Century Rain

FOURTEEN

“I have no idea what this is about,” Floyd said, “but where I come from, it’s customary to knock.”

“But we did,” the young inspector said pleasantly.

“I meant knock and then wait to be invited in. As a matter of fact, you might even try calling ahead to make an appointment. It’s called common courtesy.”

The inspector smiled. “But we did. Unfortunately, the line was busy whenever we tried. Of course, that convinced us that there was someone home now, otherwise we would have paid you a visit later this afternoon.”

“And the purpose of this visit is what?”

“My apologies,” the young plainclothesman said. “I am Inspector Belliard of the Crime Squad.” He stopped in front of Floyd’s desk and picked up a black china paperweight in the shape of a horse that had been holding a ream of typed and carbon-copied documentation in check. “Nice antique,” Belliard said. “It would make a wonderful blunt instrument.” He tossed the horse to one of his partners, who fumbled the catch and let it drop to the floor, where it shattered into a dozen jagged pieces.

Floyd fought to keep a lid on his temper—the one thing they clearly wanted him to do was lose it badly. “That almost looked deliberate,” he said. “Of course, we both know it was an accident.”

“I’ll writ you a chit for it. You can claim compensation at the Quai.”

“Do they hand out chits for electrocution burns? I might need one of those as well.”

“What an odd question,” Belliard said, smiling thinly. He moved to the window, pulling back the blinds to examine the view. Floyd noticed that for a moment neither Belliard nor his men had their eyes on his desk. He used the instant to slip Custine’s letter back under the telephone, hoping that none of the men would notice the sudden movement or the slight chime as the handset resettled on its cradle.

“I guess you’re here to harass my partner,” Floyd said.

Belliard turned from the window, blowing a line of dust from his fingers. “Harass your colleague, Monsieur Floyd? Why on Earth would we want to do that?”

“Because it’s what you’ve always done?”

The young man scratched the tip of his nose. He had a very slender face, nearly hairless, like one of the dummies Floyd frequently saw in the windows of gentlemen’s outfitters. Even his eyebrows appeared to have been pencilled in. “Funny you should mention your partner,” the man said, “because it’s Custine we were hoping to have a chat with.”

“I know all about your ‘little chats,’ ” Floyd said. “They usually involve a quick trip to the bottom of the stairs.”

“You’re much too cynical,” Belliard said, chidingly. “It doesn’t become you, Monsieur Floyd.”

“I’ve grown into it like an old shoe.”

“These are new times, a new Paris.”

Floyd picked up a pencil and rolled it between his fingers. “I think I preferred the old one. It smelled better.”

“Then maybe you should air out the place a little,” Belliard said, opening the office window. A sudden stiff breeze blew through the room, sending papers flying on to the carpet and slamming shut the main and connecting doors. Belliard turned from the window and walked towards Floyd, making no effort to avoid the case notes and paperwork now littering the floor. “There. Better already. It wasn’t the city that had a bad smell about it, it was your office.”

“If you say so.”

“Let’s stop playing games, shall we?” Belliard moved back to the side of the desk directly opposite Floyd and planted the heels of his hands on the edge of it. He was looking Floyd straight in the eye. “There’s been a murder in the Blanchard building.”

“I know,” Floyd said. “I’m the poor sap investigating it.”

“Not that one. I mean the one that happened about three hours ago.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Blanchard is dead. He was found on the pavement beneath his balcony, just like the unfortunate Mademoiselle White.” Belliard looked at one of his men. “You know, perhaps there was something in that business after all.”

Genuinely shocked despite the forewarning in Custine’s message, Floyd found it difficult to form the words he wanted to say. “Blanchard’s dead? Blanchard’s actually been murdered?”

Belliard looked at him with pale, discriminating eyes, as if judging the exact degree by which Floyd was surprised. “Yes,” he said, his thin, bloodless lips moving but the sound reaching Floyd delayed, as if travelling across a great divide. “And the unfortunate thing is that the last person seen in his presence was your associate Custine. As a matter of fact, he was observed leaving the building in something of a rush.”

