A Treachery of Spies Read online

  About the Book

  An elderly woman of striking beauty is found murdered in Orléans, France. Her identity has been cleverly erased but the method of her death is very specific: she has been killed in the manner of traitors to the Resistance in World War Two.

  Tracking down her murderer leads police inspector Inès Picaut back to 1940s France where the men and women of the Resistance were engaged in a desperate fight for survival against the Nazi invaders.

  To find answers in the present she must discover what really happened in the past, untangling a web of treachery and intrigue that stretches back to the murder victim’s youth: a time when unholy alliances were forged between conqueror and conquered, deals were done and promises broken.

  The past has been buried for decades, but, as Picaut discovers, there are those in the present whose futures depend on it staying that way – and who will kill to keep their secrets safe …

  A Treachery of Spies is an espionage thriller to rival the very best: a high-stakes game of cat and mouse, played in the shadows, which will keep you guessing every step of the way.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Manda Scott

  Copyright

  A Treachery of Spies

  MANDA SCOTT

  For Pat and Patricia Coles,

  who showed me how to live

  – with all my love

  I want to say to all young people … who do not know what it was like to be in the Resistance: It was one of the greatest times to be alive.

  Jacques Chaban-Delmas

  Prime Minister of France 1969–72

  Former Member of the Resistance

  AND THUS BY ACCIDENT WE BECAME AS GODS

  BLYTHE CHILDREN OF THE MOUNTAIN

  WARRIORS OF VENGEANCE

  UNFORGIVING, UNFORGIVEN

  UNFORGOTTEN

  PROLOGUE

  PARIS

  June 1942

  YOU MAKE A mistake, trust the wrong person, take a left turn at an alley’s end instead of a right, and it is too late.

  There are twenty of them, and one of you. You cannot outrun them and fear makes you clumsy so that you trip and fall and flail and are stamped on and kicked and brutalized in other ways. It was always going to come to this, and, as they hammer you into a van and out again, manhandle you up stone steps and down again, you swear that you will spit in their eyes and curse them as you die.

  The Boche have other plans. They do not push you into rotting cells in the basements of Paris as they have done in the past with men – and some women – whose lives they wrested slowly. They take you out of town, to a big, mouldering farmhouse, down two flights of stairs to a root cellar that is wholly insulated from the death and torment of others.

  Here, it is cold. There is no light. The smell is of rotten turnips, wet sackcloth and rats. After the first slam of the door, the stamp of boots, the silence folds in, and it is this – more than cold and hunger and thirst; more than rats and their increasing boldness; more than bladder and bowels emptied after many hours of holding, so that the stench is no longer of putrid vegetation – more than all of these, it is the suffocating absence of sound that shreds your soul.

  Come for me. Talk to me. Shout at me. Drag me out and beat me. Hang me by my thumbs from piano wire. Do you not care? Do I count for so very little? Christ on his Cross, I tried to kill you!

  In the dark of the second day, or perhaps the tenth, they come: boots, voices, light and the blurry shapes behind it and a rush of cold-clean air.

  You shrink from the light and the shame of your own stink. Go away. Go away. Leave me to die. Please, leave.

  —Do you know me?

  You are Kramme. I tried to kill you. How could I not?

  —Then you know what I can do.

  I don’t care. Just kill me. Fast or slow. I no longer care.

  —You deserve to die, of course. Many of your countrymen have done so, some with more dignity than others. But you are different. You have the potential to be useful. You have a choice, therefore: you may die here in darkness if you so desire, but I have come to offer you a proposition. Together, let us seize the day …

  CHAPTER ONE

  ORLÉANS

  Sunday, 18 March 2018

  07.10

  CHRIST, BUT THERE’S a lot of blood.

  This is the first thing Picaut sees as she pulls to a halt in the Gare des Aubrais car park and angles her headlights onto the crime scene – that it is not a scarf at the dead woman’s throat, but a sheet of blood, made black in the uncertain light, with spatter marks across the windscreen.

  It’s been a while since Picaut has seen blood. She has forgotten the visceral power of a violent death. This one jolts her, so that for a long moment she is locked as the woman in the car opposite is locked: eye to eye, face to face, life to death and back again.

  The second thing she sees, the thing that stays with her as she steps out of her car and walks over to the gathering group of officers and scene techs, is how peaceful the woman looks amidst the carnage, how hauntingly beautiful, and old enough to be her grandmother.

  Rollo is already here, standing by his own car, hunched against the dark and drizzle. He’s grown more shadowed in the past year or two, stronger. His hair is longer than it used to be, brushing his shoulders, and his black leather jacket has suffered far worse weather than this.

  ‘Two to the chest, one to the head,’ he says by way of a welcome. ‘I know men who would kill for a grouping like that.’

  From anyone else, this would be a joke, but Rollo doesn’t make jokes about guns. So that they’re clear, Picaut asks, ‘Professional hit?’ and Rollo, nodding, says, ‘We’ll see the details better when the lights are up.’

