“You think someone’s been in there?” Auger asked. Involuntarily, she touched her hip, feeling for the reassuring presence of the automatic. As tempted as she was to draw the gun now, she didn’t want the hole she was in to get any deeper.
“Wait,” Floyd said. Very gently, he tried to turn the doorknob. Auger heard it click against resistance. The door was still locked.
“Maybe the hair blew away,” Greta suggested.
“Or maybe someone found their way inside with a skeleton key,” Floyd replied.
A door a little further down the landing opened a crack, a bar of watery daylight cutting across the carpet. An elderly woman pushed her powdered face into the hall and said, in French, “Monsieur Floyd? You had better come inside, I think.”
“Not now, Madame Parmentiere,” Floyd replied.
“I really think you better had,” she said. Then she stepped back, the door creaking open another few inches. Looming behind her, a fire iron in his hand, was a large man dressed in a vest and braces.
“Custine!” Floyd said.
“You’d better listen to the lady,” the man said, lowering the fire iron. “I don’t think it’s safe for us to go into the office. The boys from the Big House have this building under heavy surveillance, and every once in a while they send someone inside to see if you’re home.”
“Come in, please,” Madame Parmentiere insisted.
Floyd shrugged and led the way into the woman’s apartment.
The layout of the rooms was completely different from the offices occupied by the detective, and even to Auger the décor and ambience suggested that they had stepped back fifty or sixty years, into a Paris at the turn of the century. There were no concessions to the modern era: not a wireless set or telephone to be seen, and certainly no television. Even the clockwork phonograph that sat beneath the window looked as if it would have suffered a fit rather than play anything more modern than Debussy. The furniture was upholstered with a maroon velvet plush, the sweeping wooden legs and armrests covered in gold leaf. The interior doorways were framed by pairs of peacock’s feathers, tilted like ceremonial scimitars. A brass bird’s cage was suspended from the ceiling, but there was no evidence that a bird had ever occupied it. Stationed around the room were at least a dozen antique oil lamps, their tinted glasses throwing shades of blue, green and turquoise on to the immaculate white walls even though none of them were lit. The room faced south and was drinking in what little remained of the day’s light.
Madame Parmentiere closed the door behind them. “You cannot stay here long,” she said.
“I know,” said the man Floyd had referred to as Custine, “and we won’t inconvenience you for a moment longer than is necessary. But may we sit down for the time being?”
“Very well,” the old lady said. “I suppose I had better make some tea, in that case.”
They all found seats, while Madame Parmentiere pushed her way through a curtain of gleaming glass beads into what Auger presumed was an adjoining kitchen.
“So who wants to start?” Floyd asked, sticking with French. “Right now I don’t know where to begin.”
“Who’s she?” Custine asked, nodding in Auger’s direction.
“The sister,” Floyd replied.
“Not much of a redhead, is she?”
“We were half-sisters,” Auger said.
Floyd spread his hands in a gesture of defeat. “What can I say? She’s got an answer for everything, André. Every damn question you can throw at her, she’s worked it all out. She even had me half-believing that a well-bred girl might take to snooping around the tunnels of the Paris Métro.”
“I told you…” Auger began, but abruptly changed tack, addressing Custine. “Anyway, who are you? I’ve got as much of a right to ask that question of you, as you have of me.”
“This is André Custine,” Floyd said. “My associate and friend.”
“And equally hopeless case,” Greta added.
Auger looked around at them. “I can’t tell whether you like each other, or hate each other.”
“We’ve been having a trying few days,” Floyd replied, before suddenly lowering his voice. “Is it me or is there a bad smell in this place?” he whispered.
“It’s me,” Custine said cheerfully. “Or rather the shirt I just removed. How else do you think I got into the building without being picked up?”
“Monsieur Gosset,” Greta said, her face lighting up with understanding. “You smell like horsemeat!”
Floyd buried his head in his hands. “It just gets better and better.”
Of the four of them, Custine was the only one who seemed completely calm and unfazed, as if this was exactly the kind of thing that happened most afternoons. “I’d had enough of Michel’s hospitality at Le Perroquet. He means well, but there’s only so long a person can stay sane in that kind of room. Thankfully, he was able to use his contacts to find me temporary lodgings elsewhere, but I needed to return here first, having been in something of a hurry when I dropped by yesterday. But how to enter the building unobserved?” He smiled, clearly enjoying the chance to be the centre of attention. “That was when it hit me: I could kill two birds with one stone. I knew that Gosset received a daily consignment of horsemeat from somewhere north of the city. I remembered the name of the delivery firm and that Gosset owed the agency a favour. A couple of telephone calls later and I’d secured myself a snug little hideaway in the back of the delivery lorry.”
“You won’t be able to pull tricks like that for much longer,” Floyd observed. “Sooner or later they’ll be searching every truck in Paris, head to toe.”
“By then, I hope such subterfuge won’t be necessary.” Custine reached up and took a cup and saucer from the tray that Madame Parmentiere had just brought into the room. In his huge hands, the delicate chinaware looked like fragile props from a doll’s house. “Anyway, here I am, although I don’t intend to stick around for more than a few hours.”
“Given any thought as to how you’ll get out of the building?” Floyd asked.
“I’ll cross that bridge when it becomes a necessity,” Custine said, sipping at the very weak tea. “Chances are they’ll be expecting me to arrive, not leave, so they may be off their guard.”
“I like a man who thinks ahead.”
Custine aimed one little finger towards Auger. “I only got half the story. You claim to be Susan White’s sister, or half-sister, or whatever?”
“There’s no ‘claim’ about it,” Auger said. “I am who I said I am. If you and Monsieur Floyd don’t like it, that’s entirely your problem.”
“This, incidentally,” Floyd said, “is what passes for gratitude in Mademoiselle Auger’s scheme of things. I was treated to it when I got her out of trouble in the Métro station and again when we were near the hotel.”
Custine studied Auger. “What happened near the hotel?”
“Auger saw something she didn’t like,” Floyd said. “Now she’s refusing to talk about it.”
Auger sipped at her own tea. The whole setting, with the four of them—not to mention their host—sitting down in these very genteel surroundings, felt ludicrously inappropriate. Less than an hour ago, she had been managing the controlled contraction of a wormhole throat, after dispatching a ship back to the real Mars in another part of the galaxy. Now she was balancing chinaware on her knee while sitting primly upright on an old-fashioned upholstered armchair, in a room where even the thought of violence seemed incongruous.
“I panicked,” she said. “That’s all.”
“Only when you saw that strange child,” Floyd said.
Custine made a low growling sound before speaking. “What kind of child?”