by Chris Ewan
Silence inside.
Trent stepped in. He listened hard. A fridge burbled and hummed.
He scanned the cramped interior. It was sparse and uninviting. The furniture was functional but dated. There were unwashed dishes in the sink. A kitchen bin in need of emptying. The chemical odour of a toilet.
‘Serge?’ Alain called.
There was no response. No rumblings or stirrings from upstairs.
Alain moved around the wicker couch towards the ladder. He hauled himself up the treads and climbed onto the mezzanine platform. He hit a wall switch and light flooded the sloping timber ceiling. Alain paced around up there, dust sprinkling down from the boards.
‘Come,’ he said, his voice gruff.
Trent mounted the ladder until his head cleared the platform. Alain was crouched low, his back pressed against the angled ceiling boards, his legs straddling a mattress down on the floor. Tousled sheets were thrown back. The bed was empty. A series of low cupboards were fitted into the eaves beneath the lowered window blind. The cupboard doors were open. They were completely bare.
Chapter Fourteen
One month ago
The modest apartment that Trent shared with Aimée in the Panier district of Marseilles felt emptier every day. There was plenty of stuff lying around. Teetering piles of DVDs and old CDs. Stacks of newspapers and magazines. Dirty clothes strewn across the floor and trash on every available surface.
But there was no conversation. No laughter. No knowing glances. No hurried, clumsy shedding of clothes and fumbling with clasps. No warm, twisted sheets.
She was gone. Had been missing for one month already. Without word. Without contact. And as each day passed, Trent experienced a creeping dread. What if he’d made a mistake? What if she hadn’t been kidnapped? What if something else had happened? Something worse?
He couldn’t contact the police. What would he say? That his fiancée had vanished more than four weeks ago and he hadn’t reported it until now because he’d been sure that it was a kidnapping for ransom?
And what if he’d been right the first time around? Maybe it was still an abduction and the people behind it were biding their time, making him sweat, making him doubt himself?
The phone wouldn’t ring. It never made a sound. It perched silently on the kitchen counter, wired up to some digital recording equipment that had grown dusty with disuse.
How many times a day did he check the line? Two, maybe three to begin with. Then it got worse. He found himself checking all the time. And that was a problem. Because what if they called when the phone was off the hook? What if they waited a day or more before calling again?
He was losing control. He was losing his capacity to think.
He’d witnessed this kind of destructive spiral in his clients many times. Watched people crumble before his eyes. Usually he was the one holding everything together. But right now he needed help. An objective assessment of the facts from someone whose judgement he trusted.
He flipped open his mobile and dialled the same guy he’d contacted from Naples.
* * *
Luc Girard arrived within two hours. Trent led him inside and watched as Girard scanned the living room like he was the first responder to a crime scene. Girard’s head turned slowly. He sniffed the air. His bulbous nose wrinkled and he walked across and pushed open a window looking over the shabby square that Trent’s apartment fronted onto. There were threadbare trees out there, and splintered park benches, and an old, neglected fountain that was empty of water. Across from Trent’s home was a children’s nursery with a fenced-in playground. Trent could hear the giddy shouts and howls of the children, their cries piercing and shrill, like a twisted rebuke.
‘You look like hell,’ Girard said.
Trent gazed down at himself. He was wearing an old pair of jogging trousers and a sleeveless blue vest. The vest was stained with last night’s takeaway. He could smell his own odour. A musty fug of dirt and sweat.
‘And your apartment is a dump.’
Trent could have told him that he and Aimée had opted to live somewhere unassuming because they preferred not to flaunt their success and aggravate any of the regional kidnap gangs. But then he realised Girard was talking about the mess.
Girard moved across to the breakfast bar that separated the living room from the kitchen. He prodded an empty fast food container.
‘Do you have any real food in your apartment?’
Trent stared back. Healthy eating was the last thing on his mind right now.
