The Way I Found Her (27 page)

After about five minutes had passed, I said: ‘I didn't think existentialists had ordinary things like wives.'

Didier still didn't look at me. ‘Well,' he said, ‘now you know that they do.'

Carmody arrived. He came with some lowly
agent
with acne, who'd been given the task of carrying in Alice's computer. Carmody looked like a man who never carried things. He had lazy eyes and the beginnings of a fat belly. While the spotty
agent
set up the computer on Alice's desk, Carmody sat in the salon, leaning back on the Louis XVI sofa, like a dinner guest. It was weird the way everyone kept putting themselves in the very place where Valentina should have been.

The
agent
left and Alice made coffee for Carmody. I watched him watching her as she came in from the kitchen and set the coffee down. Then he took out a notebook and said he had some good news for us.

‘You've found Valentina?' I blurted out.

He turned to me and smiled. ‘Perhaps . . .' he said.

‘What do you mean – “perhaps”?'

Carmody took a sip of the too-hot coffee. He flipped through the pages of his book. ‘We think,' he said, ‘there is a strong possibility that she's in Moscow. Aeroflot confirm there was a last-minute passenger booked into the flight taken by Monsieur Panin. She was travelling under the name “Marya Narishkin”, but the description of her – blonde, quite large, aged about forty – shows she could have been Mademoiselle Gavril. We have asked the Moscow police to trace this person, but they tell us they are so far unlucky. We have also discovered that Monsieur Panin is not at his home. His wife believes he is in Kiev. If he turns up there, we will be informed.'

Carmody looked delighted and proud of this information. He seemed to expect Alice and me to applaud him, but all we did was just look at him in silence.

‘It's still strange,' said Alice. ‘Don't you think, if Valentina had been planning to leave for Russia, she would have told us?'

‘Perhaps it was not planned,' suggested Carmody. ‘Perhaps she was coerced into it – by some means that we do not yet know – by Monsieur Panin, at the last minute?'

Alice shrugged. ‘Knowing her as I do, I don't think she would be “coerced” into anything, Inspecteur.'

‘With all respect, you may not know the nature of her relationship with Monsieur Panin . . .'

I got up. ‘What time was the flight to Moscow?' I asked.

‘17.40,' said Carmody.

‘Then it's not possible that she was on it!' I said. ‘She's not in Moscow or Kiev or anywhere in Russia!'

‘We believe she is. The question of
why
she's there we haven't yet understood. No doubt there is a very important reason – which would be unknown to you.'

‘No,' I said. ‘She's not in Russia. I
know
she's not! At ten past four, she was at the hospital, in the rue de Vaugirard, for her X-ray appointment. She wouldn't have had time to get to the airport for a flight that left at 17.40.'

‘Not so,' said Carmody. ‘We spoke to her radiologist, Dr Bouchain. She didn't arrive for her appointment at the hospital.'

‘Yes, she did!' I was screaming at Carmody now. I thought I might start to cry. He was the man in charge of finding Valentina and now he was wandering off on a completely stupid trail. ‘Mrs Gavrilovich rang the hospital,' I said. ‘She rang it while I was with her. The receptionist said she saw Valentina. She admired her dress . . .'

‘Well, she was not checked in. There was a cross against her name.'

‘The receptionist said she
saw
her. Who else in that hospital would have a dress she'd bother to admire?'

Carmody smiled. ‘I don't know, Louis. But she must have been mistaken. There is a cross against the name. The receptionist was quite clear about their procedure: a cross indicates that the patient has not turned up for the appointment. In any event, Dr Bouchain never saw Mademoiselle Gavril at the hospital on that afternoon.'

I felt a kind of sob come into my chest, so I walked over to the window and put my hand over my mouth, so that the sob wouldn't escape. Suddenly I saw what was
prime
in the whole question of the hospital visit. If the receptionist had said ‘black-and-white dress', this would have been absolute proof that Valentina had been there. But she hadn't said that. She hadn't described the dress; I'd just reimagined the black-and-white dress in my mind. The
prime
proof was missing.

