusedly at the ID, then up at Simon, then at the cup of coffee in Simon’s hand.

‘Police,’ Simon repeated more loudly. ‘I need to use your apartment.’ The old man opened the door wider, stepping aside. Simon pushed past him. ‘Hold this, please,’ he said, handing the old man his empty cup. ‘Where’s your balcony?’

‘This way.’ The neighbour shuffled through the apartment ahead of him, down a little corridor lined with watercolour paintings, then into a neat salon with an upright piano and mock-antique armchairs. The television was blaring. Simon saw what he was looking for, the tall double windows leading out onto the narrow balcony.

There was a gap of only about a metre and a half between the old man’s balcony and Ryder’s. Keeping his eyes resolutely off the three-storey drop to the yard below, he climbed over the iron railing and jumped across from one balcony to the other.

Ryder’s balcony window was unlocked. He drew his service sidearm and thumbed back the hammer as he paced silently into the apartment. He could hear a muffled thumping coming from somewhere. It seemed to be coming from Ryder’s makeshift laboratory. With the cocked .38 revolver pointed in front of him he moved stealthily towards the sound.

Inside the lab, he heard it again. It was coming from behind those doors where Ryder kept her revolting flies. Thump, thump.

Simon pulled open the doors, and the first thing he saw was the black, hairy insects swarming over the glass, their disturbed buzzing muted behind the thick walls of their tanks. Something moved against his leg. He looked down.

Crammed into the space beneath the tanks were his two officers, bound and gagged with tape, struggling. Their automatics were lying side by side on the desk, unloaded and stripped, their barrels missing.

The police squad found them later, one inside each of the fly tanks.

Ben tossed the little red book onto her lap. ‘First chance you get,’ he said, getting into the car, ‘you destroy that, understood?’

She nodded. ‘S-Sure.’

As the Peugeot speeded up and disappeared down the street, a man slouching in a doorway turned and watched it go. The man wasn’t a cop, but he’d been watching the Ryder place since the night before. He nodded to himself and took up his phone. When someone answered after a couple of rings he said, ‘A silver 206 coupe with a dented front wing just took off down Rue de Rome heading south. Man and a woman. You can pick them up at Boulevard des Batignolles but you’d better move fast.’

30

Six months earlier, near Montségur, southern France

Anna Manzini was unhappy at having put herself in such a situation. Who would have thought that the author of two acclaimed books on medieval history and a respected lecturer at the University of Florence would have behaved in such an impulsive and idiotically romantic fashion? To give up a well-paid professional position to go off and rent a villa-a very expensive villa, at that–in the south of France to begin a whole new fiction-writing career from scratch wasn’t the kind of measured and logical behaviour that Anna was known for amongst her former colleagues and students.

Worse, she’d deliberately chosen a secluded house, deep in the rugged mountains and valleys of the Languedoc, in the hope that the solitude would fire her imagination.

It hadn’t. She’d been there for over two months, and had hardly written more than a sentence. To begin with she’d kept herself to herself, not seeing anyone. But more recently she’d started welcoming the attentions of local intellectuals and academics who’d discovered that the author of the books The Crusade that History Forgot and God’s Heretics: Discovering the Real Cathars was now living just a few kilometres away in the countryside. After months of boredom and loneliness she’d been relieved at the chance to befriend the vivacious Angélique Montel, a local artist. Angélique had introduced her to an interesting new circle of people, and Anna had eventually decided to have a dinner party at the villa.

While she waited for her guests, she remembered what Angélique had been saying on the phone two days before. ‘You know what I think, Anna? You have writer’s block because you need a man. So for your dinner party I’m bringing along a good friend of mine. He’s Dr. Edouard Legrand. He’s brilliant, rich, and single.’

‘If he’s so wonderful,’ Anna said smiling, ‘then why are you so keen to pass him onto me?’

‘Oh, you wicked girl, he’s my cousin.’ Angélique giggled. ‘He’s been divorced only a short while, and he’s lost without a woman. He’s six years older than you, forty-eight, but has the physique of an athlete. Tall, black hair, sexy, sophisticated…’

‘Bring him along,’ she’d said to Angélique. ‘I look forward to meeting him.’ But the last thing I need in my life right now is a man, she thought to herself.

There were eight for dinner. Angélique had strategically managed to ensure that Dr. Legrand was seated beside Anna at the top of the table. She’d been right–he was very charming and handsome in a well-tailored suit, hair greying at the temples.

The conversation had dwelt for a while on a modern art exhibition that many of the guests had attended in Nice. Now they were all keen to know more about Anna’s new book project.