“Custine didn’t do it,” Floyd said automatically.

“You sound astonishingly sure of that. How could you possibly know that, unless the man himself has offered you an explanation or an alibi?”

“Because I know Custine. I know he wouldn’t do something like that.” Floyd’s throat was suddenly dry. Without asking anyone’s permission, he poured himself a sip of brandy and knocked it back.

“How can you be so certain? Do you have that much insight into his character?”

“I have all the insight I need,” Floyd snapped, “and it wouldn’t matter a damn whether I did or not, because it still wouldn’t make any sense. Blanchard took us on to solve his homicide case—why would one of us murder our own client?”

“Maybe there was always an ulterior motive,” Belliard said. “Or perhaps the murder was completely impulsive: an act of sudden, blinding rage, entirely without premeditation.”

“Not Custine,” Floyd said. His eyes drifted to the telephone, where the slip of white paper was still jutting out visibly from underneath the base, in spite of his attempt to hide it. Belliard couldn’t see it from his present angle, and might not make anything of it if he could, but if he did notice it… Floyd felt nausea flood through him like water through the Hoover Dam.

“No matter what he may have told you, André Custine was a violent man,” Belliard said, almost sympathetically. “A man died in custody under his questioning. You knew that, didn’t you? An innocent man, as it happened; not that his innocence would have been much consolation while Custine was breaking every finger on one of his hands.”

“No!” Floyd said, aghast.

“I see from your expression that he didn’t tell you. What a shame. All this might have been avoided, otherwise.”

Feeling detached from himself, as if bobbing above his body like an invisible balloon, Floyd said, “What do you mean?”

“Simply that Blanchard might still be alive. Evidently, Custine lost it again.” Belliard pursed his lips disapprovingly, as if being forced to listen to an off-colour joke. “There’s no telling what might have set him off.”

“Don’t you idiots get it?” Floyd said. “There was one homicide connected with the Susan White case and now there’s been another. Don’t go trying to pin this on Custine just because of his past, just because you and he have some unfinished business. You’ll be going after the wrong man while the right man gets away with it again.”

“A nice theory,” Belliard said, “and I’d be tempted to give it the time of day if there wasn’t one niggling little detail out of place.”

Floyd closed the telephone directory, trying to make the action seem as casual and automatic as possible. “Which is?”

“If your man Custine is the innocent party here—just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—then why was he in such a hurry to leave the scene of the crime?”

“I don’t know,” Floyd said. “You’ll have to ask him that yourselves. No, actually, I do know: Custine was no fool. He’d have known exactly how you’d try to pin this on him, for old time’s sake.”

“Then you allow that he may have fled the scene?”

“I allow nothing,” Floyd said.

“When was the last time you saw Custine?”

“This morning.” Floyd noticed that one of the other officers was writing notes in a spiral-bound notebook with a black marbled fountain pen. “I dropped him at the Blanchard place while I went off to make some other enquiries.”

“ ‘Some other enquiries,’ ” Belliard repeated, a mocking note in his voice. “That does sound so very professional, when you put it like that. What was Custine supposed to be doing?”

Floyd shrugged: at this point he saw no need to lie. “There was something about the White case that bothered us. Custine needed to get a better look at the wireless set in her room.”

“And that was the last time you saw him or heard from him?”

“I tried calling the Blanchard apartment not long before you arrived. No one picked up.”

Belliard looked at Floyd with an amused glint in his eye. “That doesn’t quite answer my question.”

Floyd reminded himself that the last thing he should do was lose his temper with these Quai men, and forced himself to speak calmly and civilly, like a man with nothing to hide. “That was the last contact I had with Custine.”

“Very well,” Belliard said. “And was there any sign that Custine had been here in your absence? He’s your associate, so I presume he has his own key to your premises.”

