Extraordinary People

I

The mediaeval city of Auxerre stood on a hill on the banks of the river Yonne, one hundred and seventy kilometers south-east of Paris, in the heart of the Bourgogne. It was early afternoon by the time they reached it, and ominous, dark clouds had already begun rolling in from the west. The air was humid, hot, filled with the promise of summer rain. As they crossed the Pont Paul Bert, daylight darkness settled like a shroud on the towers and buttresses of St. Étienne Cathedral, which dominated the skyline on the west bank. Cruise boats lined up along the quays opposite, rising and falling as if in slow motion on the gentle slate grey swell of the river.

The Stade Abbé Deschamps stood along the banks of the Yonne at the south end of town, surrounded by playing fields and running tracks. Bertrand turned left off the main road into the car park in front of the main stand, and Enzo got out of the van stretching and flexing limbs that had stiffened up during the three-and-a-half hour drive.

Kids were playing football on the far side of a fence, aspiring future stars, shouting and chasing, attracted to the ball like metal filings to a magnet. Enzo left Sophie and Bertrand and Nicole in the van and walked along the length of the stand, past the boutique and the ticket office and the administration block. He had a sickening sense of déjà vu. One football stadium was much like another. Metz had been a wild goose chase. Auxerre might well be the same. He had no idea what he was looking for.

Behind the Leclerc stand, which backed on to the river, youngsters were chasing one another up and down the concrete steps, their catcalls and laughter echoing between rows of grey plastic seats. In the dark beneath the overhang, he saw two young lovers backed up against a wall, oblivious to the kids playing on the staircases and landings above them, driven by adolescent hormones to fulfil some desperate fantasy amongst the broken bottles and discarded beer cans. Beyond the trees, two teams of rowers cut through choppy waters, the blades of their oars rising and falling in perfect unison, throwing cool spray into warm air.

Even as he found his way between the stands to the very edge of the pitch, secure behind its moat and fences, he knew that there would be nothing for him here. Cut grass and advertising hoardings, rows of empty seats rising into the stands.

When he got back to the van Nicole looked at him expectantly. ‘Well?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m wasting my time here. And yours. We should go back to Cahors.’

‘It’s a long drive,’ Bertrand said.

Enzo looked at him. The young man was exhausted. He had driven through the night to Metz, and then again all morning to Auxerre. It would be six or seven hours back to Cahors. ‘Why don’t we stay overnight?’ Enzo said. ‘I’ll pay for a hotel. We can head back in the morning.’ After all, what was there to hurry back for?

The Hôtel l’Aquarius was at the end of the Avenue Gambetta, east of the river, in the new part of town. The rooms were small, windows looking out over a shambles of red-tiled rooftops and seedy back yards. Nicole went off with Sophie and Bertrand to explore the old city, and Enzo lay down on his bed staring at the cracks in the ceiling. He thought again about all the clues which had brought him here. There were too many anomalies. The referee’s whistle with the numbers 19/3 scratched into the plating. They didn’t seem to fit with anything else. The salamander which had sent him on a fool’s errand to Metz. How certain he had been that he would find the answers he was looking for at Metz football club. A certainty so easily punctured by Bertrand’s revelation about the Coupe de France and Auxerre. Perhaps Enzo had misread the clues completely. Perhaps there was no football connection at all. When conviction is fractured, doubt creeps in through all the cracks.

The silence in Enzo’s room pressed in around him. He wondered what awaited him in Cahors. Was he still in danger? He wished he had never heard of Raffin and his seven most celebrated unsolved murders. It was one thing to make an argument in the abstract during the course of a dinner, to deliver bold statements and accept wagers, it was quite another to come face to face with reality. Real life. Real death. Murder. Personal tragedy. He thought of Charlotte, and of how things had been between them, and he remembered an old Chinese proverb. It is not an easy thing to mend a broken mirror.

He reached for the remote control and turned on the television. The melodramatic orchestral overtures of some dubbed American soap filled the room. But anything was better than the silence which accompanied regret. He closed his eyes and let the sounds of it wash over him without listening.

