The Last Witness
Part One
John Matthews
John Matthews is the author of eight books: Basikasingo, Crescents of the Moon, Past Imperfect, The Last Witness, The Shadow Chaser, Ascension Day, The Second Amendment and (under the name of John Kilgallon), The Prophecy. Combined, they have sales of 1.2 million copies over eleven languages. In 2004, Past Imperfect was included in a list of top-ten all-time best crime-legal thrillers in The Times. John Matthews lives in Surrey, England with his wife and son.
Reviews:
Distinctively written… all the forceful energy of the best thrillers.
- Kirkus Reviews.
Gripping, pulse-racing. A police departments determination to bring down a leading crime family merged with one woman’s quest to uncover a secret past.... Brilliant!
- Evening Herald.
If you think in terms of the sort of ‘woman in jeopardy’ mysteries that Nicci French writes so well, blended with a harder-edged ‘Sopranos’-style thriller, then you’ll have nailed the heart of this story. Strongly sketched characters and emotions make this one stand out from the pack.
- Murder One.
PROLOGUE
April 4th, Montreal, Canada.
There are times when all hope seems lost. When every precept and foundation previously held as true seems to have been torn down or to have faded into insignificance, and all that surrounds and lies ahead is grey desolation. And while those feelings may not last long, perhaps only moments, when they hit they are all-consuming, they form a high, impenetrable wall beyond which nothing else can be seen.
Elena Waldren was gripped by such dark contemplation, darker than she’d ever known before, as she sat parked in Montreal’s Rue St-Urbain, thousands of miles from her home in Dorset, on probably the most important quest of her forty-five years, her passenger a ten year-old Romanian girl who at one time had been as close as her own daughter, though had become practically a stranger the past two years. She shook her head; that was part of the problem right there. But she couldn’t keep them all under her wings forever.
She’d pulled in hurriedly to the side, and the afternoon traffic flowed past, becoming heavier now towards the rush hour. Rain pattered against her windscreen, slanting slightly with a fresh breeze off the St Lawrence. Elena remained oblivious to everything beyond her own thoughts, her head buried in the crook of her right arm braced against the steering wheel.
How could she have been so wrong about everything? She’d always thought she’d seen so much, lived so many roller-coaster troughs and peaks, that there could be few surprises left; the one advantage of the over-forties. And now in only two days, half of her past had been completely re-written.
‘Are you okay?’ Lorena asked.
‘Yes… I just need a minute. I’ll be fine.’ Fine? The police wire had been out for a while now, probably since their trail through France, and no doubt soon her face would be on TV news bulletins. And for what? Her own quest now at a dead-end, and the danger that had led her to take such drastic action and drag young Lorena on this odyssey – as so many people kept telling her all along – was probably imagined. For the first time Elena woke up to just how much she was out of her depth: she was just an aid worker from a backwater Dorset village home shared with her pipe-smoking, unassuming husband and two children; running the gauntlet with police across two continents was far removed from any past experience she could draw upon.
But at least she now knew his name: Georges Donatiens. Twenty-nine years, and she’d missed him by only days. Never to be seen again. Cruel fate. All she had, or would ever have, was his name on a scrap of paper and the few brief reminiscent stories from the Donatiens.
‘Georges. Georges Donatiens.’ She whispered the name almost as an incantation, as if that might suddenly bring a clearer image to mind beyond the few stark, smiling photos she’d scanned at the Donatiens’. Something to help fill that twenty-nine year void. She felt nothing now but cold and empty, and she braced her head firmer into her arm to quell her body’s trembling. Tears were close, but she swallowed hard, biting them back. Lorena had been through enough, half of it imagined or not, to see her now so distressed.
She took a fresh breath and sighed it out. It would probably have been just as bad if she had met him, started to sow the first seeds of attachment, only for him then to be taken brutally away. Either way, the pain now would have been the same.
