Century Rain

SEVEN

Floyd’s telephone dredged him from sleep just after eight in the morning. It hadn’t stopped raining since he had returned from Montparnasse. It lashed against the window in hard diagonal lines, the wind chivvying the glass in its loose-fitting metal frame. Somewhere else in the apartment he heard Custine whistling cheerily, pottering around with washing-up. Floyd grimaced. There were two things he hated early in the morning: telephone calls and excessively cheerful people.

Still half-dressed from the night before, he stumbled out of bed and picked up the telephone. “Floyd,” he said, his voice thick from what little sleep he had managed. “And how are you, Monsieur Blanchard?”

This seemed to impress his caller. “How did you know it was me?”

“Call it a hunch.”

“It’s not too early for you, is it?”

Floyd scraped grit from the corners of his eyes. “Not at all, monsieur. Been up for hours, working on the case.”

“Is that so? Then perhaps you have something to tell me.”

“Early days, yet,” Floyd said. “Still collating the information we gathered last night.” He stifled a yawn.

“Then I presume you have a few leads already?”

“One or two,” he said.

Custine bustled in, pushing a mug of black coffee into Floyd’s free hand. “Who is it?” Custine asked in a stage whisper.

“Guess,” Floyd mouthed back.

“And these leads?” persisted Blanchard.

“Bit too soon to say how they’ll pan out.” Floyd hesitated, then decided to try his luck. “Actually, I’ve already got a specialist working on the documents in the tin.”

“A specialist? You mean someone who can read German?”

“Yes,” Floyd admitted feebly. He sipped at the viciously strong coffee and willed Blanchard—and the world in general—to leave him alone until later in the day. Custine sat down on the edge of Floyd’s fold-out bed, hands in his lap, his flowered apron still around his waist.

“Very well,” said Blanchard. “I suppose it would be naïve to expect concrete progress so soon in the investigation.”

“Unwise, certainly,” Floyd said.

“I’ll be in touch later, then. I shall be most interested to hear what your specialist has to say about Mademoiselle White’s papers.”

“I’m waiting with bated breath myself.”

“Good day to you, then.”

Floyd heard the gratifying click as Blanchard terminated the connection. He looked at Custine. “I hope you turned up something useful last night after I left.”

“Probably less than you’re hoping for. How did it go with Greta?”

“Less well than I was hoping.”

Custine looked sympathetic. “I guess from that conversation with Blanchard that you’ll be seeing her again?”

“Later today.”

“At least one more chance, then.” Custine stood up and began untying his apron. “I’m going downstairs to buy some bread. Smarten yourself up and we can discuss our respective experiences over breakfast.”

“I thought you said you hadn’t turned anything up.”

“I’m not sure that I have. At least, nothing I’d stake money on. But there was something—an observation made by Mademoiselle White’s neighbour.”

“What sort of observation?” Floyd asked.

“I’ll tell you over breakfast. And you can tell me how you got on with Greta.”

Floyd leafed through the morning newspaper while Custine fetched the bread. He skimmed the headlines—something about a murder on the first page—until a familiar name jumped out at him on the third page. There was a reference to Maillol, the same inspector who had given Blanchard Floyd’s name. Maillol was a good apple in an increasingly rotten barrel who had chosen to be sidelined rather than pursue the political agenda that Chatelier was forcing upon the police. Once a rising star of the Crime Squad—which was how Floyd had met him—Maillol’s days of high-profile cases and headline arrests were long over. Now he was working scraps from the table, unglamorous assignments like anti-bootlegging operations. According to the article, Maillol had uncovered an illegal record-pressing scam in the Montrouge quartier. The article described the investigation as “ongoing,” with the police following up a number of additional leads concerning other criminal activities taking place in the same complex of abandoned buildings. The news depressed Floyd. As glad as he was that he might now be able to scour the record markets without worrying that some apparently priceless piece of jazz history—say, a Gennett recording of Louis Armstrong from 1923—might actually have been pressed about a week ago, it was dispiriting to think of a good man like Maillol reduced to such meagre fare when suspicious deaths were going uninvestigated.