He was not certain how long he had been asleep, but something in the voice that wakened him penetrated deep into his subconscious to bring him bubbling back to the surface. The national television news was playing on France 3, and he realised with something of a shock that it was after seven. His thoughts were quickly focused on the commentary of the reporter. He squinted at the picture to see helicopter footage of long traffic tailbacks on the périphérique ring road around Paris. His heart was pounding, but he wasn’t quite sure why. It took firemen more than half an hour to cut through the wreckage to recover the body, the voice-over told him. An investigation has already begun into what caused the vehicle to swerve across three lanes of traffic and into the containing wall before bursting into flames. A still photograph filled the screen, and Enzo sat abruptly upright. It was the same photograph he had seen on the internet yesterday. A stock shot, apparently in use by all the media. Diop’s unmistakable lopsided smile. François Diop was being tipped for high office at the United Nations before today’s tragedy. He is survived by a wife and two young children.

Enzo sat with the blood pulsing at his temples. Diop was dead. The man who had tried to kill him just two days ago. The man whose footballing past had led Enzo to this provincial hotel room in the ancient city of Auxerre. Dead because of Enzo. He was sure of that.

An urgent knocking at the door startled him. Sophie’s voice called from the hall. ‘Papa? Papa, are you there?’ He slid off the bed, and as he stood the blood rushed to his head. He steadied himself against the door jamb and unlocked the door. Sophie and Bertrand and Nicole stood in the darkness. Sophie seemed shocked by his appearance. ‘Papa, are you feeling all right?’

‘I’m fine, Sophie. What’s all the noise about?’

She grinned then, her eyes gleaming with anticipation. ‘You’ll never guess what we found up in the old town.’

‘You’re right, I’ll never guess.’

‘A restaurant,’ Nicole said before Sophie could respond.

Enzo sighed. ‘Is that a hint that you’re hungry?’

Nicole shook her head triumphantly, but Sophie beat her to the punchline. ‘It’s called The Salamander.’

II

La Salamandre restaurant was at number 84 rue de Paris, next door to a wine merchant’s, and opposite a shop supplying flowers for funerals. The three youngsters led Enzo up through the narrow streets of the cité médiéval. A cat sat in an open window, above an old bicycle, and watched them go by. Geraniums poured in carefully pruned cascades from hanging pots on almost every corner. Tourists filled the cafés in Place Charles Surugue, soaking up the burgundy wines and the centuries-old ambience of the ancient, beamed buildings that leaned and tilted at odd angles all around them. Enzo watched the town slide by, like a man seeing the world through a fisheye lens. There was nothing here out of the ordinary, and yet none of it seemed quite real. He felt oddly detached, as if fate had taken away his powers of decision-making, and given over his life to the vagaries of chance and serendipity. The same clues which had led Enzo to Diop were leading him now to a restaurant in a quiet back street in this départemental capital of the Yonne. A chance find by these young people he had unwittingly involved in this foolish venture.

Painted salamanders climbed the pale green frames around the door of the restaurant. Poissons — Fruits de Mer, it said in both windows. They stood outside on the pavement, looking at a menu offering oysters, large roasted king prawns, half lobster roasted in its shell with pan-fried chanterelle mushrooms.

‘What do you want to do?’ Nicole asked.

Enzo could almost hear her salivating. ‘I suppose we’d better go in and eat.’

It was still early, and they were seated at a table near the window. The waiter was a young man in his early twenties. Bertrand, at Enzo’s bidding, ordered a 1999 Pouilly Fuissé to wash down their seafood. Sophie asked for a bottle of Badoit, Nicole a diet Coke, and Enzo asked the waiter if he knew of any connection between the restaurant and Auxerre football club.

The young man gave him an odd look. ‘Why on earth would there be?’

Enzo shrugged, a little embarrassed. It must have seemed like a very peculiar question. ‘I don’t know. I just wondered, that’s all.’

The waiter looked puzzled. ‘Not that I know of. I could ask the owner if you like. Monsieur Colas. He’s also the chef. He opened this place more than twenty years ago.’

