*
Time to move on. What else could I assume, having heard nothing from any of my team?
I checked my map. Dienné was approximately fifteen kilometres away. Nothing wrong with Mathieu Deschamps, then. The little bastard who’d made me look a fool. I’d find him and make him realise his mistake.
Having extracted my leopardskin make-up bag, I dug deep down amongst the lipsticks, the eye shadow, tweezers and empty bruise-concealer tube, to locate a sliver of steel, cleverly notched at its narrow end.
Merci Dieu. Merci Sandro Berrano.
This delicate helpmeet carried a history. During a school lunch hour, just after Sophie Kassel’s disappearance, some sick person had decided to add to my woes by stealing my car keys. The thief never caught. We’d all assumed it a prank - and not the first - that before the day’s end the key would be found. But no.
If Berrano, the metalwork teacher at the nearby state school, hadn’t created this universal ignition key on one of his lathes, I’d have been too late to save the poor girl from the first of her ‘petits crises’ that were noting to do with school.
Like a good Catholic, he’d also joined the search for Sophie, but that had been a tense affair. Most of my own staff felt I could have contacted the police a little earlier; informed her lone parent immediately the girl hadn’t returned for afternoon lessons, but my school with its falling roll numbers, had its name to protect. I knew how the local newspaper reporters, would gobble us up and spit us out at the first whiff of trouble.
Besides, several of our pupils were habitually late back after their games in the nearby wood, but that hadn’t drawn knee-jerk responses. What had made the difference was that in October 1977, just weeks after starting school, Sophie Kassel was classified as ‘backward,’ with an IQ of just 82. A mother habitually away from home, and a father not only busy with his farm. God knew I’d often brought in Laure’s perfectly good cast-offs for her to try, and to improve her self-esteem. I once treated her to a fashionable, layered cut at the local hairdresser’s but been warned off for interfering.
Now that Milanese emigré’s handiwork was slotted neatly in the ignition. A gentle turn and the engine’s purr was like oxygen to the dying. I’d been given another chance. I checked in both wing mirrors. I was completely alone, save for the blowing skies and a hard sliver of moon piercing the bloated clouds.
Unlike his half-sister, Mathieu was a mouthy kid. I had to reach him before anyone else. And the thought that the cripple might beat me to him, made me focus.
Did I feel any regrets? How could I answer? Steering my way out into the route nationale and accelerating too quickly, that word didn’t exist any more. Until I realised that having foolishly clicked ‘RECEIVE’ on my phone, my whereabouts could be accurately traced.
*
The sight of the first police helicopter looping and diving over what I gauged to be land to the south-east, made me crash the gears as I slowed up to watch it. Then came another; both skimming a black shoulder of trees with a strobing light apiece,
Foux. Giving their game away. Yet, even though the Gallas abattoir was waiting I had to get closer. Then all at once, a white van with inadequate lights loomed up from the darkness behind me. For a disconcerting moment, it cruised alongside, making no effort to overtake.
Who the Hell?
I tried to remember if I’d seen one like it near my car on that ferry.
Think…
I couldn’t. My memory was letting me down. Too much had happened. Too much gone wrong…
Eventually it overtook and, as it did so, I noticed the number plate, although muddy, was all too readable.
Cher Dieu…
La Princesse Poole.
My front tyre sliced into the grass verge. I righted myself in time to brake hard because he - and I could have sworn the driver was a middle-aged male - had slowed right up in front of me. And then like a black tumour swelling in my mind, realised whoever the man was, he must have followed me to that damned Aire de Repos.
Fear, hunger, weariness all dissolved as I pulled out facing an empty, dark road rising towards a brow edged by forestry whose trees seemed locked overhead. More like a tomb than a tunnel, but I pressed on, my heel grinding against the floor…
120... 130 kms. per hour.
Allez… Allez…
Then I saw him. The Dog Collar no less. Turned towards me, laughing. Yes, laughing. Those vulpine teeth on full show, overgrown eyebrows too. His van matching my speed, keeping me in my place in the outside lane where another vehicle flashing its headlights was fast approaching,
Jésus.