“There’s no sign that he’s been back.”

“Nothing disturbed, nothing missing, no messages?”

“Nothing like that,” Floyd said, as wearily as he dared.

Belliard motioned for the other officer to snap shut his notebook. “We’re done here, I think.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out a business card. “Now it’s my turn. We found one of your business cards on Blanchard’s body, and another turned up with the witness who saw Custine fleeing the scene. By way of reciprocity, here’s my card.”

Floyd took it. “Any particular reason why I might need this?”

“Custine may try to contact you. It’s not unusual, especially if someone’s just gone on the run. He may need personal items, he may need funds. He may wish to put his side of the story to a friend.”

“You’ll be the first person I call if that happens.”

“Make sure that I am.” Belliard reached for his hat, then stopped himself. “I almost forgot: there’s a small favour I need to ask of you.”

“I’m all ears.”

“I need to use your telephone. We have a team still sweeping the crime scene and I’d like to call them before I make my next move, just in case they’ve turned something up. There’s a wireless in the car, but it’s a long walk downstairs and I won’t be able to call through to Blanchard’s apartment directly.”

“Go right ahead,” Floyd said, feeling his blood temperature drop about ten degrees. “I hope that counts as co-operating with your enquiries.”

Belliard lifted the receiver from its cradle and started dialling. “Very much so. And don’t let me walk out of here without signing you a chit for that horse.”

The edge of Custine’s letter glared at Floyd, peeking out from underneath the telephone like a flag of surrender. If they found that note, Floyd thought, then he and Custine were both as good as dead. They would take Floyd down into the Quai and make life unpleasant for him until he gave them some lead that would bring them Custine. And if he died before they got it out of him, they’d simply make sure they had enough men on the job to cover all the possibilities. They had scented blood now: the chance to punish Custine for the way he had betrayed them all—in spirit if not in name—before his enforced retirement. It had been a long time coming, and they were not going to be in the most forgiving frame of mind.

Belliard started speaking, his French almost too rapid and clipped for Floyd to follow. It was French with a heavy seasoning of police jargon: almost another language in its own right. The inspector leaned against the table and began to drag the telephone towards him by fractions of an inch, gradually exposing more and more of the letter.

He’s going to see it any second now, Floyd thought, and he isn’t going to be able to resist taking a look at it. It’s what anyone would do, in the same circumstances.

He heard someone try the outer door but find it locked. A voice called out in thick peasant French. Belliard motioned for one of the officers to open the door, while he continued speaking. Floyd picked up snatches of Belliard’s side of the conversation: something about the wireless itself being smashed to pieces on the pavement, along with Blanchard. And it sounded as if it had been a violent death this time, with no attempt to make it look like anything other than murder.

The second officer reached the outer door and unlocked it. He opened it a crack and Floyd saw another officer standing there, a man who must have been waiting in the car downstairs. Floyd had a moment to register this scene and then the door was wrenched violently from the officer’s hand as another gale suddenly tore through the apartment, snatching into the air the few papers that hadn’t already found their way to the floor. In that squall of flying paper, Floyd saw the note from Custine flutter out from under the telephone, across the room and out through the open window, like a moth on the wing.

Belliard concluded his call and returned the telephone to Floyd’s desk. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have opened that window after all,” he said, looking down at the carpet of dishevelled papers. “It’ll take you a month of Sundays to tidy up this lot.”

“That’s all right,” Floyd said, wondering how obvious his relief was. “It was about time they had a good sort.”

Belliard reached into his jacket and pulled out a book of chits. “How much for the horse?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Floyd said. “I was going to throw it out anyway.”

After he had locked the door behind the Quai men, Floyd moved to the window, still open to the mid-afternoon city, and peeled aside the dusty slats of the blinds. He watched the black police sedan below grumble into life and move away. He looked up and down rue du Dragon, noting the positions and makes of the other vehicles parked there and paying particular attention to any that he did not recognise or that seemed out of place in the rundown backstreet, with its potholes and waterlogged drains. There, three shops up, was another dark sedan. He couldn’t tell the model from the angle of his view, but it looked similar to the police car he had just seen depart—probably an unmarked police vehicle. Behind the oily gleam of the windshield, he saw a man sitting patiently with his hands folded in his lap.

