The Book of Secrets

XXVII

Paris

The taxi drove past the tourists already gathering in front of Notre-Dame cathedral. It crossed the river on the Pont Neuf and turned into the block of tiny alleys that wound around the church of St Severin, near the Sorbonne. It stopped about halfway down the lane outside a hotel, an old building with an awning over the door advertising a brand of beer. A tabby cat jumped down from the receptionist’s chair as Nick and Emily walked in and stalked away. A moment later, an elderly man appeared from the adjoining office. He answered Emily’s question with a nod and a smirk, and produced a pair of keys from the drawer. He didn’t ask for any paperwork.

They took the elevator up to the room. Nick looked at the double bed and tried to hide what he was thinking.

‘I asked for a twin,’ Emily apologised. ‘I’ll go down and ask them to change it.’

‘I can sleep on the floor.’ Just at that moment he could have slept anywhere. But not yet.

He dropped his bag and went to the small table by the window. He pulled the stiff-backed envelope from his inside coat pocket. By unspoken agreement, they had waited until they got back to the hotel room.

Like a pair of clumsy lovers they both reached for the envelope at the same time. Their hands collided, withdrew. Nick took it. He forced his finger under the flap of the envelope and tore it open. Something firm and smooth to the touch waited inside. He slid it out onto the table. A flat oblong about the size of a postcard, wrapped in white tissue paper.

‘Let me.’

This time he let her have her turn. Emily slid a nail under the tape and peeled back the folds of paper. They both stared.

After everything he had endured, Nick’s overwhelming feeling was disappointment. The object of his quest was utterly familiar. Four bears and four lions, no longer on a screen but printed on stiff, fluted paper. Age made it grey, though the printed lines were still sharp.

Emily pulled on her gloves and picked it up by the edges. ‘There isn’t any stamp or insignia on it.’

‘Should there be?’

‘If it came from a library or a major collection.’ She flicked on the table lamp and held the card against the shade so that it glowed. ‘There are no outlines around the animals. This was printed from a single copper sheet – not one of the later cut-up composites. And there.’ She pointed to the middle of the card. ‘The watermark – a crown. That’s the same as the other early cards.’

‘What about those?’ Nick pointed to a cluster of dark blots smeared on the bottom-right corner of the card. Some were black, others a reddish brown. ‘They look like dried blood.’

‘Maybe wine spilled during a game?’ Emily laid the card back in its tissue paper and covered it reverentially, like a corpse. Her lips were moist with excitement. ‘This is genuine, Nick. The first of these cards to be discovered in a century.’

Nick didn’t respond. If anything, her excitement only fuelled his resentment. He felt a sudden urge to tear the card into pieces.

‘We’re supposed to be finding Gillian.’

‘Who wanted you to have the card.’

‘And what am I supposed to do now? Put it in a museum with a sign? “Gift of Gillian Lockhart, shame she disappeared.” ’ Nick knew his tiredness was running away with him but couldn’t make himself care enough to stop.

‘Did she leave anything else?’

Emily’s question stopped him like a slap in the face. Nick picked up the envelope and shook it. Something rattled inside.

He turned it over. A credit-card-sized piece of plastic and a small gold microchip tumbled out onto the table.

He examined the plastic card first. It was red with ‘BnF’ next to an image of an open book. He turned it over and stared. There was Gillian, printed into a one-inch box in the corner, staring down the camera like the barrel of a gun. It took him a moment to recognise her. An overhead light glared off her forehead and drowned her face in an unflattering, office-issue shadow. She’d cut her hair since he last saw her and dyed it blonde. He remembered a line from a poem she’d liked to quote at him: ‘Naught shall endure but mutability’.

‘BnF is the Bibliothèque Nationale de France,’ said Emily. ‘The French national library. Forty of the original playing cards are there. This must be her pass.’ She pointed to the gold microchip. ‘What about that?’

Nick picked it up between his finger and thumb. ‘It’s a SIM card. For a cellphone.’

‘Why would she leave that?’

‘Maybe so we could see who she called.’

Nick pulled out his own phone and prised off the back cover. He slid the SIM out of its holder and replaced it with Gillian’s. He was about to turn it on when suddenly he paused. His finger hovered over the power button. ‘Or…’

‘Or what?’

‘Or because they could trace the signal to locate her.’

He put the phone in his pocket, grabbed his coat and headed for the door. Emily jumped up in alarm.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To the Métro station.’

The cold hit him the moment he stepped out of the hotel. A raft of bruising clouds hung low over Paris, and there was a bite in the air that promised snow. He hurried around the corner to the Saint-Michel station. Across the Seine, a flock of birds wheeled around the towers of Notre-Dame. He bought a ticket, pushed through the narrow turnstiles and down a flight of stairs to the crowded platform.

He switched on the phone. Searching, said the screen. When he was satisfied there was no reception, he went to work.

He started by scrolling through her phone book. A few of the names sounded familiar in a second-hand way; some were French, others looked American. Nothing leaped out. ‘Museum, Natalie Cell, Paul Home…’

No ‘Nick’. His stomach tightened. She deleted me. After everything else it was a petty disappointment, but it hurt like a bullet to the gut. Perhaps more because it was so banal: not a gesture or a message, just a piece of housekeeping.

Maybe she wanted to protect me, he tried. But he couldn’t convince himself.

So why did she send me the card?

A red double-decker train pulled into the station. For half a minute everything was chaos as one group of shoppers and sightseers exchanged places with another. The train lumbered away.

He rummaged through the folders to check her text messages. They were empty – every message deleted. Except one.

I don’t know what I’ve done but please please call me. Even if you don’t want to talk, just call once. I still love you. Nick

The time stamp said six months ago. She’d never replied. Why had she kept it, leaving it to gather digital dust in this forgotten corner?

Nick closed the message. The platform was beginning to fill up again. At the far end, a dreadlocked guitar player was singing Pink Floyd in French. Without much hope, Nick went to the phone’s call log.

There were three calls. Two of them to numbers that looked French and weren’t in her phonebook, the third – and most recent – to someone called Simon. Nick clicked to view the number. That looked local too.

He scribbled down the three numbers with the time and duration of the calls, then switched off the phone.

He spent fifteen minutes in an Internet café, then went back to the hotel room. Emily was sitting on the bed examining the playing card again, her feet tucked under her like a schoolgirl.

‘Did you find anything?’ said Nick.

She shook her head. ‘You?’

‘Three numbers.’ He pulled the scrap of paper out of his pocket. ‘The last three calls Gillian made from her cellphone.’

‘If it was hers,’ Emily cautioned. ‘You don’t know that.’

‘It was hers.’ Nick slumped into an armchair. His hands were still stiff from the cold outside. ‘One of them was to a taxi firm. I’ve got the time and date of the call, so we could see if they have any records. Then there was one to a guy listed as Simon.’

‘Does he have a surname?’

‘Not even an initial.’ What did that imply? He’d never heard Gillian talk about any friends called Simon. He pushed the thought out of his mind.

‘But the third one I had more luck with. His name’s Professor Jean-Baptiste Vandevelde. He’s a particle physicist at the Institut Georges Sagnac, just outside Paris. He specialises in X-ray fluoroscopy, whatever that is.’

Emily raised an eyebrow. ‘Her phone told you all that?’

‘He’s got a website.’ Nick handed her the printout he’d taken from the Internet café. ‘All his contact details. When I searched for the phone number, it came up.’

Emily squinted at it. ‘Why would Gillian want to talk to a particle physicist?’

‘Let’s ask him.’