‘No, that’s all right.’ Enzo knew now that this was a waste of time. No more than a bizarre coincidence. And then a thought occurred to him. ‘Are you a supporter?’

‘Of Auxerre? Sure. My father started taking me when I was just five years old.’

‘You know that the salamander was the emblem of François Premier?’

The waiter looked at him as if he were a sandwich short of a picnic. This was all getting a little surreal. ‘Was it?’ It was clear that he didn’t.

Enzo was disappointed. ‘So you wouldn’t know of any connection between Auxerre football club and François Premier.’

‘I could tell you more about the English Premiership than François Premier. And apart from where they finished in the league last season, the only unusual thing I know about Auxerre football club is their patron saint. Saint Joseph. And I only know that because it’s the name of the school I went to.’

Enzo was beginning to feel like one of the Three Princes of Serendip. ‘There’s a school in Auxerre called Saint Joseph’s?’

‘Sure. Saint Jo’s. It’s a lycée and collège and commercial school all rolled into one. Just up the hill there in the Quartier Saint Simeon.’ He paused. ‘Is there anything else I can get you?’

Enzo shook is head. ‘No. Thank you.’

Nicole looked at him. ‘Is that significant?’

‘One of the items we found along with the clues that led us here was a referee’s whistle with numbers scratched into the plating. A nineteen and a three, separated by an oblique.’

‘Nineteen, three,’ Bertrand said. ‘March 19th.’

Enzo was taken aback. It had taken Charlotte to point that out to him. ‘It’s Saint Joseph’s day,’ he said.

Bertrand thought for a moment. ‘So you think the clues only led to Auxerre football club, in order to take you on to the school, via the club’s patron saint?’

Enzo shrugged his eyebrows. ‘It’s possible.’

‘But what could there be at the school?’ Sophie asked.

‘Playing fields, perhaps.’ Enzo shook his head. ‘There has to be some reason for the inclusion of a referee’s whistle.’ The waiter brought an ice bucket to their table, Pouilly Fuissé chilling in iced water. ‘We’d better go and see.’ He caught Nicole’s look of alarm and added, ‘after we’ve eaten.’

III

Saint Jo’s Collège and Lycée was at the top of the Boulevard de la Marne on the northern edge of town. It was flanked on its west side by suburban villas and bungalows. At the foot of the hill there was a development of residential apartments, and a franchise for Mitsubishi Motors. The school itself stood, in the gathering gloom, behind white walls and blue fencing, in several acres of forested parkland. The sky was a pewtery blue-black, low clouds scraping the surrounding hills. Streetlamps fought to make any impression in the growing twilight. Bertrand drew his van up to electronic gates that were closed and padlocked. There were no lights beyond them, and no sign of life. Immediately opposite, the offices of the Crédit Agricole bank were shuttered and dark. The only light was a moth-infested pool of yellow at a roadside cash dispenser.

There was little or no traffic on the boulevard as Enzo stepped out of the van to feel the first spots of rain, warm and heavy on his face. Somewhere beyond the far hills, the sky flashed and crackled, and several seconds later they heard the distant rumble of thunder. The air was filled with the smell of ozone. A sudden courant d’air moved among the trees beyond the fence like a sigh. The first turbulent breath of the coming storm.

Enzo scaled the gate with the minimum of effort and dropped down on the other side.

‘Papa, you can’t just go breaking into the place,’ Sophie hissed at him from the van.

‘I’m not breaking anything. I’m just having a look.’

‘I’m coming with you,’ Bertrand said suddenly. And before any of the others could object, he was out of the van, and vaulting easily over the gate. He grinned at the scowling Enzo. ‘Safety in numbers.’ He snapped on his flashlight. ‘And it helps to be able to see.’

Nicole climbed out of the back. ‘Be careful, Monsieur Macleod.’

‘And for goodness’ sake be quick!’ Sophie called after them as they moved off into the grounds and were consumed by the dark.