Floyd had to give them credit. Less then four hours had passed since the murder, but the efficient boys from the Quai had already assigned a crack team from the Crime Squad to it. Admittedly, they hadn’t had to look very far for a lead—not the way Floyd and Custine had helpfully distributed business cards around the premises. But they had still organised a tail, and maybe more than one. Floyd had an idea of the way the Quai worked: if you thought there was one man putting you under surveillance, then there was probably a second or a third you had no idea about.

Floyd let the blinds flick back into place. He felt drained, as if he had just staggered to his feet after receiving a stomach punch. Everything had changed since he had walked into the office, laden down with groceries and rather fewer problems than he imagined he had. Why was it never good news that put problems into perspective? Why did it always take another set of problems?

He sat back down at his desk and tried to compose his thoughts. The basic details of the investigation remained unchanged, but now it was a double-homicide case, and the police had belatedly decided to take an interest. Or—more probably—they had latched on to Blanchard’s death as a pretext for punishing Custine. It still didn’t look as though they had much interest in the first homicide.

But even though the letter was gone, Custine had still given him a vital clue. The typewriter hadn’t been a typewriter at all, but a sophisticated piece of enciphering equipment. Several things suddenly made a lot more sense—and they all backed up the spy hypothesis.

Susan White had cooked her wireless to tune into coded transmissions. The dots and dashes had looked a lot like Morse, and maybe they were derived from it, but that was only the beginning of the encryption. Morse, as Floyd knew well from his days sailing out of Galveston, was just a way of sending the written word over the airwaves. Anyone with a Morse book could crack that kind of message even if they had no prior knowledge of the code, which was fine for parlour games, but nowhere near secure enough for spies. That was where the Enigma machine came in. The signals coming over the wireless set had already been scrambled by whoever sent them. White’s smashed Enigma machine had been her means of unscrambling those messages back into something readable.

It meant that she was definitely a spy. No doubt about that now. It also meant there wasn’t a hope in hell of ever learning what was in those Morse transmissions.

Floyd snapped out of his reverie and checked the time: three-thirty in the afternoon. Forcing himself into the role of a man who had had no contact with his partner, he decided that his most likely course of action would be to visit the scene of the crime and get the full story for himself. Floyd splashed some water down his throat, then grabbed his hat and coat. He was about to leave Susan White’s tin of documents where it was on his desk when a thought flashed into his mind: whoever had murdered Blanchard had probably been after the tin. First Susan White had been murdered, and now the landlord. Presumably whoever had committed the second homicide must now know that the tin was elsewhere. And with all those business cards lying around, it wouldn’t take them long to make the connection with Floyd.

He picked up the tin. From now on, wherever he went, the tin was coming with him.

Floyd turned the Mathis into rue des Peupliers, slowing as he noticed a trio of police cars gathered near number twenty-three. In his rear-view mirror he saw the dark sedan he had noticed on rue du Dragon glide past him towards the junction with rue de Tolbiac, slowing as the driver noted Floyd’s location. The kid pursuing Floyd was an amateur, and Floyd had made no effort to elude him on the drive across town to Blanchard’s street. There was almost certainly someone more experienced on the same surveillance detail.

Floyd parked halfway up the street, stopped the engine and observed the scene in silence for a few moments. Although the death had happened at least five hours earlier, and probably more like six, there was still a large crowd of onlookers gathered on the sidewalk beneath the balcony. Their shadows were beginning to lengthen in the afternoon light. For a morbid instant, Floyd wondered if the body was still there, crushed and disfigured by the fall. That seemed unlikely, though, and the more Floyd looked, the more obvious it became that the spectators were only gathered around the entrance to the building because they were hoping to snatch a titbit of forensic gossip from the Quai officials—police and scientists—who were presumably still coming and going from the crime scene.

