when you got the call from–’
‘Loriot.’
‘Whatever. Charming friends you have. Anyway, I remembered you mentioned you were going to Brignancourt tonight, figured I might catch up with you there if I wasn’t too late.’ She looked at him hard. ‘So are you going to tell me what’s going on, Ben? Do Sunday Times journalists always live such exciting lives?’
‘Sounds like you had a more exciting day than me.’
‘Cut the bullshit. You have something to do with all this, don’t you?’
He was silent.
‘Well? Don’t you? Come on. Am I supposed to think it’s all a coincidence that you turn up asking questions about my work, and we’re being photographed, and someone tries to kill us both on the same day? I don’t buy this journalist thing. Who are you, really?’
He refilled both their glasses. His cigarette was finished. He tossed the stub out of the window. Reached for his Zippo and lit another.
She coughed when the smoke drifted across the table towards her. ‘Do you have to do that?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s banned.’
‘Like I give a shit,’ he said.
‘So are you going to tell me the truth–or do I just call the cops?’
‘You think they’ll believe you this time?’
The train driver’s heart was still in his mouth as he drove on down the line. By the time his lights had picked out the two cars in his path, it would have been too late to do anything about it. He breathed deeply. Jesus. He’d never had anything more than a deer on the line before. He didn’t like to think what might have happened if the cars hadn’t got out of the way in time.
What kind of idiot would drive under the level-crossing barrier with a train coming? Kids, probably, messing about with stolen cars. The driver let out a long sigh as his heart rate eased back down to normal, and then he reached for his radio handset.
‘Oh, fuck.’
‘Told you we should’ve hung around.’
The three men sat in the Audi overlooking the railway line where they’d left the Mercedes earlier on. Naudon shot his colleagues a caustic glare and settled back in his seat. While Berger and Godard had been sitting giggling in the bar, he’d been listening to the radio. If there’d been a train crash it would’ve been mentioned. Nothing–so he’d kept going on about it to the others until they eventually relented, just to shut him up.
And he’d been right. No wreckage, no derailed train, no dead Englishman. The empty Merc was sitting a few metres from the track, and it certainly didn’t look like a car that had been hit by a fast-moving train.
Worse, it wasn’t alone. Its dark bodywork reflected the spinning blue lights of two police patrol cars parked either side of it.
‘This is fucking bad,’ Berger breathed, gripping the wheel.
‘Thought you said the cops never came out this way,’ said Godard. ‘That was the whole fucking point of this spot, wasn’t it?’
‘Told you,’ Naudon repeated from the back.
‘How did–’
‘Well, boys, the boss isn’t going to be pleased.’
‘Better call him.’
‘I’m not doing it. You do it.’
The police officers combed the scene, torch beams darting this way and that like searchlights while radios popped and fizzled in the background. ‘Eh, Jean-Paul,’ said one, holding up a cracked Citroën grille badge he’d found lying in the dirt. ‘Bits of headlamp glass all over the place here,’ he added.
‘Train driver mentioned a Citroën 2CV,’ replied another.
‘Where’d it go?’
‘Not far, that’s for sure. Coolant everywhere.’
Two more officers were casting pools of torchlight around the inside of the limo. One of them spotted a small shiny object lying in the rear footwell. He took a ballpoint pen out of his pocket and used it to pick up the empty cartridge case. ‘Hello, what’s this? Nine-mil shell case.’ He sniffed at it, getting the scent of cordite. ‘Recently fired.’
‘Bag that.’
Another cop had found something, a business card lying on the seat. squinted at it in the glow of his Maglite. ‘Some foreign name.’
‘What d’you reckon happened here?’
‘Who knows?’
Twenty minutes later the police tow-truck arrived. By the swirl of blue and orange lights the battered Mercedes was hitched up and taken away, a police car in front and another bringing up the rear. The railway tracks were left in silent darkness.
Rome
The two men who had come for Giuseppe Ferraro at his home that night and driven him out of the city now escorted him up the grand stairway to the dome of the Renaissance villa. They had barely said a word to him all the way. They hadn’t needed to–Ferraro knew what this was about, and why the archbishop had sent for him. His knees were a little weak as he was shown into the dome and the door shut behind him. The enormous room was unlit apart from the starlight and moonbeams that streamed in through the many windows around its circumference.
Massimiliano Usberti was standing at a desk at the far end. He slowly turned to face Ferraro.
‘Archbishop, I can explain.’ Ferraro had been working on his story ever since the call had come through from Paris earlier that evening. He’d been expecting that Usberti would summon him to the villa–just not this soon. He began blurting out his excuses. He’d hired idiots who had let him down. It wasn’t his fault that the Englishman had got away. He was sorry, so sorry, and it wouldn’t happen again.
Usberti walked towards him across the room. He raised his hand in a gesture that silenced Ferraro’s frantic stream of apologies and excuses. ‘Giuseppe, Giuseppe–you do not need to explain,’ he said with a smile, putting his arm around the younger man’s shoulders. ‘We are all human. We all make mistakes. God forgives.’
Ferraro was amazed. This wasn’t the reception he’d expected. The archbishop led him over to a moonlit window. ‘What a glorious night,’ he murmured. ‘Do you not think so, my friend?’
‘…Yes, Archbishop, it is beautiful.’
‘Does it not make one feel so happy to be alive?’
‘It does, Archbishop.’
‘It is a privilege to live on God’s earth.’