He went into the bathroom and showered in lukewarm water stained with rust from the apartment’s ancient plumbing. There was a bad taste in his mouth and it wasn’t the shower water or the memory of the orange brandy he had shared with Greta. Drying himself, he heard Custine coming back into the apartment. Floyd put on a vest and braces and a clean white shirt, leaving the choice of tie until he had to face the outside world. He padded into the tiny little kitchen in his socks. A warm-bread smell filled the room and Custine was already spreading butter and jelly on to a slice.

“Here,” the Frenchman said, “eat this and stop looking so miserable.”

“I could do without him ringing us at eight in the morning.” Floyd scraped back a seat and slumped down opposite Custine. “I’m in two minds about this whole business, André. I’m beginning to think we should call it off before it goes much further.”

Custine poured some more coffee for them both. His jacket was dark with rain, but otherwise he looked impeccably bright-eyed and well presented: cheeks and chin clean-shaven, his moustache neatly trimmed and oiled. “There was a time yesterday when I would have agreed with you.”

“And now?”

“Now I have my suspicions that there might be something to this after all. It’s what that neighbour told me. Something was going on, that’s for sure.”

Floyd started on his bread. “So what did the neighbour have to say?”

Custine tucked a napkin into his collar. “I spoke to all the tenants who were present last night. Blanchard thought they would all be home, but two were absent, or had at least left the building by the time we began our investigations. We can catch up with them later; at the very least it’ll give us another reason to drag things out.”

“The neighbour,” Floyd persisted.

“A young man, law student.” Custine bit into his jellied bread and dabbed delicately around his mouth with the napkin. “Helpful enough chap. In fact they were all helpful once they realised that they weren’t dealing with the Quai. And a murder—well…” He waved the bread for emphasis. “You can’t shut ’em up once they get it into their heads that they might be material witnesses in a murder case.”

“What did the law student have to say for himself?”

“He didn’t really know her at all, said he kept very odd hours as well and that their paths didn’t cross very often. Nodding acquaintances, that sort of thing.”

“Did he fancy her?”

“Fellow already has a fiancée, from what I gathered.”

“It sounds as if he barely knew Susan White. What did he have on her?”

“It’s what he heard,” Custine said. “You know what these buildings are like—walls like rice paper. He would always know if she was home: she couldn’t move around without the floorboards creaking.”

“That’s all?”

“No. He heard noises, strange sounds,” Custine said, “like someone playing the same note very quietly on a flute or recorder, over and over again.”

Floyd scratched his scalp. “Blanchard said he never heard her playing any music at all, not on the radio or on that old phonograph. But he did mention noises.”

“Agreed. And you think he’d have noticed if she kept an instrument in her room, wouldn’t you?”

“So it wasn’t an instrument. What else could it have been?” Floyd mused.

“Whatever it was must have been coming through the wireless. The way the student described it, the notes sounded rather like code. He heard long notes and short notes, and sometimes he was aware of repetition, as if a particular message was being repeated.”

For the first time that morning, Floyd felt the onset of something approaching alertness. “Like Morse code, you mean?”

“Draw your own conclusions. Of course, the student didn’t have the presence of mind actually to record any of these sounds as he heard them. It wasn’t until she died that he thought anything of it, and even then he didn’t attach any particular importance to it.”

“No?”

“He’s been studying for three years, renting almost a dozen different rooms in the process. He says he’d be hard pressed to think of a single neighbour who didn’t have at least one strange habit. After a while, he said, you learn to stop dwelling on such things. He admitted to me that he was fond of gargling mouthwash, and that at least one of his fellow tenants had commented that this was rather an odd thing to do at two in the morning.”

Floyd finished off his bread and coffee. “We’ll need to get back into her room, examine it thoroughly this time.”

“I’m sure Blanchard will be happy to oblige if he feels it’s in the interests of the case.”