Girard shrugged and withdrew a crumpled cigarette packet from his back pocket. He clamped a cigarette between his lips and sparked a lighter. He took a swift draw, then gestured phlegmatically with the lit end. Look at us, he seemed to be saying. Look at where we find ourselves now.
Girard had a craggy, deeply tanned face. His worn skin was bunched heavily beneath his eyes into weary pouches and sagged loosely around his drooping mouth and fatty jaw. He’d tried to camouflage his hangdog expression by cultivating a neat goatee beard, but his true salvation was a leonine mane of fine grey hair. It was long at the front and curled in towards his eyes, habitually blocking his vision until he smoothed it back with a practised sweep of his hand.
Today he had on a yellow sports shirt over grey chinos. Back when Trent had known him as a police detective, heading up a specialist anti-kidnap unit based in Nice, he’d favoured a blue blazer over a shirt and tie. Always the same blazer, worn shiny at the elbows. Always the same tie, blue with diagonal red stripes.
‘How’s the investigation?’ Trent asked.
These days, there was only one investigation. It was the same case Girard had been running all by himself for close to eighteen months.
Girard’s lips crinkled around his cigarette. Smoke drifted up past his pouched eyes.
No response. Trent wasn’t surprised. In all probability, he was the last person in France Girard would tell.
‘No progress?’ Trent pressed.
Girard pinched the cigarette between his finger and thumb and plucked it from his mouth. He stared at the burning embers like a guy contemplating setting light to something explosive.
‘You’ve heard nothing?’ he asked, circling close to Trent’s telephone and bending down to study the recording equipment. Ash tumbled from his cigarette onto the machine and Trent tried not to let it bother him.
‘There’s been no contact,’ he conceded.
‘It’s been a month already?’
‘Four weeks, two days.’
‘And her mobile?’
‘I still can’t get through.’
Girard nodded, venting smoke through his nostrils. He straightened and smoothed back his hair, then strolled behind the kitchen counter and grimaced at the mound of dirty crockery in the sink.
‘You understand, I know,’ he said, ‘that there is a question I must ask.’
‘She didn’t leave me,’ Trent replied.
And right then – bam – that precious image of Aimée filled his mind. Sunlight on white sheets and freckled skin. The impish smile on her lips. In her eyes. The hint of a secret about to be revealed. A good one. Long cherished. The fan of auburn hair on her pillow. Her hands clenched slackly above her head. An object in her right fist. Held back from him but familiar all the same.
He blinked and saw that Girard was staring at him. His sunken eyes were damp, pupils jinking left and right, like he could see inside Trent’s mind. Could watch the scene play out for himself.
Trent banished the memory. Buried it deep. He nodded for Girard to continue.
‘Forgive me,’ Girard said, and the wavering note in his voice was almost more than Trent could bear. ‘But you know that I’ve seen it before. A husband, convinced that it’s an abduction…’ His words floated away with the cigarette fumes.
‘That isn’t what’s happened. All her things are still here. Her clothes. Her passport.’ He bit hard on the side of his mouth. ‘We were happy.’
Deliriously hap
py, but scarily happy, too. Because from early on in their relationship, even as Trent had marvelled at how perfectly they seemed to fit and how wonderful their life together could be, he’d been unable to escape the lurking dread of the pain he’d experience if someone ever took her from him. Their love had made him vulnerable. Made him fearful. Transformed him into the muddle-headed dope he’d become today.
Girard let the moment spool out. He stood there, unmoving, in his canary yellow shirt and his dumb pleated trousers, smoke weaving up from the cigarette in his hand.
‘You’ve heard nothing about her car?’ he asked, finally.
‘I’ve heard nothing about anything.’
‘And her friends?’
‘There are none I can trust not to go to the police.’
Girard remained impassive. Maybe his retirement had changed things. Maybe the implied barb didn’t sting any more.
He plugged the cigarette into the corner of his mouth. Palmed back his hair.
