Extraordinary People

I

‘I was married to Christian when I was still working at the Société Générale,’ she said. ‘But finance was his forte, not mine. Still, it was useful to have a wealthy husband to support me through two and a half years as a student at ENA.’ She gazed back up the stairs at Enzo. She was a woman who liked the sound of her own voice. ‘It was starting to become fashionable at that time to accept students from the real world. It went against the stereotype of the cloistered academic, even though I already had my degree from Sciences-Po. But I preferred to be enrolled under my maiden name. Didn’t want to be thought of as a kept woman. So I was Marie-Madeleine Boucher, then.’ She smiled. ‘But when I ran for Deputé in Val de Marne, the name seemed a little too religious for a secular politician. And so I was happy to become Marie Aucoin and take my seat in the National Assembly.’

‘Where’s Kirsty?’

The Garde des Sceaux seemed disappointed by his lack of interest in her story. She sighed. ‘All in good time.’

‘Whose good time?’

‘Mine, of course.’

‘What do you want?’

Something hardened in her cold, blue eyes. And there was an edge to her voice. ‘To fulfil my destiny. I am forty-five years old, Monsieur. I am a woman, and I am the Garde des Sceaux. Do you have any idea how impossibly difficult it is to be all those things at the same time?’ She allowed herself a small smile of self-satisfaction. ‘And that’s just the beginning. Already they’re whispering in the corridors of Matignon about the possibility of my appointment as Prime Minister. But the Élysée Palace is my real destiny. To be the first woman elected to the office of President. An office from which I can change the future of my country. To which I can restore the vision of Napoléon and the genius of de Gaulle. I can lead France back to greatness.’

‘I admire your modesty.’

‘Modesty is for fools!’ She jumped down from her shelf. ‘Why don’t you come down and join me?’ It wasn’t so much a request as an instruction. She moved away from the foot of the stairs to the far side of the small chamber the monks had built to accommodate the fontaine. She took off her rucksack and laid it on the shelf beside her and folded her arms.

Enzo hesitated. He knew that once he had descended into the chamber he would be trapped there. ‘Where’s Kirsty?’ he demanded again.

‘She’s nearby.’

‘If you’ve harmed her….’

‘She’s alive and well. And it is not my intention to do anything to change that.’

Still he hesitated.

‘Unless you force me to.’

He had no choice then. Slowly, reluctantly, he climbed down the six steps into the pit and turned to stand facing her across the green basin. They were only two meters apart, and he saw now that her eyes were quite dead. Almost opaque. She saw the world through cataracts of self-deception. She looked at the baseball bat dangling from his right hand and smiled.

‘Really, Monsieur, did you think you were going to beat me to death?’

‘It’s dangerous down here.’

‘Not if you know your way around. I’ve been exploring the catacombes since I was a student. I love it. It’s like life, really. You need to know what lies beneath, to understand what’s on the surface.’

‘Why did you kill him?’

The sudden directness of his question seemed to ruffle her surface calm, and for a moment he caught a glimpse of the darkness that lay beneath.

‘He humiliated us.’ Her mouth curled in anger. ‘Picked us out as the brightest and best and then told us how much smarter he was than we would ever be. A process of daily, ritual humiliation. He had this compulsive need to demonstrate his superiority. Always at our expense. In private he would tell us that we were the future of France, in public he made fools of us in front of our fellow students. He wanted to mould us in his image, but made it clear we would always be inferior copies. He wanted us to worship at the altar of his brilliance, an acknowledgement from the intellectual cream of our promotion that we were mere cerebral midgets in the shadow of his towering intellect.’ She almost laughed. ‘And what had he become, this great brain? A reviewer of films.’

‘So you killed him?’

‘Have you any idea of what it is like to be mocked and ridiculed, Monsieur Macleod? To be fêted and flattered in one breath, and then denigrated in the next?’ She paused. ‘Yes, we killed him. He needed to know, in the end, that we were smarter than he was. That the future was ours, not his. It was a demonstration of our superior intelligence.’

Enzo began to see how twisted minds worked. They had all been child prodigies. Little geniuses. Groomed for greatness. The cream which had risen to the top of the Schoelcher Promotion. The elite of the elite. ‘I’ve always thought that violence was the first and last resort of the inferior intellect,’ he said.