She started to shake off her dark mood, lift her head – but Lorena’s muttered ‘Ele!…’ and her suddenly aware of a figure by the car, made her look up sharper: brown uniform, one hand by the gun holster, the other reaching out.
The RCMP officer tapped at her window, signalling for her to wind it down.
ONE
February 11th, Montreal, Canada.
‘Two minutes over now. He’s late.’
‘Don’t worry, he’ll show.’ Michel Chenouda sounded confident, but inside it was just one more worry to stack with the mountain of others that had built excruciatingly over the last hour of the set-up.
Four of his RCMP team were with him in the 2nd floor of the warehouse overlooking the St Lawrence dockside, the other three in an unmarked car around the corner, and dead centre in their night-sight binoculars’ frame was their mark Tony Savard, waiting on Roman Lacaille and his men. It was –7ºC that night and Savard’s breath showed heavy on the air. Three years tracking in the shadows of the Lacailles, Montreal’s leading crime family, and now hopefully, finally, Michel would nail them.
The Lacailles had put up a strong legitimate business front over recent years, but Chenouda was convinced they were secretly behind Eastern Canada’s largest drugs supply network. Then eleven months ago with the murder of Eric Leduc, one of the network’s key men, he had the confirmation he wanted: Roman Lacaille was responsible for the murder, had pulled the trigger himself in a fit of rage. They heard it first from the car’s driver when pressured over a vice bust; but he refused to officially testify and finger Roman Lacaille, and five months later he was dead. A ‘boating’ accident. That left only two other witnesses: Tony Savard and Georges Donatiens. But Donatiens was too much ‘family’ for them to hope he’d testify, so they’d piled on the pressure with Savard: if he didn’t come forward, he’d be next to go the same way. Finally Savard cut a deal.
The only problem was that unlike Donatiens – who was in the back of the car when Leduc was shot – Savard was standing outside the car on watch. He hadn’t seen Roman Lacaille actually pull the trigger. There was also the problem of Roman Lacaille’s likely plea of self-defence.
The plan now was therefore a meeting with Roman Lacaille to discuss general business, and almost jokingly, by-the-way, Savard would comment about the mess of cleaning up after Leduc. ‘Couldn’t you have shot him out of the car? We were still finding bits of him there two days later.’
Once Roman Lacaille opened up about the shooting, Savard would then press a bit about the gun on the floor not being Leduc’s normal piece to try and break his self-defence story, and they’d get it all on tape. Enough hopefully to…
‘Attends! Something’s happening. Vehicle approaching... fast! But it’s not Lacaille’s Beamer, it’s a black van. Stopping. Back doors opening… two men getting out. Something’s wrong. They’re wearing ski masks!’ Chac, his closest aide in the RCMP, was main look-out. Chac moved quickly aside and let Michel Chenouda look through the binoculars.
Michel watched as a startled Tony Savard was bundled into the back of the van, looking sharply over his shoulder; a silent plea for help. Michel reached for the radio mike.
‘Move now! Two men have just grabbed Savard. Black Chevy Venture. No sign of Lacaille, and we’re not even sure it’s his men. So get close so that you�
�re ready to cut in on them when I say.’ Michel had switched to English for the command. The driver, Mark, was only three years up from Ottawa, and Michel liked to use English with those for whom, like him, French was a second language. Now more than ever: he couldn’t risk even a split-second delay for the driver to understand.
As the back-up car swung into view, a faint night mist swirling opaque in its beam, the van was already heading off. A gap of maybe eighty yards between them, Michel estimated, but closing quickly with the car having gained momentum. Sixty yards, fifty…
But as they came to the end of the warehouse block and the first inter-section, Michel watched in horror a large double trailer cut suddenly across just after the van had passed. The squad car braked hard and slued to an angle, stopping just yards short.
They beeped, flashed their lights and shouted furiously, but the truck driver simply lifted his palms and shouted back in defensive protest. Only when badges were frantically waved and their cherry siren was put on the roof and fired up, did he start moving; though even then only slowly. The van was long gone.
