“It looks insane to me,” he said. “But you know more about these things than I do. Does any of this make sense to you?”
“That depends on what you mean by ‘make sense,’ ” Custine replied. “I recognise most of these parts, certainly. Smoothing condensers here… a pair of decoupling capacitors there… standard valve heaters over here… and this, I think, is a two-gang tuning condenser. It’s all common stuff, frankly; the oddity is seeing so much of it in such a little space. But she wouldn’t have needed access to any specialist supplies: a few dozen wireless sets and she would have had everything she needed.” He smiled. “Apart, of course, from a degree in electrical engineering and a very steady hand with a soldering iron.”
“Maybe neither was a problem for her. After all, if you can train a spy to learn a code, you can train them to make things.”
“So you seriously think Susan White made this contraption?”
Floyd looked at his partner. “Her or one of her associates. I see no alternative explanation.”
“But why did she need to make it at all? If she was a spy, couldn’t she have brought her own wireless equipment with her?”
This question troubled Floyd as well, but he had no satisfactory answer. “She must have been worried about being discovered,” he suggested. “If she came into this country via official channels, she’d have had to go through customs.”
“But aren’t spies supposed to have secret compartments in their luggage, that sort of thing?”
“Still too much risk of being discovered. Better to have some kind of coded shopping list of radio parts and instructions on how to put them together.”
“All right.” Custine stood up and leaned against the wall, one finger tapping his moustache. “There are clearly still some things we don’t understand. But let’s at least consider what might have happened. Susan White arrives in Paris as a foreign spy and finds a room for herself. She now needs to keep in touch with her compatriots—whoever and wherever they might be.”
“Or else she needs to listen in on someone else’s signals,” Floyd said.
Custine conceded Floyd’s point by raising a finger. “That’s also a possibility. Whatever the reason, she assembles this receiver, starting with a simple wireless set. She might even have been using it when she was disturbed. The intruder killed her by throwing her over the balcony, just as Blanchard suspected. Then they noticed the wireless, or had already seen her using it. Clearly they wanted to destroy it, but they couldn’t remove it from the room without drawing attention to themselves. And perhaps they—singular or plural—had very little time before they had to leave the room. After all, there was a dead body on the pavement.”
“And a smashed typewriter,” Floyd added.
“Yes,” Custine said, sounding less confident. “I’m not quite sure where that fits in. Perhaps they used it to bludgeon her.”
“Let’s just assume the killer was in a hurry for now,” Floyd said.
“Whoever it was had just enough time to pull the wireless away from the wall, jimmy open the back and get their hand inside. They did what damage they could, hoping to render the wireless inoperative. Doubtless if they’d had more time they would have done a more thorough job of it, but as it is, it looks as if they only wrenched a few wires loose and left it at that.”
Floyd pulled aside one knot of wires, wishing he had a torch. “We need to make this thing work,” he said.
“What we need to do,” Custine said, “is hand this whole matter over to the relevant authorities.”
“You think they’d take it any more seriously now that we have a broken wireless to show them? Face it, André: it’s all still circumstantial.” Delicately, Floyd picked out one of the bare-ended wires and searched for its counterpart. “If we could fix this…”
“We don’t know whether the murderer took anything out of it.”
“Let’s assume they were in too much of a hurry, and let’s also assume they didn’t want to be caught with anything on them that would link them to this room.”
“It’s not like you to be so optimistic.” Custine frowned, moved to the door and placed his ear against it. “Hang on—someone’s coming up the stairs.”
“Let’s get this thing back against the wall. Hurry!”
Floyd held the cover loosely in place while Custine secured it with a few turns of one screw; the others would have to wait. Behind them, the door rattled as someone tried the knob.
“It’s Blanchard,” Custine hissed.
“Just a moment, monsieur,” Floyd called, while the two of them inched the cumbersome wireless set back into place, scraping and rucking up the carpet in the process.
The landlord knocked loudly on the door. “Open, please!”
“Just a moment,” Floyd repeated.
Custine moved back to the door and unlocked it, while Floyd stood in front of the wireless, doing his best to smooth the carpet back into place with the heel of his shoe. “We felt it best to lock the door,” Floyd said. “Didn’t want any of the neighbours poking their noses in.”
“And?” Blanchard asked, stepping into the room. “Did you find anything?”
“We’ve only been here five minutes.” Floyd gestured at his surroundings, wishing that he had not chosen to stand so close to the wireless set. “There’s a lot to work through. She was a busy little beaver, Mademoiselle White.”
“Mmm.” Blanchard observed them both through narrowed eyes. “The point is, Monsieur Floyd, that I had already deduced as much based on my own observations. It is fresh insights that I seek, not things I have already worked out for myself.”
Floyd moved away from the wireless. “Actually, I need to ask you something. Did you ever see her up here with anyone else?”
“I never saw her with anyone else the whole time I knew her.”
“Never?” Floyd asked.
“Even when I followed her towards the Métro station, I did not see the exchange take place.”
Floyd remembered Blanchard telling them how he had shadowed Susan White while she struggled towards the station with a loaded case. Floyd had forgotten that detail until now: it was in his notebook, but not at the forefront of his mind. Now that he suspected that she had been in contact with fellow agents (unless, as Custine had said, she was using the wireless to intercept someone else’s transmissions), he began to develop a vague idea of how she had worked. She was a foreign agent in an unfamiliar city, and for much of the time she was acting alone. Perhaps she received orders and intelligence through the modified wireless. But she could not be totally alone in Paris, or else the handover in the Métro station could never have taken place. So there must be other agents out there, from the same side as her: a small, loosely organised web of them spread across Paris, who kept in contact via coded radio transmissions. And unless the radio transmissions were originating from very far away, there must be someone in the area sending those orders.
Floyd felt a weird sense of vertigo: a combination of fear and thrill that he knew he would not be able to resist. It would pull him deeper, and it would do what it would with him, whether he liked it or not.
“You do think she was murdered, don’t you?” Blanchard asked him.
“I’m coming around to the idea, but I’m still not sure whether we’ll ever know exactly who did it.”
“Have you made any more progress with the documents?” Blanchard persisted.
Floyd had left a note with Greta the night before, saying that he would pay her a visit later today. “There might be something in them,” he said. “But look, Monsieur Blanchard, if she gave you those papers for safekeeping, then she must have felt that her life was in danger.”