So, his heart hadn’t stopped as I’d planned. He wasn’t going to let me in, and in that looming, deadly moment, I saw all the faces of those I’d tried to forget. Lovers who’d used me; the sister who’d resented my cleverness, my drive. The kids who’d brought me nothing but grief. But I wasn’t ready to die just yet.
*
My brakes screamed as I pulled my car back, smashing the van’s left rear light as I did so. And as if to poison my sense of relief, came another’s face That of the simple Kassel girl who’d not been so simple after all. Who’d known far too much about things she shouldn’t.
I braked again, thanked my God no-one was behind me, before turning sharp right on to a track no wider than my car. I was soon amongst waving trees, still bare - perhaps diseased - but at least giving me a view of the sky where one of the helicopters I’d spotted earlier was moving northwards. Was it signalling with its lights. If so, why?
My hands still shook on my steering wheel even though there was mercifully no sign of my crazed pursuer. Someone was looking after me, which made a change. If anything, the track I was on had become more narrow, with a water-filled ditch on either side. Where it would lead was anybody’s guess, but that noisy helicopter was still tantalisingly in view.
Suddenly my phone came to life. Its ring intermittent, so I let down my window to angle its aerial into the windy, earth-smelling air. Was it him again? The cripple? Or the Dog Collar trying to lure me into a snare? Then Eduard came to mind. His steel-blue eyes. His lips, his tongue…
He’d let me down, not the other way round and, like a piece of blown debris, the helicopter was drifting away…
A voice from my phone.
“Elisabeth?”
Don’t use my name.
Him, after all.
I stopped the car. Kept the engine running, my pulse on fire.
“Please, no interruptions,” he said.
The main beneficiary of my largesse lowered his voice, so his next words were barely audible over the tumult outside. My plans had become almost impossible to salvage. The Welsh transporter hadn’t arrived at Mignonville as agreed. Instead, the Hervieux gendarmerie had received an anonymous call from my niece, claiming to be its new driver, with enough evidence of criminal activity to land myself and the Cardiganshire couple behind bars for the rest of our lives. Unless I came clean.
26. John.
Sunday 13th March 4a.m.
The local gendarmerie at Hervieux wasn’t the best place to be so early in the morning but, having found Laure’s room key under our door, her rucksack on her bed and then the broken-up phone call from somewhere in the middle of nowhere, we’d had no choice. To cover themselves, the B&B’s owner had also alerted the police who’d already been searching the surrounding countryside for Mathieu. We’d then followed their blue van to this small, still-sleeping town where the only obvious light came from the room to which we’d been directed.
Alison’s unbrushed hair and lack of her usual lipstick said it all and, while giving Laure’s description to Capitaine Didier Rousson, squeezed her eyes shut as if to keep tears at bay.
“She could be in real danger,” I added to this lean, hard-bitten cop who placed two cardboard cups of coffee in front of us with all the grace of a surly teen. “From her mad aunt. From Sion Evans and a woman called Beti Morgan who’d stolen her horse.”
“
We’re doing our best, Monsieur,” he interrupted. “Given our current lack of resources. Last year’s forest fires and that ongoing case of the missing schoolgirl…” Here his good English petered out, but I’d heard enough to make my heartbeat quicken.
“You mean Sophie Kassel?”
That surprised him.
A nod.
“Look, we need to target the Gallas abattoir at Mignonville urgently,” I said. “All roads seem to lead to this particular Rome. How far is it from here?”
A pause that felt too long.
“Sixty-five kilometres,” said Alison who’d studied the map on our journey here. “We should go now.” She began to get up. Checked her watch. “Time’s not on our side.”
The cop raised his hand in a way that suggested this was his trade-mark gesture. Sat down opposite us, leaning forwards.
“Not yet, hein? There’s Elisabeth Jourdain and her young nephew. They take priority. We’ve just had a call.” He pulled out a small, battered pad from his shirt’s top pocket. “A man who was on the Poole-Cherbourg ferry with her, claimed she’d tried to kill him before she escaped. He’d kept the used syringe as evidence and caught up with her on the N147 near Mazerolles, then lost her.”
