Pampelonne? Or to the Countess’s house?
Calque accelerated up the steep hill towards the village. The road beyond Gassin was a winding one, and little used at this time of year. If the man was to make his move, he would doubtless make it there.
Calque was counting on the man’s innate curiosity to stay his hand. It was a thin edge to trust your life to, and Calque could feel the anxiety eating away at him. He had no weapon in the car. No possible means of self- defence. His heart was weak, and a lifetime of heavy smoking had ensured that his lungs would be of little use in a crisis.
The blue Renault closed in on him. They were well out of Gassin, now, and heading into the hills towards Ramatuelle. They couldn’t be more than five or six kilometres from the Countess’s house. Surely the man would hold his fire for a little longer?
Calque saw a car ahead of him, and speeded up. There was safety in numbers. People instinctively tried not to shit on their own doorsteps if they could possibly avoid it. And certainly not with witnesses present. The man behind him had already had one body to deal with – two would prove something of a crowd, surely?
The extra company appeared to have put the blue Renault man off his stride. Calque saw the car behind him drop back again. Perhaps he still thought that Calque was unaware of his presence?
Now they were approaching Ramatuelle. Calque sent up a brief prayer that the motorist in front of him was not intending to stop off for a newspaper or for his morning cup of coffee. He felt an overwhelming affection for the anonymous little man he was following – curious how it was possible to love a complete stranger.
The man continued on out through the village with Calque clinging to his tail like a pilot fish. They were barely three kilometres from the Countess’s house now, and Calque began to feel an upwelling of confidence in his own judgement. He had called the thing correctly. The man driving the blue Renault had obviously been in touch with the Countess, and she had told him to hold off and see what Calque intended.
Now it only remained for Calque to keep his head – before inserting it directly inside the tiger’s mouth.
28
With one hand still on the wheel, Calque felt inside his jacket pocket and retrieved the tape recorder. He flipped open the lid of the tape compartment and extricated the cassette. He wedged the tape recorder behind the passenger seat cushion, and placed the cassette on his lap. Then he felt around for his cell phone and placed that beside it. He owed that much to Picaro. It wouldn’t do to have the Corpus scrolling back through his recent calls and identifying who it really was who had snatched Lamia.
The blue Renault was still pulling flotilla duty fifty metres behind him.
Two kilometres to go until they reached the Countess’s house – had he left it too late? Had fear eaten into his brain and frozen his intelligence?
Calque saw an S-bend three hundred metres ahead. That was it. This would be his last chance. The man in the blue Renault would almost certainly close up on him as they neared the Countess’s house.
As he approached the bend, Calque triggered the offside electric window and stepped on the gas. It would take the blue Renault a split second to respond to the move and match his speed. That would be enough to carry Calque into the blind part of the corner, temporarily out of sight of both the car in front and the blue Renault behind him.
As Calque rounded the crest of the corner, he tossed the cassette and the cell phone through the open window, his eyes searching feverishly for landmarks in the underbrush at the side of the road. Then he punched the window button, and used his engine braking, and a rapid downshift through the gears, to slow the car back down – he wanted no tell-tale flashing of red lights to mark what he had done.
The blue Renault was sitting directly on his tail now. Calque recognized the butler, Milouins, in the driving seat. So it must have been one of the two footmen that Picaro had killed. Butlers. Footmen. Calque wondered what century the Countess imagined she was in. Hadn’t she heard of the Revolution? Had the woman no shame?
The entrance to the Domaine de Seyeme was fifty metres ahead on the left. Calque fought back a last-minute impulse to accelerate away from the blue Renault and try to avoid his impending fate – but that would mean overtaking the car in front on a blind corner, and dealing with a vengeful Milouins if he happened to survive the manoeuvre. No. The Countess was a better bet. He might be able to bluff her. Milouins, on the other hand, had always struck him as the sort of man who shot first and asked questions afterwards.
Calque switched on his indicator and prepared to turn. Marvellous. Here he was, naked and out in the open, voluntarily putting himself in the enemy’s hands. How was it possible? If he’d tried to botch the thing on purpose, he couldn’t have contrived a more humiliating ending for himself. All they had to do now was kill him – in as tactful and non-intrusive a way as possible – then plant him in his car, and deposit the car on top of Picaro’s hit-and-run victim. He could just imagine the Countess’s relish at describing what must have taken place to the police.
‘We knew the ex-detective was stalking us. That he somehow blamed our family for the death of his assistant. That it had become an obsession with him. So I sent one of our people out to reason with him – we didn’t want to waste any more police time, you see. But the man must have been mad. He simply drove at my footman in a rage – then, when he saw what he had done, he killed himself.’
That would tie in nicely with his purported breakdown, wouldn’t it? He could imagine the Nice Matin headlines. EMBITTERED EX-COP GOES
BERSERK.
Talk about an own goal…
Calque drew up in front of the Countess’s house. Milouins pulled the blue Renault across the entrance to the courtyard behind him, effectively sealing him in. Calque sighed, and rested his head back against the seat restraint. The Corpus certainly wasn’t beating about the bush.
Calque reached across and checked that the empty tape recorder was sufficiently well concealed behind the passenger seat cushion. Then he climbed slowly out of the car. No point in locking the damned thing. They’d simply bust in the window.
The last time he’d stood in this courtyard had been with Macron, two months before, with the full force of the French judicial system at their backs.
Now here he was again. Alone.
29
Calque sat on a porter’s chair in the hallway, and waited. Six feet away stood the Countess’s surviving footman. Calque cracked the man a supercilious smile. The footman drew one finger slowly across his throat, and then pretended to gag, with his tongue dangling out the side of his mouth.
Well. It was communication of sorts.
Twenty more minutes went by.
Calque began to speculate on how the Countess would decide to play it. Would she offer him a cup of coffee first, like she did last time? Play the Grande Dame? Or would she calmly order Milouins to smash in his teeth with a matraque?
Calque cursed himself for having played so cravenly into the Countess’s hands. No one but Lamia knew what he was engaged upon. And there was no one else who could be remotely relied upon to explain to the authorities what he’d been up to these past six weeks. Picaro? Aime Macron? Neither one was the sort of man who easily volunteers information to the police. And what did they have to offer, anyway? Hearsay. Pure hearsay.
Calque sensed that he was about to become a victim of the very loi du silence he had striven against all his working life. He hadn’t even had the nous to bring Adam Sabir back into the loop. No. He had wanted to play it
