Ben shrugged his shoulders and was about to move on when he saw that the young woman had dropped something else on the ground. Shed been so distracted that she had failed to notice that her phone had bounced off the kerbside and into the gutter, where it was lying among the washed-up debris and broken bottles the cleaning crew hadnt yet reached.
He picked it up. A slim, new-model smartphone in a smart black leather wallet case. The leather was wet, but the phone inside was dry. There was no question that it hadnt been lying in the gutter for long, and that it belonged to the woman. He could feel the residual trace of warmth from where it had been nestling in her bag close to her body. In an age when peoples phones seemed to have become the hub of their entire lives, she must have been in a hell of a preoccupied state of mind not to have noticed its absence.
Ben stood there for a moment, thinking what he should do. Further along the street he could see the striped red and white awning of a café-bistro that had obviously escaped damage and was open for business. His mouth watered at the thought of coffee and croissants and he was torn between the temptation of breakfast and the notion of going after the woman to return her phone. She was well out of sight by now, and could have turned off onto any number of side streets. He decided on breakfast and slipped the phone into his pocket.
The place was bustling and noisy, but there was a table free in a corner. Out of habit, Ben sat with his back to the wall so he could observe the entrance. A hurried waiter took his order for a large café noir and the compulsory fresh-baked croissant.
While he waited for his order to arrive, Ben sat quietly and absorbed the chatter from other customers. Predictably the subject of the day, here as everywhere in the city, was the riots. A pair of middle-aged men at the next table were getting quite animated over whether or not the president should declare martial law, order the rebuilding of the Bastille prison, stuff the whole lot of troublemakers behind bars and throw away the key.
When his breakfast arrived Ben gave up eavesdropping on their conversation, took a sip or two of the delicious coffee and tore off a corner of croissant to dunk into his cup. A Gauloise would have rounded things out nicely, but such pleasures as smoking inside a café were no longer to be had in the modern civilised world. He went back to thinking about the strange woman who had bumped into him. What was she so frightened of? Where had she been running from, or to? He had to admit it, he was intrigued. And sooner or later, he was going to have to do something about the phone in his pocket.
Curiosity getting the better of him, he took it out to examine more closely. If the screen happened to be locked, there might not be much he could do except just hand it in to the nearest gendarmerie as lost property. But when he flipped open the leather wallet he soon discovered that the phone wasnt locked.
Which left him a number of potential ways to find out who the woman was and where she lived, allowing him to return the item to her personally. Ben was good at finding people. It was something he used to do for a living, after hed quit the SAS to go his own way as what hed euphemistically termed a crisis response consultant. A career that involved tracking down people who didnt always want to be found, especially when they were holding innocent child hostages captive for ransom. Kidnappers didnt make themselves easy to locate, as a rule. But Ben had located them anyway, and the consequences hadnt been very pleasant for them.
By contrast, thanks to todays technology, ordinary unsuspecting citizens were easy to track down. Too easy, in his opinion.
Feeling just a little self-conscious about intruding on her privacy, he scrolled around the phones menus. There were a few emails and assorted files, but his first port of call was the womans address book. She was conservative about what information she stored in her contacts list. There was someone called Michel, no surname, and another contact called Maman/Papa, obviously her parents, but no addresses for either, and no home address or home landline number for herself. But the mobiles own number was there.
Ben took out his own phone to check it with. Damn these bloody things, but he was just as bound to them as the next guy. Hed got into the habit of carrying two of them: one a fancy smartphone registered to his business, the other a cheap, anonymous burner bought for cash, no names, no questions. Its anonymity pleased him and it came in handy in certain circumstances. But for this call he used his smartphone. He punched in the womans mobile number. Her phone rang in his other hand. You could tell a lot about a person from their choice of ringtone. Hers was a retro-style dring-dring, like the old dial phone that stood in the hallway of the farmhouse at Le Val. Ben liked that about her. He ended the call and the ringing stopped. So far, so good.
Next he used his smartphone to access the whitepages.fr people finder website, which scanned millions of data files to give a reverse lookup. When a prompt appeared he entered the womans mobile number and activated the search. Not all phone users were trackable this way, only a few hundred million worldwide. Which was a pretty large net, but still something of a gamble. If it didnt pay off, he still had other options to try.