At that moment, Savard’s voice came over clearly on sound. ‘Jesus! What’s happening… what’s going on?’
Only silence returned. Nobody answered.
Michel watched the screen-finder dot recede rapidly out of the dockside, continuing straight for a moment before bleeping and flashing at a tangent. ‘They’ve turned off either at Lafontaine or Ontario, heading east,’ he hissed into the radio-mike. ‘Looks like they’re headed downtown. We’re going to cut across and back you up.’
Michel grabbed the screen-finder and directed two of his men to come with him, the other to stay with Chac. They took the stairs at a flying run, two and three at a time. Michel’s heart pounded hard and heavy, almost in time with the screen dot. His breath rasped short; he was heavier than he’d have liked, and at moments like this it told.
Michel took the passenger seat, and the youngest of them, a lanky, twenty-nine year old Montreal anglophile named Phil Reeves, drove. His heavier, twelve years older, bulldog-expressioned Quebecois partner, Maury Legault, sat in the back. In age, build and countenance, Michel was practically a hybrid between them. Except that in certain lights and at certain angles, his high cheekbones and the slight almond slope of his dark brown eyes gave away his part Mohawk ancestry. But now as they sped off and he caught his own reflection briefly in the side window, he looked as hangdog as Maury. Defeated. Three years work funnelled now into only frantic minutes, and it was all fast slipping away.
Michel watched the dot bleep deeper. As they approached Lafontaine, he could tell now that the van was on Ontario, the next cross street. He raised Chac on the radio-phone.
‘Anything on sound?’
‘Nothing significant. Some rustling and movement, traffic sounds in the background, but no voices. Nothing since Savard asked ‘what’s happ–’’
Even over the radio mike, Michel heard what had stopped Chac mid-sentence: a faint background crunching and a strangled, guttural ‘Maird!’ followed by some indiscernible mumbling from Savard. At that same instant, the screen-finder dot disappeared.
‘No, no… please no.’ Michel closed his eyes for a second as he made the breathless plea. He swallowed hard, fearing the worst with his next question. ‘Have you still got sound, Chac?’
‘Yeah… still there. Heavier rustling now, and Savard’s breathing’s more laboured. Now he’s coughing... or sounds like him. The others wouldn’t come over that clearly.’
Michel slowly let out his breath and opened his eyes again. Thank God at least they still had that. The directional signal had been in Savard’s watch, the wire – because they knew Savard would likely be searched vigorously by Lacaille – was sewn discreetly into his coat lapel.
‘They’ve obviously only smashed his watch. Let’s just pray they don’t find the sound bug.’ But he knew it was practically worthless unless Savard’s captor’s actually spoke, gave some clue of where they were headed. ‘Link me in directly to the wire, Chac. We’re running blind here. Maybe I’ll be able to pick up something from background traffic and city sounds.’
As soon as the wire feed came over the radio, Michel turned it up. The hiss of static and faint rustling filled the car. Michel immersed himself in it, blotting out completely the surrounding traffic noise as Phil sped along Rue Ontario. After a moment he could pick out the rise and fall of Tony Savard’s breathing. A faint cough, a swallow. Then a few seconds later Tony Savard’s voice came over, loud and distorted.
‘Where are we going? I can’t see nothing with this hood on?’
Michel clenched a fist tight. Savard was trying to tell them what he could. No answer returned. Michel honed in on background sounds beyond Savard’s breathing: traffic drone, a horn beeping, faint distant siren wail. Michel turned the radio down. He couldn’t hear the siren himself from outside, which worried him. It meant that they weren’t anywhere close to Savard.
Michel patched in to the other car. ‘Mark, can you hear a siren from where you are?’
Moment’s pause, then: ‘No, nothing here.’
‘We’ve lost directional, but we’ve still got wire sound. Any fix on where they’re headed from where you are?’
‘We followed what you last gave us, east on Ontario. But no sign of them. They gained a good half mile when the truck blocked us. They could be anywhere.’
