He removed the handwritten note from her phone case, since hed no longer need it. Then raised his hand to ring the doorbell with a knuckle. Force of habit. In his past line of work, leaving fingerprints often wasnt a good idea.
Then he stopped. Because hed suddenly noticed that her door wasnt locked. Not just unlocked, but hanging open an inch. He used his fist to nudge it gently open a few inches more, and peeked through the gap. The apartment had a narrow entrance passage papered in tasteful pastel blue, with glossily varnished floorboards. There were four interior doors leading off the hallway, one at the far end and one to the left, both closed, and two more to the right, both of which were open though Ben couldnt see into the rooms from where he stood.
He called out in French, Hello? Anybody there? Mademoiselle Juneau? He hoped it wasnt being too sexist to assume her marital status.
There was no reply. Ben tentatively stepped inside the hall passage. He felt uneasy about doing it, since a lone male stranger didnt ideally want to be seen to be lurking in the apartment of a young single woman.
The first odd thing he noticed was the smell of something burning, which seemed to be coming from the nearer open door on the right. The second was the little stand in the passage that had been knocked over on its side across the middle of the hallway floor. A pretty ceramic dish lay smashed on the floorboards, various keys scattered nearby. The camel coat Romy Juneau had been wearing earlier looked like it had been yanked down from a hook by the entrance and was lying rumpled on the floor.
Ben moved a little further up the passage, stepped past the coat and the fallen stand, and peered around the edge of the first open door on the right. The door led to a small kitchen, clean and neat, with worktops and cupboards the same pastel blue as the hallway and a table for one next to a window overlooking the street side of the building. The burning smell was coming from a coffee percolator that had been left on the gas stove. It had bubbled itself dry and was giving off smoke. Ben went in and took the coffee off the heat, using a kitchen cloth because it was hot. Then he quickly flipped off the gas burner with a knuckle. Force of habit, again.
Whoever had been in the middle of making coffee had taken a carton of non-fat milk from the fridge and a delicate china cup and saucer from the cupboard and laid them out ready on the worktop next to a little pot of Demerara sugar and a tiny silver spoon. All very dainty and feminine. Ben presumed that someone was the apartments occupant. So where was she, and what was all the mess in the hallway?
By now the alarm bell was jangling in the back of his mind. Something wasnt quite right. He stepped back out into the hallway and called again, a little more loudly, Hello? Mademoiselle Juneau?
Still no reply. He nudged open the closed door to the left, which was a bedroom. Romy Juneau evidently had a thing for that shade of blue. It was everywhere, the bed covers, the curtains, the walls. But she wasnt in the room. He stepped up to the further open door on the right, which he now saw led to a salon.
It was inside the salon that Ben now saw Mademoiselle Romy Juneau for the second time.
It would be the last time.
Chapter 4
As far as Romy Juneau was concerned, she would only ever have met Ben on the single occasion theyd bumped into one another in Rue Georges Brassens. She was oblivious of their second encounter, and always would be, because she was lying sprawled on the Persian rug inside her living room with a broken neck. That much Ben could tell at a glance from the unnatural angle of her head to her body.
He stood frozen in the doorway for an instant. He had seen many dead people before now. But never quite in such circumstances. His shoulders dropped and something tightened inside his throat at the pathetic sight of her lying there. The leather satchel shed been carrying earlier had been emptied and left lying along with its contents on the rug a few feet away.
He went over to her and knelt next to the body. She was very still, with that special quality of inertia that only death can confer on a person. If there had been any blood, it would have been easy to see against the white cashmere top she was wearing. It looked as though a single strike to the neck had killed her. Ben looked around him for any kind of impact weapon, but there was nothing. A very strong man could have done it using his bare hands, but it would have taken a blow of tremendous force.
Her eyes were open and staring sightlessly straight at him, the vividness of their colour faded like the wings of a dead butterfly. Ben reached out and laid two fingers on the side of her throat. He had expected no pulse and found none. Her soft skin was still warm, also expected, because this had happened to her only minutes ago. While shed been waiting for her coffee to brew.
