I'll Keep You Safe

Chapter Five

Irina and Georgy’s apartment was in the Rue Houdon, above her workshop and the boutique on the corner below it. This was a narrow cobbled street near the top of the hill in Montmartre. It fell steeply away from the Rue des Abbesses and the little Jehan Rictus garden square just above that, famous for its Wall of Love. Forty square metres of blue tile on which the words I love you are written 311 times in 250 languages. Words that Georgy Vetrov had perhaps taken just a little too seriously.

It was still pitch dark when Sylvie Braque arrived to meet up with a van full of officers from the police scientifique, two uniformed policemen and a colleague from the brigade criminelle. The streets were deserted, too early yet for the municipal water wagons that would sluice down the gutters and spray the sidewalks. But lights shone from the odd boulangerie, and the occasional delivery truck climbed its weary way up the hill.

Vehicles lined one side of the Rue Houdon, vans and private cars, and a tall square trailer covered in graffiti and old torn posters that looked like it might have been abandoned. So they all had to park around the corner in front of the Café L’Aristide and walk down.

Philippe Cabrel was younger than Braque, but held the same rank. He was short and cocky and losing his hair, but for some reason that Braque could never fathom was popular with the ladies. Dishevelled and bleary, he looked as if he might have been dragged from the bed of one of them within the last hour. He cast an incredulous eye over Braque. ‘What the hell, Sylvie? You didn’t get all dressed up like that just to search an apartment.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘So where were you?’

‘I wasn’t anywhere.’

‘Oh come on. Sexy skirt, high heels, low-cut blouse. You must have been somewhere. Got a secret lover you haven’t been telling us about?’

To Braque’s annoyance her heels clicked loudly on the pavement, echoing off the buildings that rose all around them. ‘If you must know I had a date.’

‘Ohhh.’ Cabrel grinned. ‘Anyone we know?’

‘No.’

The police scientifique and the uniformed officers were waiting for them by the door to the stairs of the Vetrov apartment. ‘No reply,’ said one of the uniforms. Braque had already tried calling several times.

She waved a warrant. ‘Better break it down, then.’ The officer smiled. A chance to do some damage.

‘Hang on,’ Cabrel said. ‘No need for that.’ He knelt down and took a keyring full of slender steel instruments from his wallet, and choosing the right one expertly picked the lock. The door swung open. ‘There we are. No need to wake the neighbours.’

The uniform looked disappointed.

As they climbed the stairs to the apartment itself Braque said, ‘Where did you learn that little trick?’

He grinned. ‘When you’ve spent as much time undercover as I have, Sylvie, you pick up a thing or two.’

At the door of the apartment he repeated the process then pushed it open into a narrow hallway, reaching in to switch on a light before stepping aside to let the forensics team in their Tyvec suits and bootees go in first. He picked up on his earlier theme.

‘So, are you going to tell me about this date or not?’

‘No.’

He tutted and raised his eyes towards the ceiling. ‘Why not?’

‘Because it never happened.’

He looked surprised. ‘How’s that?’

She sighed and realized she was going to have to come clean. ‘It was a blind date.’ Then qualified herself. ‘Well, not exactly blind. I’d seen photographs of him.’

‘A dating website?’

‘Yes.’ She was glad that there was so little light spilling from the apartment on to the landing and he couldn’t see her embarrassment. ‘I was supposed to meet him in a Korean restaurant in the Rue Amelot. But the bomb went off in the square before I got there and, well... I never did get there.’

‘He’s going to think you stood him up. Could you not have phoned?’

‘I didn’t have a number. And anyway...’ She gave him a look. ‘I was busy.’

‘Yeah, me too.’ He grinned. Then, ‘I don’t suppose that’ll do your standing on the website much good.’

‘No it won’t.’ She pursed her lips in annoyance. Another dead end in her search for a relationship to replace her marriage. It was a constant source of irritation to her how quickly her ex had been able to replace her.

‘Who’s looking after the kids?’

‘They’ve been with their dad this week.’

She saw the mischievous twinkle in Cabrel’s eye when he said, ‘He still with that new girl?’

‘Yes.’ She almost spat it at him.

The senior forensics officer called from the other end of the hall. ‘Okay guys, you can come in now. Gloves on.’

They each pulled on latex gloves and walked into the apartment. It was bigger than it seemed from the outside. Three bedrooms, a large open-plan lounge and kitchen with views from windows on two walls that looked out over the city. Lights twinkled below them into a misted distance. The furniture was Scandinavian. White walls were hung with original artwork. Cabrel examined the tableaux briefly, reeling off the names of the artists. Martin Barré, Turner Prize winner Laure Prouvost, Mickalene Thomas, Enoc Perez. Art theft was one of his specialities. ‘Expensive,’ he said.

A laptop computer sat open on the dining table, amidst a scatter of papers and books. A MacBook Pro. Braque sat down at it and tapped the space key. The screen lit up. She went straight to system preferences and brought up Users and Groups. Current user and administrator was Georgy Vetrov. This would have to go back to HQ for forensic examination by a computer expert. But before she closed and bagged it she checked his mailer to see if he, too, had received an email from ‘a.well.wisher.xx@gmail.com’. Nothing.

‘Hey Sylvie,’ Cabrel called from down the hall. ‘We got a staircase here leading down to what looks like her workshop. Want to take a look?’

Irina’s workshop was spread across a mezzanine level above her boutique. There was a draftsman’s desk, a workbench strewn with scissors and clips and needles and dozens of offcuts, several tailor’s dummies, and racks and racks of hanging clothes. Jackets and trousers and capes and skirts, and any number of tops in a range of colours and styles. The place smelled faintly of incense. Musky, like sandalwood.

A laptop on a stand beside the draftsman’s desk woke from sleep at Braque’s touch, its screen filled with diagrams and patterns in a complex piece of dressmaker’s software. Braque supposed that it, too, should go back for examination.

She looked around. Here was Irina Vetrov’s creative soul. Everything had come out of her imagination. A reflection of who she was, or rather who she had been. There was a dress under construction on one of the tailor’s dummies. Eighties retro, with subtly padded shoulders and short sleeves. A dress designed for a slender figure, with a daring slash at the cleavage, and another at one thigh. It was cut from a soft, textured fabric whose weave of a dozen or more coloured threads created the illusion of pale mauve verging on blue. Braque wondered how much a dress like that might cost. Thousands probably. Well beyond her pay scale. But she fancied that it might well fit her, and that if it did she would look like a million euros in it.

The chief forensics officer came down the stairs. ‘We’ll get DNA from his razor, and hers from the hair in her hairbrush. Looks like he might have left in a hurry. If he’s packed anything at all it must have been in an overnight bag.’ And Braque knew that she was unlikely to get any sleep tonight.