A Foreign Country

42

Back at the hotel, there was a voice message on Kell’s telephone from a petulant-sounding Madeleine Brive. She was sorry to hear about the attack at Cité Radieuse, but seemingly more upset that Stephen Uniacke had not possessed the good grace to call her earlier in the afternoon to warn her that their dinner at Chez Michel would not now be going ahead. As a consequence, she had wasted her one and only night in Marseille.

‘Charming,’ Kell said to the room as he hung up. He wondered if Luc was still listening.

He slept well, as deeply as at any point in the operation, and ate a decent breakfast in the hotel restaurant before checking out and finding an Internet café within a stone’s throw of the Gare Saint-Charles. His laptop was now effectively useless; Luc’s DGSE comrades would almost certainly have fitted it with a tracking device or key logger software. Kell saw that Elsa Cassani had sent a document by email, which he assumed — correctly — was the vetting file on Malot. A message accompanying the document said: ‘Call me if you have any questions x’ and Kell printed it out with the assistance of a hyper-efficient Goth with a piercing in his tongue.

There was a branch of McDonald’s at the station. Kell bought a cup of radioactively hot coffee, found a vacant table, and worked his way through Elsa’s findings.

She had done well, tracing Malot’s secondary school, the college in Toulon where he had studied Information Technology, the name of the gym in Paris of which he was a member. The photograph of Malot sent by Marquand showed two of his colleagues from a software firm in Brest that had been bought out and absorbed by a larger corporation in Paris, at the headquarters of which Malot now worked. Elsa had traced two bank accounts, as well as tax records going back seven years; there were, in her opinion, ‘no anomalies’ in Malot’s financial affairs. He paid his bills on time, had been renting his apartment in the 7th for just over a year, and drove a second-hand Renault Megane that had been purchased in Brittany. As far as friends or girlfriends were concerned, enquiries at his office and gymnasium suggested that François Malot was something of a loner, a private man who kept himself to himself. Elsa had even telephoned Malot’s boss, who informed her that ‘poor François’ was on an extended leave of absence following a family tragedy. As far as she could tell, Malot had no presence on social networks and his emails were regularly downloaded to a host computer that Elsa had not been able to hack. Without the assistance of Cheltenham, it had not been possible to listen to his mobile telephone calls but she had managed to intercept one potentially interesting email exchange between Malot and an individual registered with Wanadoo as ‘Christophe Delestre’ whom she suspected was a friend or relative. Elsa had attached the correspondence to the file.

Kell placed the rest of the documents in his shoulder bag, drained his cup of coffee and sent Elsa a text.

This is all first class. Thank you.

In different circumstances, he might have added one of her kisses — ‘X’ — at the end of the message, but he was the boss, and therefore obliged to keep a certain professional distance. He then proceeded to read the Delestre emails. They were in French and dated five days earlier, which placed Malot at the Ramada towards the tail-end of his holiday with Amelia.

Kell put the email printout with the rest of the documents in his shoulder bag. He found a public toilet in the underground level of Gare Saint-Charles, went into a cubicle, tore up the entire file and flushed it in small pieces down the toilet. He went back upstairs, bought himself a ticket with a Uniacke credit card, and caught the ten o’clock TGV to Paris.

It was time to have a little chat with Christophe.