“Syringe?” I said, immediately thinking Noctran.
Another nod. “He had a blood test yesterday afternoon. The results shouldn’t take long.”
“I’d like to know when they come through. She’ll be hunting for Mathieu. And Laure, once she finds out about her. Jesus...”
The single bulb above us flickered, and Capitaine Rousson glanced up. “A storm is on its way. Already the Charente has been hit.”
“So, no choppers?”
“Choppers?” He looked puzzled.
“Helicopters,” Alison said, standing up. “I’m sure we heard some earlier.”
“Doubtful. We’ve just had new safety rules about bad weather call-outs.”
“Why not try the army?” She reached down, took a sip of coffee and grimaced. “Surely they’d respond. In the UK they would.”
“We are the army.”
“The GIGN, then?”
“Not a public safety issue.”
Silence in which a down pipe somewhere rattled against the wall. Then Rousson’s desk phone rang. A loud, prolonged sting in the air until his hand was on it. His frown almost caused his eyes to disappear.
“Non. Merde…” He glanced at me, slapping the receiver back into its cradle. Something was badly wrong. He pressed in a number while with his free hand, pulled his jacket from the back of his chair. “Raoul?” he yelled into the phone, followed by a rapid message I couldn’t make out. Alison whispered the word “accident.”
He turned to us. “There’s been a fatality just outside L’hommaizé on the N147. Someone you might know.”
*
We followed his blue van with its spinning light and wailing siren, until another equally noisy gendarmerie van slipped in front of us. After twenty kilometres driving south in a surreal kind of turbulent blackness I’d rarely experienced before, a hazy light appeared in the distance, drawing us to it like moths.
Neither Alison nor I could speak. Dread had kicked in. Laure my first thought. The girl whose father seemed to be off the planet, while above us in that dense, hellish sky, the choppers we’d originally heard from our B&B, had gone.
“Thanks for being here,” I said to Alison, pulling on to a lay-by behind a white SAMU ambulance. “It’s going to be long haul.”
She touched the side of my face, like she’d done earlier before falling asleep. “Maybe not be if we can get to that abattoir.”
“We will. OK?” I said, and then, before I could open my door, Capitaine Rousson stood against it with a shorter man, again wearing a gendarme’s navy-blue uniform, but this time with two full holsters. Having checked our IDs, he led us to where a covered stretcher was being lifted into the ambulance. Two black boots poked out from beneath the already bloodstained red blanket. Judging by the toe shapes, they definitely belonged to a female. But not Laure.
Thank God….
“Do you recognise her?” Rousson quizzed me, placing himself between myself and Alison and both paramedics to peel back the blanket’s top edge. “Might be difficult, given the severe injuries.”
“Beti Morgan.” I said. “I saw her on Friday night in the missing truck’s cab with Sion Evans.”
Rousson seemed to flinch. I wondered why.
“And you?” to Alison who’d glanced at the corpse then turned away.
“I didn’t know her, but you have to trust John here. He was a senior detective for thirty years.”
If he was impressed, the cop didn’t show it.
“Any proof she’d still been in that transporter?” I asked, thinking of the Hunter rifle and new Beretta out there somewhere. “My word alone might not be enough.”
Rousson shook his head. Almost too keenly.
“That’s odd,” Alison said.
“Everything’s bloody odd,” I replied, taking a final look at the dead woman’s grim, bony face, but not the rest, almost in two parts. Severed and crushed by something huge. “Let’s hope we find out what hit her. And,” I looked up and down that oddly quiet road. “Why?”
“Perhaps she’d had a row with that thug,” said Alison. “Fell out of the cab. Or even walked under it deliberately. Perhaps her conscience was kicking in…”
“Unlikely. They both seemed quite happy with what they’d done. She’s from the Sea Breeze Hotel near Glan y Mor in Cardigan, Pays de Galles,” I added, writing it down in my notebook and tearing out the page for him. “I need to call them, yet again.”
