The Boy Who Saw: A gripping thriller that will keep you hooked

by Simon Toyne

  ‘The fuck I’m paying you for?’

  Madjid turned and raised his arms against the next blow. ‘Désolé,’ he called out, backing away from the man with the stick in his hand. ‘Désolé, monsieur.’ Madjid bumped against the vines and a handful of grapes pattered on to the dust, their skins wrinkled and spotted with blight.

  ‘Sorry doesn’t get the work done.’ The cane sliced back down and Madjid felt the bite of it on his forearm and fell to his knees. He stared up at the large, sweaty figure of Michel LePoux through a gap in his raised arms and saw anger burning in piggy eyes staring out from a bright red face. ‘Désolé, Monsieur LePoux,’ he said.

  The cane rose again and Madjid closed his eyes against the blow. Heard the swish of it coming back down and the slap of it striking skin, only this time he felt no pain. He opened his eyes and looked up. LePoux was standing right in front of him, silhouetted against the bleached blue sky – and so was the man from the road.

  ‘Ouch,’ he said, in a voice that was low like thunder and soft as the wind through the vines. ‘Ça fait mal’ – That hurt. He stretched the word ‘mal’, like the locals did, and it came out sounding more like ‘mel’.

  LePoux tugged at his cane, trying to free it from the man’s grip but he held on to it with little apparent effort, despite the fact that LePoux was twice the weight of the stranger. LePoux stopped tugging and glared at the man. ‘You’re trespassing.’

  ‘And you are violently assaulting someone,’ the stranger replied, ‘which of those crimes is the greater, do you suppose?’

  ‘Crime?’ LePoux spat on the ground. ‘There is no crime. This man is mine and what I do with my property on my land is my business.’

  He yanked the stick again and the stranger let go, sending LePoux stumbling backwards. He grabbed at the vines and more shrivelled grapes pattered to the ground. The stranger dipped down to pick one up. ‘Your country banned slavery in 1831.’ He crushed the grape, sniffed the pink juice, then licked the end of his finger and looked up at LePoux. ‘So how can this man be your property?’

  LePoux stood up and pulled his sweat-damp shirt away from his skin. ‘I don’t know who you are, monsieur. Your accent’s local but I know that you’re not. I know everyone around here – law, lawyers, judges, everyone – but I don’t know you and you’re trespassing on my land, so if I want to chase you off it with a stick or a shotgun, no one here would say a thing against it.’

  He raised his cane again but the stranger didn’t move. ‘How long has this land been yours?’ he asked.

  ‘My family’s been here for five generations,’ LePoux replied, puffing out his chest.

  The stranger stared at LePoux and shook his head slowly. ‘Pity you won’t make it to a sixth.’

  LePoux’s face flushed red and his knuckles whitened. He lashed out with the cane, bringing it down hard on the stranger. LePoux was fast but the stranger was faster. He stepped aside as quick as blinking and the cane smacked on to the ground where he had been standing. LePoux stumbled forward, unbalanced by the force of the blow, and the stranger stamped down on the middle of his stick, breaking it in two with a sound like snapping bone, then twisted and kicked LePoux so hard he flew right through the vines and landed in the next row in a tangle of wire and foliage.

  He smoothed his suit jacket down and held out his hand to Madjid and he felt the strength in it as he pulled him to his feet. His hand was solid like marble and strong like a blacksmith’s, though with none of the coarseness of work upon it, and he seemed both old and young, his white hair ageing him but his smooth skin making him seem youthful. He could have been any age between twenty and sixty, though his eyes were old and black and deep, like staring into a well.

  ‘The next town,’ the man asked in his low voice, ‘what’s it called?’

  ‘Cordes,’ Madjid replied. ‘Cordes-sur-Ciel.’

  He nodded. ‘And is there a tailor there?’

  ‘Monsieur Engel.’

  ‘What about a man or a place called Magellan?’

  Madjid frowned and searched his memory. He wanted to help this man who’d helped him but the name meant nothing. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve never heard that name.’ He felt bad, like he had let him down in some way.

