There was a muted bleep, and she snatched the phone from her belt without checking the caller. “Jude?”
“No, it’s not Jude, whoever she is, or he is, it’s me. Mark. Listen, you know I said I was going to talk to Shauna? Well, I have. I’ve…”
She no longer heard him. She couldn’t afford to listen, couldn’t afford to let go the thought that had just that second, completely unbidden…
“Mark, I’m in a meeting, OK? I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Liz, please, I…”
Ignoring his protests, she rang off.
Mackay grinned. “Who was that?”
But Liz was already standing. “Wait here,” she said. “I want to look at that list on the laptop. I’ll be back in a sec.”
Leaving Mackay’s room, she crossed the corridor to Temeraire. Switching on her laptop, and tapping in her password, she called up her incoming e-mail list. It took her less than a minute to find what she wanted.
“You were right,” she told Mackay, back in Victory. “There is a Jean D’Alvéydre.”
“Er, OK.”
She consulted a handwritten list. “And a Jean Boissevin, and a Jean Béhar, and a Jean Fauvet and a Jean D’Aubigny and a Jean Soustelle.”
“Right.”
“And I bet you anything you like that one of them isn’t a Jean, rhyming with con, but a Jean, rhyming with teen.”
Mackay frowned. “Who’s been put with the French men because she’s got a French-sounding surname, you mean?”
“Exactly.”
“My God,” he murmured. “You could be right. You could be damn well right.” He took the list of names from her. “That one would be my guess.”
“I agree,” said Liz. “That was my choice too.”
She reached briskly for her bag. “Wait here. Give me five minutes.”
If the phone box on the sea front had been unprepossessing in the day, it was worse at night. It was ice cold, the cement floor was covered with cigarette ends and the receiver stank of the last user’s beery breath.
“Jude…” Liz began.
“I’m afraid the answer’s no so far,” said Judith Spratt. “About sixty per cent of the French names are in, and they’re all negative.”
“Jean D’Aubigny,” said Liz quietly. “Second page, with the French men.”
There was a pause. “Oh my Lord. Yes. I see what you mean. That could easily be an old English name. I’ll-”
“Call me back,” said Liz.
She and Mackay had time to finish the wine and drink a cup of coffee each. When Judith Spratt finally called back, Liz knew from her tone that she’d been right. In the phone box her back ended up pressed hard against Mackay’s chest but she couldn’t have cared less.
“Jean D’Aubigny, twenty-four,” said Spratt. “Nationality, British, current address, deuxième étage à gauche, 17 Passage de l’Ouled NaÏl, Corentin-Cariou, Paris. Registered as a fee-paying student at the Dauphine department of the Sorbonne, reading Urdu literature. Congratulations!”
“Thanks,” said Liz, twisting round to nod at Mackay, who gave her a wide grin and a clenched fist salute. Got you, she thought. Got you!
“Parents are separated and live in Newcastle under Lyme; neither was expecting Jean for Christmas as she had told them she was staying in Paris with friends from the university. We’ve just finished speaking to her tutor at Dauphine, a Dr. Hussein. He told us that he has not seen Jean since the end of the term before last and assumed that she had withdrawn from the course.”
“Can the parents get us pictures?”
“We’re on to all that, and we’ll e-mail them to you as soon as we get anything. Apparently Jean hasn’t lived with either of her parents for several years now, but we’ve got a couple of people on their way up there anyway. We’re also going to suggest that the French take a quiet look at the flat in Corentin-Cariou.”
“We’re going to need everything,” said Liz. “Friends, contacts, people she was at school with… Her whole life.”
“I know that,” said Judith. “And we’ll get it. Just keep checking your e-mail. Are you going to go on staying up there in Norfolk?”
“I am. She’s in this area somewhere, I’m sure of it.”
“Talk later, then.”
Liz cut the connection, and hesitated, finger poised over the dial. Steve Goss first, she decided, and then Whitten. Yes!
40
What people saw in the Strand bungalows, mused Elsie Hogan, was more than she could fathom. They were poky, they were cold, you had to drive all the way to Dersthorpe if you wanted so much as a box of tea bags, and there wasn’t a telly or a phone in any of them! Still, Diane Munday had to know what she was doing. She wouldn’t hang on to them if they weren’t turning her a profit.
Elsie “did” for the Mundays on the days that she wasn’t “doing” for the Lakebys. She wasn’t particularly fond of Diane Munday, who was rather liable to run an accusing finger along a dusty skirting board, and to argue the point when it came to totting up the hours. But cash was cash, and she couldn’t survive on what the Lakebys paid her alone. If Cherisse fell pregnant… Well, it didn’t bear thinking about.
Sunday was Elsie’s morning for the bungalows. She didn’t sweep them all out every weekend, especially if they were unoccupied, but she kept an eye on them, and as she lurched slowly up the uneven track in her ten-year-old Ford Fiesta, windscreen-wipers thonking back and forth against the steady rain, she could just see the front of the black car belonging to the woman staying in Number One. Student, Mrs. M had said. Well, she was welcome to her studies, especially on a morning like this.
From the front seat of the Astra, Jean D’Aubigny watched the Fiesta’s slow approach through her binoculars. She had driven up to within a couple of feet of the track to give herself a clear field of vision in either direction, and for the last hour’s watch had been listening to the local BBC station on the car radio, hoping for news of the Gunter murder. Nothing had come through, though, and she had been left peering through the sweeping curtains of rain and attempting to subdue her mounting agitation. The last time-check, a couple of minutes ago, had been 10:20 a.m.
When were they going to go against the target? she wondered for the hundredth time. What was the delay? The C4 was volatile, as Faraj knew, and couldn’t be stored for long. But he was imperturbable. “We go when it is time,” he had said, and she knew better than to ask again.
She blinked, and returned her eyes to the binoculars propped on the Astra’s half-open window. Slowly, like a mirage, the other car crept towards her. It was old, Jean could now see, and almost certainly too clapped-out to be carrying plain clothes policemen or any other servants of the state. On the other hand, they might deliberately be using a cheap old car to get close to her. To be on the safe side she drew the Malyah, and laid it in her lap.
The Fiesta was almost on her now, and Jean could see the driver-a solid-looking middle-aged woman. Switching on the engine and putting the car into gear, she accelerated and let out the Astra’s clutch, intending to reverse towards the house, well out of the other car’s way. But the car was not in reverse. Somehow she had put it into first or second, and as the gears engaged the car leapt hard forwards and hammered into the wing of the oncoming Fiesta. There was a crunch, a lurching cough as the Astra stalled, and a cascade of headlight glass. Swinging counter-clockwise across the wet surface, the Fiesta came to an unsteady halt.
Shit, thought Jean. Shit! Shoving the Malyah into the waistband of her jeans, she jumped from the car, heart thumping. The Astra’s bumper was dented and it had lost a headlight. The Fiesta’s entire passenger-side wing, however, was a write-off and the car’s driver was sitting motionless, staring in front of her.