They followed the beam of Bertrand’s flashlight along a metalled drive, an empty car park brooding silently away to the right. To their left, a roadway ran off through trees to a cluster of single and two-storey flat-roofed buildings. Up ahead, floodlights mounted on the roof of the school gymnasium were trained on an area of playing fields behind a high wire fence. In the distance, Enzo could just make out a patchwork of baseball and volleyball courts. Immediately to their right was the football pitch. A dusty, chalky, burned-up stretch of what might once have been grass. Bertrand swung his beam across the pitch to pick out the white of the goal posts. The nets had been removed. Big fat raindrops were leaving craters in the dust.

‘We’re going to get wet,’ Bertrand said.

Enzo nodded absently. He was staring off thoughtfully across the football pitch in the final glimmer of the day’s light. ‘You know a bit about football, don’t you?’

‘I used to play for an amateur side.’

‘Where does the referee usually stand when he blows for kick-off?’

He heard the young man expel air through his teeth. ‘Well, I don’t think there’s any set place.’ Bertrand thought for a moment. ‘I guess he usually stands somewhere around the centre circle.’

‘That’s a big area to dig up.’

‘What, you mean you think that what you’re looking for is buried somewhere in the centre circle?’

‘I don’t know. I really don’t. I’m clutching at straws here. If we’re in the right place — and I’ve got to believe that we are, since all the clues have led us here — then there has to be a reason for the referee’s whistle.’ Enzo sighed, frustrated, trying to articulate his reasoning. ‘The clues have always been symbolic or representative of something else, Bertrand. So maybe it’s not the whistle itself that’s important, so much as the person who blows it.’

He began walking out across the pitch towards the centre circle. The lines delineating the field of play were faded almost to the point of obscurity. The rain would very soon obliterate any remaining traces. Bertrand followed him to the centre circle, his flashlight trained on the halfway line that led them there.

‘My God,’ Enzo said surveying a diameter of something close to twenty meters. ‘It’s huge. We couldn’t possibly dig up an area this size.’

‘We don’t have to,’ Bertrand said. ‘Wait here.’ And he took off, running back towards the gate before Enzo had the chance to ask him what he was talking about. He stood, then, a solitary figure, in the centre of the football pitch, where generations of breathless kids had chased elusive aspirations in the shape of a leather ball, and when genius had eluded them, gone on to become doctors, lawyers, waiters. For a moment, he felt surrounded by the ghosts of failed ambition, until lightning tore open the sky and he saw that he was completely alone.

All daylight had bled, now, from the evening. The darkness was absolute. Thunder cracked so loudly overhead that it felt like a physical blow. Enzo ducked involuntarily, and as lightning flashed again beneath dangerously low clouds, he saw the lean, fit figure of Bertrand loping back across the pitch, his flashlight in one hand, his metal detector dangling from the other. Bertrand was grinning when he reached him. ‘I knew this would come in useful for something.’

Enzo looked at him for a long moment. Words escaped him. Then finally he said, ‘Well, I hope the damned thing works!’

Bertrand began a first circuit of the centre circle, the metal detector hovering just centimeters above the parched ground as he swept it methodically from side to side. And then the rain began in earnest, almost tropical in its intensity. Within seconds both men were soaked to the skin. Enzo held the flashlight and followed Bertrand’s progress. The hard-baked earth was slow to soak up the rain, and it began lying in ever widening puddles on the surface of the playing field. The metal detector emitted a steady, high-pitched whine, only just audible above the drumming of the rain.

‘Papa…’ Enzo turned as Sophie and Nicole ran into the circle of light, a shared raincoat held over their heads and shoulders.

‘You can’t stay out in this,’ Nicole said.

‘It’s crazy, Papa.’

‘You should have stayed in the van,’ was all he said.

And suddenly the wail of the metal detector rose half an octave. In that moment lightning filled the sky, infusing every single drop of rain with its light so that the world was lost in a brief, blinding mist. But even above the crash of thunder that followed, Enzo could still hear the shriek of the metal detector.