Floyd smoothed his hair, slipped his hat on and left the car. He walked up to the gathering of onlookers, recognising none of them. Two uniformed officers were standing guard at the door, bantering with the crowd. Gently, Floyd pushed his way through the people until he was in plain sight of the policemen.

“Can I help you, monsieur?” asked the older of the two officers.

Floyd showed the man his identity papers and business card. “I’m a private detective,” he said. “Monsieur Blanchard—the late Monsieur Blanchard—happened to be my client.”

“Bit late then, aren’t you?” the officer replied, to a chuckle of approval from his colleague.

Floyd tried to sound as breezily unconcerned as the police officer. “Monsieur Blanchard had me investigating an earlier incident that occurred in this building. Now that something’s happened to him, I can’t help wondering if there’s a connection.”

“Your client’s dead,” the older officer said. He had bad breath and a shaving problem. “Doesn’t that mean no one’s paying your wages?”

“He gave me a generous retainer,” Floyd said. “Anyway, I still have a personal involvement with this case. My associate appears to be the prime suspect.”

“How would you know that?” the officer asked.

“I had a visit from Inspector Belliard. He filled me in.” Floyd lowered his voice. “Have you talked to these people yet?”

“These aren’t the residents. Interviews with the residents are taking place inside.”

“All the same, they might have seen something.”

“They didn’t. They’d have said so otherwise.”

Floyd turned to the people around him; by now he was the focus of attention, rather than the ominous dark smear on the pavement. “This is my case as much as theirs,” he said, addressing the gathering, making eye contact with as many of them as possible. “A woman was murdered here three weeks ago and these bright young things from the Quai didn’t bother taking it seriously. Now there’s been another suspicious death.”

Floyd reached into his jacket and pulled out a sheaf of business cards. “If any of you people care about preventing a third homicide, now’s the chance to do something about it. Think back over the last few days, perhaps the last few weeks, if you like, and try to remember anything that struck you as unusual. Maybe it was someone hanging about that you didn’t recognise. Maybe even a child. My guess is that whoever was responsible for the first killing had something to do with the second.”

A middle-aged woman in a droopy hat reached out and took one of the cards from his hand. “I saw something,” she said. “I tried to tell these men, but they weren’t interested.”

“Call me and we’ll talk about it,” Floyd said.

“I can tell you now. There was a big man, like a wrestler. Very well dressed, but all sweaty and out of breath. He came running out into the street and tried to flag down a taxi. There was an argument: someone else was already waiting for the cab and the big man didn’t like it. They almost came to blows.”

“You saw this?” Floyd asked.

“I heard it.”

“When?”

The woman looked across the gathering to a male friend. “What time was that commotion?”

“I looked at my watch,” the other bystander said, taking the burnt-down stub of a cigarette from between his lips. He wore a chequered flat cap and a pencil moustache. “It happened at exactly—”

“I didn’t ask you, I asked the lady.” Floyd turned back to the woman. “Did you actually see this happen?”

“I said I heard it,” she repeated. “A commotion in the street, cars honking their horns, voices raised.”

“But you didn’t actually see the big man yourself?” he persisted.

“Not with my own eyes, no,” she said, as if this was only a subtle distinction. “But he did”—she pointed at the man again—“and what with the commotion I heard—”

“This is a street in the middle of Paris,” Floyd said. “You’d be hard pressed to find a single half-hour when there wasn’t some sort of commotion.”

“I know what I saw,” the spivvy man said, before pushing the exhausted stub of his cigarette back between his lips.

“That argument over the taxi,” Floyd asked him, “did you notice anything else happening at the same time?”

The man looked around at his fellow watchers, wary of a trap. “No,” he said, after due deliberation.

