Silent tears spilled from her eyes to roll slowly down her cheeks as she turned to gaze again at her daughter.
‘They brought tutors in to educate her. She loved to read and watch movies. Very early, she discovered a talent for painting. You’ll find her work all over the clinic. She painted portraits of all the staff, and everyone wanted their own. Her work is in homes and on walls all over this town. We never hid from her that her life would be short. She’s always understood that. Knew that she would have less time on this earth than others.’
She searched for a pack of tissues in her bag, and wiped away the tears from her cheeks.
‘None of us knows how long we have, do we? And maybe that’s how we can live without fear. But Alice has never been afraid of dying, just grateful for every day she was alive.’ Her eyes met Dominique’s very directly. ‘So, you see, why would I even question the funding that made that possible? It has been an extraordinary life. And it has touched everyone who knew her.’
Dominique looked again at the fading girl on the bed. A serenity in her face. Her life reflected in all the paintings on her walls, and she felt guilty for intruding on her mother’s pain. She placed a hand on Anne-Laure’s arm and said, ‘I’m sorry.’
Anne-Laure turned to search her face with sceptical eyes. ‘Are you?’
Dominique took her hand away, resigned, and said, ‘I’ll leave you to your visit.’
At the elevator, she stopped and looked back along the hall. Anne-Laure was still standing gazing in at her dying daughter. She wiped her eyes again with a fresh tissue before composing herself and opening the door.
Dominique stopped at reception and smiled at the young nurse who had predicted rain. ‘Might it be possible to have a word with the director?’
The director was a square-shaped woman in her middle forties, who wore a charcoal-grey skirt and white blouse. Hair streaked with silver was drawn back into a neat bun at the back of her head. She was evidently not the same director who had come to Anne-Laure’s house twenty-three years previously. She had a pleasant face and smiled warmly as she rose from behind her desk to shake Dominique’s hand. ‘You’re a friend of Anne-Laure’s.’ It was a statement rather than a question, so Dominique didn’t contradict her. On the wall behind the desk she noticed a framed portrait of the director painted by Alice. It was a good likeness. The director waved her into the seat opposite. ‘How can I help you?’
Dominique sat down and came straight to the point. ‘The family would like to know who has been covering the cost of Alice’s treatment all these years.’
The director frowned. ‘I’m not sure I understand. You mean they don’t know?’
‘No, they don’t.’
The director sat back, clearly surprised and considering how she should respond. ‘Well, I’m afraid I wouldn’t be at liberty to say, even if I wanted to. This is a private clinic. Our funding is confidential.’ She lifted her shoulders in a shrug of consternation. ‘And what difference would it make now, after all this time? That little girl’s life has shone more brightly than any of us ever dared to hope. But the light is fading now, and she’ll be gone within the month.’
The wind had stiffened by the time Dominique stepped back out into the car park, and leaves were falling like snow from the tall chestnut trees that were lined up along the outer wall. She could see no sign of the cedars from which the clinic had taken its name, and she slipped behind the wheel of her car to sit for some minutes in thoughtful silence. She reached into her jacket pocket for her phone and tapped the Contacts icon. After entering the name ‘Bouthet’, she sat looking at the contact details which had materialised on her screen, and had a momentary flutter of regretful recollection. Then she tapped the number to autodial.
A girl on a switchboard answered her call. ‘Tracfin. How may I help you?’
‘Could I speak to Franck Bouthet?’ Dominique said.
‘One moment.’
But it was several long moments before the phone ringing on his extension prompted Franck to answer it. ‘Hello?’
Dominique felt the remnants of the butterflies he always used to give her resurrect themselves in her tummy. ‘Franck, it’s Dominique.’
There was a moment’s silence, laden with a whole history. Then that familiar voice. ‘My God! Dominique. You certainly know how to waken a man from his slumbers.’
‘You’re at work, Franck. You’re not supposed to be sleeping.’
‘My whole life has been in hibernation since we went our separate ways.’
She laughed. ‘Hedgehogs and bears hibernate, Franck. Not policemen.’
‘Emotionally, I meant. I’m just an automaton at work.’
‘You’re a damn genius. Which is why they pulled you out of the gendarmerie.’
She could hear him smile. ‘Flattery will get you everywhere.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Because I have a favour to ask.’
Chapter thirty-six
Paris was wet and grey, and several degrees cooler than Bordeaux. Winter here, it seemed, had already got the city in the grip of its dead hand.
Jean-Marie Martinot lived beyond a gated arch in an apartment block called Villa Adrienne overlooking sumptuous gardens hidden from view off the Avenue du Général Leclerc in the fourteenth arrondissement.
Two of the three rooms he had once shared with his wife on the second floor were largely unused, gathering dust along with his memories, and he spent much of his life in one room with large windows that looked out over the gardens. It was a shambles. Settee and armchairs strewn with discarded clothes, half-eaten meals on plates gathering themselves on bookshelves and tables. Newspapers and wrappings accumulated in drifts on the floor.
‘Excuse the mess,’ he said as he showed Enzo in, but he seemed not in the least embarrassed by it. As if he had long stopped seeing it as the symptom of his loneliness that it was. The air was so thick with cigarette smoke that Enzo immediately wanted to open a window, but Martinot was oblivious. He had a hand-rolled cigarette, stained brown by nicotine, burning between his lips, and ashtrays everywhere were overflowing. He lifted an old coat from the back of an armchair by the window where rain ran like tears down the glass, and he waved Enzo into the seat. He threw the coat on the settee and sat himself down opposite, across a cluttered coffee table.
He wore baggy dark trousers held by a belt at the waist, and a stained grey cardigan open over a white shirt frayed at the collar. A day’s growth of silver bristles covered fleshy cheeks beneath a high forehead and a sweep of thick white hair. A big man once, age had diminished him in more ways than one. But there was still a twinkle in his clear blue eyes, even though Enzo noticed that he was wearing different-coloured socks.
‘So,’ he said, ‘you’re still on the Lambert case. I thought you’d got his killer?’
‘Well, yes. The one who actually broke his neck. But not whoever paid him to do it.’
The old policeman shook his head. ‘There are some cases that just never go away. The Lambert killing haunted me for damn near twenty years, even into retirement.’ He gave Enzo a look of grudging admiration. ‘But I could never have tracked down that killer the way you did. I’m just not up on all this new technology. In my day it was all about knocking on doors, tramping the streets and following your instincts.’