‘Yes, I suppose so.’ It felt strange having run like a crazed rabbit from the police these past days to suddenly now have them on the same side, calmly discussing how they might work together to nail Ryall.
Crowley felt guilty building up her hopes, but then she’d asked for good news and that was probably the best he could give. With the abduction their chances were probably far less than thirty-percent, and with odds so low it was doubtful the CPS would even take it on. But he didn’t have the heart to tell her that, make everything appear so hopeless at the first strike.
And also he didn’t want to have to face that himself. She’d only just played the tape and broke the news, but already he felt his blood boiling. It was bad enough that Ryall was molesting the girl, but he’d been so arrogant and condescending with pushing them to trace her. Crowley recalled the way Ryall had spoken to him, and he felt like putting Ryall on a spit roast. But how? From what Elena Waldren had told him, without doubt it looked like Ryall was going to walk.
Flesh crawl. He couldn’t have put it better, but his position stopped him being so vocal, forthright. By the book. Sometimes it was frustrating. The seed of an idea started to gel at the back of his mind, but it wasn’t exactly something he’d want to discuss on an open police line.
‘Look – you’ve just broken all of this to me. And there’s a score of things I’d like to check internally before I give you a final opinion. Is there a number I can get you on in an hour or so?’
Elena was back at the hotel to take Crowley’s return call, and by then he had the whole game-plan worked out. She was almost breathless at its audacity.
‘Do you really think it could work?’
‘I certainly hope so. The thing is, what other choice is there?’ Crowley was calling from an outside booth, having already primed the man whose name he’d passed on to Elena. ‘We could contact him and run this, we’ve used him before – but it could take ten days or so to get the paperwork through, with also the chance that it won’t get approved. Concerns about police entrapment and all that. You contact him directly, and he could have it all up and running by tomorrow. You don’t want to leave Lorena exposed with Ryall any longer than you have to.’
The mention of Lorena’s exposure made Elena face again what she saw as the main problem. ‘The trouble is, to pull this off Lorena’s going to have to be in on it. She’s going to have to be told that Ryall’s been molesting her. Knowing that, I’m not sure she could face going back to him – even if it might only be for days.’
‘That’s the one thing I can’t answer for you. Whether or not she’ll be strong enough to go through with this. But that is the choice right there: nail-biting worry for a few days, but if it works she’s rid of him forever. Or take the chances with a court case with the knowledge that there’s a seventy percent chance of her going back to him in six months or a year.’ Crowley suddenly felt he should mention his concerns about the CPS so that she had the full weight of the options. ‘…With the odds so low there’s even the chance of them deciding not to pursue the case at all. She could end up back with him in only weeks.’
There was silence at both ends of the line for a moment. Another strike against. Elena sensed that Crowley wanted her to take the leap, but she just wasn’t sure Lorena was up to it. She’d braved the worst that the Bucharest streets and orphanages could throw at her, but playing this knife-edge game with a wily old fox like Ryall was something else again. She moved on to other issues to give her a moment more to think.
Crowley told her not to worry; Ryall wouldn’t give her any trouble with pressing for abduction charges. His plan was to remind Ryall of the tape she’d left with Gordon and that Lorena had consented, then comment that one of the sessions in Canada could be seen as suspect in regard to him molesting Lorena – though in the end they’d decided it was inconclusive. ‘But of course if he was to press for prosecution with you, you’d no doubt bring all of that out in your defence. That should be enough to warn him off.’
When they came to travel arrangements, Elena said that she didn’t know yet if she could travel back with Lorena. ‘There’s something very important that I might have to stay for.’ She paused only for a second before adding, ‘I’m hoping to meet up with the son I haven’t seen in twenty-odd years. He got separated from me at birth.’ She originally wasn’t going to explain to Crowley, but it struck her that he might think it odd to let Lorena travel back alone, especially given what she might have to face.
