Sabine Merel had been an art student in Paris, studying sculpture, sharing a small apartment with a couple of other girls. She’d been working late in the studio at the art college one night in May, but had arranged to meet her friends later at a party. They’d thought little of it when she’d failed to show up.
The next morning, her body had been found in the alley at the back of a restaurant. She’d been punched hard in the face, then strangled with her own scarf some short time later. She’d been robbed, and her clothes, casual clothes for the studio, had been left in disarray, top pulled up, jeans and underwear pulled down, but there had been no evidence of a sexual assault beyond that.
The police had subsequently suggested that both the robbery and the interference with Sabine’s clothing might have been post-mortem attempts to suggest a false motive, and they’d speculated that Sabine had more likely been killed by someone known to her.
A student who’d also been in the studio that night had been questioned but then released without charge. A brief media storm had followed because the male student was of Algerian origin and, given the strength of his alibi, the police had faced accusations of racism.
There had been no other suspects in the murder of Sabine Merel and no one had ever been charged with the crime. It seemed that in the fourteen years since, no further leads had ever arisen, and the death of this young art student had been quietly forgotten, probably by everyone except her own family and friends and, of course, Jack Redford.
It had taken Dan the last hour of the afternoon to piece together that much, working through the French in the articles Redford had saved. In one sense it was nothing new or surprising to him. He’d known, seen, and sometimes even brought about, too many unjustified deaths to be much moved by the story of another.
Yet it had moved him in some way, his mood sinking as the hour had ground on, perhaps because of the gradual drip-feed of information, bringing the girl back to life, even though he knew it was an illusion and that nothing would undo what had been done to her all those years before. He doubted anything would stir within him the indignation Redford had clearly felt, but he felt sad all the same, and mystified by that sadness, for a woman he’d never known, who’d been dead a long time.
As they walked back through the twilight, a darkness that seemed to rise up from the woodland floor rather than descend from above, he summarized what he’d learned for Inger’s benefit. She walked ahead of him in complete silence, though he could tell she was listening intently.
It was a simple story, yet harrowing for all that, and he felt his energy sapping away just in the telling of it, the all-too-familiar tale of a young woman with a promising future snuffed out for no reason at all.
He finished just before they got to the cabin and at the door Inger turned and shook her head and he noticed that a tear had worked its way free and glistened on her cheek. In some way he was both pleased and sorry that it had upset her.
He reached up without thinking and wiped the tear away, then immediately took a step backwards. “Sorry, I . . .”
She ignored the apology and said, “She would have been a year older than me, but I don’t know why I find it so sad. Maybe just the thought of her being in the studio, you know, working towards something, creating, and then that. It’s so cruel, unbearably so.”
He wasn’t sure what to say, but didn’t need to say anything, because they both turned in response to an indistinct sound and saw Mr. Eklund walking along the track, carrying the dinner tray with his effortless and loose-limbed gait.
Inger said something under her breath in Swedish, something affectionate, brought on by the sight of the old man. And Dan understood the sentiment even if he hadn’t understood or even heard the words properly, because it was reassuring after a day like they’d had, to be reminded that there were good things in the world, and good people, simple food cooked well, strangers sharing their kindness indiscriminately. Dan had been outside that virtuous circle himself for most of his adult life, but he was grateful to be inside it now.
It was only when they were sitting down over their meal that Inger went back to the story of Sabine Merel, though she’d put the poignancy of her death to one side and was business-like again, focusing on the case.
“Did you read anything at all that might have suggested a link with Brabham?”
“Nothing. She was from . . .” He struggled to remember the name of her home town. “Limoges, I think. I don’t know what her parents did, but I couldn’t see any suggestion that they moved in the kind of circles where they might have encountered the CIA’s Paris station chief.”
“So what will you do?”
“There has to be a connection. I’ll find out if Patrick can tell me anything about Redford, and if Sabine Merel’s murder means anything to him. Then I guess I need to do what both the Paris police and Jack Redford failed to do; find out who killed her and why.”