The Last Witness

by John Matthews

  ‘Right.’ Chenouda’s gaze stayed on her steadily, and for a moment she half expected him to suddenly stand up and announce: ‘But that’s not what we in fact know to be the case, Mrs Waldren.’ And signal his assistant to handcuff her. But in the end all he said was, ‘It must have been very tough on you.’

  ‘Yes… yes, it was.’ She let out a tired breath. As quickly as the pressure had been turned on, it was off again.

  Michel contemplated the papers on the table. It would have made everything so much easier if this was a hoax, a predictable try-on from Roman. But it all seemed so real, far too intricate and detailed to be a scam: the English connection, the court order and birth certificate… the orphanage. Roman was devious, but even he couldn’t have gone to these lengths.

  Michel had already checked her out on the computer for any criminal record an hour before she arrived: nothing. Now he had some new names and details to check, but his first gut feeling was that this English woman, Elena Waldren, was telling the truth. She was Georges Donatiens’ birth mother.

  The coincidence of the timing he’d been uneasy about the most, but her explanation there too had come across as real. Heartfelt, emotional, her voice had been close to breaking at points: if she wasn’t telling the truth, then Roman had found one of the best Michel had ever come across. The other possibility was that Roman had at some stage discovered about her being Georges’ real mother and had pulled her out of the woodwork now when he most needed her.

  But her initial enquiries with the search agency were weeks ago, when Roman still had Georges firmly in his sights and high hopes of soon removing him. And from her passport, her flight over was three days ago, eighteen hours before Georges’ abduction. Even her visit to the orphanage was the day before their final announcement and Roman possibly knowing that he might need her as an ace card.

  Though still Michel sensed an anxiety and nervousness beneath that he couldn’t quite fathom. He looked at her contemplatively for a second as he forced a weak smile.

  ‘I’m sorry, but we can’t be too careful.’ Maybe it was more shell-shock than nerves: she’d obviously been through the mill, and now on top had to face the third degree from him and the worry that having got this far she might fail at the final hurdle. She might never get to see her son. And all of that now rested in his hands. It was enough to make anyone nervous, and that realization also pressed the weight heavier on his own shoulders: just how was he going to wend his way through this, explain? ‘These people threatening your son are highly dangerous and probably by now also desperate. They’d go to any lengths to use others to try and get to him.’ Michel held out a palm. ‘Others such as yourself.’

  ‘Oh, I… I understand.’ Though it had taken a second for the penny to drop. They’d been at crossed purposes all the time! With the questioning starting to have an edge, she’d become convinced that he’d seen something on the computer, but all the time he’d been thinking that she might be a mafia plant! She almost couldn’t resist smiling – partly release of tension, partly at the ludicrousness – but bit it back: out of step with the mood. What had brought them to this room and the fact that its outcome balanced on a knife’s edge, hung heavy in the air, smothered all else.

  Now for the difficult part, thought Michel. He felt her eyes on him expectantly, full of hope that he’d say she’d be able to see her son. The son he’d made sure was hidden away from everyone, possibly never for her to see again. He felt the pressure of it like a dull ache at the back of his neck.

  He remembered his mother saying that if you tell a lie, it’ll come out somehow. ‘Don’t know how, but it always does.’ He’d convinced himself before the meeting that it must be a ruse from Roman. It had his trademark all over it, was the perfect extra pressure to bring into play: ‘You want to hide him away forever: there, I’ve trumped you. The mother he’s never seen. Get out of that one.’ He’d become so convinced that it was false that he didn’t expect to have to face this moment now. Tell this woman who’d already been through a living hell that the chances of her getting to see her son were slim.