I deliberately didn’t mention that DS Rickards would hopefully be doing so. Why? Because this cop didn’t seem to be singing from our hymn sheet.
I was right.
“Non, merci. We’ll do that.” Rousson let his stern gaze rest on Alison. “Do not make this incident known to anyone. Not yet. Not while we have four missing persons to find. And another thing,” his voice hardening against the wind. “Remember you are guests in our country. We have our own methods of detection. Our own procedures…”
I could have sworn he’d clicked his heels together, but then he was gone, leaving us sidelined in the middle of bloody nowhere. The word ‘lemons’ came to mind.
“Incident?” I repeated. “Hardly.”
Alison took my hand. Her fingers cold, tense. But her chin stuck out in that determined way I’d seen during our various sorties in Nottingham.
“Plan A, then?” she said.
I nodded, pulling the blown hair from her eyes. “You’re on.”
*
“Nice to feel wanted,” Alison observed while poring over our road map by torchlight. Did you sense something strange about our guide?”
“Rousson?”
“Yes. He of the tattoed forearm. Surely you spotted the anchor and snake?”
“Can’t say I did.” I had to slow down. The car was being buffeted from all sides.
“Weird…”
“Ben Rogers had something similar, didn’t he?” I said casually. “On his left buttock, he once boasted, down the pub.”
Silence, save for the frantic, blowing trees.
“Sorry,” I said, seeing her expression change. “It just came out. Blame the tension…”
“I can’t see the name of that bloody abattoir’s village anywhere.” She then peered at the open map with the aid of a pocket torch. “Mignons-les-Biens… Mignorettes…” Anything rather than answer my petty, jealous question. “I wish I could remember the one Alain Deschamps gave you.”
She meant why hadn’t I remembered…
Dammit.
We had to stick together even though our hopeful embrace at the hotel in Vierzon had ended in disaster. My erection as brief as a breath before she’d rolled away from me and muttered that young, dead cop’s name in her sleep.
“Definitely somewhere south-east of Poitiers.” I pulled my phone from the glov
e-box, ready to call the racehorse trainer again.
“We’re talking an area the size of Wales,” she snapped. “And forget asking any of the local CRS or gendarmerie to help.”
She was right. And because not all hamlets and villages were included in the pages’ topography, I pulled up the phone’s aerial as thin slices of dawn light were hi-jacking the moody sky.
*
“Who are you phoning?” she said.
“Alain Deschamps.”
“It’s 3a.m. back there, remember? You may get another mouthful.”
“I can take it. Besides, he has to know about this latest development.”
Just as I began to dial his number, my mirrors reflected a dazzling, phosphorescent light from something large approaching from behind. Were they army trucks? Convois exceptionnelles?
Fuck.
Alison too, swore out loud when two closed in and moved over on to our lane in fact. Both like bats out of hell. Covered personnel carriers, more appropriate to the desert than here. Local plates too. Then, having sprayed my windscreen with mud, they vanished into that eerie gloom of a flat, endless countryside where no-one in their right mind would hang around unarmed. The reek of diesel filled the car and Alison wound down her window to dispel it.
“Filthy sods,” she said. “I wonder where they’re going.”
I hit the VW’s accelerator. For a second, its 1.4 litre engine baulked then responded. Alison grabbed my arm. “What are you doing?”
“Following. I’ve got another hunch.”
“You’re mad! They could be anything.”
*
I remembered a similar exchange on Friday morning in the middle of west Wales. But now there was even more at stake. I also recalled how the Turner Street gang in Nottingham had commandeered army Jeeps to ferry their drugs around.
“Those choppers have gone,” I said. “Why? Because something or someone’s been found. We can forget about Capitaine Rousson and his sidekick. We’re on our bloody own.”
Alison’s eyes like a power drill were turned on me. She removed her hand from my arm. “John, just face it. Think back to Karen Fürst and Les Pins. Your current problems, and me…”
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