Thomas. Comment allez-vous?’
Rule One of SIS was never to moan, never to show weakness. So Kell mirrored Marquand’s supercilious tone and said: ‘Je suis très bien merci, monsieur,’ as though he was addressing a French teacher at a primary school.
‘You found her BlackBerry?’
‘In the boot of a hire car. It was parked a quarter of a mile from the hotel.’
‘How did you get the keys?’
‘She left them in the safe in her room.’
Marquand smelled a rat.
‘Reason for that?’ he asked.
‘Search me. Maybe she didn’t bank on George Truscott sending a team after her.’ He let that one sink in and pictured Marquand nervously adjusting his hair. ‘But she had time to pack, she wasn’t in a rush. There was no toothbrush in the bathroom, no perfume. Most of her clothes have gone AWOL as well. She’s travelling on an alias, probably wearing her glasses and carrying a leather overnight bag. It’s possible she left the key because she wanted me to find her, but that’s a long shot. Her passport and credit cards were wrapped up with the BlackBerry, her house keys, SIM card, the lot. All in a hire car that she obviously wasn’t worried might get nicked.’
Kell wanted to have both the BlackBerry and the SIM analysed by someone who could break their SIS encryptions. Marquand, despite the early hour, had already been in touch with a source in Genoa and explained that she would reach Nice at around midday.
‘Elsa Cassani. Used to work for us in Rome. Freelance now. Worked out she can make a lot more money that way. Can do tech-ops, background checks, more contacts in more agencies than I care to think about. Feisty, smart, hyper-efficient. You’ll like her. Comes highly recommended.’
‘Tell her to call me when she gets into town.’ Kell reckoned he could grab a few hours’ sleep if Elsa left him undisturbed until twelve. ‘What else have you got?’
‘Cheltenham has been in touch. They’ve analysed the numbers you sent through. One of them was Amelia’s house in Wiltshire. She rang it three times over the course of two days. Must have spoken to Giles on each occasion because he’s been down there for the last week. As far as we know, he hadn’t heard from her since she vanished. Each conversation lasted less than five minutes.’ As an afterthought he added: ‘Giles probably bored her into a persistent vegetative coma.’ Kell was looping a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the handle of his room and was too strung out to acknowledge the joke. ‘The French mobile isn’t known to us. It’s a new number, purchased in Paris four months ago. Registered to a François Malot. Amelia may have only left a message because the call lasted less than thirty seconds.’
Kell made the connection. ‘Malot was one of the funerals in the Fourteenth.’ He put the security chain on the door and remembered how Marquand had always been a beat behind the rest.
‘Right, yes. Very good, Tom. I knew we’d hired the right man. I’ll take a closer look. Watch this space.’
14
Elsa Cassani had the washed-out complexion of a young woman who had spent the bulk of her twenty-seven years sitting behind computer monitors in darkened rooms. A full-figured, lively Italian with stud ear-rings and a steady smile, she had called Kell’s mobile shortly after twelve o’clock and arranged to pick up the SIM and BlackBerry from a café on the Rue de l’Hôtel des Postes.
The handover was straightforward. As instructed, Elsa had put on a hat, found herself a table and ordered a Campari and soda. (‘Ah,’ she had said, enjoying the trick. ‘Because it’s red.’) Within a few minutes, Kell had strolled in, spotted the hat and the drink, handed over the hardware and told her that he needed the results ‘by sunset’. He had then walked off in the general direction of the Mediterranean leaving Elsa alone at the table. Nobody had batted an eyelid. No need for the discipline of a formal brush contact. No need for Moscow Rules.
Kell had forgotten how much he disliked Nice. The city had none of the character that he associated with France: it felt like a place with no history, a city that had never suffered. The too-clean streets, the incongruous palm trees, the poseurs on the boardwalks and the girls who weren’t quite pretty: Nice was an antiseptic playground for rich foreigners who didn’t have the imagination to spend their money properly. ‘The place,’ he muttered to himself, remembering the old joke, ‘where suntans go to die.’ Kell recalled his last visit to the city, an overnight stay in 1997, tracking a Real IRA commander who had struck up a friendship with an unsavoury Chechen money launderer with a villa in Villefranche. Kell had flown down on a soggy May morning to find a ghostly and sterile city, the cloistered cafés surrounding the old port deserted, the Café de Turin serving half a dozen oysters to half a dozen customers. It was different now, a tornado of summer tourists in the city, taking up every inch of sand on the beach, every changing room in the smart boutiques on Rues Paradis and Alphonse Karr. Kell began to wish that he had simply stayed in his hotel, lived off room service and watched pay-per-view movies and BBC World. Instead, he found a brasserie two blocks back from the Med, ordered inedible steak frites from a pretty Parisian waitress who smouldered for tips, and began to work his way through the copy of Seamus Heaney’s The Spirit Level that he had packed at the last minute in London. Behind the bar, a fifty-something proprietor who appeared to have modelled his appearance on Johnny Hallyday was killing time on an iPhone, trying to catch his reflection in a nearby mirror. Kell had long ago concluded that all restaurants in the south of France were run by the same middle-aged proprietor on his thirty-fourth wife with the same paunch, the same tan and the same bombshell waitress whom he was inevitably trying to fuck. This one kept scratching an itch in the crack of his bum, like Rafael Nadal preparing to serve. When it was time to settle the bill, Kell decided to have some fun with him.
‘The steak was tough,’ he said in English.
‘Comment?’
The proprietor was looking past his shoulder, as though it was beneath his dignity to make eye contact with a Brit. ‘I said the steak was tough.’ Kell gestured towards the kitchen. ‘The food in this place is only marginally better than the stuff they served up in Papillon.’
‘Quoi?’
‘You think it’s OK to charge tourists eighteen euros for medium-rare chewing gum?’
‘Il y a un problème, monsieur?’
Kell turned around. ‘Never mind,’ he said. It had been enough to see Hallyday stirred from his complacency. The waitress appeared to have overheard their conversation and honoured Kell with a flirtatious smile. He left fifty euros of Truscott’s money for her on the table and walked out into the afternoon sunshine.
A wise man once said that spying is waiting. Waiting for a joe. Waiting for a break. Kell killed time by wandering the streets of Vieux Nice and the Yves Klein galleries at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. On a steel bench in the mezzanine he checked the messages on his London phone. Claire had left a series of increasingly irate texts from the waiting room of their marriage guidance counsellor. He had completely forgotten the appointment.
Thanks a lot. Total fucking waste of my fucking time.
He did not want to explain himself, to confess that Marquand had brought him in from the cold. Instead, texting quickly, he wrote:
Sorry. Totally forgot. Crazy
