‘How long?’

‘Only got back about two hours ago. We went to Castelnaudary.’

‘Castelnaudary? That’s near Toulouse, right?’

‘Look it up.’

Kell blew the smoke back. ‘Or you could just tell me.’

‘Pay me the money.’

He took an envelope containing the cash from his jeans and passed it across the table.

‘So. For a thousand euros, Arnaud. Where’s Castelnaudary?’

The cab driver smiled, enjoying the game. ‘West of here. Maybe three hours on the autoroute. Past Carcassone.’

‘Cassoulet country,’ Kell replied, thinking of the Languedoc-Roussillon but not expecting much in the way of a reaction. ‘Did you drop him in town? Do you remember the address?’

‘There was no address.’ Arnaud put the envelope in the hip pocket of his chinos and it was as if the weight of the money, the reality of it, jolted him into a greater cooperation. ‘It was strange, in fact. He wanted me to leave him on the outskirts of a village ten kilometres to the south. In a lay-by, in the middle of the countryside. He said that somebody was coming to collect him.’

Kell asked the obvious question. ‘Why didn’t you just take him to where he needed to go?’

‘He said that he didn’t have an address. I didn’t want to argue, I didn’t really care. I had a long drive back to Marseille. I wanted to come home and see my daughter.’

Kell thought about enquiring after Arnaud’s family, to soften him up a bit, but it didn’t feel like a strategy worth pursuing. ‘And what about the rest of the journey? Did you talk on the way? Did he have anything to say to you?’

The African smiled, more broadly now, and Kell saw that his gums were yellowed with age and decay. ‘No, man.’ He shook his head. ‘This guy doesn’t talk. He doesn’t even look. Mostly he sleeps or stares out of the window. Typical racist. Typical French.’

‘You think he was racist?’

Arnaud ignored the question and asked one of his own. ‘So who is he? Why is a British newspaper interested in him? Did he steal something? He fuck Princess Kate or something?’

Arnaud laughed heartily at his own joke. Kell wasn’t much of a royalist but refrained from joining in.

‘He’s just somebody we’re interested in. If I had a map, could you show me exactly where you left him?’

Arnaud nodded. Kell waited for him to make a move. They sat in silence until it became clear that Arnaud was holding out for something.

‘Do you have a map?’ Kell asked.

Arnaud folded his arms.

‘Why would I have one in here?’ he asked, looking down at the floor. The crust of an old sandwich was hardening beneath a torn leather stool. Kell could not get a signal on his iPhone and had no choice but to stand up and leave the café, again running the gauntlet of track-suited youths and unleashed dogs outside. He found his waiting cab and tapped on the window, waking the driver from a brief sleep. The window came down and Kell asked if he could borrow a road map of France. This simple request was met with almost complete contempt, because it required the driver to step out of the vehicle, to open the boot of his Mercedes and to retrieve the map from the boot.

‘Maybe you should keep it in the car,’ Kell told him, and returned to his table in the café. Arnaud took the map, flicked to the index, found Castelnaudary and pointed to the approximate area where he had left François Malot.

‘Here,’ he said, a dry, nail-chewed finger momentarily obscuring the precise location. Kell took the map and wrote down the name of the village: Salles-sur-l’Hers.

‘And it was a lay-by? In the middle of the countryside?’

Arnaud nodded.

‘Anything distinctive about the area that you can remember? Was there a church nearby? A playground?’

Arnaud shook his head, as though he was becoming bored of the conversation. ‘No. Just some trees, fields. Fucking countryside, you know?’ He said the word ‘countryside’ as if it were also a term of abuse. ‘When I turned around to go home, I remember I went past some recycling bins after maybe one minute, two, so that’s how far I dropped him from Salles-sur-l’Hers.’

‘Thank you,’ Kell replied. He passed the number of the Marquand mobile across the table. ‘If you think of anything else …’

‘I’ll call you.’ Arnaud slid the number into the same shirt pocket in which he kept his cigarettes. The tone of his reply suggested that this would be the last time that Thomas Kell ever saw or heard from him. ‘What happened to your eye? The passenger did this to you?’

‘One of his friends,’ Kell replied, rising from the table. His beer had arrived while he was fetching the map. He left a two-euro coin on the table though he hadn’t touched it. ‘Thanks for agreeing to meet me.’

‘No problem.’ Arnaud did not bother standing up. He shook Kell’s hand and with the other, patted the wad of money in his pocket. ‘I should say thank you to your British newspaper.’ Another yellow-gummed smile. ‘Very generous. Very nice present.’

42

Back at the hotel, there was a voice message on Kell’s telephone from a petulant-sounding Madeleine Brive. She was sorry to hear about the attack at Cité Radieuse, but seemingly more upset that Stephen Uniacke had not possessed the good grace to call her earlier in the afternoon to warn her that their dinner at Chez Michel would not now be going ahead. As a consequence, she had wasted her one and only night in Marseille.

‘Charming,’ Kell said to the room as he hung up. He wondered if Luc was still listening.

He slept well, as deeply as at any point in the operation, and ate a decent breakfast in the hotel restaurant before checking out and finding an Internet café within a stone’s throw of the Gare Saint-Charles. His laptop was now effectively useless; Luc’s DGSE comrades would almost certainly have fitted it with a tracking device or key logger software. Kell saw that Elsa Cassani had sent a document by email, which he assumed – correctly – was the vetting file on Malot. A message accompanying the document said: ‘Call me if you have any questions x’ and Kell printed it out with the assistance of a hyper-efficient Goth with a piercing in his tongue.

There was a branch of McDonald’s at the station. Kell bought a cup of radioactively hot coffee, found a vacant table, and worked his way through Elsa’s findings.

She had done well, tracing Malot’s secondary school, the college in Toulon where he had studied Information Technology, the name of the gym in Paris of which he was a member. The photograph of Malot sent by Marquand showed two of his colleagues from a software firm in Brest that had been bought out and absorbed by a larger corporation in Paris, at the headquarters of which Malot now worked. Elsa had traced two bank accounts, as well as tax records going back seven years; there were, in her opinion, ‘no anomalies’ in Malot’s financial affairs. He paid his bills on time, had been renting his apartment in the 7th for just over a year, and drove a second-hand Renault Megane that had been purchased in Brittany. As far as friends or girlfriends were concerned, enquiries at his office and gymnasium suggested that François Malot was something of a loner, a private man who kept himself to himself. Elsa had even telephoned Malot’s boss, who informed her that ‘poor François’ was on an extended leave of absence following a family tragedy. As far as she could tell, Malot had no presence on social networks and his emails were regularly downloaded to a host computer that Elsa had not been able to hack. Without the assistance of Cheltenham, it had not been possible to listen to his mobile telephone calls but she had managed to intercept one potentially interesting email exchange between Malot and an individual registered with Wanadoo as ‘Christophe Delestre’ whom she suspected was a friend or relative. Elsa had attached the correspondence to the file.