I kept staring out of the window. An ambulance siren went screaming along the rue de Lisbonne.

‘Does this mean,' I heard Alice say, ‘that you're going to stop searching for Valentina in France?'

‘No. Of course not,' said Carmody. ‘When someone is missing, we go on searching until they are found – dead or alive. But we have no leads in France, absolutely none, whereas—'

I turned and faced Carmody. ‘She's not dead!' I shouted. ‘But she could be dead soon, if you don't hurry up and find her!'

‘Why do you say that?' said Carmody.

‘Because it's obvious! Someone's taken her. They want to get hold of her jewellery and her money. She's probably being kept in some horrible place. She could even be buried alive . . .'

‘If she had been kidnapped, I would have expected some ransom demand to come by now. But there is complete silence. It's possible that such a demand may come, but as yet there is nothing to lead us towards a kidnap, except, as you say, Louis, the general motive of money.'

Carmody turned back to Alice. I could tell he thought my fury was amusing. He cleared his throat. ‘However,' he said, ‘the trail to Russia is beginning to emerge. Among the possessions we took from the bureau in Mademoiselle Gavril's study, we found two love letters, hidden inside a street map of Beijing. They are from Monsieur Panin, dating from earlier this year.'

Carmody leafed through his notebook again, then went on: ‘One of the letters talks of suicide and the other includes the following sentence:
What I would like to do is drag you back here with me, so that you could see the misery that is my life
.'

Carmody rested his notebook on his knee and looked at us both in turn. He made an expansive gesture with his hands. ‘Do you not feel,' he said, ‘that this may at least be a pointer to what has happened?'

Sergei came into the salon at that moment, still smelling of lemonade and wagging his billowing tail. I made him sit by me and concentrated on stroking him, so that I didn't have to answer Carmody's question. I felt really confused and wretched, like my brain was being trussed up with wool. Inside the wool tangle somewhere was the thought that Grisha hadn't struck me as an evil man.

I wanted an ally.

Alice wouldn't do. Half her mind was elsewhere. I wanted somebody with an analytical brain, a kind of pedantic genius, like Porphiry Petrovich.

I was sitting alone in the salon, wondering if I actually knew such a person, when I heard a sound at the apartment door. It was Violette. I knew it was her because she always turned the key to the left to start with and then had to turn it the other way three times for the door to open. She never seemed to remember which way that lock turned. She wouldn't have been much good at chess.

As soon as she saw me, she started whispering. ‘Come in the kitchen, Louis,' she said. ‘I can tell you something.'

I followed her in. She put her bag down on the kitchen table, took out the two photographs I'd given her and handed them to me. ‘I saw Lisette-Marie,' she said in her whispering voice. ‘This American girl was called Gail. Gail O'Hara. Lisette says she was very bad to Madame. Very bad.'

‘Bad how?'

‘What is “bad”, Louis? Cruel.'

‘What did she do?'

‘I don't know. But Lisette-Marie says, all the time she was here, Madame was unhappy. This girl used to shout. Lisette-Marie could often hear this shouting and insulting. And Madame was often crying.'

I looked at the two pictures. Gail O'Hara looked a bit neglected. Her hair was rather stringy and her fingers were stumpy, as if she chewed her nails. I looked up at Violette and said: ‘Madame once told Alice she'd “killed” this girl, Violette. Does Lisette-Marie know what happened to her?'

‘What you mean, “killed her”?'

‘I don't know what I mean.'

Violette shook her head and made a gesture over her chest a bit like the sign of the cross. Then she sighed one of her sad sighs. ‘All I know is she went into the hospital. Lisette had to pack a bag and Madame said she was taking this to Gail in the hospital. She was sick for a long time. And she never came back here. Lisette-Marie was told to pack all her things into a new suitcase Madame bought and this suitcase was put into a taxi. But I don't think she died, Louis. I think she just went home to the United States. That's what Lisette was told: “Mademoiselle O'Hara has gone back to her home.”'