  The lights are on their way. From deep in the dark, a generator heaves into life, arc lights fizz and pop, and, all of a sudden, liquid light pours over the car and the woman sitting behind the wheel, who has been—

  Bloody hell.

  From Picaut’s other side, a younger voice says, ‘Tell me they did that after she was dead?’

  There is a brief silence. Lieutenant Daniel Evard, nephew to Orléans’ fire chief, is the new graduate who joined the team while Picaut was in hospital.

  There was a time when infants faced with scenes of wanton destruction
retired behind a wall to vomit. Petit-Evard keeps his hands in his pockets where he won’t wreak havoc with forensics, looks from Picaut to Rollo and back again, and says, ‘You’re not telling me she was still alive when they took out her tongue?’

  ‘I sincerely hope not.’

  Because this is what the lights have shown: that it is not lipstick around her mouth any more than it was a scarf at her throat. Someone, clearly, has been busy with a knife. Remarkably, it has done nothing to mar her beauty.

  She has no name yet, this woman who shows such grace in death; Picaut knows nothing beyond what she can see through the windscreen, spectacular as it is. She takes her hands from her pockets and flexes her fingers. There’s a particular sensation in the first moments of a case that marks it for the duration and this one feels like standing at the edge of a high cliff in a thunderstorm with a hang glider strapped to her back. She has dreamed of this moment. It has not let her down.

  Start with what you know.

  The stationmaster discovered the victim when he came to begin his shift. In an otherwise empty lot in a sleepy northern suburb of Orléans, he parked his Renault behind the only other vehicle in the car park and strolled over to find out what train the lady thought she was going to catch at five fifteen on a March morning.

  He is currently being interviewed by Lieutenant Sylvie Ostheimer, the final member of Picaut’s new team, and the one who can best be trusted not to traumatize him further.

  The car is an ageing Citroën BX, in nearly mint condition. The victim is sitting on the driver’s side – which does not, of course, prove that she was driving – with her right hand on the wheel. Her left, on closer inspection, hangs down at her side. Most people neither sit nor drive like this, but the window controls are in the armrest and the window has been lowered (or raised?) to leave open a gap of around a hand’s breadth.

  Judging by the angles of the gunshots, they were all directed through this small space, which is the point Rollo was making about the skill of the shooter. This is not a blundering amateur.

  The car door is closed, but it must, at some point, have been open because, while you might shoot through that gap, you couldn’t reach in to cut out someone’s tongue: that takes two hands. Picaut makes a note in her phone. To Rollo, she says, ‘We need UV images of the blood patterns outside the car before anyone else goes near it.’

  He gives half a shrug that might be an apology. ‘We did that before the lights went up.’

  Right. Rollo’s a captain now and he’s been leading his own team for nearly a year. It’s amazing, really, that he took the offer to come back and work with Picaut. He and Sylvie are the only ones from her old team who did. The rest have gone on to other things. In time, doubtless, Picaut’s world will feel less truncated by their loss.

  She turns back to the car. Freed from the need to preserve the scene, she moves round for a closer look. The woman has clear skin, not smooth, but with the translucent, porcelain quality that the fortunate carry into old age. The shots that so impressed Rollo have made neat, round, nine-millimetre holes and the one at her temple has faint powder burns tattooed at the margins. Whoever it was got very close. Does that mean they knew each other, shooter and victim?

  For a time of death, Picaut eases her hand in through the open window to feel the old lady’s brow. Her skin is cool, but not cold, and the muscles of her face, when pressed, are not yet rigid. An accurate time will have to wait for the pathologist, but at her best estimate the shooting took place in the first hour after midnight.

  So the killer used a silencer. An entire estate of single-storey cottages nestles less than fifty metres away, inhabited by the kind of respectable, retired middle-class couples who head for bed at ten o’clock and sleep lightly: three shots in the middle of the night would have had them reaching for their phones by the dozen.

  This close, it is clear that the victim had money and the taste to use it well. Her silver-grey suit is linen, cleanly cut. The pearls at her neck glow softly under the arc lights. Her hair is finely white, spun sugar rising sparsely from the pinked crown of her head. It’s this that ages her, the sparseness of her hair; a bit thicker and she could be in her seventies. As it is, Picaut puts her closer to ninety. There’s still something hauntingly familiar about the shape of her face, the fine, clear angles of her cheeks.

  Thoughtful, she says, ‘We need a name.’

  Rollo bites the edge of his thumb. ‘Car’s locked. We haven’t got in yet.’

  To the waiting techs, Picaut says, ‘Anyone?’

  A blond forensic technician pushes through the throng and has the driver’s door open in less than the time it takes Rollo to light a cigarette. The photographers step in to do their work and then Picaut is free to crouch down and study the damage done by the knife.