But that wouldnt be necessary, because he scored a hit first time. In a few seconds hed gained access to a whole range of information about the mystery woman: name, address, landline number, employer, and the contact details of two extant relatives in the Parisian suburb of Fontenay-sous-Bois a few kilometres to the east. If hed been interested in offering her a job, he could run a background check to verify her credentials and see if she had any criminal record. If he was thinking of lending her money, he could view her credit rating. As things stood, he only needed the basics, which he now had.
Piece of cake.
Her name was Mme Romy Juneau. All adult women in France were now officially titled Madame regardless of marital status, since the traditional Mademoiselle had been banned for its alleged sexist overtones. But her parents shared surname matched hers, suggesting she was unmarried. Some traditions still prevailed. Ben guessed that the phone contact called Michel was probably a boyfriend. She worked at a place called Institut Culturel Segal, ICS for short. The Segal Cultural Institute, whatever that was, in an upmarket part of town on Avenue des Champs-Élysées.
More important to Ben at this moment was her home address, which was an apartment number in a street just a few minutes walk from where he was sitting right now, and in the direction shed been heading when theyd bumped into one another.
It seemed safe to assume that she hadnt been going to work that morning. Maybe she had the day off. Whatever the case, it was a reasonable assumption that shed been making her way home. From where, he couldnt say, and it didnt really matter. If she was heading for her apartment, there was a strong likelihood that shed have got there by now, considering the hurry shed been in.
Ben scribbled her details in the little notebook he carried, then exited the whitepages website and punched in Romy Juneaus landline number. As he listened to the dialling tone, he thought about what hed say to her.
No reply. Perhaps she hadnt got home yet, or was in the bathroom, or any number of possibilities. Ben aborted the call and looked at his watch. The morning was wearing on. He needed to be thinking about finishing breakfast and heading over to see Gerbier at his offices across town. Romy Juneau would have to wait until afterwards.
No reply. Perhaps she hadnt got home yet, or was in the bathroom, or any number of possibilities. Ben aborted the call and looked at his watch. The morning was wearing on. He needed to be thinking about finishing breakfast and heading over to see Gerbier at his offices across town. Romy Juneau would have to wait until afterwards.
He was slurping down the last of the delicious coffee when his phone buzzed. He answered quickly, thinking that Romy must have just missed his call and was calling him back. His anticipation soon fell flat when he heard the unpleasantly raspy, reedy voice of Gaston Gerbier in his ear.
The estate agent was calling, very apologetically, to cancel their morning appointment because his hundred-year-old mother had started complaining of chest pains and been rushed off to hospital. It was probably nothing serious, Gerbier explained. The vicious old moo had been dying of the same heart attack for the last thirty-odd years and false alarms were a routine thing. Still, he felt obliged to be there, as the dutiful son, etc., etc. Ben said it was no problem; they could reschedule the appointment for next time he was in town. He wished the old moo a speedy recovery and hung up.
There went his mornings duties. Ben couldnt actually say he was sorry to be missing out on the joys of Gerbiers company. And never mind about the apartment. It wasnt going anywhere. With a suddenly empty slate and nothing better to do, he decided now was as good a time as any to play the Good Samaritan and deliver the lost phone back to its owner in person. Given the nervous way shed acted around him before, so as not to freak her out still further by showing up at her door hed just post it through her letterbox with a note explaining how hed found it. And that would be that. His good deed done, he could wend his way back to his apartment, jump in the car and be home at Le Val sometime in the afternoon.
Ben munched the last of his croissant, paid his bill and then left the café and set off on foot in the direction of her address. The sky was blue, the sun was shining, the day was his to do with as he pleased, and he felt carefree and untroubled.
He had no idea what he was walking into. But he soon would. He was, in fact, about to meet Mademoiselle Romy Juneau for the second time. And from that moment, a whole new world of trouble would be getting ready to open up.
Chapter 3
Romy Juneau lived in a handsome 1920s period apartment building near the end of a busy little street called Rue Joséphine Beaugiron, fifteen minutes walk away, flanked by a travel agency and a corner bar-restaurant called Chez Bogart.
