Abby was evidently a classy sort of gal. Ben asked, ‘Is Thierry in trouble?’

She paused. ‘Would you be asking me that if you were one of them?’

‘I’m not. Cross my heart and hope to die.’

‘Thierry is trouble,’ she sighed. ‘Story of my life.’

‘What happened?’

‘Same old, same old. Except this time he went too far. I told him, “Thierry, you get in debt to those people, you’ll regret it.” Did he listen to me? Did he ever?’

‘Who did he borrow from?’

Abby made a grumphing sound. ‘The kind of people who break your arms and fuck up your knees up with hammers, if you don’t pay them back pronto, with interest.’

‘How much does he owe?’

‘Enough to piss them off that he hasn’t repaid a cent of it.’

‘So now he’s hiding from them.’

She paused to take a noisy drag on a cigarette, then grumphed again. ‘Skipped out two weeks ago. Not heard from him since. So fucking typical, you know? That’s it this time. We’re finished. You tell him that, if you see him. And I want—’

‘His junk out of your place. I get that. Listen, Abby, I really do need to find him. Maybe I can help him.’

‘I don’t give a shit if you can help him or not. He’s got it coming.’ She sucked on the cigarette again, and seemed about to hang up the call. Then she blew out an exasperated sigh and said, ‘You could try that slimeball Pierrot. They hang out together. He might be lying low there. I don’t want to call, because Pierrot is such a creep. The way he pervs on me makes me want to fucking puke.’

She gave Ben an address for the creepy slimeball. He wrote it down, thanked her and promised to remind Thierry about the junk. She said, ‘Whatever,’ and hung up.

Ben slugged down the last of his coffee, grabbed his car keys, locked up the apartment and was on his way.

Chapter 12

Paris is divided up into twenty arrondissements or municipal districts each with its own number, which to the casual visitor seem to be scattered randomly about the city but are actually arranged in a rather quirky helix pattern, spiralling out from the centre to form something like a snail shell within the rough circle of the Boulevard Périphérique, Paris’s ring road. The address that Thierry Chevrolet’s ex-girlfriend had given Ben was situated on the border of the tenth and nineteenth districts, where the helix unwound itself towards its outer edge in the north-east of the city, about one o’clock on the clock face of the circle.