‘Please, I don’t want to talk about it,’ said Anna. ‘It’s so depressing. I have writer’s block. I just don’t seem to be able to do it. Maybe it’s because I’m writing a book of fiction for the first time, a novel.’

The guests were surprised and intrigued. ‘A novel? What about?’

Anna sighed. ‘It’s a mystery story about the Cathars. The trouble is that I have such difficulty imagining my characters.’

‘Ah, but I have the right man here to help you,’ Angélique said, seeing her opportunity. ‘Dr. Legrand is a famous psychiatrist and can help anyone with any kind of mental problem.’

Legrand laughed. ‘Anna hasn’t got a mental problem. Many of the most talented people have sometimes suffered from temporary loss of inspiration. Even Rachmaninov, the great composer, found his creativity blocked and had to be hypnotized in order to create his greatest works.’

‘Thank you, Dr. Legrand,’ Anna said, smiling. ‘But your analogy does me far too much credit. I’m no Rachmaninov.’

‘Please, call me Edouard. But I’m sure you are very talented.’ He paused. ‘However, if it’s interesting characters you’re looking for, with a taste of the mysterious and the gothic, there I may be able to help you.’

‘Dr. Legrand is director of the Institut Legrand,’ said Madame Chabrol, a music teacher from Cannes.

‘The Institut Legrand?’ asked Anna.

‘A psychiatric hospital,’ Angélique filled in.

‘Just a small private establishment,’ Legrand said. ‘Not far from here, outside Limoux.’

‘Edouard, are you referring to that strange man you once told me about?’ Angélique asked.

He nodded. ‘One of our most curious and fascinating patients. He’s been with us for about five years now. His name is Rheinfeld, Klaus Rheinfeld.’

‘His name sounds like Renfield, from the Dracula story,’ Anna commented.

‘That’s quite apt, although I haven’t yet observed him eating flies,’ Legrand replied, and everyone laughed. ‘But certainly he’s an interesting case. He’s a religious maniac. He was found not far from here, in a village, by a priest. He self-mutilates–his body’s covered in scars. He raves about demons and angels, convinced he’s in Hell–or sometimes in Heaven. He continually recites Latin phrases, and is obsessed with meaningless series of numbers and letters. He scrawls them all over the walls of his ce-…his room.’

‘Why do you allow him to have a pen, Dr. Legrand?’ asked Madame Chabrol. ‘Could that not be dangerous?’

‘We don’t, any longer,’ he said. ‘He writes them in his own blood, urine and faeces.’

Everyone around the table looked shocked and disgusted, except Anna. ‘He sounds terribly unhappy,’ she said.

Legrand nodded. ‘Yes, I believe he probably is,’ he agreed.

‘But why would anyone want to…mutilate themselves, Edouard?’ asked Angélique, wrinkling her nose. ‘Such an awful thing to do.’

‘Rheinfeld displays stereotypic behaviour,’ Legrand replied. ‘That is to say, he suffers from what we call an obsessive-compulsive disorder. It can be triggered by chronic stress and frustration. In his case, we think that the mental disorder was caused by his years of fruitless searching for something.’

‘What was he searching for?’ Anna asked.

Legrand shrugged. ‘We don’t really know for sure. He seems to believe he was on some form of quest for buried treasure, lost secrets, that sort of thing. It’s a common mania among the mentally ill.’ He smiled. ‘We’ve had a number of other intrepid treasure hunters in our care over the years. As well as our share of Jesus Christs, Napoleon Buonapartes and Adolf Hitlers. I’m afraid they’re often not very imaginative in their choice of delusions.’

‘A lost treasure,’ Anna said, half to herself. ‘And you say he was found not far from here…’ Her voice trailed off in reflection.

‘Can nothing be done to help him, Edouard?’ asked Angélique.

Legrand shook his head. ‘We’ve tried. When he first came to us, he received psychoanalysis and occupational therapy. For the first few months he appeared to respond to treatment. He was given a notebook to record his dreams. But then we discovered that he was filling its pages with insane babble. Over a period of time, his mental state deteriorated and he began to self-mutilate again. We had to take away his writing implements and increase his medication. Since then, I’m afraid to say, he’s descended deeper and deeper into what I can only describe as madness.’

‘What a terrible pity,’ Anna breathed.

Legrand turned to her with a charming smile. ‘In any case you would be more than welcome to have a tour of our little establishment, Anna. And if it could help you gain inspiration for your book, I could arrange for you to meet Rheinfeld in person–under supervision of course. Nobody ever comes to see him. You never know, it might do him good to have a visitor.’