‘There’s something here,’ Bertrand bellowed above the noise of the rain. ‘Right below here!’ He had completed about two thirds of his circuit and stood at ten o’clock on the circle. Gelled spikes had dissolved into streaks of black hair striping vertically on his forehead. Water dripped from his eyebrow piercings and nose and lip studs, and he was grinning like an idiot. ‘We’d better start digging.’

‘We can’t dig in this rain,’ Enzo shouted back. ‘The hole will just fill with water.’

‘I’ve got an old two-man tent in the back of the van. If we put up the outer skin we can cover the hole.’

‘Did you bring the shovels?’

‘Of course.’

‘You’re mad!’ Sophie shouted at them.

But Enzo just turned to the two girls and said, ‘Go and get the tent and the spades.’

Within ten minutes they had erected the arched cross-frames of a small igloo tent, stretching its plastic outer skin tightly across it and pegging it into increasingly soft earth. Bertrand began digging first, until he had made enough of a hole to allow Enzo in beside him, and the two men dug furiously by the light of the flashlight, expelling shovel after shovel of mud through the open flap on to the pitch beyond. The rain hammered an unrelenting tattoo on the taut plastic. Sophie and Nicole stood outside, beneath their raincoat, watching the silhouettes of the two men in the tent rise and fall like some distorted shadow theatre playing out on its curving walls.

They were almost a meter down before Enzo’s spade hit metal. It jarred up through his arms and shoulders, but the dull clang of metal on metal was sweet music to accompany the drumming of the rain. In spite of the tent, water was seeping back into the hole. Enzo knew they would have to get the chest out completely, to be sure of keeping its contents dry and free from contamination. It took another fifteen minutes to prise it from the mud suction of its ten-year resting place and lift it carefully up on to the rim of the crater they had made.

The flashlight’s batteries were failing fast, and they both stood panting, and staring at the trunk in the fading yellow light. It was the same military green as all the others. Enzo glanced at Bertrand, and saw that his face was sweat-streaked and covered in mud. They were like clay men, standing ankle deep in liquid earth, breathing hard and filled with anticipation and trepidation.

The girls crouched down at the opening and peered in. ‘Is that it?’ Sophie said.

Enzo nodded. ‘Take a pair of latex gloves from my bag and give me something to dry my hands with.’

Nicole held out a handkerchief for him to wipe the mud from his hands and face, and Sophie handed him a pair of surgeon’s gloves from his bag. He tore them out of their plastic wrapping and snapped them on. Very carefully he unclasped the lid of the trunk and lifted it open. It was stiff, complaining loudly as he forced it back, against the will of rusted hinges. Bertrand shone his flashlight inside.

‘Jesus!’ Enzo heard him whisper.

The skeletal remains of Jacques Gaillard’s torso almost filled the interior. Bleached white bones. Shoulders, ribs, pelvis, spine. Enzo had to reach carefully through a rib cage chipped and scarred by the blades which had killed Gaillard, to remove one, by one, what he knew now to be the final set of clues. A short meat cleaver. A baking tray with twelve cookie moulds in the shape of seashells. A bunch of chopsticks tied together with a piece of string. Even before he counted them, Enzo had guessed how many there might be. Thirteen. Unlucky for some. There was a green glass model of the leaning tower of Pisa, and a key ring replica of the Eiffel Tower. Enzo looked at it closely and saw that it was made in China. Just one more confirmation. The final item was a small rock hammer with a rubberised handle grip.

He laid them out side by side on the inside of the lid. The only thing he had not yet worked out was the name of the last surviving killer.

‘Give me my camera,’ he said to Sophie, just as Bertrand’s flashlight delivered its final flicker and plunged them into blackness.

Almost at the same instant, they were dazzled by a blinding white light, and the sound of revving motors soared above the storm. As Sophie and Nicole spun around to see what was happening, Enzo saw lightning flash through the tent flap, and the silhouettes of half a dozen vehicles behind a phalanx of lights were thrown into momentary sharp relief as they came hurtling towards them across the football pitch. Then blackness swallowed the sky, and their eyes were filled again only with the light. The vehicles pulled up abruptly, engines still revving, and a dozen or more figures streamed out into the rain-filled glare, automatic rifles clutched across their chests. A voice crackled through a megaphone.