“Maybe.” Floyd stood up, scratching his chin and making a mental note to shave before leaving the building. “But I’d prefer to keep a lid on this for now. I don’t want him getting all excited over the possibility that she might have been a spy.”

Custine looked at him with a knowing twinkle in his eye. “But you’re considering it, aren’t you? You’re at least toying with the possibility?”

“Let’s stick to concrete evidence, meaning eyewitnesses. What about the other tenants? Get anything from them?”

“Nothing useful. One fellow reported seeing an odd little girl hanging around the place on the day of the accident.”

“Odd in what way?”

“Said the child looked rather sickly.”

“Well, then,” Floyd said with a flourish of one hand, “round up the usual sickly children. Case closed.” But nagging at the back of his mind was the memory of the girl who had been coming out of Blanchard’s building when they had arrived the evening before. “There couldn’t really be a connection, could there?”

“The fellow was just trying to be helpful,” Custine said defensively. “At least the tenants all have your card now, and everyone I spoke to promised to get in touch if anything jogs their memories. No one knew anything about a sister.” He set about buttering himself another slice of bread. “Well, that’s my news. Your turn.”

The Mathis slid through thick Thursday-morning traffic, ankle-deep water hissing around the wheels where the overloaded drains had backed up and overflowed on to the street. The rain had finally eased and the sun was glinting fitfully off wet stonework and the fluted iron columns of street lamps; gleaming off statues and the Art Nouveau signs guarding the entrances to the Métro. Floyd loved Paris like this. Through his blurred and slitted eyes the city looked like an oil painting that needed a few more days to dry.

“So about Greta,” Custine said, from the passenger seat. “You can’t put it off for ever, Floyd. We had a deal.”

“What deal?”

“That I’d tell you about my interviews, and you’d tell me about Greta.”

Floyd’s knuckles tightened on the wheel. “She isn’t back for good. She won’t be rejoining the band.”

“And there’s no hope of talking her into it?”

“None at all.”

“Then why is she back, if it isn’t to torment you with what might have been? She’s cruel, our imperious little Fräulein, but she isn’t that cruel.”

“Her aunt’s dying,” Floyd said. “She wants to be with her until the end. That’s part of it, anyway.”

“And the rest?”

Floyd hesitated, on the verge of telling Custine to mind his own business. But Custine deserved better than that—his future was at stake here just as much as Floyd’s. He just didn’t realise it yet. “She’s not going back to the touring band either.”

“Fell out with them?”

“Seems not, just didn’t feel they were going anywhere, and that she wouldn’t be either if she stayed with them. So she got an idea into her head.”

“She’s going solo?”

Floyd shook his head. “More ambitious than that. Television.” He said the word like an obscenity. “She wants to be part of it.”

“Can’t blame the girl,” Custine replied, shrugging. “She’s got the talent, and she’s definitely got the looks. Good for her, I say. Why aren’t you cheering her on?”

Floyd steered the car past a hole in the road where some overall-clad workmen were swapping jokes but showing no other sign of activity. “Because she’s talking about television in America,” he said. “In Los Angeles, of course.”

Custine said nothing for a few blocks. Floyd drove on in silence, half-imagining that he could hear the grinding of his partner’s mental gears as he worked out the implications. Finally they slowed for a set of traffic lights.

“She’s asked you to go with her, hasn’t she?” Custine guessed.

“Not exactly asked,” Floyd said. “More like delivered an ultimatum. If I go with her, there’s a chance for us to be together. She said we could see how it works out. If I don’t, she walks out of my life and I’ll never hear from her again.”

They moved off again as the traffic light changed. “That’s quite an ultimatum,” Custine said. “Understandable from her point of view, though—it would be useful to have a burly American boyfriend around to fend off the sharks.”

“I’m French.”

“You’re French when it suits you. You pass as American just as easily when that suits you.”

“I can’t go. I have a life here. I have a business. I have a business partner who depends on me for his livelihood.”

“You sound like someone trying very hard to convince himself of something. Would you care for my opinion?”

“Something tells me I’m going to get it anyway.”