If she was staying, they arranged that she’d take Lorena to the nearest British embassy. Crowley would make the travel arrangements directly with them from that point. ‘Either they’ll send someone or we will. Quite honestly, I’d fly over myself and hold her hand all the way if it might make her brave enough to go through with this and help us nail Ryall.’
Elena got the first hint of antipathy between Crowley and Ryall; or maybe it was just the tape she’d played. But, everything else filed and sorted, the problem was back before them: whether a ten-year-old girl could help them succeed where the system had failed.
Ryall had probably been molesting her for years, dragging her down into a deep hypnotic sleep so that he could do what he liked with her. His eager hands travelling all over as her small body lay inert; her steady breathing suddenly fractured, more hesitant, but only part of her subconscious registering what he was doing. And he’d probably done the same with Mikaya for years before that. Elena shuddered with revulsion at the thought. And now as they finally revealed to Lorena what her subconscious had kept trapped for so long, they wanted her to lay inert for Ryall one more night so that they could get the proof to nail him.
Elena rubbed her forehead and glanced towards her hotel room door. Lorena was downstairs, no doubt still swapping stories over the bar with Alphonse. In the end only Lorena could decide if she could possibly face that. Throw the decision back to a ten-year old girl. The rest of them were hopeless: the system, Crowley, and most of all herself – strung out from pills, stress and lack of sleep – she was the last one balanced enough to decide. ‘I’ll talk to Lorena and see what she thinks.’
Elena was still in the same position minutes later, hands clasped anxiously together, chewing lightly at the back of her knuckles, wondering how on earth she was even going to begin to broach this topic with Lorena – I’ve got some good news and some bad – when the phone rang again. It was Staff-Sergeant Michel Chenouda.
‘Mrs Waldren. I’ve got some good news.’
* * * *
‘…I was planning this all for tonight. If we’re going to do this, we should move quick. One thing I argued in your favour is that you’ve just arrived – nobody knows about you. As time goes on, that advantage could be lost. I was thinking, say… ten o’clock tonight. Is that okay?’
‘Yes, yes… I think so.’
‘You’ll have to come on your own… So can you make arrangements for your daughter by then? You won’t be returning till tomorrow morning.’
‘Yes, uh… I have a friend she can stay with.’
‘Fine. Now it’s a few hours run. A two-hour flight by small plane, and the car drive each end. And as soon as you start heading out of the city, you’ll have to wear a blacked-out headset. Secrecy is absolute on this – nobody’s to know where he is.’
Funicelli listened to them go through the last of the arrangements, then phoned Roman. Fourteen minutes later Roman was alongside him in his car as he replayed the tape. They were five blocks away from the Montclaire on Rue Berri. No point in keeping up the look-out: the police might run a sweep before coming by to pick her up. They’d return later and start following.
Roman checked his watch as the tape ran to an end. ‘Just over four hours, huh. We’re going to have to move fast.’
Funicelli nodded thoughtfully. He hit stop and rewound. ‘You should listen to the conversation she had just before.’
‘Right.’ Roman was still thinking about the tight time schedule and the flight. Particularly the fli
ght: that could give them problems tracking and following. It took him a moment to detach to what was happening on tape. He smirked almost as slyly as when he first heard Chenouda had given her the green light. ‘Sounds like she’s a bit of a player herself.’ Some scam with the young girl and the British police, and she’d told Chenouda it was her daughter. But he didn’t have the mind space to throw it around much, his thoughts were quickly back with his own problems. Maybe Roubilliard would be able to help with this flight dilemma. In half of Roubilliard’s distribution territory in the northern reaches of Quebec, light aircraft were one of the main modes of transport.
Roman raised Roubilliard on the phone. He knew at least half a dozen guys with small planes. ‘But probably the best bet is a guy I know with a farm up near Chibougamau – mainly because right now he’s here in Montreal for a couple of days. Flew down yesterday.’
‘Is he someone you’d trust? Some heavy stuff could go down.’
‘Yeah. He’s run more than a few kilos for me in with the seed packets and farm supplies.’
