by Peter May
III
Light came slowly into his world of darkness. But just before light came sound. Distant at first, then jumbled, unrecognizable. Until gradually it grew clearer. Feet moving across wooden floorboards, the rustle of cloth on cloth, a woman’s voice. Words he could not understand. As awareness increased he began to register smells, odours evocative of distant memories. The musk of a woman’s perfume, the smell of hot food, cigarette smoke.
He opened his eyes and light flooded his head in a startling, swimming brightness. He screwed them tight shut and then eased them open more slowly. Where was he? He felt warm and stiff, and all around a delicious softness caressed his skin. Above him he saw a white plaster ceiling supported by black painted beams. A woman’s face peered down at him and smiled. It was a round, pleasant face. She spoke to him, but he could not understand. Her head turned away and she spoke to someone else that he could not see. Consciousness had fully returned now, and with it came a pounding pain in his head. His body ached and he found it almost impossible to move.
With a great effort he pulled himself up on his elbows to lower his horizon. Beyond the end of the bed du Maurier sat on a hard-backed wooden chair, watching him. He wore the same hat and coat as when he’d last seen him, the same weariness etched deeply in the lines of his face. His dark eyes stared sadly back at Bannerman.
The woman bent over Bannerman, blocking the policeman from view, and she plumped the pillow behind his back so that he was supported to sit half upright in the bed. Then she had a bowl of hot soup at his lips. He accepted it gratefully and took rapid gulps of the hot, thick liquid, allowing a little of it to spill from the corners of his mouth in his haste. It tasted good in a way that nothing had ever tasted before. It filled him with a core of warmth that seemed to radiate outwards to reach every part of him. He finished it and let the bowl drop away from his mouth, suddenly self-conscious of the eyes that were on him. And with that self-consciousness came memory, of the events of . . . he knew not how long ago. The red dot, the choking gas in the moonlit bedroom, the agonizing chase across the snowy wastes, the remains of the man in the crater. The rest was hazy. Staggering through the snow, the lights on the road. He held out the bowl and the woman took it.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
She was a plain, plump woman in her middle forties, long thick hair drawn back and held with an elastic band. She smiled.
‘Are you strong enough to talk?’ du Maurier said. Bannerman glanced at him and nodded. The Inspector spoke briefly to the woman, whose face clouded. There was a terse exchange between them which du Maurier cut short with an authority Bannerman had not seen in him before. The woman stopped mid-sentence, colour rising on her cheeks, and left the room without another word. Silence fell in her wake.
This was not a big room. Bare floorboards covered by a small square of rug. Rough plaster walls painted white. The old brass bedstead in which Bannerman lay was pushed against the wall opposite the window. A big wardrobe dominated the room. A dresser and two chairs took up the remaining floor space. The light-bulb dangling from the ceiling was unshaded and threw its unrelenting light into every corner. Du Maurier took off his hat and leaned forward. Elbows on knees, he ran the rim of the hat round and round between his fingers.
‘So,’ he said, ‘I’ve driven all the way from Brussels and I’ve sat up most of the night.’
‘I didn’t know you cared.’
Du Maurier glared at him. ‘If I had not come you might have been in a great deal of trouble. I want to know what happened.’
‘And if I don’t tell you . . .?’
‘You could still be in a great deal of trouble.’
Bannerman considered this. His head hurt, his body ached. He didn’t have the strength to fight. So he told du Maurier exactly what had happened, or as much of it as he could remember. Leaving out only his discovery of the PO box in Brussels and Gryffe’s poste restante card. Somehow, in the telling, that seemed like such an obvious hole. But du Maurier appeared oblivious. He sat listening, his face blank.
‘I don’t know what happened to the shooter,’ Bannerman said. ‘There was an explosion. I have no idea why, but there was not much left of him.’
The Inspector nodded. ‘I’ve seen his remains for myself. You were very lucky, Monsieur. You were saved by a landmine. The woods are riddled with them, a legacy of the last war. There are warning signs every hundred metres or so. It is quite common in this part of Flanders.’ Bannerman shivered suddenly as though someone had walked over his grave. Du Maurier sat back now, his eyes fixed on Bannerman, fingers still turning the rim of his hat. ‘The red spot you saw was a laser beam. These things can pinpoint a target at over one thousand metres. A new American rifle, the B120. The high-powered laser sight enables the marksman to line it up on any target. Even I couldn’t miss.’
Bannerman frowned. ‘But he did.’
‘Yes, he did.’ The policeman paused and placed his hat carefully on his thighs. ‘Let me tell you something, Monsieur Bannerman. The B120 is a highly specialized weapon. There are very few of them around. To be in possession of one you’d have to be somebody pretty . . . special.’
Bannerman considered the implications. And du Maurier’s use of vocabulary. ‘Like . . . Special Forces, you mean?’
Du Maurier shrugged. He was not going to commit himself. ‘Let’s just say a professional marksman.’
Bannerman said, ‘So he wasn’t trying to kill me.’
Du Maurier inclined his head in silent acquiescence.
‘Well it sure as hell didn’t seem like it at the time. What about the gas?’