“Well, that’s funny,” Floyd said, “because by rights there should have been a body on the sidewalk.”

“Well, there was…” the middle-aged woman said, but on a falling note.

“Before the fight over the taxi? Or just afterwards? Think about it carefully, because rather a lot depends on it.” While he was speaking, Floyd noticed a younger woman looking at him from the back of the crowd. She kept opening her mouth, as if on the point of saying something, but other people kept interrupting.

A man in a butcher’s apron raised his hand. “Why did you ask about a child just now?”

“Just covering all the bases.”

“I did see a child. A little boy. A very nasty-looking one, hanging around here.”

Before Floyd could pursue that information, a new voice emerged from the doorway leading into Blanchard’s apartment building. “Send him inside. We need to talk to him.”

Floyd quickly handed out the rest of his business cards, urging the witnesses to contact him if they remembered anything else. He watched as someone passed a card to the woman at the back of the crowd. Then he slipped past the two policemen into the dark, mildewed hallway of the apartment building.

“Hello, Floyd. I notice you’ve been scattering cards around like confetti lately,” the newcomer said, still standing in the shadows.

“The last time I checked, there wasn’t a law against it.”

“You’re right to phrase it that way,” the man replied. “These days, one can’t be too careful about anything, including the law. Shut the door behind you.”

Floyd found himself doing as he was told. The man’s voice was simultaneously both commanding and reassuring. It was also a voice Floyd had heard before.

“Inspector Maillol?”

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it? How long ago was the Monceau stabbing—five, six years?”

“At least.”

“An ugly business all round. I’m still not convinced we caught the right man.”

Floyd’s involvement with the case had been tangential—one of his then clients had been linked to the victim—but it had still been enough to bring him into contact with the men from the Big House. Politely enough, Maillol had told him to stop treading on their steel-capped toes. Floyd had taken the hint.

“I assume you’ve already had a nice chat with my colleague Belliard?”

“He got his point across,” Floyd said.

“Belliard has his methods; I have mine.” Maillol looked every bit the evil interrogator: he had a thin, drum-tight face through which the bones of his skull seemed about to burst, a cruel little mouth and crueller little eyes behind rimless glasses. The last five or six years had done nothing to soften that countenance. He took off his homburg and scratched at the shaven egg of his scalp.

“I hope your methods are an improvement,” Floyd replied.

“Your friend is in a great deal of trouble,” Maillol said, without prevarication. “All the more so now that Belliard has taken an interest in the case.”

“I got the impression I wasn’t exactly off the hook either.”

“Belliard is one of the bright young things. The right suit, the right hat, the right wife. He even has the right political connections.”

“Chatelier?”

“Who else?”

Something in the man’s tone of voice eased Floyd. “I take it you’re not exactly singing from the same hymn sheet.”

“Times are changing,” Maillol said. “This is not the same city it was a few years ago.”

“Funny—that’s exactly what Belliard said.”

“But he undoubtedly said it as if it was a good thing.” Maillol slipped his hat back on, pressing it down firmly. It made a scratching sound against the stiff stubble above his ears. “I am serious about Belliard: he is not a man of whom you wish to make an enemy.”

“You’re his superior.”

“In theory,” Maillol said. “Sadly, I lack both his ambition and his connections. Do you read the papers, Floyd?”

“I keep up with the funny pages.”

“I shouldn’t be working this case. Officially I’m not even here. I’m supposed to be working anti-bootlegging investigations in Montrouge.”

“I read about that. I also heard that you dropped my name when Blanchard was looking for a private eye.”

“You were the obvious choice. I was concerned about the death of the American girl: something about it didn’t add up. But the director of prosecutions was satisfied with the accidental-death verdict, so there was nothing I could do.”

“But now the police must take both cases seriously, surely.”

“That depends on whether they want either of them solved or not.”

“Belliard seemed pretty keen to get results.”

“Ah, but what kind of results? He was wrong to ignore the earlier killing: he missed a perfect opportunity to blame her death on some handy minority. But now he has Custine in the frame, he will more than make up for that oversight.”