‘Okay. Get back to you.’ Roman was on the phone almost constantly the next hour: Jean-Paul, Frank Massenat, and twice more to Roubilliard, who by then had in turn confirmed arrangements with their pilot for that night, Mel Desmarais.
Only ninety-four minutes from Chenouda’s call to the hotel and they’d worked out every last detail. Two and a half hours left until she was picked up at the hotel. Roman met up with Massenat forty minutes later and they grabbed some kebabs and falafels from a takeaway on St Laurent and sat eating them in a side street in Roman’s BMW, waiting. Funicelli had gone to hire a car for them to follow her – no familiar registrations in sight – and would join them again at 9.15 pm.
Roman made one last call just before Massenat arrived, to Gianni Cacchione. It was a call that he knew one day he’d have to make, but events had brought things forward. Once Georges was hit, the Genie was out of the bottle. He felt strangely empty, morose, after putting down the phone. He’d weighed this from every side so many times that he thought he’d worked the guilt through long ago. Jean-Paul had cast him aside, showed little thought for him while pursuing his foolhardy plans; he’d brought this on himself. Maybe it was just that with Jean-Paul gone, there would be no more challenge, nothing more to strive for; he’d miss the banter and confrontation, playing in the shadows which he did so well. From now on, he’d be in the spotlight.
‘You think everything’s going to go okay?’ Massenat asked.
‘Yeah, it’s not that.’ Heavy rain slanted against the windscreen, and Roman broke off from the repeated tapping of one finger against the steering wheel as he peered up at the night sky. ‘Just not the best night to be flying. So go easy on the falafel and the hot salsa, I ain’t brought a change of suit.’
‘Art. It’s Jean-Paul. I need a favour.’
Art Giacomelli in Chicago listened thoughtfully as Jean-Paul explained his dilemma. ‘Things got that bad between you, huh?’
‘Well – it’s just I don’t know whether I can trust him with this or not. There’s always been some bad feeling between him and Georges, and I’m afraid that in the heat of the moment he might do something rash. It’s important to me that this is done right.’ Jean-Paul could hear the slow draw and exhalation of a cigar or cigarette being smoked Giacomelli’s end.
Faint smacking of the lips as Giacomelli chewed it over a second longer. ‘I can help, Jean-Paul, no problem there. But it’s very short notice – three and a half hours. I’m not going to be able to send one of my own guys. The closest that could make it is a guy I know works out of Toronto – Dave Santagata – ‘Santa Dave’ as he’s known.’
‘Is he good? Can he handle something like this?’
‘Yeah, one of the best. I’ve used him a lot. Young, keen, but not hot-headed. Cool professional all the way – he ain’t earned the catch-phrase ‘Santa always delivers’ for nothing. Don’t worry, he’ll keep Roman in check.’
They made the arrangements. ‘Santa Dave’ would catch the next shuttle flight from Toronto and should arrive with half an hour to spare. He’d call Jean-Paul directly from the airport, by which time Jean-Paul said he’d have phoned Roman and told him he had one more along for the ride.
Jean-Paul looked up at Simone as he hung up. His mouth skewed slightly. ‘Is that okay? Do you feel better now about things?’
Simone ruffled her hair. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ She thought again of George’s panic that night in the restaurant about Roman, then the abduction; and now it was Roman being sent to get Georges out of the clutches of the RCMP. Perhaps someone else riding shotgun like this would make it okay, but still she felt uneasy. She shook her head. ‘Can’t we use someone else apart from Roman?’
‘Who, who?’ Jean-Paul held out both hands. ‘I can’t go myself. Even when the family was more involved with crime, I never get involved with such things – with security. Let alone now. And Massenat on his own without Roman’s direction would be useless. Like sending in a sheepdog without its owner.’
Simone didn’t answer. She cast her eyes back down, shaking her head again slightly. Jean-Paul could tell that she was distraught, anxious, but he didn’t know what else he could do. She looked better than in the panicky first hours after Georges’ disappearance, but not much. Her hair was tidier but still lank, her mascara smudged where she’d rubbed at her left eye, and her face was tight with tension.