‘Tear gas, probably. Or something a little more toxic. But you were never in danger, Monsieur Bannerman. He left you a way out and you took it. Though neither you nor he could have foreseen how it would all end.’ He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. ‘How long was it since you had eaten?’
‘I had a coffee and croissant at the station before I caught the train.’
‘And nothing after that?’
Bannerman shook his head.
‘So you hadn’t eaten all day. You spent several hours in a freezing-cold house. You had lacerations to your face and leg. You inhaled a toxic or semi-toxic gas, then ran nearly two kilometres in sub-zero temperatures before falling into a half-frozen stream. You must have the constitution of an ox, Monsieur!’
Bannerman raised a wry eyebrow. ‘They breed us tough in Scotland.’
Du Maurier was unimpressed. He blew smoke at the naked bulb and watched how it clouded the light. ‘When the Police Communale found you in the road you were very nearly dead. They got fluids into you last night and a doctor from Torhout dressed your wounds. His recommendation is that you remain in bed for two or three days.’
Bannerman glanced at the window. There was no sign of light beyond the shutters. ‘What time is it?’
Du Maurier glanced at his watch. ‘Just after eight. It should be getting light soon.’
‘Where are we?’
‘A small auberge in the village of Smoelaert. Just a few kilometres from Monsieur Gryffe’s house – or what’s left of it.’
‘Are you going back to Brussels?’
‘In an hour or so. I have to square things first with the local police.’
‘Will you give me a lift back?’
Du Maurier shook his head. ‘Monsieur, you are in no condition . . .’
But Bannerman was dogged. ‘Will you give me a lift?’
The Inspector sighed. ‘If you insist.’
‘I do.’
They fell silent then, and there was not a sound in the place. Bannerman rubbed the stubble on his chin and saw for the first time that he was wearing an old woollen dressing gown with a faded checked pattern. He looked up to see du Maurier drawing on the last of his cigarette.
‘Who was he?’
The police
man said, ‘An Englishman going by the name of Michael Ritchie. Almost certainly an alias. He had been staying here at the auberge for the last couple of days, and I have no doubt it was he who searched Gryffe’s house before you. The night before last he checked out in a hurry, apparently after getting a telephone call at the inn. He made inquiries at reception about train times to Brussels.’
An ugly little thought wormed its way into Bannerman’s mind. He pushed it aside.
Du Maurier lit a fresh cigarette. ‘You’d never seen him before, I take it?’
Bannerman said, ‘Yes, I had. Yesterday morning at the Gare du Midi. He was waiting on the platform, and got on the same train as me.’ He remembered the face peering at him through the waiting-room window.
‘So he caught a train from here to Brussels, then came straight back on the same train as you.’
‘A lot of trouble for someone to go to not to kill me.’
Du Maurier said, ‘Perhaps he just wanted to frighten you.’
‘They did that all right. Scared the shit out of me!’
‘They?’
Bannerman said, ‘He was just the piper, Inspector. Someone else was calling the tune.’ And when du Maurier frowned Bannerman smiled. ‘A Scottish idiom. Just means somebody else sent him. Someone who’d rather I dropped this story.’
‘Perhaps.’
The policeman drew Gryffe’s poste restante card from his jacket pocket and held it up.
‘You forgot to tell me about this.’
‘So I did.’
‘And do you want to now?’
‘Not really.’
‘Then you’d better take it.’ He held it out.
Bannerman pulled back the covers and very gingerly swung his legs over the side of the bed. He took the card and looked at du Maurier with genuine surprise.
‘It’s of no use to me,’ the policeman said. ‘And in any case, my superiors would only bury it.’
‘I thought you’d had a crisis of conscience about feeding me information.’
Du Maurier’s head fell a little and an odd melancholy washed over his face. ‘Things have changed since then.’
Bannerman frowned. ‘What’s changed?’
The policeman sighed. ‘The night before last, just a few hours after you visited her, Tania Slater went missing. An alarm was raised after an apparent break-in at the clinic and her room was found empty.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I
The afternoon editions of the evening papers were on the streets. The sounds of traffic, of people laughing, of the paper-boy calling headlines, floated through the doors of the café. Tucked away in a side street off the Boulevard Adolphe Max, this place felt removed from the life that flowed around it like a stone in a stream.
Kale sat in the farthest corner from the door. Here he sought refuge, alone in a dark place where his face was unknown. He would be neither noticed nor remembered. The only light came through grimy windows that faced on to the street. The floor was unswept, tables and chairs rocked on uneven legs. Half a dozen people sat alone, staring gloomily into drinks that they made last for hours. Or gazing sightlessly at the flickering screen of a TV set on the far wall. The sound was set to mute, but the second-hand images of other people’s lives held a mindless fascination. Company for lonely souls.
An old woman with short grey hair sat behind a scarred zinc bar, staring into space, puffing periodically on an evil-smelling cheroot. Kale stared despairingly at the newspapers in front of him. He had bought them all. This day and the day before. Scrutinizing every column inch of words he did not understand. Searching but never finding. There was nothing that even remotely suggested a story about a missing child. Not even anything on the shootings at the Rue de Pavie. It was as though none of it had ever happened. He was discovering a quiet, alien desperation in himself, a need to know that his existence made a difference, that the things he did had consequences. Here in this strange foreign city, where he knew no one and no one knew him, it was as though he did not even exist.
