24

Incongruous in his ten-year-old charcoal-grey Le Bon Marché suit, Calque sat in the sand, his knees spread, staring out to sea at the gradually emerging dawn. The woman, covered in a tartan blanket from the back of his car, lay motionless beside him.

The sudden opening of her eyes had proved to be a false alarm – a purely automatic reaction to the change of light. She was still doped out, her mouth partly open, her hands turned back on themselves as if she were trying to fend off the attentions of an overactive pet.

Calque lit a cigarette. Scrunching his eyes against the smoke, he fished the tape recorder out of his pocket and reversed the spool. Then he hit the play button and held the recorder up to his ear.

The recorder was sound-activated – meaning that the moment it identified a sound within a radius of maybe three metres, it would start itself up. The tape would then automatically turn itself over after forty-five minutes, and cut off for good after ninety. Calque noted with satisfaction that the full ninety minutes appeared to have been used.

The first noise Calque heard was that of a vacuum cleaner. The tape switched itself on and off a dozen or more times as the vacuum cleaner moved in and out of focus. Calque reined in a desire to fast-forward the tape. He had time. No one knew he was here. And the sea was calming in its way.

Half an hour in, he picked up his first voices. Calque shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over his head, creating a mini echo chamber. Two men were talking. Calque recognized the voice of the butler, Milouins, and someone whom he assumed to be one of the footmen – for it was clear from Milouins’s tone that he was addressing a subordinate. The two men seemed to be preparing the room for a meeting. As Calque listened, Milouins told the footman to lay on the wax polish with a will. A series of bumps followed.

‘The bastard is cleaning the table,’ Calque said to himself.

More bumps.

‘He’s moving chairs. The bastard is moving chairs.’

Another ten minutes went by and the tape auto-reversed. Still cursing, Calque began to fast-forward. Nothing. Just bumping, banging, and the occasional word between Milouins and the footman he was ordering about.

Calque switched off the tape recorder, replaced it in his jacket, and let the jacket slip down around his shoulders. He threw back his head as if he were about to howl at the moon. Five weeks. Five weeks of waiting and watching, and for what? A ninety-minute tape recording of two men cleaning a room.

He was past it. That was clear now. He had finally lost the plot. The Service had been right to green-light his early retirement. He was nothing but a liability. A dinosaur.

He looked down at the woman.

The dawn was up and her face was clearly visible now. She was watching him, her eyes wide open in shock.

Calque fought the temptation to plunge his hand back inside his jacket pocket and drag out his purloined badge for the second time. Why aggravate the situation? If the woman decided to prosecute him for kidnap, the fact that he had attempted to masquerade as a serving police officer would doubtless secure him a good two-to-three years’ extra prison time. Think what a field day some of his recidivists would have with him inside. They’d tattoo his eyeballs with a screwdriver.

‘You’re free to go, Mademoiselle. I want you to understand that. I’m not coercing you in any way.’

Lamia raised herself up on her elbows. After staring silently at him for what seemed the better part of sixty seconds, she allowed her eyes to drift away from Calque’s face and off towards the horizon. ‘Where am I?’

‘You’re at Pampelonne Beach. Near St Tropez. It’s just after dawn.’

Lamia sat up, shrugging the blanket away. She stretched her hands out in front of her, as if she still expected to find them tied up. ‘What am I doing here?’ She glanced across at Calque. ‘And who are you?’

‘Ah,’ said Calque. ‘You want to know who I am?’ once again he found himself on the cusp of declaring that he was Captain Joris Calque, Police Nationale, 2ème Arrondissement, Paris. Instead, he muttered, ‘If you will forgive me, Mademoiselle, I will withhold my name until the situation we are in establishes itself a little clearer.’

Lamia began to laugh. ‘Are we really in a situation?’

Calque shrugged. He felt like digging a hole in the sand, laying himself face down in it, and inviting the woman to fill it in. ‘In a manner of speaking. Yes.’

The smile stayed on Lamia’s face. ‘Have you kidnapped me? Or have you saved me? Make up your mind, please.’

Calque unslung his jacket from about his shoulders and replaced it carefully over Lamia’s. ‘It’s cold, Mademoiselle. This is the time of day when the body is at its most fragile.’

Lamia reached across herself and touched the flap of the jacket. ‘If you’re a kidnapper, you’re not a very good one. You’ve left your gun in your jacket pocket.’

Calque gave a small bow. It was clear that the woman was inviting him, for the second and last time, to lay his cards on the table. ‘It’s not a gun but a tape recorder, Mademoiselle. A tape recorder that I secreted illegally in your mother’s house some months ago, whilst I was still a serving police officer.’

Lamia pinched the jacket closer around her shoulders. ‘Ah, yes. The intellectual policeman. I’ve heard all about you. You’re the man my mother says harassed my brother into an early grave.’

Calque could feel himself bridling. An early grave? A psychopath like Achor Bale? Best place for him. He stopped marginally short of expressing his feelings in words, however, for he was still trying to second guess the woman’s intentions – just as she was attempting to gauge his.

He cleared his throat, measuring the level of his tone against the distant sound of the sea. ‘You were tied up and doped when my associate found you. Am I right in assuming that my admission about bugging your mother and your siblings has not distressed you quite as much as it might have done under other circumstances? That you might even …’ and here Calque felt perversely tempted to burst out laughing ‘ …be alienated in some way from the rest of your family?’

Lamia gave Calque his jacket back. ‘Could we discuss this someplace else, do you think? Over a coffee and a croissant perhaps? I haven’t eaten anything in fifteen hours.’

Calque shrugged on his jacket. He could smell the woman’s scent on his collar, and it disturbed him. ‘Of course.’

‘And my name is Lamia.’

The sudden volte-face wrong-footed Calque. ‘Lamia? That is certainly an uncommon name.’ He vainly tried to conjure up who or what Lamia had represented in Classical mythology. Had she been the one whose tongue Jupiter had torn out in a fit of pique to prevent her giving the game away to Hera about one of his many affairs? No, that had been Lara. Or was that Laodice? So it was true, then. His brain was definitely going. ‘My name is Calque. Joris Calque. Ex-Captain in the Police Nationale.’

‘Well, Ex-Captain Calque, do you have any aspirin on you? I have a splitting headache. And your associate – for you mentioned an associate, didn’t you? – appears to have overlooked my handbag in his headlong rush to kidnap me.’