‘You sound just like him.’

‘Is that why you want to kill me, too? Because I found out you weren’t as smart as you thought you were? Because, in the end, you couldn’t get away with murder after all?’

She shook her head. ‘Oh, but we did. No one even knew he was dead. It was the perfect murder, Monsieur Macleod.’ She smiled. ‘The thing about intelligence is that in itself, it has no real value. It must be practised and applied. If you have a vision, you need the courage to see it through. My co-conspirators turned out to lack the courage of their convictions, that’s all.’

‘So you killed them, too.’

She shrugged. ‘Hugues saved me the trouble. Philippe was weak, and his weakness was a danger to me.’

‘And Diop?’

‘An old favour repaid, by someone who knows better than to ever open his mouth.’

‘Juge Lelong?’

‘Good God, no. Lelong’s a pedant. A zealot. As straight as the day is long. He really believed you were raising a middle finger to his precious enquiry.’

‘So it wasn’t the good judge that you delegated to try to dispose of me?’

A frown of genuine consternation crinkled her eyes. ‘You? What are you talking about?’

‘The two men on the bridge. The truck on the autoroute.’

Now her consternation gave way to amusement. ‘I think you’ve been letting your imagination run away with itself, Monsieur Macleod.’

Enzo experienced a fleeting embarrassment. Had he really just been a victim of his own paranoia? He moved on. ‘What I don’t understand is why you left clues with the body parts in the first place.’

‘There is a great deal you don’t understand, Monsieur Macleod. I’m not sure it’s even worth your while trying.’

‘Indulge me.’ He needed to keep her talking. He needed every moment he could claw back from her to think of a way out of this.

She sighed, bored now, it seemed. ‘Each of us took responsibility for burying one piece of the Maître. And each of us revealed that location to only one other. The clues were then designed to lead from one trunk to the next, revealing the identity of one of us each time. That way, none of us could betray the others, without the circle of clues leading eventually back to him.’

‘Or her.’

She inclined her head in acknowledgement. ‘Or her. Of course, we couldn’t make the trail too easy. If one of the trunks was discovered by accident, we didn’t want some knuckle-headed policeman putting it all together. We had to make the clues hard enough that it would take someone of equal intellect to solve the puzzle.’

‘Someone like me.’

She laughed, then. And her mirth seemed genuine. ‘No, Monsieur. You were never in our league. You had the internet at your disposal. In 1996, we had no idea what the internet might become, or how it might unravel all our carefully considered clues. It took us five months to assemble them and put our plan together.’

‘And one bloody night to carry it out.’

‘You should have seen his face, Monsieur. That moment of realisation. When he knew, for all his arrogance, that those he had humiliated were capable of far more than he ever suspected.’

‘So, really, you just killed him to show how clever you were. An intellectual game of murder which no one would ever know you had won.’

‘Until now.’ She held his gaze for a moment, enjoying the opportunity to echo his words.

‘So what are you going to do?’

She turned and removed a small gun from her rucksack and levelled it at him. ‘I’m going to kill you, and then it’ll just be our little secret. A fitting reward for your obstinate persistence, don’t you think?’

Fear flooded his being like a poison gas. ‘What about Kirsty?’

‘Oh, I won’t have to kill her. Nature will do that for me. A very trusting girl.’

‘Where is she?’ Enzo looked around for some way out.

‘Chained to a wall in one of the transversals below the Rue d’Assas. Water’s pouring in from the sewers. A fortuitous summer storm. It was more than half full when I left her. I doubt if her misery will last for too much longer.’

The full horror of the circumstance she had so calmly described created a still centre to Enzo’s fear. ‘Kirsty!’ he bellowed at the top of his voice, and when its echo faded, silence was the only response.

‘Too late already, perhaps.’

And, then, very faintly, they heard a voice calling out of the darkness. It seemed a long way off. A tiny voice full of terror and despair. And disbelief. ‘Daddy?’

He felt as though someone had plunged a knife into his heart. He could not remember when she had last called him that.

‘Daddy, help!’ It was a scream filled with both fear and hope.