“You should go with her. Take the boat or plane or whatever to America. Look after her in Hollywood, or wherever it is that these television people have their empire. Give it two years. If it hasn’t worked out, Greta will still be able to make a good living back here.”

“And me?”

“If she makes a good living, maybe you won’t have to worry about earning one.”

“I don’t know, André.”

Custine thumped the dashboard in frustration. “What have you got to lose? We may have a case at this moment, but most of the time we barely have two centimes to rub together. It’s all excitement now, but if this murder investigation doesn’t pan out, we’ll be back exactly where we were this time yesterday: knocking on a lot of doors in the Marais. Except we won’t have a double bass.”

“We’ll always find detective work.”

“Undoubtedly. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in your employment, Floyd, it’s that there’s only so much money to be made from tracking down mistresses and missing cats.”

“What would you do?” Floyd asked.

“What I have always done,” Custine replied. “Follow my instincts and my conscience.”

“I’ll hand the business over to you, of course, if it comes to it.”

“Then you’ve at least thought things through that far. I’m glad, Floyd. It shows that you are thinking clearly, for once in your life.”

“I’m considering the options. That’s all.” Floyd steered the car on to the street where Blanchard lived. “Nothing will happen until we solve this case.”

“An unexpected breakthrough?” Blanchard asked when he opened the door to his rooms and let them inside. So little outside light made its way into the stairwells and corridors that the atmosphere of the building had barely changed from the previous evening. “Clearly a lot can change in an hour.”

“I told you we had some leads,” Floyd corrected him. “In the meantime, my partner and I need to have another look in Mademoiselle White’s room.”

“Do you think you missed something significant the first time?”

“That was a glance, not an investigation.” Floyd nodded at the little briefcase Custine had brought with him. “This time we’re here to do a proper job.”

“I’ll show you up to the room, in that case.”

They waited a moment for the landlord to button on a cardigan and fetch his keys. Politely, Floyd and Custine followed him as he ascended the stairs to Susan White’s room on the fifth floor.

“Just to confirm—no one but you has touched this room until we saw it yesterday?” Floyd asked.

“No one at all.”

“Could anyone else have found their way in without you knowing about it?”

“They would need a key,” Blanchard said. “I have Mademoiselle White’s key. It was on her person when she died—the police returned it.”

“Could someone have copied that key?” Floyd persisted.

“Conceivably, but it’s numbered for an apartment. No reputable locksmith would duplicate it without consent from a landlord.”

Blanchard let them into the room. In daylight it looked larger and dustier but otherwise was as Floyd remembered it from the evening before, crammed with books, newspapers, magazines and records. The balcony doors had been latched open an inch to air out the place, and the filmy white drapes drawn across them were moving in the breeze.

“We’ll need some time alone up here,” Floyd said. “Please don’t take offence, but we tend to work best without an audience.”

Blanchard hovered at the door, and for a moment Floyd wondered if they were ever going to get rid of him.

“Very well, then,” Blanchard said eventually. “I shall give you some privacy. Please, leave everything as you found it.”

“We’ll do just that,” Custine assured him. He waited until the door had closed behind the landlord before asking, “Floyd—what exactly are we looking for?”

“I want to know what she was listening to on the wireless. Go and check that the old man isn’t still snooping around outside, will you?”

Custine went to the door, opened it a crack and checked the hallway. “No, I can hear him moving down the stairs. You want me to check on the neighbours as well?”

“No need. They’re probably at work.” Floyd knelt down and started fiddling with the huge old wireless set. He had brought his notebook and made sure that the dial was still tuned to the same wavelength as when they had last examined it. Once again, the tuning band’s pale illumination glimmered to life as the valves heated up, and there was crackling as he turned the dial and slid the arrow along the band from station to station. But there was still no music, no voices, no codelike noises.

“Perhaps the neighbour was imagining it,” Custine said.

“Blanchard also mentioned hearing noises. I don’t think the two of them were imagining the same thing independently.”

“There must be something wrong with the wireless, in that case.”

“Maybe there is. Look at this.”