Her death touched Ben deep, though he didnt know why. It was as if hed known her, somehow. As if part of his mind was trying to reconnect with an old scrambled memory lost somewhere in the murk of the dim and distant past. It was a strange feeling.
He lingered next to her body for a couple more seconds, then stood up and walked grimly to the living-room window. It was the archetypal Parisian floor-to-ceiling iron window with the ornate knobs and designer rust, flanked by gauzy white drapes. It overlooked the same side of the building as the kitchen. He looked out at the street below. The carpenters had finished fixing the plywood to the bookshop window. Cars, vans, bikes were passing by on the road, pedestrians strolling along the pavements, normal city life going on as usual.
And up here on the floor behind where Ben was standing, a young woman with a snapped neck.
He was about to turn away from the window when he saw a man emerge from the building and step towards the edge of the kerb. About Bens own height, though it was hard to tell from the downward angle. He was wearing a long dark coat. Quality wool, expensive. Black leather gloves that matched his shiny black shoes. He was well built with broad shoulders. Black hair, streaked with silver.
The man from the lift.
He stood at the kerbside with his back to the building and looked down the street as though he was waiting for a taxi to come by. Ben couldnt see his face, but now he was seeing him again there was something oddly familiar about the guy and not just from their fleeting brush a couple of minutes ago. Ben felt a weird tingle up his back, like a knife blade drawn along piano strings.
Just then, the man turned and craned his neck to look straight up at the window of Romy Juneaus apartment. He was in his early forties, with the olive skin that hinted at Mediterranean ethnicity. He could have been taken for anything from Italian to North African to a Middle Easterner. His features were strong and square, not unhandsome, and his eyes were dark and clear and intelligent. They found Bens and stared right at him through the window.
And the tingle up Bens back turned icy cold. That was when it hit him. It couldnt have hit him harder if the man down in the street below had pointed a gun and shot him. Because in that dizzy moment Ben realised what it was that his mind had been trying to reconnect just now. It wasnt Romy Juneau who had triggered a distant memory from the past. And the strange feeling he was getting had started before hed set foot in this apartment.
It was the man in the lift who had set it off.
The man now standing staring up at the window.
Ben now realised that he knew this man. And as the memories were suddenly unlocked and rushed into his mind, he was able to pinpoint exactly when and where he knew him from, and why they had met before, and what had happened on the last occasion theyd crossed paths.
None of the memories were good ones.
For just the briefest instant, Ben closed his eyes. He was suddenly transported back in time. He flashed on another face. A very different face, one with deep dark eyes that looked into his. And he thought, Samara.
As the instant ended Ben opened his eyes and was brought back to the present. The man in the black coat was still looking up at the apartment window, frowning as though similar thoughts were going through his mind, too. Then a silver Mercedes Benz saloon pulled sharply up at the kerbside next to him with a screech of tyres. Its tinted drivers window slid down and another olive-skinned, swarthy-looking guy inside started gesticulating and beckoning. Ben couldnt make out the words, but it was obvious the driver was urging the man in the black coat to get in the car.
The man hesitated for a second, as though he was thinking about turning back and returning inside the building. Ben wished he would. But then the man changed his mind and hurried around to the cars passenger side, yanked open the door and flung himself into the seat, and the door slammed and the driver hit the gas and the Mercedes took off with another squeal of tyres, accelerating hard away down the street.
By then, Ben was already racing from the apartment. He jumped over the body of Romy Juneau, sprinted through the hallway and hammered down the stairs and slid down the spiral banister rail to descend the last two floors more quickly. Reaching the entrance foyer he burst out of the inset door into the street.
But the silver Mercedes was already long gone, and the man in the black coat with it. All that remained in his wake was the memory of his name, who he was and the things he had done.
And the fact that he was supposed to have been dead years ago.
Chapter 5
Ben didnt return upstairs to Romy Juneaus apartment. There was nothing more he could do. He had left no trace of his visit; it was as though hed never been there at all.