‘Did Lisette-Marie see her after she went into the hospital?'

‘No. I don't think so.'

‘So she could have died?'

‘No. If she had died, I think the police would have come.'

‘Are you sure they didn't come?'

‘They didn't come.'

‘How do you know?'

‘Lisette would have seen them.'

The Orangina supply had been replenished, so I poured us out two glasses. My brain was going into a kind of cash-register mode, trying to add things up.

I went on: ‘Maybe they came when Lisette-Marie wasn't there?'

Violette shrugged. She had a shrug more expressive than anyone else's I'd ever seen. What it expressed was Violette's relationship with the world. It was like the world was the night sky and Violette couldn't say if the stars were pieces of rock or whether God had sprinkled the dark with luminous muesli.

I gave up nagging her at the point of her shrug and told her about Carmody's search. I didn't look at her while I described how thorough the police had been, even prodding about in the chimney and going through Valentina's shoes. I expected her to seem frightened, knowing the next thing Carmody might do was start questioning everybody in the building, but she didn't. And then, quite suddenly, she stood up and her face broke into a smile. She said: ‘Never mind those untidy police; I can tell you some other news, Louis.'

‘Can you? What other news?'

‘Today is a good day. My work permit came through!'

‘Hey!' I said. ‘That's brilliant. That's fantastic!'

‘Oui, c'est fantastique!'

And Violette began a little dance round the kitchen table, with her hands in fists, gyrating and her bum sticking out and swaying. ‘C'est fantastique, c'est fantastique!' she kept on saying and I joined in: ‘C'est fantastique, c'est fantastique!' and tried to dance with her. Sergei stood at the kitchen door, barking at us, like we were two loons, and then Violette started singing what could have been a voodoo chant or a wedding song or a prayer or just a rhyme people sang in Benin when something good happened to them, like the return of a stolen truck:

I had to follow the Grisha trail. I knew more than Carmody because I'd seen the Post-It notes in Grisha's book.

The next thing I had to do was to buy the French edition of the book and make notes about what was in it. After that, I had to get access to Alice's English translation and compare the two. Then I'd know how much or how little Valentina had pinched from Grisha. What I still wouldn't know was whether Grisha knew about it or not.

I was thinking, I hope Valentina
is
in Russia. I hope we'll get a call from her today saying she's coming back at the weekend. Then we can all go out to the airport to meet her – Alice and me and Mrs Gavrilovich and Sergei – and I'll be able to stand where the passengers come out, knowing that within minutes I'm going to see her . . .

On my way out of the door with Sergei, en route for the bookshop, I heard the telephone ring. Alice wasn't in the apartment, so I ran back and picked up the receiver. Every time the telephone rang, I expected Valentina's kidnapper to be on the other end of the line. I imagined his voice, muffled by a balaclava. I imagined the phone booth he was in, outside some horrible factory, or in a village miles away in the mountains. I would say to him: ‘We'll pay whatever you're asking.'

It wasn't him. It was a woman from Bianquis, Valentina's publishers, and her name was Dominique. ‘C'est Dominique Monod,' she said. ‘Est-ce que Valentina est là?'

She sounded completely calm and normal, so I knew she didn't know a thing. I thought for a moment, then I told Dominique that Valentina was away in Russia and we weren't certain when she'd be back. To get this lie out, I had to hold on to the arm of the hard chair by the telephone table. I had a feeling that this news would upset Dominique and it did. She began shouting at me. ‘In Russia? What on earth is she doing in Russia when she has a book to finish? Has she forgotten there's a deadline?'

‘I don't know,' I said weakly.

‘Who am I talking to?' asked Dominique crossly.

I said I was the son of Valentina's English translator. This didn't impress her. It was like translators were way down in her hierarchy of important people and the sons of translators were even further down, like the things Sergei found in the gutter.

‘Well,' she said, ‘do you have a contact number for Valentina? I suppose she has a telephone in Russia?'