But he was powerless to help her. Marie Aucoin had let her gun drop for a moment, but now she raised it again. Enzo’s breathing became rapid and shallow, and he turned his eyes to heaven as if appealing for help from a higher power. And like the answer to a prayer, he heard a voice from above. ‘There’s no point in killing anyone, Madeleine.’

Both he and the Garde des Sceaux turned to see Charlotte standing on the top step. She had a gun pointing at the other woman, trembling slightly in an unsteady hand. Enzo recognised the polished wooden hand-grip. It was Raffin’s revolver. Just behind her he saw the gleam of Bertrand’s nose stud, and the shadow of someone else.

Marie Aucoin’s self-confidence seemed shaken. She turned blazing eyes on Enzo. ‘I told you to come alone!’

‘It doesn’t matter now,’ Charlotte said. ‘The whole world knows who you are, Marie-Madeleine Boucher. The police are on their way.’

‘And who the hell are you?’

‘You murdered my father.’

Marie Aucoin frowned in confusion. ‘Gaillard had no children.’

Charlotte glanced at Enzo. ‘I’m sorry, Enzo. Another deception. I didn’t know myself until I tracked down my birth parents. I’d always called him uncle and thought he was an old friend of my adopted parents. It seems I was one of his early indiscretions. My mother wanted nothing to do with him, and I was to be aborted. But he couldn’t bear to destroy any part of himself. And so he bought her off, and persuaded the son and daughter-in-law of an old family retainer, a childless couple in Angouleme, to adopt me. I think I was the only thing he ever loved apart from himself. A man of strange contradictions. Flawed in ways that maybe only a daughter could love.’ She saw Enzo flinch from the thought, and looked back at Marie Aucoin. Her hand had stopped shaking. ‘But you, you’re a much more interesting case. Would you like my professional diagnosis?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Narcissistic Personality Disorder. It’s quite rare. At first I thought you were displaying the classic symptoms of catathymia. You remember we discussed that, Enzo? But I was wrong.’ Charlotte paused, and refocused her attention on the Garde des Sceaux. ‘No doubt someone of your academic background will have read Dostoevsky.’ Marie Aucoin remained unresponsive. ‘And so no doubt you’ll remember how the murderer, Raskolnikov, wrote an essay on extraordinary people, and how such people are above the law. People like you, Madeleine. People who value themselves above all others. People who have no empathy. People who become so preoccupied by grandiose fantasies that they will commit any crime to achieve their goals. People who believe that they are above the laws that lesser beings like us must follow.’ She shook her head. ‘How ironic that we should have made you the guardian of the very laws you feel so at liberty to ignore.’ Anger filled her dark eyes. ‘Narcissism is the beating heart of psychopathy. I shouldn’t hate you, I should pity you.’

Marie Aucoin let her gun fall to her side. She seemed smaller now, diminished by her defeat. But no more so than in her own eyes. ‘You came to kill me, didn’t you?’

Charlotte nodded. ‘Yes.’

Marie Aucoin took a deep breath and pulled herself up to her full height.

Enzo watched with horror as Charlotte’s finger tightened on the trigger. ‘Don’t!’ he said. She was trembling once more. The gun shook increasingly as she tried to hold her aim. And then suddenly her eyes cleared. She lowered Raffin’s gun. She had found her pity.

And that, Enzo realised, was probably the hardest pill of all for Marie Aucoin to swallow. She would probably never know, as they did, that she was not the extraordinary person she believed herself to be. She would never see herself through their eyes as the pathetic, deluded individual she really was.

‘That’s the trouble with you people.’ Her defiance was brittle. ‘You have no courage. To realise your vision you need the courage to carry it through.’ She raised her gun, bit down hard on the barrel and pulled the trigger.

Green turned to red.

‘Daddy!’ Kirsty’s scream echoed through the dark chambers of the catacombes.

‘Jesus…’ Enzo stepped over the prone figure of the Garde des Sceaux where she had fallen at the foot of the steps and leapt up the stairs. ‘Kirsty’s going to drown.’

‘Where is she?’ Enzo saw now that Samu was the shadow beyond Bertrand. His face was blanched, shocked.