He wished he could just reach out to her as he used to when she was a young girl, gently stroke her hair and say, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay.’ And she’d look up at him with big eyes and immediately trust, and that would be the end of it. But she was older now, time had moved on and past him without him hardly noticing – or had he just been too busy taking care of business – it seemed only yesterday she was a little girl. Still he might have been able to get away with reaching out to her, but these problems with Roman and Georges seemed to have put an extra barrier between them that was difficult to reach across.
He felt a sudden pang of fear again, a tight constriction in his chest, that he might lose her over this. In a way he had as much to lose as her if it all went wrong.
Before the call to Art Giacomelli, he’d laid out clearly how he saw everything. They both desperately needed Georges back to talk with him: Jean-Paul felt sure that Georges going into the WPP was purely as a result of the abduction. Jean-Paul wanted to reassure that he’d had nothing to do with that, and hopefully then go ahead with his original plans of getting Georges away to Cuba for a while. And Simone no doubt wanted to let Georges know her feelings, whether their relationship had any future – which Jean-Paul sensed Simone hadn’t even got clear yet in her own mind. One area he’d batted on Georges’ behalf: she felt stung at receiving no call, felt that it was a clear indication of how Georges felt – and he’d defended that it was probably more to do with the rigors of the programme. ‘They wouldn’t allow him to call – no matter the excuse.’
Jean-Paul shook his head in sympathy with her. ‘I don’t think Roman would dare play renegade on this one. He wouldn’t be able to face me if he did. He swears blind that he had nothing to do with the abduction, that it was down to Gianni Cacchione. But even if it was Roman, he was playing under the table where nobody would know and he could get away with blaming Cacchione. Now he’s out in the open with nobody else to blame: he wouldn’t dare take the risk. And with Giacomelli’s man looking over his shoulder, he won’t even get the chance.’
Simone looked up slowly. ‘I hope so. I hope you’re right.’
And for a moment with her eyes fixed on his, it was easy to believe she was a child again, blindly trusting. Things hadn’t really changed that much, Jean-Paul reflected: just with each passing year everything became more complex, the explanations longer in order to gain that same trust.
Elena looked down at the street-lamp light-bars playing across her lap as the squad car made its way through the city, and she recalled Uncle Christos in the taxi the day befo
re she flew out. Streetlight and shadow playing alternately across his face as he’d told her only half the truth about her father. And she’d in turn told everyone else only half the truth. Now you see it, now you don’t.
Shadow games. And now Ryall with Lorena. Close your eyes… trust me. Elena closed her eyes and bit at her lip. She wished she could be as brave as Lorena. She’d left her at the British embassy over two hours ago, and the parting had been emotional, tearful.
At first Lorena had been in shock and very hesitant when Elena told her what had been revealed at Lowndes’ last session, then explained Crowley’s plan. She’d agreed with Lowndes and Crowley to spare Lorena from actually hearing the tape, she just told her that some things in the session pointed to her being right about Ryall molesting her. But very quickly their roles became a reversal of what Elena had expected, and it was Lorena telling her not to worry, she could handle it. ‘If that’s how it has to be, I can do it. Don’t worry.’ Once again one of those Kodak moments when Lorena was suddenly old beyond her years, drawing from some deep inner resolve that had helped her endure the dark days of the orphanages and sewers. She’d survived a thousand rats down there; this was just one more rat.
Returning from the embassy after leaving Lorena, Elena nursed a scotch up at the bar with Alphonse in order to steady her nerves, and after a while felt she had everything under control again. But gradually images started to bombard her: baring her soul to Gordon, fainting in the orphanage, Uncle Christos and her mother on the phone turning her world upside down about her father, the Donatiens telling her that they didn’t think she’d be able to see her son ‘…It was on the news… didn’t you see?’ And it was all going to end here, now, in only a few hours.
The Last Witness Page 51