“That’s not all they were asking for. They also wanted a contact in Saint-Malo, someone who could get them an export officer.”
That got Henri’s attention. Saint-Malo’s main shipping lanes led to the Channel Islands, and from there on to England’s south coast. “So they’re smugglers, and they intend to accompany the cargo. But it could be drugs, guns, whatever. I still don’t see how this leads to what I’m looking for.”
“That’s because I haven’t finished.” Marcel lowered his voice further. “First, they killed the forger. Slit poor Benoît’s throat,” he said, dragging a finger across his neck for emphasis, “and they’re probably halfway to Saint-Malo by now.” Marcel took a final drag from his cigarette, blowing an angry jet of smoke as he tossed the butt into the gutter. “Bastards. There was no need to kill the old man.” He paused to light another.
Henri pondered this. Why kill a forger, and judging from Marcel’s reaction a well-liked one, unless the documentation you had him prepare was extremely sensitive and unusual? Fake EU passports were as common as the raindrops falling around them, available from every forger in every city. “What makes you so sure they’re already on their way north?”
“Because there are a lot of people here who’d kill them in retaliation for Benoît, if they were found. That’s the final thing; everyone in town went looking for them, and a couple of the lads found the shitty little guest house where they’d been staying. The landlady knew nothing. They paid in cash, kept quiet, and she assumed they were summer workers on their way to Provence or somewhere. The room had been emptied; there was nothing there. So the next day, the boys who’d been to the house passed everything on to the cops through back channels, to at least get something on the wires about these guys.”
“Do you have descriptions of them?”
“Not really,” Marcel shrugged. “They looked Portuguese.”
“Oh, how helpful,” said Henri sarcastically. “Still not seeing the point, here.”
“So listen. The same boys who went to the guest house, they fell ill the next day. And then a couple of the cops did, too.”
Henri perked up. “Have they checked it out?”
“Let’s put it this way. All the other guests, the landlady, and all her neighbours were evacuated this morning. Now you can’t get within a hundred metres of the place.”
“Hazmats?”
“The works. They’re not saying anything, but a little birdie tells me the Geiger counter was buzzing, if you know what I mean.”
Henri did know what he meant. This was exactly what he’d been afraid of, ever since the chatter about matériel chaud began circulating. “Are you sure they were from Portugal?” he asked. “Only we were thinking it would probably be another Mafia supply out of Italy, not from Portugal via Spain.”
“It’s possible, but if they came through Turin, why slog all the way over here? Plenty of forgers in Lyon for them to use up and spit out.”
Henri paid Marcel his usual fee, then walked back to the station. As the train set off for Paris, the rain stopped and gave way to a beautiful Toulouse sunset, but he didn’t notice it.
18
Bridge had never been any good at crosswords. Luckily, Tenebrae_Z had done most of the hard work.
After listening to her recount events at the house, and her confirmation that Declan O’Riordan and Tenebrae_Z were one and the same, Giles had given her the rest of the day off. She didn’t know what he thought she’d do with that time, but Bridge had gone straight home and spent the rest of the day staring at the lines of ASCII art on her screen, trying to decipher their meaning.
She’d scoured the archives of france.misc.binaries-random as far back as she could, even peeking into private Usenet servers whose archives went back months further than regular public locations. Ten had said all the posts he’d found were no more than six months old, but he’d also found random pieces in other newsgroups. Who knew where else they might have been lurking, and for how long?
But she couldn’t find anything older than six months either, and he hadn’t told her in which other groups he’d found other examples, so it was a needle in a haystack. She’d turned instead to the five posts from f.m.b-r, going over them again and again. If only she had access to his computer, she could find his archive and see everything. But Andrea Thomson had been right. Not only was this so far still a purely domestic matter, but seeing a picture of Bridge on Ten’s cork board had been a genuine shock to both of them. Now Andrea probably thought she was lying about not knowing Ten in person, and might even suspect Bridge was somehow connected to his murder. Under the same circumstances, Bridge wouldn’t have let herself within typing distance of the Alienware either.
But knowing it wasn’t true — that they’d never met, and she didn’t know who Ten really was before today — made the photograph all the more unsettling. One consolation was that it had been just one among many pictures of uk.london.gothic-netizens members. It wasn’t pinned out separately, or framed, or, God forbid, built into some kind of creepy stalker shrine. Another consolation came when Andrea confirmed that Ten’s login password definitely wasn’t ‘ponty’. They didn’t know what it was yet, but they’d tried that without success, and Bridge had sighed with relief. It meant Andrea was taking her seriously, and was also further confirmation that Ten hadn’t been some kind of weird obsessive.
Well, that wasn’t true. He had been completely obsessed…just not with her.
She remembered the pictures she’d taken of the newspapers. Why collect newspapers, of all things? Ten was one of the most tech-savvy people she knew. But Declan O’Riordan was a middle-aged man, old