Like Bens own neighbourhood, the street hadnt survived last nights riot completely unscathed. The quaint old antiquarian bookshop opposite Romys building had taken a hit, and like Habib the grocer its owner was surveying the damage with a sour look of disgruntlement as two carpenters fitted a sheet of plywood over the broken window. Why anyone would attack a specialist book store filled with nothing but a bunch of dusty old tomes by dead writers, Ben couldnt say. Maybe the rioters were intent on procuring some edifying literature to alleviate the boredom of throwing firebombs at the police.
Romys building had an art deco archway, once grand, now slightly grungy, on which someone had recently sprayed an obscene slogan about the president. It had tall carved double doors, firmly locked, with a smaller inset door, also firmly locked. On the wall by the door was a buzzer panel with twelve buttons, one for each apartment, each with a corresponding name plate with the initial and surname of the resident. R. Juneau was in apartment 11.
He pressed the button for apartment 6, labelled J. Vanel, waited for some guys voice to crackle Qui est-ce? out of the speaker grille, and said he had a delivery for Vanel that needed signing for. A moment later the buzzer buzzed and the inset door clicked open, and Ben pushed through into a brick foyer that led to a small interior courtyard. A short, stumpy concierge lady with curlers in her hair was sweeping the floor and barely glanced at Ben as he walked in. The hallway walls were streaked with dirt and a row of wheelie bins smelled of mouldy garbage. Not the best-kept apartment building in Paris, but not the worst either, not these days.
To his left was the door to the concierges ground-floor apartment, to his right a spiral stairway with a worn antique banister rail. Set into the centre of the stairway was an original period cage lift apparently still in service, all ornate black wrought iron. A Gothic death trap, to Bens eye. On the opposite wall were fixed twelve separate grey steel mailboxes, one for each resident, marked with their names. He took Romys phone from his pocket, along with his notebook and pen. He wrote a brief note to the effect that he was returning her property, signed it, folded it inside the phones leather wallet and was about to pop it into her mailbox when he noticed that two of the other boxes had had their locks forced open with something like a screwdriver, the grey paint scratched through to the bare metal.
Hardly the most confidence-inspiring level of security. The building was obviously a little too soft a target for thieves, unlike Bens place which had a hardened steel security door youd need a cutting torch to break through. He didnt want to have gone to the trouble of returning Romys phone to her, only for it to be nicked by some light-fingered opportunist punk before she could get to it. He decided to hand it to her in person, face to face. Shed surely realise she had nothing to be frightened of, if he smiled a lot and acted his usual charming self. If she asked how hed found her address, hed admit the truth and advise her to erase her own number from her contacts list because it made her far too easy to track online. There were too many suspicious characters around these days to be taking risks.
Choosing the stairs over the Gothic death trap, he started to climb. The stairs were worn and creaky with age, spiralling up around the central lift shaft. The first-floor landing had apartments numbers 1 to 3, the second floor numbers 4 to 6. By his reckoning that made number 11 the middle door on the fourth floor, right at the top of the building.
As he headed towards the third floor, Ben heard the rattle and judder of the lift descending, sounding like it was going to shake itself apart and bring the whole building down, and he was glad hed taken the stairs. Through the wrought-iron bars he saw the lifts passenger, a lone man making his way down from an upper floor. Ben gave him only the briefest of glances, but his eye was trained to notice details. The guy was standing with his back to Ben and his face turned away. He was broad-shouldered and well built, about Bens height at a shade under six feet. He wore black leather gloves and a long dark coat, quality wool, expensive, with the collar turned up. His hair was short and black, silvering in streaks. Ben caught a whiff of aftershave. The man didnt turn around as the death trap rattled on its way downwards.
Ben watched the lift disappear below him between floors, then kept on climbing the stairs. A strange, vague feeling had suddenly come over him, as though something at the back of his mind was needling him. He had no idea what it was, and quickly forgot about it.
Moments later he reached the top floor. As hed guessed, apartment 11 was the middle door of the uppermost three apartments. He paused on the landing for a moment, thinking of the most innocuous way to introduce himself. Honesty and openness were the best policy. She would soon realise he was the friendliest and least menacing guy on the planet. At any rate, he could be that guy when he wanted.