  ‘The problem is, Mrs Waldren, as I told Claude Donatiens and he no doubt passed on to you – this programme is very strict. The idea is that your son sees no one – and I mean no one from his past. Now that’s not to say that that rule can’t be broken given very special circumstances, and then again only if we can put the right safeguards in place. The first thing to happen is that we tell your son – because it’s certainly not in the programme’s charter that we withhold vital personal information from him. Now if he doesn’t want to see you for whatever reason, then that’s the end of the road right there. If he does, then it has to be put before the department that set up the programme in Ottawa. Then we have to…’ Michel broke off. She’d been through enough for her not to have to suffer him burying the likelihood of seeing her son under a chain of procedural details. It was the least he owed her. ‘Well, put it this way – we have to measure the strength and need of your request against the risk taken by granting it.’

  ‘What are my chances?’

  Michel looked slightly down to one side. She’d wasted no time, cut right to the core. Now the spotlight had swung round on him, and he found the plea in her eyes unsettling, difficult to meet head on. His first instinct was to bluff, buoy her spirits, if nothing else than to ease that searching stare. But he’d already played enough shadow games with this; he didn’t want to also be responsible for leading her on in the final clinches.

  ‘They’re no better than even.’ His voice was level, matter-of-fact. ‘Your reason and need are strong, couldn’t be stronger – but the risks we’d likely subject your son to are equally as strong. In the end it wouldn’t be up to me to decide – S-18 in Ottawa will have the final say.’ Another truth: Mundy would decide, Michel wasn’t just passing the buck so that he could side-step the pitiful plea in her eyes. Right now he was the only focus for what she wanted.

  But her eyes stayed steadily on him, and she reached one hand across the table and gently gripped his. ‘But you’ll do your best to help me? To try and convince them?’

  Michel wished she hadn’t made that final physical contact: he’d saved a last gap for himself in case he needed to shield within it, stay remote from her dilemma. And now she’d bridged it: he’d felt her hand trembling like a trapped bird, felt all the hopes and desires of a lifetime built up and now passed on to him with that single touch.

  ‘Yes… yes, I will.’ His voice wavered slightly, though once again he was telling the truth.

  But what he couldn’t explain was that he’d plead her case strongly as much for himself as for her: having trawled his conscience long and hard before finally going ahead with Georges’ faked abduction, what he couldn’t bear was an ounce more doubt or guilt over it. And if she finally got to see her son, there was no harm done. Things would be back to how they were before she’d made contact.

  ‘I think we can trace her.’

  Crowley was hit with the claim as soon as he walked in the squad room that morning. DC Proctor, one of the more technically attuned of his team, invariably took pole position whenever things drifted sufficiently into cyberspace to make eyes in the squad room start to glaze over.

  ‘Really?’ Crowley prepared himself for an onslaught of techno-babble as he took of his jacket and looped it over the back of his chair. He might have shown more enthusiasm if Proctor hadn’t broken the golden rule that it was best not to speak to him until he’d downed his first coffee.

  Proctor continued undeterred. Crowley blinked at him twice heavily, yawned, and halfway through headed to the coffee machine with Proctor’s voice trailing behind him. It was about the call Elena Waldren had made with a call card. Yes, central exchange, but the cards were usually all numbered. ‘If we give them the number called and the time, they should be able to tell us what number card made that call.’ Proctor paused for emphasis. ‘And also where that card was sold.’

  Crowley poured and took his
first sip, but the last part had already got him fully awake. His eyes were wide above the cup. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Sure as can be.’

  Crowley gave Proctor the green light to start chasing it. A stream of secrecy and liability disclaimer forms faxed back and forth between them and the global call company eat up much of the day, and mid-afternoon Gordon Waldren was on the line about his wife’s deadline. Could Crowley extend it? His wife had a session planned with a psychiatrist and she fully expected to come out with proof positive that Ryall was molesting Lorena. ‘But I won’t know for sure until my next contact with her at eight-thirty tonight.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Crowley clasped at his hair and looked across at Proctor. At any other time he might have said yes, but if they found a firm trace Turton would probably be reluctant to delay any longer. ‘I’ll make a call to the powers that be and let you know in an hour or two.’

  Proctor had the information in only another forty minutes that the card used was in a batch that went through their distributor for Eastern Canada.

  ‘Eastern Canada?’ Crowley confirmed. ‘They can’t narrow it down closer than that?’

