LÉON ROUSSEL
Her face.
Hadn’t it been through enough? Léon wanted to take it in his hands and kiss each rip and bruise and break. There was black blood in her nostrils, panda rings around her eyes. Yet she seemed indifferent to it and unselfconscious when a passing patient stared openly.
Her fingers touched his lips, as if to pull the words from behind them. ‘Tell me,’ she said again.
He described the search of Gilles Bertin’s house in Arles, just the way he’d written it up in his report. The house was rented, so he’d looked up the owner on the town’s register and acquired a key from her. On Friday the premises were empty, so he and his two officers proceeded to search every cupboard and drawer, as well as all possible places of concealment.
‘I did that too,’ she whispered.
‘What? How did you get in?’
She gave him a hint of a smile. ‘I have hidden skills. I didn’t tell you because I knew it was illegal and I didn’t dig up anything that helped us.’ She paused, cupped his chin in her hand and gave it a sharp shake. ‘Did you?’
He imagined her finding the photographs of herself hidden behind the bedhead and the sickness that must have welled up in her when she shuffled through them.
‘Yes, I think we did.’
‘You found the photographs? Of me.’
He nodded and a dull flush seeped up her neck.
‘And the aircraft ones as well?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘What else?’
‘Guns and a rifle.’
Her eyes widened and her scabbed eyebrows shot up. ‘Where? I searched but didn’t find them.’
‘They were under the floorboards.’
She gave a low-key whoop of delight. In the next bed a pleasant young crew-cut airman with his leg in plaster looked across but quickly went back to his Life magazine.
‘Did you take the guns away?’
‘Of course. We are now searching for Bertin himself.’
She sat back in her chair. She looked a small figure in this large impersonal ward but there was something in her that filled the space, something like those nuclear bombs out there on the base. Something unstoppable. She narrowed her eyes and smacked her hand on his wrist.
‘Stop teasing me,’ she said.
But he hesitated a moment longer. This was police business. He shouldn’t be telling her.
‘I found a small diary. Under the linoleum in the bathroom.’
‘You are very thorough.’
‘It’s my job to be.’ But he hesitated once more.
‘Come on, Léon,’ she said softly with the sideways look she gave when she knew he was uncertain how she would take something. ‘Let me hear it.’
‘In the diary was a list of your movements each day, what you do and where you go.’
To his surprise she shrugged. ‘I have got used to the idea that I am being watched. I don’t know why. Gilles Bertin seems,’ again the dull flush, ‘obsessed.’
‘Obsessed, maybe. Or reporting to someone.’
This time he felt a tremor ripple through her fingers, though her expression didn’t change.
She thought for a minute and then pointed out, ‘But none of that helps us.’ She moved closer, her voice a whisper. ‘Which means there must be something else you found.’
His fears for her safety were growing stronger. ‘I hope you came here with Clarisse, not alone,’ he said. ‘Where is she?’
‘Outside in the car.’ She waved a hand dismissively. ‘What is the something else?’
‘It’s a photograph of two men. Drinking in a bar together somewhere, laughing as if they know each other well.’
‘Who are they?’
‘A man who I believe, from your description, to be Gilles Bertin. Pencil moustache and deep chin cleft.’
‘And the other?’
‘Colonel Frank Masson.’