“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.