He was burning up inside with anger and confusion and frustration. But he kept his pace slow and measured as he walked up to the end of Rue Joséphine Beaugiron and went inside the bar-restaurant called Chez Bogart. The interior was all decked out with framed posters and stills from old movies. Whoever owned the joint was obviously a big Bogie fan. And doing good business, too. Most of the punters were the late breakfast crowd, noisily enjoying their brioche French toast and buttered baguettes sprinkled with grated chocolate and bowls of café au lait while defenceless women got battered to death just down the street.
It was still a little early in the day for hard drinking, even for him, but Ben was willing to make an exception. He ordered himself a double shot of Glenlivet at the bar, no ice, no water, and carried it over to a corner table beneath a giant blow-up still from Casablanca, the classic image of Bogart in white tux, loitering by the piano as Dooley Wilson sang As Time Goes By. He took a long drink of his scotch and thought about peculiar coincidences and the return of figures from the past whom youd never thought youd see again.
Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world.
Ben knocked the whisky down fast and soon felt the alcohol go to work to settle his nerves. Then he set down his empty glass and headed for the mens room. It was empty, which was what he needed because he wanted no witnesses. And quiet, which was also good, because when anonymously reporting a murder it was generally preferable to leave no clues as to where you were calling from. He took out his phone, the prepaid burner this time. This was exactly the kind of purpose it served. He dialled 17, police emergency, got through quickly, and just as quickly gave the call handler the necessary details. Victims name and address, but not his own. He had no desire to spend the next two days being grilled by police detectives about what he was doing in her apartment around the time of her death.
Ben could easily have told them the name of the man hed seen leaving the scene of the crime, but he held that information back too. There would have been no point. Whatever identity the guy had used to enter France would certainly be fake. Ben strongly doubted that his real name would even come up on the INTERPOL crime database, except in certain classified files to which regular cops would have no access. Any one of a variety of aliases Ben could have given them might have triggered a response. The kind that would have the whole street and surrounding area closed down by paramilitary forces armed to the teeth, searching door to door and stopping cars with K9 units on standby.
But that would have been just as pointless. They wouldnt stand a chance of catching the guy. He was far too good for them. And if they somehow did succeed, it would probably be the last thing they ever did.
Ben cut off the police emergency call handlers questions and left the restaurant through a tradesmens back exit that led into an alleyway. He lit a Gauloise and slowly walked back around the corner, crossed the street and made his way along Rue Joséphine Beaugiron as far as the antiquarian bookshop opposite Romys building, from where he could monitor events at a discreet distance. He finished his cigarette outside the shop and then wandered inside and spent a while browsing the shelves of dusty old books.
Fourteen minutes later he heard the police sirens screeching to the scene. By then hed picked out a handsome old deluxe volume of the collected poetry of Charles Baudelaire. A present for his friend and colleague Tuesday Fletcher at Le Val, possibly the only ex-British Army sniper in the world with a taste for nineteenth-century French poetry. Ben ambled up to the front desk with the book in hand. The sirens were growing loud outside, filling the street. He said to the shop proprietor, Whats happening now?
God only knows, the guy grumbled. This whole city is going to shit, if you ask me.
The two of them stood in the shop doorway watching as a pair of marked cars and a gendarmerie van screeched to a halt across the street, a team of uniforms scrambled out looking highly purposeful and disappeared inside Romy Juneaus building. Just regular police, responding to a regular incident. If only theyd known who they were really dealing with.
Dear me, I hope nobody got hurt, Ben said. The bookshop owner just grunted, threw up his hands in resignation at the terrible state of the world and returned to his desk. If only he knew, too.
The cops would soon call in the coroner and start asking questions up and down the street in search of potential witnesses to the incident. It was time for Ben to be moving on. He paid for his purchase, tucked the book under his arm and left the store at a relaxed pace, nice and easy, drawing no attention from anyone. The best way to disappear in a crowded city was to go underground. He headed for the nearest Métro station, joined the fast-moving crowd heading for the tunnels, and caught a packed train that took him on a winding, circuitous route back towards the safehouse.