‘Somewhere beneath the Rue d’Assas. In one of the transversals. It’s flooding.’

‘We’ll have to go back to the bunker, then,’ Charlotte said. She put a hand on his arm and squeezed it. ‘That’s how Samu brought us in. Bertrand made a chatière with a sledgehammer.’

‘No time,’ Enzo said. ‘Marie Aucoin must have had her own way of getting in. So there must be a way out to the Rue d’Assas from here.’

‘It used to be bricked up at the far side there,’ Samu said, and they followed him through the dark cavern, Bertrand hefting his sledgehammer on his shoulder. A tunnel led off from the north-west corner. Two meters along it they reached a dead end. It was sealed off. Red brick covered in graffiti, a cartoon image of a white pig with a curling tail, the names of countless visitors sprayed in red and black and green. There was a pile of loose rubble gathered against the foot of the wall. Enzo dropped to his knees and started pulling the stone away with desperate fingers.

‘There’s a hole behind this.’

They all joined in, and very quickly uncovered a hole hacked in the brick. It was wide enough for only a very slight person to crawl through.

‘Get out of the way,’ Bertrand said quietly. And when they had moved aside he swung his sledgehammer at the brick, sending sparks and splinters flying through the air. He let the heavy head of it fall to the floor before heaving it back above his shoulder and swinging it down again through an arc at the wall. Enzo saw the impact of it shudder through the young man’s body. There was sweat trickling down from his scalp. It took five swings before, finally, brick and mortar cracked, and the wall collapsed around the initial hole. Cold, damp air rushed through the opening.

They could hear Kirsty screaming now, desperate pleas for help. Enzo clambered over the shattered brickwork and into the east tunnel of the Rue d’Assas. ‘Which way?’ he shouted.

‘Turn right.’ Samu’s voice was right behind him.

Water fell like rain from the cold stone above their heads, making it slippery underfoot. The light of their flashlights barely penetrated the fog of humidity that filled the tunnel, and they very nearly ran into a second wall blocking their progress. It, too, had been holed, but this time the gap was big enough even for Enzo to get through.

Kirsty’s voice was closer now, but it had lost its fire, shredded and chopped by sobs and tears.

‘Kirsty, hold on!’ Enzo shouted.

‘Da-ad-y!’ she screamed back, and he felt tears of shock and fear fill his eyes, burning them like acid.

‘There, on your left,’ Samu called, and Enzo saw a narrow opening on the west side of the tunnel, just ahead of them. The ground sloped away steeply into the turn, and down into the transversal. Somewhere along the way, Enzo had lost his helmet. He shone the flashlight Samu had given him down into the tunnel and saw that it was full of water.

‘Oh, my god!’ He started wading into it, almost surprised at how warm it seemed, and very quickly he was up to his chest. He raised the flashlight above his head and kept going. The water was almost up to his neck before finally the ceiling levelled off, and he found himself looking along the gap between the water and the roof. It was maybe fifteen centimeters. He shone his flashlight along the surface and saw Kirsty’s head tipped back so that her mouth and nose were above the water level, only just still able to draw breath. She turned her head towards the light, and he saw the terror in her eyes.

‘Daddy!’

‘Hold on, baby, I’m coming.’ Enzo plunged under the water, kicking hard to propel himself forward. It was cloudy. The light of his flashlight barely penetrated it, and he could hardly see his hand in front of his face. He bumped into Kirsty before he saw her, and immediately surfaced to gasp for air. The water level was rising fast. There was hardly any gap left at all now. He ducked under again and grabbed his daughter’s arms, following them to find metal cuffs at the wrists attached to a chain. The chain was half a meter in length and looped through an iron ring set into the stone. The loop was padlocked. He took the chain in both hands, braced his feet against the wall and pulled with all his might. There was not even the hint of movement. The chances were the ring had been sunk in the stone years ago and was rusted solid into it.

His lungs were bursting now, and he surfaced again for air. This time he smacked his head against the roof. There was no longer any gap. There was no more air. He saw his own blood colour the water red. And he turned to see Kirsty looking at him through cloudy water, eyes wide, filled with resignation, bubbles streaming up from her nose and mouth. He knew he couldn’t hold his breath much longer, and so he grabbed her and hugged her to him, wondering if it were possible to make up for all those years of lost love in their last seconds together.