  ‘No, that’s the closest. They supply to the distributor, and from there have no track of exactly which cities which cards go to.’

  Great, Crowley thought: they’d narrowed it to an area geographically five times larger than the half of Western Europe where originally they thought she might be. But at least it was down to a population of 14 million rather than 200 million and the number of cities and towns was far less. He phoned Inspector Turton and explained the state of play.

  ‘Could be just a delaying tactic from Gordon Waldren,’ Turton commented, sucking in his breath: added weight to his deliberation. ‘He knows that she’s made a mistake with the call card, knows that we could well be close to tracing her. So he’s trying to buy some time. But on the other hand, if he’s telling the truth I don’t want a heavy-handed arrest or her cut down in a hail of bullets. So alert the RCMP, but just keep it light-weight for now. Arrange to speak to Waldren at, say, nine tonight, straight after he’s spoken to his wife. And if it appears he’s only mucking us around, get straight back to the RCMP with a grade one abduction alert.’

  ‘Jerry! Jerry!... Jerry!’

  As Georges walked into the lounge from having grabbed a coffee in the kitchen, Clive and Steve were on their feet watching Jerry Springer, chanting along with the audience as two scraggly blondes tried to tear each other’s hair out. Chac sat to one side smiling. Russell was downstairs in the study watching monitors.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re into this shit?’ Georges raised an eyebrow as he sipped his coffee.

  ‘Yeah, we’re into this shit,’ Clive said defensively. ‘It’s one of our top-bet shows. You never know how many times that bleeper’s going to go.’

  As the show wound down and Clive and Steve exchanged some money – Steve apparently held Russell’s stake money – Clive explained. To kill the boredom on safe-house assignments, they’d started betting at first on sporting events: ice-hockey, football, boxing, whatever. Then they’d stretched it to normal TV, with Springer one of the first candidates.

  ‘We’ve been running bets now for over a year on just how many bleeps and fights there are in one show – closest call wins. The record so far is eighty-four bleeps and twenty-two fights.’

  They bet on how many times the dog appeared or the brother called at the door on Frasier, how many tunes were played on Ali McBeal and how often the record needle scratched off halfway through, or whether Kenny would get killed or Chef would sing on South Park. For them the soap opera day suddenly took on a new excitement.

  Georges shook his head with a wry smile and went out to the terrace as Friends came on. The running bet was apparently how many times Joey said ‘Hey’ or whether Phoebe would pick up her guitar. The sun was strong enough by midday that you could sit out wearing a thick sweat-shirt, but still it was crisp. Georges’ breath showed on the air.

  Chac joined him after a minute. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Just starting to worry that this is what my life holds from hereon in: watching ice melt and putting bets on the number of F-words on Springer.’ Georges went back to staring out blankly across the frozen lake.

  ‘I know.’ Chac shrugged. ‘But don’t worry – it’s just the first months until the trial. After, you’ll be re-located with a new identity – be playing golf in the Carolinas or fishing in the Florida Keys with some Jennifer Lopez look-alike on your arm. Or maybe with the language thing, they’ll buy you a new life in the South of France. Things will be looking up again.’

  ‘Yeah, sounds good.’ Georges nodded dolefully. He confided in Chac more than anyone else. Perhaps because Chac had been with him throughout since the abduction, or maybe it was just his size: broad shoulders and soft edges to cushion problems. ‘But the thing is, Chac, I’m missing her. I’m missing her like hell.’

  ‘Did you speak to Michel about it?’

  ‘Yeah. But he says no go. They’ll be watching her too closely, and whatever I said would probably only be used against us at trial.’

  Chac joined him in staring out across the frozen lake. Georges had probably explained it better to him than he’d got a chance to over the phone to Michel: just why he was unhappy leaving things on this note with Simone. And it made sense: a sort of closure to that part of his life so that he could get on with this new chapter now. But Chac could also see the risk from Michel’s viewpoint.