‘Nobody threatened you?’
‘Plenty of people have threatened me.’
‘Anyone in particular? A specific gang?’
‘Not lately.’
Girard nodded, the cigarette jerking up and down in his mouth, threads of ash drifting into his beard.
‘Who knew that you were in Italy?’
‘Anyone could know. I was listed as a speaker on the website for the convention.’
Trent was growing impatient. He shifted his weight between his feet.
Girard held up a palm. He pulled free his cigarette and extinguished it on one of the plates in the sink.
‘You ask my opinion?’ He exhaled the last of the fumes. ‘OK, my opinion is that your fiancée was not kidnapped. And you say she did not leave you. What, then, could have happened to her?’
Trent gaped at Girard like a man staring cruel death in the face. He’d asked for this. Invited it into his home. A second opinion. Only now that opinion was rushing at him too fast. Was too hard and uncompromising. He could taste something foul in his mouth. Like dirty water. Like decay.
‘We need to begin by retracing Aimée’s movements in the days before she disappeared,’ Girard said. ‘Who did she meet? Where did she go? I’m sorry, but this is the best way – maybe the only way – to find out who may have harmed her, and why.’
Chapter Fifteen
Alain fumbled with his keys as he led Trent in through the front door of the villa. He found the one he was looking for, then inserted it into the deadlock on a door immediately to Trent’s left. The tumblers tumbled and Alain passed inside and hit a light switch on the wall but Trent didn’t follow straight away. He was staring at the ring of keys left hanging from the lock.
Most of them were standard house keys. But one was different. It was small and stubby, fashioned from aged brass. Trent was pretty sure it would fit the locks on Jérôme’s desk. And it was right there in front of him.
He reached out a tentative hand but Alain chose that very moment to stick his head back into the foyer.
‘What are you waiting for?’
Trent closed his fingers into a fist. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Go ahead.’
The room was very cramped. Little more than a cupboard. It was only just big enough for the two men to squeeze inside. It was windowless. The air was stale and the only light source was a twitching fluorescent tube fitted to the low ceiling above. There was a desk, a stool, a microphone and a bank of security monitors.
Trent counted twelve monitors, laid out in three rows of four screens. The screens were small. A different image was flickering on each one. Most were colour. The rest had the green-grey wash of night-vision technology. They were fewer in number, located in areas where there were no security lights.
After ten seconds or so, the screens blanked out for an instant before new footage appeared. Another ten seconds and the screens cycled back to the images Trent had first seen. That gave a total of twenty-four cameras.
The images were all exterior shots. On a quick glance, Trent could see the lighted perimeter of the villa, the swimming pool, the driveway and the view from the fence. A digital clock located in the bottom right-hand corner of each monitor read 03.40.
There’d been far more security cameras than Trent had realised. Those inside the gate were well hidden and he guessed that made sense. The cameras on the fence were there as a deterrent. The rest were designed to capture the movements of anyone who managed to sneak inside.
He leaned towards the monitors, studying the buildings that came up on screen. He could see the main villa, the pool house, the garage and what he took to be the cottage where the housekeeper lived. They were all in colour. But there was another structure, too. A squat and slanted timber building with a bowed roof. Rendered in the ghoulish green of night vision, it was surrounded by a thin copse of blurred trees.
The view Trent was looking at showed a rickety door with shuttered windows on either side. Then the screen went blank, replaced by another angle of the shack, this time from the rear. Two windows this time. One of them was shuttered. The other was boarded up with planks of wood that had been roughly tacked across it. It looked like a cabin from a fairy tale, or maybe a horror movie.
There was no way of telling where the cabin might be found. The tree cover didn’t jibe with anything Trent had seen so far.
Alain tapped the microphone bud. ‘This is how I talked to you at the gate. And from here,’ he said, passing his hand over a control panel that was positioned beneath the bottom rank of monitors, ‘I can review everything from the last seven days.’
