The Book of Secrets

XXXIII

Paris

It was dark when Nick woke, though his watch showed half past nine. The jet lag was playing havoc with his body. He lay on the floor for ten minutes failing to get back to sleep, his mind in overdrive, then stood up and almost fell over with fatigue.

Emily emerged from the tiny bathroom, already dressed and made up. There was something feline, unfathomable to Nick, about the way she managed to maintain her privacy in such close quarters. He’d spent the whole night in the same room as her and couldn’t even say what colour her pyjamas were. Now she was wearing a thick cream sweater over a chocolate-brown skirt and black stockings.

Nick pulled off his T-shirt and threw it over a chair. Emily looked alarmed.

‘There’s a café around the corner. I’ll wait for you there.’

A shower, a shave and a clean shirt made Nick feel more human. Half an hour later he braved the cold outside and walked the short distance to the café. Emily was sitting in a heated conservatory with a cup of black coffee, reading Le Monde. Unlike Gillian, who would have been looking around the restaurant, chatting up the waiters, checking the door every ten seconds, she looked completely at peace on her own.

Nick ordered the American breakfast and prayed the coffee would come quickly. Emily put down her paper.

‘You’re not in it.’

Nick didn’t smile. He hadn’t forgotten he was a fugitive. Every siren in the distance and traffic cop, every passer-by who stared, every tourist’s camera he walked in front of was like water torture.

Emily gauged his moody silence. ‘So what do we do today?’

‘I don’t know.’ He felt empty. A pack of mopeds roared past the window, their drivers veering and swerving like birds as they raced each other. Regret gnawed at him. It was insanity to have come here. Better to have stayed in New York and let Seth defend him.

‘Gillian left us three bits of information: the playing card, the mobile phone SIM and the library card.’

‘Three cards.’ Nick frowned and wondered if it meant anything. Even now, could it be some kind of bizarre joke on Gillian’s part? Gill’s an extraordinary girl. ‘Two more and we’d have a full house.’

Emily’s eyes narrowed as she puzzled at it for a few moments. ‘We don’t even know if she meant them to be found when she left them there.’

‘But she sent me the code.’

‘Afterwards.’ Emily took out a pen and drew a line down the margin of her newspaper. She put a cross-stroke near the top. ‘Gillian went to the chateau in Rambouillet two weeks before Christmas, December the twelfth.’ Another stroke. ‘Two days later she disappeared. December the fourteenth. Then no trace until she turned up online on January the sixth.’ She looked up at Nick. ‘Have you got the list you made of her phone calls?’

Nick produced it. ‘She rang Vandevelde on the afternoon of December the thirteenth. The day before she vanished.’

‘And the day after she’d visited the chateau.’

‘That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,’ Nick cautioned. ‘In Gillian’s line of work she might have found the card anywhere. She could have been sitting on it for months – brought it with her from New York, even.’

Emily rolled her eyes. ‘She found a card that’s been lost for five hundred years, and she spent the day before she vanished in a library full of unknown fifteenth-century manuscripts. I know where I’d start looking.’

‘Atheldene was talking about books. He didn’t say anything about cards.’

‘Most of the cards survived because they were pasted into other books. Often not long after they were printed. The library had been flooded and the books were damp. That would have loosened the glue – the card might have fallen out right into her lap.’

Nick watched the flush that came to her cheeks, the exaggerated hand gestures as she mimed the card falling out of the book. Thought uninhibited her like alcohol.

‘OK. We’ll assume she found the card in the dead guy’s library.’

‘The next day, she rang Vandevelde. She went out to visit him, he analysed the card and found… something.’

‘Except that he says she never went there, and that even if she did there’s nothing to find in the card.’

‘He’s lying.’ Emily said it with sweet certainty. ‘What was the next phone call?’

‘The taxi company. December sixteenth.’

‘And the call to Atheldene?’

‘That was earlier. The night before she disappeared.’

‘But after she found the card.’ Emily stirred the foam on her coffee. ‘Did she tell Atheldene about it?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Nick. ‘He sounded pretty surprised when I asked him about the Master of the Playing Cards on the phone.’

He pushed a piece of waffle around his plate, soaking up the melted butter.

‘We’ve looked at the playing card and the phone records. The one thing we haven’t tried is the library card.’ Emily sipped her coffee. ‘The Bibliothèque Nationale is a research library. I spent some time there when I was doing my thesis. You have to order the books you want to be delivered to you.’

‘So?’

‘The library card logs you in to the catalogue. It keeps a record of what you’ve ordered. We can see what Gillian was reading.’

A bleak and paralysing despair washed over Nick. ‘Would that help?’

‘There isn’t anything else.’

Nick drained the last of his coffee. ‘I’m going to go back and check her home page. Maybe there’s something there.’

Emily looked worried. ‘Do you think it’s safe to split up?’

‘Safer for you than being together. I’m the fugitive, remember.’ He stood. ‘Anyway, hopefully we left all the bad guys in New York.’