  ‘I’ll try and talk to him about it next time he calls,’ Chac said. ‘Maybe there’s a different angle to play it.’

  Crowley’s call came through to RCMP central in Ottawa at precisely 11.08 am EST.

  ‘No, we can’t narrow it down more than that, I’m afraid.’ And, no, she wasn’t armed and dangerous. ‘In fact they know each other quite well, so the girl is in no immediate danger. But it is urgent we have contact with them and that the girl is returned to her parents.’

  Within the hour the alert was logged and put out on the network for the attention of all stations in Eastern Canada, which included Dorchester Boulevard. But Michel Chenouda had already done his checking for Elena Waldren on the system over an hour ago.

  Then at 12.52 pm EST, Ottawa received another call from Crowley.

  ‘We’ve narrowed it down! They’ve gone to Toronto.’

  ‘You’re sure of that now? Before I make the final change.’

  ‘Yes, yes… positive. We just got the confirmation through from the airline.’

  ‘Okay.’ A few key taps, and the alert was amended solely for Toronto and Ontario police. It had been on the Quebec network for less than two hours before vanishing like a dying radar blip.

  Hanging up, Crowley was bursting with excess adrenalin and energy. They’d finally traced the flight, a charter from Brussels to Toronto and Edmonton: she’d booked all the way to Edmonton, then changed at the last moment.

  Two days with nothing, and suddenly the breaks were all hitting at the same time, the squad room was once again buzzing with it. Often the way.

  The squad room was like a morgue.

  A hubbub of activity only seconds before, each time Michel Chenouda walked in it fell quiet. This was the pay-back for having put them under suspicion with S-18. Michel felt like picking out individuals and saying I don’t think it’s you or you, or ‘Come on, we’ve worked together years now: I’m not pointing the finger at you, it’s others here I’m not so sure about.’ And then those others would stare at him blankly. Chac and Maury Legault were getting the treatment too, because they were the only ones he’d singled out to trust. He’d had to trust somebody, and they were his longest standing partners. But nobody had any idea just how much he’d trusted them, that they shared his secret of Donatiens’ abduction.

  Maury had taken notes during his interview with Elena Waldren, and the squad room had predictably fallen silent as they’d walked back in. Chac thought he’d drawn the short straw getting the ma
in duty guard with Donatiens: unlike him and Maury, he didn’t have kids to see, a failed marriage to try and make good on after the event. But Chac was better off out of it, Michel reflected: at least his isolation was real, tangible. This forced isolation, surrounded by people you knew so well yet were made to feel so apart from and out in the cold, in a way was much harder to take.

  He felt guilty having roped Chac and Maury in on his little scheme, subjected them as well to this icy inter-departmental blast. Along with their help, he’d wanted them as sounding boards to convince himself he was doing the right thing: ‘If we just leave Donatiens, Roman’s going to take him out for sure. All we’re doing is advancing what Roman’s going to do to him in a few days. And at the same time we get our witness.’ Chac and Maury had been heavy with doubt and concern at first. There’d been a lot of frowns and forehead-cradling at the terrible risk to their careers, and Michel moved in swiftly with the clincher. ‘What’s the alternative? We know he’s about to die – yet we just sit around and let it happen?’

  He’d wanted their honest input, but in the end had shamelessly cornered them, left them little choice: how could they put their precious careers before a man’s life? The reverse of that same coin, once the battle banners had been raised, suddenly made their actions seem terribly noble. They’d put their necks on the line to save Donatiens’. Michel clung to that, recited the same headline justification each time the guilt seeped back.

  Because what Michel didn’t want to have to face is that his obsession with the Lacailles might have finally made him step too far. He’d known all along that he was going to corner Chac and Maury, because he couldn’t have done it without them. He didn’t just want head-nods that he was doing the right thing. Chac had in fact helped him choose the two abductors and set things up, then he’d assigned Chac and Maury to watch over Donatiens, allowing just the right leeway for his abductors to get away – until the last moment. Every detail had been painstakingly pre-choreographed and timed.