‘Okay. I’ll let you know if we pick up anything useful on the wire.’
Back to Savard’s breathing. The siren had now faded from the background. Then after a moment in gruff Quebecois, the first comment from Savard’s captors.
‘Where’s our drugs money, Tony?’
‘Quoi?… What drugs money? I don’t know nothing about that. I was there for a meet with Roman Lacaille.’
‘Don’t know the man personally. Now, again – where’s our money, Tony?’
‘I don’t know… don’t know what you’re…’
Chac’s voice crashed in. ‘More action here. Roman Lacaille’s Beamer’s just rolled up. He’s getting out with another man, bold as you like… looking around.’
Michel’s stomach fell. Whatever was going to happen with Savard in the van, Lacaille was distancing himself from it. ‘I turned up as arranged, but he’d already gone. And half a dozen RCMPs know it couldn’t have been me, because they were watching me through binoculars.’
‘Now he’s lifting his arms in a “where is he?” gesture.’
Michel could picture Lacaille gloating as he made the gesture. He closed his eyes and solemnly nodded. ‘Okay. Nothing we can do with him, though. And he knows it. Put me back to the wire.’ Staying with Lacaille wasn’t productive.
‘…last time. Where is it, Tony?’
‘I told you… I don’t even know what you’re talking about.’
A heavy pause, background traffic drone returning, Savard’s breathing laboured, expectant. Then finally: ‘Well… if he’s not going to talk.’
Michel tried to discern what was happening from the next sounds: heavier rustling, movement closer to Savard, then a guttural ‘Espece d’encoulé! What the fu… uuugh,’ receding quickly into two more grunts and heavier breathing from Savard, now raspier, more nasal. Michel guessed that Savard’s mouth had been bound. The rustling and movement receded, then after a second a fresh voice came from the front.
‘Bon. So, where are we going to do this?’
‘I thought Saint Norbert.’
‘No, not good. The car park there’s only five storeys. He might survive the drop. Could still be alive and talking when he hits the deck.’
Michel’s hopes leapt: some fix on where they were headed at last! But at the same time the reason for the binding became clear, and he felt for Savard: they knew he’d start shouting and screaming at their new turn in conversation. Michel could hear Savard hyperventilating with fear, muffled grunts mixed with rapid nasal wheezing.
‘So where would you suggest?’
‘Place Philips
car park. Eight floors, straight down. He won’t survive that.’
Savard’s grunting and wheezing was almost out of control, combined now with some heavy rustling and thudding. He was obviously writhing around in protest, the only movement he was left with.
Michel wished that he could reach out and hug and reassure Savard: Don’t worry. We know where they’re headed now. We’ll get to them before they can throw you.
Phil turned and dropped two blocks down to Rene Lévesque to make better time heading into the city centre, and Michel alerted Mark on the radio phone. ‘We just got it on the wire that that’s where they’re headed.’
‘Saint Catherine entrance or Philips?’
‘We don’t know. You take Saint Catherine, we’ll take Philips.’
Silence again. Only the sound over the wire of Savard’s muffled, laboured breathing as Phil floored it through the night-time streets, touching seventy.
Within the cocoon of darkness of the hood, Savard’s terror had reached a peak. He’d found breathing difficult with the restriction of the hood as it was, had felt his own hot breath bouncing back at him; but now with something bound tight around his mouth over the outside, pushing the cloth in, it was practically impossible. With each breath the cloth felt as if it was sucking in, gagging him, and the binding had also pulled the hood tight against his nose. Upon hearing he’d be thrown, he’d writhed and banged about; partly in fear, partly in vain hope of catching the attention of cars or people they passed. But as the blood pounding through his head hit a hot white crescendo and he felt nauseous and almost blacked out, he stopped. He reminded himself of the wire. They’d handled him roughly bundling him into the van and tying his hands and feet, but he was pretty sure it was still there. Michel had no doubt heard where they were headed.
The Last Witness Page 1