  The stranger nodded and frowned. ‘Thank you for your time,’ he said, then he turned back to LePoux. ‘Your land is rotten,’ he said, plucking a leaf from a branch and holding it up so the sun lit up the orange and black tiger stripes on the green leaf. ‘You have esca in all your vines but, given the sorry state of your land and the way you treat your workers, I would imagine you have neither the funds nor the reputation to get the help you need to cut it out. Your harvest will fail and you will be forced to sell, sooner rather than later.’ He dropped the leaf and turned back to Madjid. ‘You should leave,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing for you here but pain.’ Then he tipped his head in a courtly way and walked away.

  Madjid watched him leave, moving through the vines and back towards the road. Behind him he heard crashing and huffing as LePoux scrambled back to his feet.

  ‘Get back to work,’ he said, picking up the broken halves of his cane and looking at them before throwing them to the ground.

  Madjid looked around at the vines, the tiger-striped leaves glowing orange on almost every plant. The stranger was right, the crop was already lost. And when rot had claimed the whole harvest, LePoux would blame him, call him lazy and beat him as he drove him from the land without pay. He needed to get away from here. It was so obvious he felt like he had woken from a spell. He had been blinded by his lack of options and by his blind faith in hard work. He looked back at the stranger who had opened his eyes. He was almost at the road now. ‘What’s your name, monsieur?’ he called after him.

  ‘Solomon,’ the man replied without looking round, his voice as soft as before but carrying back to Madjid as clearly as if he had shouted it. ‘My name is Solomon Creed.’

  3

  Commandant Benoît Amand of the Police Nationale felt the buzz of an incoming call in his pocket. He ignored it, reaching out instead to wipe a finger across the swastika someone had sprayed on the Jewish memorial, the thick black paint dripping on to the names carved into granite remembering those who’d been rounded up and transported to the death camps on the night of 26 August 1942. He heard the crunch of footsteps across the boules court and the slop of water in a bucket.

  ‘You want to take pictures first?’ a voice asked.

  ‘No,’ Amand said, moving past him and heading across La Place 26th Aout towards Café Belloq on the far side of the square. ‘I want you to scrub away all trace of it.’

  The breakfast crowd were sitting in the shade of a wide, red awning, drinking their coffee and staring at their phones and newspapers. A few were looking over at him. Jean-Luc Belloq was one of them. He had been polishing the same glass with his apron ever since Amand had arrived.

  Amand reached into his pocket, his hand pushing past his now silent phone to the bottle of glycerine pills, and unscrewed the lid one-handed so Belloq wouldn’t see. He passed the half-constructed stage, part of the planned celebrations to mark seventy years since the end of the Second World War. The banners weren’t up yet, otherwise the vandal might have defaced them too. The rest of the square was deserted, the chess tables and boules courts not yet populated by the old men who used the square as an al fresco social club. He palmed a glycerine caplet, popped it into his mouth under cover of a cough, manoeuvred it under his tongue and immediately felt the tightness in his chest melt away. His phone buzzed again, rattling against the pill bottle, but he let it ring, focusing instead on his breathing like his doctor had taught him as he mounted the stone steps to the café and nodded a greeting to the few diners who weren’t tourists.

  ‘Commandant,’ Jean-Luc said, polishing the glass like it would never be clean. ‘I still can’t get used to the way you look. Let me get you a coffee.’ He made to turn then stopped and struck his forehead theatrically with his palm
. ‘Sorry. No stimulants, right? Must be so frustrating to lose all that weight and still have the heart of a sumo.’

  The phone in Amand’s pocket stopped buzzing and the pill under his tongue continued to dilate his veins. ‘What time did you open this morning?’ he asked.

  ‘Around six, same as always.’

  ‘Notice anything suspicious?’

  ‘Suspicious how?’

  ‘Like someone over by the memorial plaque spraying a swastika on it?’ Jean-Luc shook his head. ‘Anyone else around?’ He continued to shake his head. ‘What about the café, anyone in before you?’

  ‘I’m always first in.’

  ‘When did you notice the graffiti?’