Custine knelt down next to Floyd and followed his partner’s gaze. “It’s a carpet, Floyd. They’re a surprisingly common feature in houses.”

“I mean the scuff marks, you idiot,” Floyd said affectionately as he indicated two scratches in the carpet, spaced about the width of the wireless set. “I don’t know if they’re recent or not. I noticed them when we here last night—the carpet was rucked up, as well—but I didn’t put two and two together until now.”

“And now you’re thinking…?”

“I’d say they were caused by someone dragging the wireless away from the wall.”

“They must have been in a hurry to make such a messy job of it.”

“My thinking exactly.” Floyd patted Custine on the back. “Let’s have a look, shall we?”

“Can’t hurt.”

“Make sure that door’s bolted. I don’t want the old man coming back in and seeing us fiddling with the wireless. That’ll really put ideas into his head.”

“It’s secure,” Custine said, after checking the door.

Between them they heaved the wireless set away from the wall, taking care not to add any more scuff marks to the carpet. It was a job for two people, and Floyd didn’t doubt that he would have had a difficult time of it had Custine not been there. “Look,” he said, when they had the wireless a clear half-metre from the wall. “Three screws on the floor and some wood shavings, suggesting that they were ripped out of the back of the wireless, for some reason.”

Custine peered over his shoulder, holding a handkerchief to his face against the dust. “Someone’s fiddled with it,” he said.

“In a hurry, too.” Floyd pulled aside the thin wood backing of the wireless, which was hanging loose, attached by only one screw. “It wouldn’t have taken five minutes to unscrew the back, but whoever did this obviously didn’t have time to find a screwdriver. They must have poked something into the gap and levered the backing away just enough to get at the innards.”

“Good thing I have a screwdriver, then,” Custine said and went to fetch his briefcase. Custine always kept a set of locksmith’s tools handy, no matter what case they were working on.

“Now see if you can get that backing off,” Floyd said.

Custine removed the remaining screw and the plywood backing dropped free, revealing the guts of the wireless.

“That’s… interesting,” Floyd said.

“Here,” Custine said. “Let’s turn it to the light. I need a better look.”

They angled the contraption until the open back was facing the balcony windows. A shaft of morning sunlight speared the room, crisscrossed by specks of dust, and fell upon the exposed heart of the wireless, gleaming back from a bird’s-nest tangle of wire, glass valves and enamelled parts. Practically the entire volume of the wooden cabinet was crammed with electrical components arranged in a looping, knotted jumble of intestinal complexity.

“That’s like no wireless I’ve ever seen,” Custine said. “It looks more like some mad piece of modern art, something you’d waste good money to stand in front of, stroking your chin and looking thoughtful.”

“Maybe she was a spy after all,” Floyd replied.

“But what is this thing? What was she making?”

Floyd turned off the wireless, then gingerly pushed a finger into the mess of wires, being careful not to disturb anything. Some of the wires were loose, he noticed: their bare metal ends sparkled in the daylight, and he could see nubs of solder where they had been ripped free from the larger electrical parts.

“It looks insane to me,” he said. “But you know more about these things than I do. Does any of this make sense to you?”

“That depends on what you mean by ‘make sense,’ ” Custine replied. “I recognise most of these parts, certainly. Smoothing condensers here… a pair of decoupling capacitors there… standard valve heaters over here… and this, I think, is a two-gang tuning condenser. It’s all common stuff, frankly; the oddity is seeing so much of it in such a little space. But she wouldn’t have needed access to any specialist supplies: a few dozen wireless sets and she would have had everything she needed.” He smiled. “Apart, of course, from a degree in electrical engineering and a very steady hand with a soldering iron.”

“Maybe neither was a problem for her. After all, if you can train a spy to learn a code, you can train them to make things.”

“So you seriously think Susan White made this contraption?”

Floyd looked at his partner. “Her or one of her associates. I see no alternative explanation.”

“But why did she need to make it at all? If she was a spy, couldn’t she have brought her own wireless equipment with her?”