“He hates Custine that much?”

“They all do.”

“And you?” Floyd asked.

“I knew Custine. We worked together ten years ago, in the seventeenth.” Maillol reached inside his jacket and removed a slim metal cigarette case embossed with a mermaid. He offered a cigarette to Floyd, who declined, before lighting one for himself with a small lighter inlaid with ivory. “He was a good detective. A hard man, but always one you could trust.”

“Then you’ll know he isn’t capable of this.”

“Why did he run, in that case?”

“He may have left the scene of the crime,” Floyd said, “but only because he was smart enough not to hang around. He didn’t push Blanchard off his balcony.”

“Someone must have done it,” Maillol said, tapping ash on to the floor. “Your friend is the perfect suspect.”

“It seems that Custine was already in a taxi when the body hit the street.”

“Which still doesn’t let him off the hook. We won’t know until the coroner’s report comes in, but it’s still entirely possible that he killed Blanchard.”

“I don’t see how.”

“He might have stabbed or shot the old man, without killing him instantly. He leaves Blanchard in a weakened condition, knowing he won’t last long, and rushes downstairs to hail a taxi. Upstairs, meanwhile, Blanchard finds enough strength to stumble around, which unfortunately leads him to fall out of his window.” Before Floyd could frame an objection, Maillol raised a hand and said, “Merely a scenario, of course. There are others. The point is simply that the observed sequence of events is not necessarily inconsistent with your friend having committed murder. Believe me, I’ve investigated far stranger cases.”

“Then maybe you’ve developed an overactive imagination,” Floyd said. “How’s this for an alternative scenario: Custine was up there with the old man, either in the same room or nearby. He had every right to be up there—after all, we’d been invited into the building to work the White case.”

“And the trifling matter of Blanchard’s death?”

“Someone else did it. Custine witnessed it, or came in too late to do anything about it. Of course he fled. In his position, any sane man would have done the same thing.”

“The law will still take a dim view of it.”

“But you understand, surely,” Floyd said, “knowing what you do about Custine, about his relationship with his former colleagues… what else could he have done?”

Maillol conceded the point with a downward stab of his cigarette. “The fact that I know Custine’s history or might have done the same thing in his shoes changes nothing.”

“He’s innocent,” Floyd insisted.

“But you can’t prove it.”

“What if I could?”

Behind his glasses, Maillol widened his cruel, pale eyes the merest fraction. “You have something tangible?”

“Not yet. But I’m sure I can put together enough—”

“It will take more than circumstantial evidence to protect him from Belliard.”

“Then I’ll find what it takes.”

“You’re a reasonable man, Floyd.” Maillol took a lengthy drag on the cigarette before continuing. “I realised as much when our paths crossed over the Monceau case. I told you to back off then and you did. I appreciated that. And I know you mean well by your partner. For what it’s worth, I doubt that Custine did this. But the only thing that will get him off the hook is another suspect.”

“Then I’ll find you another suspect.”

“Just like that?”

“Like I said, whatever it takes.”

“Do you have anyone in the frame? If you do, you should tell me immediately. Not doing so could constitute the withholding of evidence.”

“There’s no one else in the frame,” Floyd said.

“I wish you were lying, for Custine’s sake.” Maillol flicked his spent cigarette to the floor, where he crushed it underfoot. His shoes, Floyd observed, were very scuffed and old. “Unfortunately, I rather suspect you are telling the truth.”

“I’ve only been on the case a couple of days.”

“But now there is no case,” Maillol said. “The man who was employing you is dead.”

“What are you saying?”

“You care about Custine. You may even know where he is. But this is a battle neither of you can win. If Custine has a chance, now is the time for him to leave Paris. That’s what I would do.”

“It’s only men like Custine who are standing between this city and the wolves.”

“Then perhaps we should all give some thought to leaving,” Maillol replied.