  ‘I didn’t.’ Jean-Luc nodded at a waitress cleaning a couple of tables at the rear of the terrace. ‘She did. She told me. I called you.’

  ‘Does she have a name?’

  ‘Probably. We have a high turnover of staff here and I’m not good with names.’

  Amand nodded. Café Belloq was notorious for working its staff into the ground and paying them peanuts. ‘Mind if I talk to her?’ He started to head over and Jean-Luc followed. Amand stopped and turned to him. ‘Alone, if you don’t mind.’

  Belloq looked like he did mind but the phone started ringing inside the café, the trilling bells like an echo from the past. It was an old Bakelite model, so ancient it had become fashionable again, a result of meanness rather than forward thinking or style.

  ‘Shouldn’t you get that?’ Amand said. Jean-Luc glanced at the waitress, then turned and marched away. Amand waited until he disappeared inside the café before walking over to the waitress.

  ‘Mademoiselle?’ he said, stopping at her table. ‘I’m Benoît Amand from the Police Nationale.’ She looked up in alarm from the croissant crumbs she was sweeping on to a plate. ‘Don’t worry, you’re not in any trouble. What’s your name?’

  Her eyes flicked over to the café where Jean-Luc was visible through a window, talking on the phone and looking in their direction. ‘Mariella,’ she murmured.

  ‘Mariella, Monsieur Belloq says it was you who spotted the graffiti on the plaque.’ She gave a tiny nod. ‘What time was this?’

  ‘When I was setting the tables out. Six thirty maybe.’

  ‘And when did you tell Monsieur Belloq about it?’

  ‘I told him as soon as I spotted it.’

  ‘And was anyone else around at that time?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thank you, Mariella.’

  She nodded and scurried away, grateful for the release.

  Amand headed into the café, glancing over at the man with the bucket scrubbing away at the memorial plaque, the swastika now concealed beneath thick suds that dripped grey down the stonework.

  ‘He’s here,’ Belloq said, holding the phone out to him the moment he stepped into the bar.

  ‘Is that clock right?’ Amand asked, nodding at the grandmother clock that had kept time in Café Belloq since before the war.

  Belloq nodded. ‘I reset it each morning when I wind it. Why?’

  ‘Because I’m interested to know why it took you three hours to call us after you first saw a Nazi symbol painted on a Jewish memorial outside your café.’

  Belloq shrugged. ‘Didn’t think it was important.’

  Amand took the phone and caught the smell of tobacco soaked into the black plastic over decades. ‘Amand.’

  ‘Why aren’t you answering your phone?’

  Amand stiffened, picking up on the tension in the sergeant’s voice. ‘What’s up, Henri?’

  ‘It’s Josef Engel. His cleaner just called. She’s hysterical, said that there are rats everywhere. Parra is already on his way to Engel’s atelier. She said that he’s been murdered.’

  4

  Solomon’s hand stung where he’d caught the cane, a burning sensation that was not entirely unpleasant. He flexed his fingers to feed the ache and let it sharpen his senses as he walked down the road. He could smell hints of the town ahead of him now, like something small and hard buried beneath the softer, blanketing smells of the countryside: stone and concrete; hot tile and cooking oil; sour sweat and hair grease and the underlying sewagey stink of almost a thousand years of human occupation.

  His feet were road weary inside the scuffed rancher’s boots he’d borrowed from a dead man in Arizona. They had carried him along the interstates and back roads of New Mexico and Texas, clanged on the sheet-metal deck of a container ship out of Galveston, and now trod the same straight road sandalled centurions had built two thousand years earlier. Squares of grey overlapped on the road’s surface where intense summer heat and dry frozen winters had split and cracked it again and again until it had become a thing of fragments – like Solomon himself.

  The town of Cordes came into view gradually, emerging from the mist like a mountain castle at the end of the patchwork road. Castellated walls circled the summit, the thick stone worn with age and blending into the jagged outcrops of limestone from the original Puech de Mordagne. Stone buildings clung to the side of it like barnacles on a shark’s fin and Solomon could read the history of the town’s development in its architecture, oldest buildings at the top, youngest at the base, with narrow winding streets and long flights of stone steps linking the different levels. A thin tower rose up at the top, the name of the church it belonged to whispering in his head, prompted by the sight of it: L’Eglise Saint-Michel – the Church of St Michael.