The controls looked relatively straightforward. There was a grid of numbered buttons, a digital display, a series of switches and several plastic dials.
‘Do you move the cameras by remote?’ Trent asked. He was thinking of the way his progress along the perimeter fence had been tracked.
‘It’s possible.’ Alain’s skin was bleached in the fluorescence from the ceiling light. Trent could see his scalp through his cropped hair. ‘But they’re also fitted with sensors that can capture movement. I prefer to have them work automatically. I’m not always in this room.’
Trent gazed up at the corners of the confined space and at the wall that pressed in on him from behind. He didn’t blame the guy. If it was up to him, he’d spend as little time in this room as he could.
‘OK,’ Trent said. ‘Let’s see what you have.’
Alain leaned towards the control panel and flicked a couple of switches. He reached for a dial and twisted it to the left.
The footage on the screens began to rewind. The digital clocks counted backwards. Alain went slowly to begin with and Trent concentrated on the monitors showing the swimming pool and the pool house. He watched footage of himself and Alain walking backwards around the pool to enter the timber hut. Their movements had a clockwork jerkiness, like stop-motion animation. A few seconds of stillness and the two of them emerged from the pool house and jolted backwards through the garden towards the house. Trent’s eyes switched to an adjoining monitor. He watched their arms and legs twitch as they reversed along the gravel pathway.
The screens rewound further, a flurry of static and broken horizontal lines. Alain increased the speed. The clocks whizzed backwards in unison.
03.22.
03.10.
Trent caught movement in a screen on the top row. A vehicle had driven by the external gate, its there-and-gone movement repeated in a further three screens.
02.50.
02.20.
Trent saw the blur of a cat or a fox passing the fountain out front. The sightless dazzle of the creature’s eyes as it turned its head. Then the stillness of the swimming pool. The mysterious green-lit shack, unmoving, undisturbed, alone among the tangled pines.
01.30.
01.00.
00.27. A number of monitors displayed Philippe’s low-slung sports car appearing to reverse from outside the house and along the driveway in a cloud of dust before sweeping out of the gate.
00.00
23.57
A middle screen showed Trent and Alain circling the fountain and following the same route. They bolted back along the moonlit drive. Trent walked out through the gate.
Alain glanced at him. Trent didn’t say a word.
He was focused on the uppermost screens, watching himself marching backwards along the fence, eyes bright and lidless in the night-vision glow, finally disappearing from view at 23.29.
A fast scan through another twenty minutes and Trent saw the battered Mercedes reverse along the driveway and out through the gate, its single headlamp twinkling in the dark.
Then stillness. Calm. A flickering, blurred repeat of shot after shot, camera switch after camera switch. The time counted down. The footage shifted even faster.
‘Wait,’ Trent said. ‘There.’
Alain punched a switch. The monitors froze.
21.47.
Trent pointed at the second screen from the left, top row. It showed a colour still of the lighted entrance gate. The gate was swung back a short way. A young black guy was passing through. He was staring up at the camera lens. Eyes fearful and wide, mouth gaping and jammed full of stark white teeth.
‘That’s him,’ Alain said. ‘That’s Serge.’
He hit PLAY on the control panel. The screens buzzed, then advanced in real time, the counters clicking upwards, second by second.
The chauffeur had sleek, very dark skin. He was slim and boyish, with long limbs and a compact torso, as if he hadn’t fully grown into his body just yet. His head looked too big for his trim shoulders, perched on a lean neck, and his jet-black hair was tightly curled. He had on a chequered shirt over faded jeans. A blue holdall was slung over his shoulder.
Trent watched the gate swing closed behind Serge and then the cameras picked him up on the other side, flattening himself against the bars. The holdall was down by his feet and his face was angled to one side, eyes downcast. He looked nervous. His whole body was tensed. Every muscle. Every tendon.
He held the pose for a long time. It seemed to take a lot out of him. Pretty soon he was trembling.