This question troubled Floyd as well, but he had no satisfactory answer. “She must have been worried about being discovered,” he suggested. “If she came into this country via official channels, she’d have had to go through customs.”

“But aren’t spies supposed to have secret compartments in their luggage, that sort of thing?”

“Still too much risk of being discovered. Better to have some kind of coded shopping list of radio parts and instructions on how to put them together.”

“All right.” Custine stood up and leaned against the wall, one finger tapping his moustache. “There are clearly still some things we don’t understand. But let’s at least consider what might have happened. Susan White arrives in Paris as a foreign spy and finds a room for herself. She now needs to keep in touch with her compatriots—whoever and wherever they might be.”

“Or else she needs to listen in on someone else’s signals,” Floyd said.

Custine conceded Floyd’s point by raising a finger. “That’s also a possibility. Whatever the reason, she assembles this receiver, starting with a simple wireless set. She might even have been using it when she was disturbed. The intruder killed her by throwing her over the balcony, just as Blanchard suspected. Then they noticed the wireless, or had already seen her using it. Clearly they wanted to destroy it, but they couldn’t remove it from the room without drawing attention to themselves. And perhaps they—singular or plural—had very little time before they had to leave the room. After all, there was a dead body on the pavement.”

“And a smashed typewriter,” Floyd added.

“Yes,” Custine said, sounding less confident. “I’m not quite sure where that fits in. Perhaps they used it to bludgeon her.”

“Let’s just assume the killer was in a hurry for now,” Floyd said.

“Whoever it was had just enough time to pull the wireless away from the wall, jimmy open the back and get their hand inside. They did what damage they could, hoping to render the wireless inoperative. Doubtless if they’d had more time they would have done a more thorough job of it, but as it is, it looks as if they only wrenched a few wires loose and left it at that.”

Floyd pulled aside one knot of wires, wishing he had a torch. “We need to make this thing work,” he said.

“What we need to do,” Custine said, “is hand this whole matter over to the relevant authorities.”

“You think they’d take it any more seriously now that we have a broken wireless to show them? Face it, André: it’s all still circumstantial.” Delicately, Floyd picked out one of the bare-ended wires and searched for its counterpart. “If we could fix this…”

“We don’t know whether the murderer took anything out of it.”

“Let’s assume they were in too much of a hurry, and let’s also assume they didn’t want to be caught with anything on them that would link them to this room.”

“It’s not like you to be so optimistic.” Custine frowned, moved to the door and placed his ear against it. “Hang on—someone’s coming up the stairs.”

“Let’s get this thing back against the wall. Hurry!”

Floyd held the cover loosely in place while Custine secured it with a few turns of one screw; the others would have to wait. Behind them, the door rattled as someone tried the knob.

“It’s Blanchard,” Custine hissed.

“Just a moment, monsieur,” Floyd called, while the two of them inched the cumbersome wireless set back into place, scraping and rucking up the carpet in the process.

The landlord knocked loudly on the door. “Open, please!”

“Just a moment,” Floyd repeated.

Custine moved back to the door and unlocked it, while Floyd stood in front of the wireless, doing his best to smooth the carpet back into place with the heel of his shoe. “We felt it best to lock the door,” Floyd said. “Didn’t want any of the neighbours poking their noses in.”

“And?” Blanchard asked, stepping into the room. “Did you find anything?”

“We’ve only been here five minutes.” Floyd gestured at his surroundings, wishing that he had not chosen to stand so close to the wireless set. “There’s a lot to work through. She was a busy little beaver, Mademoiselle White.”

“Mmm.” Blanchard observed them both through narrowed eyes. “The point is, Monsieur Floyd, that I had already deduced as much based on my own observations. It is fresh insights that I seek, not things I have already worked out for myself.”

Floyd moved away from the wireless. “Actually, I need to ask you something. Did you ever see her up here with anyone else?”

“I never saw her with anyone else the whole time I knew her.”

“Never?” Floyd asked.

“Even when I followed her towards the Métro station, I did not see the exchange take place.”