‘Step out into the light. Keep your hands above your heads.’

Enzo and Bertrand pulled themselves from the hole and crawled out of the tent into the rain and the light. The girls had abandoned their shared raincoat and stood with their hands high above their heads. The rain streamed down Sophie’s frightened face. Before either man could get to his feet, boots came splashing through the wet, and strong hands forced all four of them face first into the mud. Enzo felt the cold bite of handcuffs around his wrists as they snapped shut.

IV

Sophie was furious. She paced restlessly around the cell. ‘It’s ridiculous. A complete overreaction. We were digging a hole in a football field, for God’s sake. And they send men with guns?’ She waved her arms in the air. ‘And look at me. Look!’

They all looked. The mud was drying on her now, cracking and flaking. It was stuck in her hair like glue, smeared across her face, and caked on her tee-shirt and jeans. But she was just a mirror image of the rest of them.

‘It’s assault!’ she railed. ‘I bet I’m covered in bruises. I’m going to sue them!’ She hammered on the steel door with her fists. ‘I demand to see a doctor! It’s my right to see a doctor!’

She was answered by a resounding silence. Digging a hole in a football field, it seemed, had been enough to deprive them of their rights.

They had been denied their right to a telephone call. They had no means of exercising their right to a thirty-minute private interview with an avocat, since no one knew they were there. And now, Sophie claimed, she was being denied her right to be examined by a doctor. Enzo supposed they had been granted their right to silence, since nobody had asked them anything.

They had been bundled into a police van and driven, under armed guard, to the Hôtel de Police in the Boulevard Vaulabelle, less than a kilometer from the Stade Abbé Deschamps. Through a barred window at the back of the van, Enzo had seen the painted dragons and white lions of the Golden Pagoda Chinese restaurant, before they turned into the Rue de Preuilly and through a sliding blue gate into a walled yard. There they had been hustled out through the rain and along a dark corridor before being pushed unceremoniously into this holding cell, its stout steel door slamming resoundingly behind them.

Since then, Enzo supposed, more than two hours must have passed. He had no idea what time it was, since they had taken his watch, along with everything else. Sophie’s fury was intermittent, punctuated by long periods of sullen silence during which indignation simmered and gathered momentum before exploding again in another outburst.

Bertrand had not said a word, sitting silently on the floor, his back to the wall, legs pulled up to his chest. They had made him remove his nose and lip studs, and the shards of metal from his eyebrow. Strangely, Enzo thought, he seemed almost naked without them. Nicole, too, had been unusually quiet, tearstains dried now on her cheeks. Their clothes were still damp beneath the drying mud, and in the chill of their cell, it was all Enzo could do to stop his teeth from chattering. Sophie threw herself down on the single bunk bed and lapsed into another period of brooding silence.

It was Bertrand who broke it. He raised his head suddenly and said to Enzo, ‘You knew what they meant, didn’t you?’

‘What?’ Enzo dragged himself back from a gathering of dark thoughts.

‘The things we found in the trunk. You weren’t surprised by anything.’

Enzo shrugged. ‘They complete the circle, that’s all. They lead us back to the place we started — with the skull under the Place d’Italie.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The first body part, the skull, and the first five clues were found by accident in a collapsed tunnel beneath the thirteenth arrondissement in Paris,’ Enzo explained patiently. ‘Each set of clues led us to the next body part. The ones we found tonight lead us back to the skull.’

‘How?’

‘The Eiffel Tower… What does it symbolise?’

‘Paris,’ Nicole said, emerging suddenly from her cocoon of depression.

Enzo nodded. ‘That’s the first clue to the location. The key ring was made in China. That’s the second. The leaning tower of Pisa. Well, that’s Italy, isn’t it? So now we have Paris, Place d’Italie, and a Chinese connection. We already know that the skull was found beneath the Avenue de Choisy, just off Place d’Italie, right in the heart of Chinatown.’