The nightmare quality of the last days haunted him. He had discovered things in himself that he never knew were there. Things that confused him, frightened him. His values, if he’d ever had any, his relationship with the life that ebbed around him, had altered beyond his understanding. It was as if he had thrown a pebble into a pool and seen the stone vanish without breaking the surface of the water. There were no concentric rings radiating out to infinity, no evidence that the pebble had ever existed. Would such a man, perhaps, begin to doubt his own existence? Would he then dare to look into the pool for fear that there might be no reflection?
He pulled on the last inch of his cigarette and blew grey smoke through nicotine-stained teeth. Why had he not killed her? The opportunity had been his for the taking. And why, after only two days, had the killings in the Rue de Pavie vanished from the front pages? The papers, surely, should still be full of it. As they should be full, today, of the disappearing child.
He had bought English newspapers, too, at a newsagent’s in the centre of town. Front pages had been given over again to the election; the Prime Minister speaking in Edinburgh; the Leader of the Opposition making an important policy statement on immigration.
Why had he not killed the child?
His mind drifted back to the hospital in the snow, to the sudden flood of light from the downstairs window which had trapped him like a rabbit in the headlights of a car. He had seen the child looking down at him, seen the recognition in her eyes. Even then, after the light had gone, it had not crossed his mind to draw back. Neither had he fought against the irresistible pull of the currents that drew him towards the vortex. He had moved around the house, forcing a window and climbing into the pitch darkness of the kitchen. It must have been then that he had heard the first whispers of guilt. Something in the warmth of the place, the stale smell of cooking, a scrap of blue ribbon lying on a work surface by the door. Something reminiscent of his childhood.
In the hallway, night lights glowed faintly along the ceiling and his heart leapt at the sight of a figure watching him from the far end. It took several seconds before he realized he was looking at his own reflection. A mirror on the far wall. He had stood staring at the mean and furtive figure that was himself, unable to move, unable to draw his eyes away from it. And for just a moment he thought he saw his mother’s face staring back at him out of the darkness. He had never seen the resemblance before. It was uncanny.
The spell had been broken by the sound of footsteps coming from somewhere in the house, falling softly like blows upon his conscience. Was it fear that had made him turn on his heels and run? Back through the kitchen, out again into the cold night, the window left swinging behind him.
In the darkness he had stumbled through the snow in despair. And as he came around the house he saw her. A shadow in the night running down the steps, a coat clutched tightly, a woollen hat pulled down around her head. She had glanced in his direction, but hadn’t seen him, and had run away across the terrace. She slipped and fell. He heard her sobs as she picked herself up and ran on, out of sight down the driveway. He might have followed. It would have been easy then. But he had not.
A gendarme came into the café, a black cape across his shoulders, and Kale tensed. The policeman cast an eye around the tables. Was it only in Kale’s imagination that his eyes had rested longer on him? He stared back out of sullen, hateful eyes and the policeman turned away to buy a pack of cigarettes. He exchanged a few words with the grey-haired woman and left without a backward glance.
Kale finished his beer, left fifty francs in the saucer, and went out into the street. He scuffed along the pavement close to the wall, away from the boulevard, turning left into the Rue Neuve and along to the Place de la Monnaie. A great weight had settled on him. He stopped to light a cigarette and looked up to see the man he had followed to the hospital.
&nbs
p; Bannerman was crossing the square only fifty metres away. Kale stood transfixed, watching as the man climbed the steps to the heavy swing doors of the Post Office. It all came back to him. The knowledge of what he must do. He might almost have cried. Something he had not done since childhood. But then, that would have shown weakness, and he could not afford to find yet more fault in himself. He slipped his right hand into his coat pocket and felt the slip of paper he had drawn from the left-luggage locker. Just three words. They very nearly burned his fingers.
II
Some time later, Bannerman stepped into the warmth of the IPC building. There was still an ache in his bones and he felt a slight shiver raise goosebumps on his skin. A fine, cold sweat crawled across his forehead. He passed the reception desk. The telephonist did not look up from her magazine. In the press bar he sat on one of the high stools and leaned forward on his elbows, breathing heavily. The barman raised an eyebrow. ‘Monsieur?’
‘Whisky.’
He clutched the glass with trembling fingers and poured its golden warmth over his throat.
‘Another.’
We are making every effort to find her. Du Maurier’s words came back to him. They had been walking across the street from the auberge to the car, the sun rising over the tops of trees that were sculpture against the palest of skies. ‘But there has been none of the attendant publicity you would expect. People in high places are afraid it could resurrect the entire case. And God forbid such people might put the welfare of a child above their own survival.’
Bannerman’s breath had drifted like mist into the early morning. ‘Is there any chance, do you think, that they will find her alive?’
Du Maurier said, ‘You want my honest opinion?’
Bannerman nodded, knowing what the answer would be.
‘No.’
‘And I suppose nothing of what happened here last night will reach the papers either.’