“Who are you? Non, I know. You’re from sécurité. Never give up, do you?”
“Did my windbreaker give me away?” Aimée said the first thing that came into her head. There was an orange Sécurité logo on the collar; she’d appropriated the windbreaker from a security job she’d done several years ago. At least it gave her an intro.
“You’ve probably been listening to everything we’ve said,” Fran?oise said. “After all these years, can’t you just leave me in peace?”
“Désolée, Madame Delavigne, but—”
“You’re all the same,” she interrupted. “Whatever branch or unit. Can’t you just stop hounding Roland? We deserve some privacy.”
So there was history here. An intimacy. The woman already resented her, so she might as well jump right in. Test her hunch that this was somehow connected to the tell-all memoir Martine had told her about.
“The blackmail threat’s real, Madame Delavigne.”
“Blackmail?” Her voice carried under the branches. “Roland’s na?ve, a fool sometimes. Leave him alone. His brother was the manipulator, not him. Why bring this all up again, so many years later?”
Fran?oise Delavigne pulled a tissue from her pocket, blew her nose. Wiped her eyes. The excitable unattended Westie rooted in the bushes.
“Not for me to say, Madame.” Aimée racked her brain for how to steer the woman toward Pascal Leseur’s death. “But his brother …?”
“Pascal? Pah. Just like your bosses on the quai d’Orsay.” Fran?oise Delavigne had assumed Aimée worked for the ministry’s internal surveillance team. Not the first time she’d encountered a member of that team, judging by her reaction. “Clutching at power, backstabbing, manipulating.” She’d warmed up, breathing fire now. “Roland’s brother excelled at that. That’s what did him in. Not our—”
“Affair?” Aimée interrupted. “Or was it Djanka Constantin’s murder?” Held her breath—she’d either hit the truth or gone off in left field.
“Our affair, of which you’ve evidently been informed, ended long ago.”
But she hadn’t denied the link to Djanka’s murder.
“Pascal Leseur fathered Djanka Constantin’s child.”
“Et alors?”
“Pascal’s and Djanka’s bodies were discovered within hours of each other.” Now she tried her hunch. “So at Roland’s insistence, the flics were pulled off the investigation, and now twenty years later he’s being blackmailed over the cover-up.”
“Cover-up? I don’t doubt it,” she said, matter-of-fact. “But not on Roland’s end. Roland can’t admit Pascal kept secrets, dirt on his colleagues at the ministry. Suicide, murder?” Shook her head. “I don’t know. A tragedy. That’s what my husband always said.”
She thought again. A staged suicide as René had suggested? She thought of René’s theory. That would have been a convenient way to dispose of a backstabber like Pascal, as Fran?oise seemed to think of him. And Drina knew too much, so her father …
“In case you think any of this has anything to do with me or Roland, you’re way off course,” Fran?oise was saying. “Leave him alone. My husband never gave a fig that Roland I were lovers. Gerard’s mistresses were numerous … enfin, until the Parkinson’s really took hold.” Fran?oise shook her head. “Not news to your bosses. Postings in foreign countries were a good cover for his indiscretions, and for a slow-developing disease. Your people were always so good about getting us out of the way. Which was what this has been really about, hasn’t it?”
Aimée didn’t know what to say. Just nodded.
“Your bosses would have done anything to keep my husband quiet.” She jerked at the leash. “Well, it’s all over now. Gerard’s dead and whatever he knew went with him. Tell your boss I don’t care, let the papers and publishers print what they want. It’s twenty years ago. I’m just a forty-seven-year-old grandmother who’s living in London to help my daugher get treatment.”
“But Madame, you and I know the powers that be—then and now—have a lot to lose. Especially whoever was involved in the cover-up.”
“Exactement, Mademoiselle. You came here to give me a warning, n’est-ce pas? Tell them it’s received loud and clear, and not to count on me giving a damn.”
No wonder this savvy Fran?oise spoke with such candor. She’d been navigating these waters for a long time. She gave Aimée a sideways look. “You look intelligent. But I’m a terrible judge of character. I picked the wrong man to leave.” She paused. “Think about where you work. Your paycheck comes from men afraid to lose power, driven by fear. Like Versailles—nothing has changed in two hundred years. They’re all vengeful backbiters.”
“You mean appointed officials,” Aimée said, angling for names. “Like who?”
“Men afraid of a Gypsy taboo,” Fran?oise said. “Would you believe, grown men terrified by hocus-pocus?”
The Westie barked. Before Aimée could ask more, it had dragged Fran?oise around the hedgerow and into the path of a jogger. Fran?oise stumbled and swerved, just avoiding a collision.
Barking louder now, the Westie pawed the dirt by a clump of bushes. “What’s the matter, Filou?”
Aimée took out her penlight. Shone it on the undergrowth.
The dog yelped and pawed in the bushes behind the reach of her beam. “Filou, if that’s a squirrel …”
Aimée saw a lanyard hanging from the dog’s mouth.
“Mon Dieu!” Fran?oise pulled Filou’s leash. “Leave it alone, Filou. There’s homeless people sleeping here.”
Her phone vibrated. René.
“I have to take this call, Madame,” she said, taking a few steps away on the path. “Where’s Roland Leseur gone?” she asked René, lowering her voice.
“You tell me, Aimée. I think he discovered the tracker.”
Her neck tingled. “Why?”
“No movement.”