‘I’ll bet there were thirteen chopsticks,’ Nicole said.

Enzo managed a pale smile. ‘You’re right. Thirteen chopsticks, representing the thirteenth arrondissement and Chinatown.’

‘So the rock hammer must symbolise the quarriers.’ Nicole’s interest was fully engaged now.

Enzo nodded again. ‘Who dug out the catacombes that run right under the Avenue de Choisy. Had we got that far, I’m sure we would have found some sign down there that would have led us to the trunk. As it was, fate beat us to it.’

‘What about the cleaver and the baking tray?’ Bertrand asked.

Enzo shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Each set of clues provided us with a location, and the name of one of the murderers. Presumably the cleaver and the baking tray will lead us to the name of the final killer. But I haven’t really given it any thought yet.’

‘You don’t have to. It’s easy.’

Enzo, Bertrand and Nicole all turned towards Sophie,who had hoisted herself up on one elbow on the bunk bed. She looked back at them, wide-eyed.

‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’

‘Is it?’ asked Bertrand.

‘Of course. I mean, who uses a meat cleaver like that?’

‘A Chinese chef,’ Nicole said. ‘And I suppose that would also be another Chinese clue.’

Sophie shook her head in irritation. ‘Who else uses a meat cleaver?’

‘A butcher.’ This from Bertrand.

‘Exactly.’ Sophie looked at her father triumphantly. ‘Butcher in English, boucher in French. It doesn’t matter which, it’s a surname in both languages.’

Enzo looked doubtful. ‘You can’t jump to quick conclusions with these clues, Sophie. We’d need something else to confirm it.’

‘What about the baking tray?’ Bertrand said.

‘Well, that doesn’t need any confirmation.’ Sophie was piqued by her father’s lack of enthusiasm.

Enzo and Bertrand looked at her expectantly, and Nicole said, ‘Of course, being men, they wouldn’t know.’

Sophie hesitated then, and Enzo saw that her eyes were beginning to fill up. ‘Every young girl makes them with her mum,’ she said. ‘Except me, of course. I made them at school.’ She quickly brushed away a tear with the back of her hand and made a brave attempt at a smile.

Enzo looked at her and felt his own emotions well up inside. However hard he might have tried, and for all the love he had given her over all these years, there were still things she had missed out on. Things that only a mother and daughter can share. And now he had let her down, exposed her to danger. It had been his duty as a parent to protect her, and he had failed in that, too. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, and he heard the crack in his voice.

‘Madeleine cakes,’ Nicole said. ‘As every little French girl would tell you, that’s what the seashell moulds in the baking tray are for. Making Madeleine cakes.’

‘Madeleine Boucher.’ Bertrand tried the name out for size. ‘I suppose it’s possible.’

Sophie looked to her father for his approval. But it was as if he had set eyes on the face of the gorgon and turned to stone.

If Enzo had believed it possible for his heart to stop, then he would have said it had done so. And for the first time in his life he understood how it might feel if his blood were to turn to ice. He remembered the handwritten inscription in the book so very clearly. For Madeleine, aged seven. Happy Birthday, darling. And he remembered how evasive she had been. Why won’t you tell me? he had asked her. And finally she had sighed and told him, She’s me. All right? I’m Madeleine. He remembered, too, how strongly she had reacted against his suggestion that he call her that. No! I don’t want to be Madeleine!

‘Papa?’ Sophie had risen from the bed and crossed to touch his face with her fingertips, leaving a little trail of mud flakes in her wake. ‘Papa, what’s wrong?’

‘Mad à minuit,’ Enzo said. ‘Madeleine at midnight. That’s who he was meeting in St. Étienne du Mont.’

Bertrand was watching him closely. ‘Do you know her?’

Enzo pulled himself back from the brink of an abyss he dared not peer over. ‘Maybe.’

Sophie frowned. ‘Do we?’

‘You met her last night. Charlotte’s her middle name. Her given name is Madeleine.’