A hand grabbed him and pulled him roughly aside. He saw Bertrand’s piercings and his nose stud and the grim set of his mouth. He had strapped on Samu’s hard hat, and its lamp cut a sharp beam through the murk. The boy took the chain and, like Enzo, braced himself against the wall. Well-toned muscles, built during hours of patient exercise, bulged and strained. Enzo saw the veins stand out on his forehead. Still the ring did not move. Bertrand let go, then, and wound the chain around both elbows, bending his arms and placing his feet flat against the wall again. Enzo held on to Kirsty, air escaping now in great billowing bubbles from his lungs, and saw Bertrand strain every living fibre, jets of air exploding from his mouth and nostrils. He heard himself saying, I don’t want Sophie throwing her life away on a waster like you, and felt a dreadful surge of guilt. And then, suddenly, the ring gave, in a cloud of brown rust, and they were free. Bertrand grabbed Enzo by the collar and pulled him back along the transversal. The limp form of Kirsty trailing along behind them.

As soon as they hit the ramp, Bertrand hauled them both clear of the water, and Enzo felt air tearing at his lungs, choking and wretching and gasping for breath. Charlotte and Samu helped drag them up into the tunnel.

Enzo got himself on to his knees, tears streaming from his eyes. Kirsty lay on the floor, eyes shut, mouth gaping. She was no longer breathing. He was too late. He had always been too late.

Samu pulled him away as Bertrand bent over the prostrate form of his daughter, pinching her nose, and putting his mouth to hers. He blew air into her lungs, and then placed his hands on her chest to pump it out again. Water spluttered and spurted from her mouth. He repeated the action. More water. A third attempt, and this time a cough, and then an involuntary gasp, followed by a fit of coughing and water bubbling from her lips and nostrils. Her eyes opened, full of fear and incomprehension.

II

Warm summer rain poured down on them out of the night as Bertrand slid aside the heavy IDC plaque. He pulled himself up on to the pavement, and then knelt to help Enzo out after him. Kirsty was still only semi-conscious. Enzo had insisted on carrying her, and now he laid her out on the hard wet paving stones, easing her down from an aching shoulder, before collapsing beside her, utterly exhausted. He saw neon lights in the window of the Brasserie Les Facultés. Traffic lights on the corner of the Rue Joseph Bara were at green, but there was no traffic. He rolled his head the other way and saw, at the far end of the street, the Faculté de Droit et Sciences Économiques d’Assas, from which the young Jacques Gaillard had graduated all those years before.

Hands helped him to sit up, and he turned to find himself looking into dark eyes full of concern, and something more. Something he couldn’t quite define. Charlotte smiled and kissed him on the forehead. ‘No more secrets,’ she whispered.

Samu and Bertrand pulled him across the pavement so that he was propped up against the wall below a line of billboards. And then they leaned Kirsty against his chest, and she drew up her legs like a child in the womb. He put his arm around her shoulder and let his head fall back against the wall, and he found himself looking up at Bertrand. He held his gaze for several seconds, and then reached up a hand. When the young man gave him his, he held it tight. ‘Thank you,’ he whispered.

He was only vaguely aware, then, of Bertrand talking on a cell phone, and no idea how much time had passed before he heard a car draw up at the kerbside, and the sound of sirens in the distance. There seemed to be people and voices all around them. He saw Nicole’s pale-faced concern drift in and out of his field of vision. He heard Raffin say something about the police. He looked up and saw a tearful Sophie looking down at them. ‘I promised you I’d come back,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘I still hate her, though.’

Kirsty turned her head, something in the voice that dragged her back from the deep. That strange, whisky-sweet Scottish accent. ‘Who? Who does she hate?’

‘You,’ Sophie said.

Kirsty looked at her father with eyes that she could barely keep open. ‘Who is she?’

Enzo smiled. ‘She’s your sister, Kirsty. But she’s only kidding. Aren’t you, Sophie?’

Kirsty looked up at her again. Sophie smiled. ‘Sure I am.’ And she got down on her knees to put her arms around them both, and buried her face in her father’s neck.