  Solomon had seen the town before, in a dream. He slept little and dreamed hardly at all and when he did it was usually the same dream, the one of the mirror that showed no reflection. But once, in his cramped bunk in the galley of the transport ship, he had slipped into slumber and seen this place, misty and indistinct, exactly as it appeared now.

  Cordes-sur-Ciel – Cordes on Sky – named for the phenomenon Solomon was now witnessing where the town seemed to float on the valley mist.

  The town continued to materialize from the mist as he drew closer, and more facts surfaced in his mind:

  Founded 1222 by the Comte de Toulouse … Almost ended by plague in 1348 … Battered by the Hundred Years War in the fourteenth century and the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth.

  Market town. Merchant centre. Textiles and wool, then indigo and Broderie Anglais lace. The small crocodiles on a famous French designer brand had been made here.

  Tourist town now, teeming in the long summer months with people drawn by its history and weather and the beautiful stone houses with views over vine-covered valleys.

  The information cascaded through Solomon’s head, every fact correct but nothing that told him how he might be connected to the place. That part of his memory was gone, along with every other detail of who he was or might once have been. Whenever he focused his know-it-all mind on thoughts of himself, it fell silent – no facts, no memories. It was like staring into the mirror in his dream, the one that reflected nothing. All he had were fragments and questions.

  He unbuttoned his tailored suit jacket and looked at the label stitched inside:

  Ce costume a été fait au trésor pour M. Solomon Creed – This suit was made to treasure for Mr Solomon Creed.

  The gold thread shone in the morning sunlight, spelling out the address where the suit had been made around the edge of the label:

  13, Rue Obscure, Cordes-sur-Ciel, Tarn.

  He let the flap of the jacket fall back down, the cut fitting the slender contours of his body perfectly. This was the place where someone had measured him and adjusted the cut until it fit him like a second skin. Here someone must have taken payment, perhaps made arrangements for its delivery, noting down an address and a name, tiny fragments of his lost history that might lead all the way back to who he really was, like stones through a dark forest. He was incomplete and so was the story of the clothes he wore.

  Ce costume, the label said – this suit – yet he only had the jacket.

  He re-buttoned it, the scents of his long journey trapped in the fabri
c – the salt of the ocean, diesel fumes and rice-wine vinegar, horseradish and tobacco smoke. He flexed his hand and carried on walking towards the town and the tailor he had travelled over five-thousand miles to find. Towards the address stitched in gold on a label. Towards answers.

  The scent of the town was stronger now he could see it, the smell of the people who lived here soaked into the stone over countless centuries and carrying on the misty breeze like pollen. Solomon breathed deeply, identifying each scent as easily as a florist enumerating the fragrance of different flowers. He knew the cause of each too, the emotion beneath each enzyme: fear, regret, happiness, longing … and a new scent, an unusual odour, sharp and metallic, that seemed more familiar to him than all the other smells blowing his way on the shifting breeze. It was a smell that made his heart thrum faster and the brand on his shoulder ache in a way that told him it was significant – the smell of freshly spilled human blood.

  5

  Lieutenant Emile Parra was already at the Atelier on the Rue Obscure when Amand arrived. He parked his fifteen-year-old Citroën, stepped out into the street and looked up at the silent and shuttered house, the single-storey workshop built on the side with a sign above the door saying ‘Atelier Engel – Costumier’.

  Amand looked over at Parra. ‘Who’s been inside the house?’

  ‘Only the cleaner – and me.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  Parra nodded up the street to where a thin, grey woman in a pale blue housemaid’s smock sat on the steps of a shuttered-up holiday home, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes fixed on the cobbles in a way that made her look like she was praying. Amand recognized Madame Segolin, a matriarch from one of the older local families. ‘Have you questioned her?’