She picked the phone up off the desk and threw it hard. It cracked him on the head with a clatter, and then a further clatter as the briefcase and the gun inside it fell onto the floor. He was dazed for only a second, but she was around the desk before he came up for air and she was pulling the telephone cord tight around his neck.
“Who sent you?”
His arms flailed, trying to strike her a body blow but unable to find her where she stood directly behind him.
“Who sent you?”
He tried another approach, trying to pull her own hands off, then trying to get his fingers under the cord, desperately tearing at his neck, drawing blood with his fingernails. He wouldn’t talk; he was at least that professional. She yanked up the tension an extra notch, and the flailing of the arms gave way to a more convulsive movement through his entire body. She had to use all her strength to keep him in the seat, but she couldn’t resist leaning down, whispering breathlessly into his ear.
“You know that song about Jeffers? It’s a celebration. See, Jeffers was a diamond trader, and he was English!”
She couldn’t get the phone working again, even after she’d disentangled it from his body. She took her cell phone and dialled. When Lambert picked up she said, “Someone came after me. I’ll need removals.”
“Someone from the North?”
“No, he claimed to be one of us.”
“Name?”
“Patrick Jeffers. Passport backs that up.” She looked at the passport she’d retrieved from his jacket. He certainly had the right look.
“Jeffers? There has to be a mistake. Let me just check something.” She could hear Lambert tapping away on his computer keyboard. He was as much an old timer as she was and always hit the keys like they belonged on a manual typewriter. ‘Liz, Patrick Jeffers is on his first assignment, but he’s in Damascus; he’s a Middle East specialist.”
She looked at the throttled body, slumped in the chair like a drunk, and now that she thought of it, he hadn’t seemed to recognize the name of Robinson Jeffers, and surely he would have done, as surely as she knew who Robbie Burns was.
“Well, I hope he’s doing better than the Jeffers in front of me now.”
Lambert laughed. She liked Lambert; he had a good sense of humour. People didn’t need to look much in this game, but a sense of humour was an absolute must.
DISTILLING THE TRUTH by Marilyn Todd
The instant Marie-Claude’s husband told her that he’d compiled a dossier detailing the Chief Inspector’s corruption complete with dates, names and times, then placed the file personally in the hands of the Commissioner, she knew it was all over. No wonder he waited until he’d finished his tartiflette to tell her what he’d done. She’d have thrown the damned dish on the floor and to hell with dinner, and he could have whistled for his île flottante as well. As it was, she didn’t hear him out. What on earth was the point of lengthy explanations?
“You’re a fool, Luc. No one likes a whistle blower.”
“I didn’t join the police to be popular.”
“It’s the end of your career, you know that? They won’t keep you on in Paris after this!”
“Blackmail, extortion, what was I supposed to do, Marie-Claude?” He laid down Le Figaro and turned his gaze to her. “For years, Picard has been preying on the very people he was meant to protect. I couldn’t simply turn aside.”
“And I’m sure the Commissioner shook your hand and thanked you warmly for your efforts.”
One side of Luc’s face twisted uncomfortably. “Not exactly, no.”
“You see? No one likes a whistle-blower. They’d rather close ranks and have a bastard in their midst than admit to one bad apple, and you already know my feelings about the Commissioner.”
Like when they were invited over to dinner and she overheard him talking to her husband in his study when she went to find the bathroom.
“Your wife is truculent, selfish and a pain in the cul, Luc-”
The rest was drowned by children’s laughter upstairs, but who cared? That’s the last time she’d eat at that pig’s house, she told Luc, and if her husband felt bad about making excuses when future invitations arrived, then so much the better. She wanted nothing to do with a man who insulted her, and it wouldn’t have hurt Luc to have stuck up for her, either.
“ – couldn’t agree more, sir-”
Truculent and selfish, her cul. She pushed her thick curls back from her face. She had married too young, that was the trouble, and to a man ten years older than herself at that. Admittedly, after six years Luc was no less handsome and his back was as strong, but that type of love can’t sustain a marriage indefinitely. And when he wasn’t working all the hours le bon Dieu sent, he had his head stuck in a file or wanted to talk politics, and not even French politics, either. Honestly! Who cared whether rich diamond deposits had been found in Siberia or how many communists this Senator Mc-Whatever-His-Name accused in the American State Department? What was going to actually change people’s lives were things like the new television transmissions that were now coming out in colour, not some piece of paper signed by Egypt and Britain over a canal in Suez that Luc insisted was going to have far-reaching consequences. But however exasperated Marie-Claude got with her husband, she’d never once known him to lose his temper.
Not even when, a mere fortnight after delivering his sanctimonious dossier, the Commissioner transferred him to Cognac.
“You’ll like the South,” Luc said confidently, as their train pulled away. “Twice as much sunshine, warmer summers, better winters-”
“Better theatres, Luc? Will they have better street cafes and shops? Will they get subtitled versions of ‘On the Waterfront’, do you think?” By all accounts, it was set to scoop an Oscar. “Will they have better parks? Better gardens? Women in peignoirs leaning over the balconies, calling obscenities to men in the street?”
He looked at her beneath lowered lids as the train chugged through the forests of Rambouillet. “You never liked Montmartre.”
“It had life,” she retorted. “It had character and substance, it was always noisy, colourful, constantly changing-”
Marie-Claude broke off. Why was she referring to these things in the past tense? For heaven’s sake, it wasn’t as though she wasn’t going back! No, no, once she’d seen Luc settled in (she owed him that) she would start a new life. A new life with a man who appreciated art, the cinema, fashion and fun. Someone who liked dancing, for sure!
“I’ll bet they’ve never heard of Perry Como in Cognac.”
“You can probably count yourself lucky if they’ve heard of Bing Crosby,” he murmured behind his guide book. “But this is promotion, Marie-Claude. We’re lucky to get it. Do you want to look through this, by the way?”
Marie-Claude shook her head. She’d seen enough of those military vines and flat-bottomed boats from upside down, thank you.
“We’ll be able to afford a house of our own, instead of a poky apartment on the fifth floor where you can hear everything that happens next door. We’re close to the seaside, and I’ll bet the air’s better, too.”
There was nothing wrong with the air in the Rue de Roc, she wanted to say, but his nose was back in the pamphlet and, as Orleans rumbled past, she stroked the hat in her lap. Such a jaunty little number, as well. Très Audrey Hepburn with just a dash of Ava Gardner. She sighed and closed her eyes. By the time she got the chance to wear it again, it would either have too many feathers or too few, and who would be seen dead wearing green for next season? At Tours, the only other couple in the carriage got off and an old woman with a runny nose got in.