Floyd remembered Blanchard telling them how he had shadowed Susan White while she struggled towards the station with a loaded case. Floyd had forgotten that detail until now: it was in his notebook, but not at the forefront of his mind. Now that he suspected that she had been in contact with fellow agents (unless, as Custine had said, she was using the wireless to intercept someone else’s transmissions), he began to develop a vague idea of how she had worked. She was a foreign agent in an unfamiliar city, and for much of the time she was acting alone. Perhaps she received orders and intelligence through the modified wireless. But she could not be totally alone in Paris, or else the handover in the Métro station could never have taken place. So there must be other agents out there, from the same side as her: a small, loosely organised web of them spread across Paris, who kept in contact via coded radio transmissions. And unless the radio transmissions were originating from very far away, there must be someone in the area sending those orders.

Floyd felt a weird sense of vertigo: a combination of fear and thrill that he knew he would not be able to resist. It would pull him deeper, and it would do what it would with him, whether he liked it or not.

“You do think she was murdered, don’t you?” Blanchard asked him.

“I’m coming around to the idea, but I’m still not sure whether we’ll ever know exactly who did it.”

“Have you made any more progress with the documents?” Blanchard persisted.

Floyd had left a note with Greta the night before, saying that he would pay her a visit later today. “There might be something in them,” he said. “But look, Monsieur Blanchard, if she gave you those papers for safekeeping, then she must have felt that her life was in danger.”

“Which is exactly what I have been saying all along!”

“The point is, if the murder was premeditated, then it might also have been well executed. No loose ends, nothing to lead to the killer. Don’t believe those dime-novel mysteries: the killer doesn’t always make a mistake.”

“If you believe that sincerely, then we may as well conclude our contract now.”

“It’s too early for that,” Floyd said. “I’m just saying that at some point we might have to give up.”

“Give up, or retreat in the face of danger?”

Custine coughed before Floyd could say anything he might regret. “We really shouldn’t take any more of your time this morning, monsieur,” he said smoothly. “We have a lot more to do in this room, not to mention the parallel lines of enquiry we should be pursuing.”

Blanchard considered this and nodded politely. “Very well. Monsieur Floyd, at least your associate still appears to consider the case solvable.” For a moment, his attention seemed drawn to the disturbed area of carpet in front of the wireless, and a flicker of comprehension troubled his face. Then he turned and left them alone.

“I can’t help liking the old coot,” Floyd said, “but I do wish he’d get out of our faces.”

“It’s his money. He just wants to make sure that it’s being spent wisely.” Custine paused and dug into his toolkit again, before shaking his head. “I was hoping I might have something in here I could use to splice those wires back together, but I don’t. I’ll need to return to the office.”

“You think you can fix it?”

“I can try. If we assume that nothing has been removed, then it’s only a matter of reconnecting the broken wires.”

“They all looked the same to me,” Floyd said, peering through a narrow gap in the balcony curtain. Five storeys below, the mid-morning sun had turned the wet street into a sparkling mirror. He watched passers-by stepping between puddles, and then something caught his eye.

“Of course they do,” Custine said. “Nevertheless, there should be a manageable number of permutations. If I haven’t got anywhere by the end of this afternoon, I doubt that more time will make any difference.” Custine waited a moment. “Floyd? Did you hear a word of what I just said?”

Floyd turned from the window. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re thinking about Greta again, aren’t you?”

“Actually,” Floyd said, “I was thinking about that little girl standing across the street.”

“I didn’t notice any girl when we arrived.”

“That’s because she wasn’t there. But now it looks as if she’s watching this room.”

He let the curtain slip back into the place. He’d had enough of a look at the little girl to make him doubt that she was the same one they had seen coming out of Blanchard’s apartment the evening before. But there was still something about the way light fell on her face that made him want to look elsewhere.

“You don’t seriously think a child has something to do with this murder, do you?” Custine asked.

“Of course not,” Floyd said.

They took the stairs down to the Mathis. By the time they reached the car, the watcher was gone.