Had it been an old house or even a pretty one, then perhaps some memory of the dead girl would have remained there, but the room was empty, contemporary and pitiless. I examined the locks and hinges, probed the mattress and shoulder pads, rolled back the cheap carpet and put a knife blade between the floorboards. Nothing. Perfume, lingerie, bills, a postcard greeting from Nice, ‘… some of the swimsuits are divine …’, a book of dreams, six copies of Elle, laddered stockings, six medium-price dresses, eight and a half pairs of shoes, a good English wool overcoat, an expensive transistor radio tuned to France Musique, tin of Nescafé, tin of powdered milk, saccharine, a damaged handbag containing spilled powder and a broken mirror, a new saucepan. Nothing to show what she was, had been, feared, dreamed of or wanted.
The bell rang. There was a girl standing there. She may have been twenty-five but it was difficult to say. Big cities leave a mark. The eyes of city-dwellers scrutinize rather than see; they assess the value and the going-rate and try to separate the winners from the losers. That’s what this girl tried to do.
‘Are you from the police?’ she asked.
‘No. Are you?’
‘I’m Monique. I live next door in apartment number eleven.’
‘I’m Annie’s cousin, Pierre.’
‘You’ve got a funny accent. Are you a Belgian?’ She gave a little giggle as though being a Belgian was the funniest thing that could happen to anyone.
‘Half Belgian,’ I lied amiably.
‘I can usually tell. I’m very good with accents.’
‘You certainly are,’ I said admiringly. ‘Not many people detect that I’m half Belgian.’
‘Which half is Belgian?’
‘The front half.’
She giggled again. ‘Was your mother or your father Belgian, I mean.’
‘Mother. Father was a Parisian with a bicycle.’
She tried to peer into the flat over my shoulder. ‘I would invite you in for a cup of coffee,’ I said, ‘but I musn’t disturb anything.’
‘You’re hinting. You want me to invite you for coffee.’
‘Damned right I do.’ I eased the door closed. ‘I’ll be there in five minutes.’
I turned back to cover up my searching. I gave a last look to the ugly cramped little room. It was the way I’d go one day. There would be someone from the department making sure that I hadn’t left ‘one or two little things that could embarrass us all’. Goodbye, Annie, I thought. I didn’t know you but I know you now as well as anyone knows me. You won’t retire to a little tabac in Nice and get a monthly cheque from some phoney insurance company. No, you can be resident agent in hell, Annie, and your bosses will be sending directives from Heaven telling you to clarify your reports and reduce your expenses.
I went to apartment number eleven. Her room was like Annie’s: cheap gilt and film-star photos. A bath towel on the floor, ashtrays overflowing with red-marked butts, a plateful of garlic sausage that had curled up and died.
Monique had made the coffee by the time I got there. She’d poured boiling water on to milk powder and instant coffee and stirred it with a plastic spoon. She was a tough girl under the giggling exterior and she surveyed me carefully from behind fluttering eyelashes.
‘I thought you were a burglar,’ she said, ‘then I thought you were the police.’
‘And now?’
‘You’re Annie’s cousin Pierre. You’re anyone you want to be, from Charlemagne to Tin-Tin, it’s no business of mine, and you can’t hurt Annie.’
I took out my notecase and extracted a one-hundred-new-franc note. I put it on the low coffee table. She stared at me thinking it was some kind of sexual proposition.
‘Did you ever work with Annie at the clinic?’ I asked.
‘No.’
I placed another note down and repeated the question.
‘No,’ she said.
I put down a third note and watched her carefully. When she again said no I leaned forward and took her hand roughly. ‘Don’t no me,’ I said. ‘You think I came here without finding out first?’
She stared at me angrily. I kept hold of her hand. ‘Sometimes,’ she said grudgingly.
‘How many?’
‘Ten, perhaps twelve.’
‘That’s better,’ I said. I turned her hand over, pressed my fingers against the back of it to make her fingers open and slapped the three notes into her open palm. I let go of her and she leaned back out of reach, rubbing the back of her hand where I had held it. They were slim, bony hands with rosy knuckles that had known buckets of cold water and Marseilles soap. She didn’t like her hands. She put them inside things and behind them and hid them under her folded arms.
‘You bruised me,’ she complained.
‘Rub money on it.’
‘Ten, perhaps twelve, times,’ she admitted.
‘Tell me about the place. What went on there?’
‘You are from the police.’
‘I’ll do a deal with you, Monique. Slip me three hundred and I’ll tell you all about what I do.’
She smiled grimly. ‘Annie wanted an extra girl sometimes, just as a hostess … the money was useful.’
‘Did Annie have plenty of money?’
‘Plenty? I never knew anyone who had plenty. And even if they did it wouldn’t go very far in this town. She didn’t go to the bank in an armoured car if that’s what you mean.’ I didn’t say anything.
Monique continued, ‘She did all right but she was silly with it. She gave it to anyone who spun her a yarn. Her parents will miss her, so will Father Marconi; she was always giving to his collection for kids and missions and cripples. I told her over and over, she was silly with it. You’re not Annie’s cousin, but you throw too much money around to be the police.’
‘The men you met there. You were told to ask them things and to remember what they said.’
‘I didn’t go to bed with them …’
‘I don’t care if you took the anglais with them and dunked the gâteau sec, what were your instructions?’ She hesitated, and I placed five more one-hundred-franc notes on the table but kept my fingers on them.
‘Of course I made love to the men, just as Annie did, but they were all refined men. Men of taste and culture.’
‘Sure they were,’ I said. ‘Men of real taste and culture.’
‘It was done with tape recorders. There were two switches on the bedside lamps. I was told to get them talking about their work. So boring, men talking about their work, but are they ready to do it? My God they are.’
‘Did you ever handle the tapes?’
‘No, the recording machines were in some other part of the clinic.’ She eyed the money.
‘There’s more to it than that. Annie did more than that.’
‘Annie was a fool. Look where it got her. That’s where it will get me if I talk too much.’
‘I’m not interested in you,’ I said. ‘I’m only interested in Annie. What else did Annie do?’
‘She substituted the tapes. She changed them. Sometimes she made her own