  The incision to her throat is clean-edged, which gives credence to Picaut’s hope that it was done post-mortem. She levers her pen between the teeth and confirms that the tongue has, indeed, been cut out and that yes, this too almost certainly took place after death; the blood is dark.

  On a roll now, Picaut searches for an ID. The jacket pockets are empty, but there’s a leather bag in the passenger footwell in which she finds, amongst other things, a passport and two credit cards. Standing, she says, ‘She’s Madame Sophie Destivelle until we find anything to say otherwise.’

  Petit-Evard opens his mouth, thinks for a moment, then shuts it again and starts a web search on his phone. Picaut is beginning to like him.

  Sylvie arrives from soothing the stationmaster. Her spiky hair is black these days, and she wears a short skirt, thick tights and big leather boots, relics of a year spent undercover in the anarchist networks south of the Loire.

  Unless Petit-Evard is hiding more skills than he shows, she’s the best they have just now with tech. To her, Picaut says, ‘I want to know where she came from and where she was going. Get me anything and everything Sophie Destivelle has ever done.’

  ‘On it.’

  Sylvie departs. Petit-Evard says, ‘She’ll be lucky; there’s nothing on Google. We could tidy up her image and put it out on Interpol? Somebody must know more about her.’

  ‘I know more about her, if I could only remember.’ It’s like a fish, slipping through her fingers, her memory of this woman. She can feel the shape of it, taste the texture on her tongue. ‘She’s been in the papers. On the news. On Facebook. Something. She was sad. I remember thinking that.’

  ‘So do we run her out to the news wires?’

  ‘Not yet. I want to find out more about who was making what point and why, before we do anything rash.’ Rising, Picaut says, ‘Get her to pathology. Eric’s got new software that makes people look more alive: we can run that through the databases and see what turns up. And check the car. If it’s registered to her, that’s our route in. If it’s not, then we want to know where she got it because— Ah, fuck. Just when things were going well.’

  A pearlescent white BMW rounds the corner and swings into the car park. Picaut feels her face stiffen; those parts that are not already stiff. She shoves the car door shut with her shoulder. To Petit-Evard, she says briskly, ‘Head back to the office and start a search on the car registration. If Sophie Destivelle is not the owner, track down whoever is, and find out what they know about her. I’ll be at the pathology lab. We’ll meet there in half an hour and see if the post-mortem tells us anything beyond what we already know.’

  He may be new, Petit-Evard, but he’s fast off the mark. His car is reversing out of the gateway before the BMW has fully parked.

  Rollo catches Picaut’s eye. ‘Want me to stay?’

  Yes, but also … definitely not. Some things she needs to manage alone from the start.

  She says, ‘No, I’m fine. See if you can shake any trees that have assassins hiding in them. I want to know if there’s been anyone of this calibre touting themselves around the dark spots of Europe.’ And so Rollo, too, has gone by the time Ducat steps out of his car. The sundry technicia
ns clear his path.

  Pegged of tooth, squat of frame, with a lawyer’s pedantry and an unreconstructed attitude to women, there was a time when the city’s prosecutor, Maître Yves Ducat, barged roughshod over Picaut, trampling the fabric of all but her most solid cases. Tonight, he has a head cold, and arrives partially veiled behind a linen handkerchief. Nodding a greeting, he stares gloomily at the dead woman, the gunshot wounds, the car. ‘Who is she?’

  Picaut says, ‘Sophie Destivelle.’ And at his frown: ‘We’ve drawn a blank on the name. Petit-Evard is tracing the car.’

  Ducat pulls a face. He angles awkwardly at the waist to peer into the car. ‘Professional hit?’

  ‘That’s the assumption.’

  ‘Fuck.’ She waits. Ducat is a man who chooses his words with care and this one is spoken with a distinct lack of inflection. He takes time to fold his handkerchief away. ‘The Americans are not going to like this.’

  Indeed. In an arrangement made under the old administration, the US security services have brought their oh-so-quiet anti-terrorist summit to Orléans. It’s been running for two days now, and is due to go on for another three – unless they decide it’s unsafe to continue.

  Picaut says, ‘Think they’ll cancel?’

  ‘If they do, you and I will join the queue of those trying to find work in poorly paid positions at minor security firms.’

  And that, too, is true. A quite spectacular amount of effort went into persuading the CIA, the NSA and the many corporate-owned acronym-holders who populate the global espionage community, that they really wanted to come to Orléans for this year’s conference. That choice was made on the understanding that the city was safe. A mutilated woman sitting in a car with two shots to the chest and one to the head is not, by anyone’s measure, safe.

  ‘Job share?’ Picaut says. I’ll take the nights if you take the days.’

  Ducat pinches his lower lip. ‘If, on the other hand, we can get the suits on side, they’ll keep the press off our backs. The threat of the NSA rifling through a lifetime’s emails should be enough to silence anyone who thinks they’re going to make a name for themselves breaking a hot story. I’ll take care of this. Just make sure to let me know what you’ve got when you’ve got it.’