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

by Simon Toyne

  She walked back up the short hallway, feeling dazed and numb and thinking about the last time she had spoken to Josef, everything he had said, the warnings he had given her, how agitated he had been. And she had ignored him. And now he was dead and it was her fault. He was dead because of her.

  Léo was at the table reading a comic, his wide eyes sucking adventure from the page. He was wearing his maroon school sweatshirt and his Spider-Man socks, his feet dangling below his chair, his legs too short to reach the ground. Marie-Claude cleared her throat, trying to shake some of the tightness from it. ‘You OK here for a minute?’

  ‘Who’s at the door?’ Léo replied, never taking his eyes off the comic.

  ‘It’s Uncle Benny. I need to … I have to talk to him about something.’

  Léo looked up. ‘You OK, Mama?’

  She forced a smile. ‘I’m fine. Read your comic. I’ll tell you all about it after I’ve spoken to Uncle Benny.’

  Then she turned and walked away before Léo could see the tears starting to build in her eyes.

  Léo watched his mama leave and heard her go into her bedroom and close the door behind her.

  He knew she was sad, he could see it in her colours. He knew why she was sad too because he’d heard what Uncle Benny had said at the door, about Grampy being dead. He heard lots of things he wasn’t supposed to hear.

  Mama reckoned his hearing was so good because his eyes were weak. It was his special power, she said, his Spidey senses. But it wasn’t always a good thing. It meant he heard how sad his mama got sometimes, crying into her pillow at night, though she always acted happy in front of him. He could see when she was sad though, he could see it in the colours that shifted and floated around her like feathers. That was one of his Spidey senses too, only Spider-Man couldn’t do it, only him and Grampy could.

  It’s in the blood, he’d told him one time, but only in boys, and you have it stronger than me.

  Léo felt sad that he wouldn’t have anyone to talk to about it any more. His mama didn’t like him talking about it. She didn’t have the gift. That’s what Grampy called it – his gift.

  Léo heard things in colours too. He knew when people were telling the truth because their voices were a different colour from their bodies if they were trying to hide something. That was how he knew when Mama was sad. Her voice was usually a greeny orangey colour, like leaves in autumn or parrot’s feathers. Nice colours. Warm colours. But when she was hiding something it became dark grey and purple like a bruise. That’s what she sounded like now.

  Léo shifted in his chair and leaned towards the door to try and hear what his mama and Uncle Benny were talking about. He liked Uncle Benny because he made his mama happy and did lots of nice things for them. He’d asked her once if she was going to marry Uncle Benny and said he wouldn’t mind if she did, and she’d laughed and said Uncle Benny wasn’t the marrying kind and that she’d explain it to him when he was older. He could hear his voice now, low and muddy-coloured, the way grown-ups’ voices always went when they talked about serious things.

  He wanted to go to his mama and give her a hug, tell her it was OK to be sad. Grampy had been old, really old, old enough to have been in the big war, the one where Captain America had fought the Nazis, though Grampy had never talked about it. Léo never understood that. If he had fought against the Nazis he would tell everyone about it. His mama said he didn’t like talking about it because he’d been held prisoner in a very bad camp where lots of people had died and it was too sad for him to remember it. She’d explained how lots of people had died in those camps, people like them – Jewish people. She’d shown him photos, black-and-white pictures of kids younger than him wearing what looked like striped pyjamas with stars pinned to the front.

  When Uncle Benny had gone, he would go and hug her to help lighten her colours, because his colour was white mostly and he could lighten the darkness in others by hugging them, like when he was painting his comic scenes and swirled a white paintbrush through the murky water in a jam jar. Most kids had bright colours, like most adult colours were murky, but no one was as bright as him.

  At first he’d thought maybe he only looked brighter to himself, in the same way his voice sounded louder because he heard it inside his head. Or perhaps it was because there was only him and his mama, so all her love went to him rather than him sharing it with a daddy or brothers or sisters, and this was what made him shine. But Grampy had told him he shone too, and that he had only ever seen one other person in his life who had shone as brightly. It had been the only time he had ever talked about the bad camp and his colours had gone dark when he spoke of it – black with flashes of deep, deep red, like a crow’s feathers splashed in blood. He said the pale man had appeared at the end of the war, when most of the guards had gone and the few that were left were liquidating the camp. Léo thought that meant they were washing it or something, but Grampy’s colours were so dark he knew it must mean something else – something really, really bad. Grampy told him how everyone in the camp thought they were going to die, then this man appeared dressed in a beautiful white suit, shining as bright as Léo shone, and he’d saved him and his friends when they thought they could not be saved. Grampy had told Léo the man’s name, a funny sounding, old-fashioned name, like from a fairy story. And just like in a story, the man had asked Grampy and his friends to make a suit in exchange for saving them. So they did. They made him the finest suit any of them had ever made, according to Grampy. And it must have been something, because even though Léo didn’t know much about clothes he could see that the suits Grampy made were special because they always brightened the colours of anyone who wore them, even the greyest people. But the man never returned to collect his suit, and Grampy and his friends decided to divide it between them – the designer, the weaver and the tailor – each keeping a piece of it.

  Like a talisman, Grampy had said. You know what that is, boy?

  Léo knew all about talismans because the comics he read were full of them – magic charms to ward away evil.

  It keeps us safe, Grampy said. We keep the suit and the suit keeps us.

  Léo had asked to see Grampy’s piece of the suit, but he had darkened at the question.

  Forget about it, he’d said. Forget about the pale man. Forget the suit. Forget what happened back in the bad camp during the war. Forget everything.

  And he had never spoken of it again. Léo had always hoped, when he was a little older, that Grampy might one day show him the suit and talk some more about the camp. But now he was dead and Uncle Benny had come here all dark and muddy with the news of it, and the suit hadn’t kept Grampy safe at all.

  He looked back at his comic, one of the earlier Captain America stories when he was fighting the Nazis, the ones Grampy had never wanted to talk about and now never would. The thought made him feel sad and he sensed himself dimming. He needed to stay bright for his mama, so he could stir some brightness into her when she stopped talking to Uncle Benny.

  He started to read again, his heavy glasses sharpening the colours of the drawings while his mind flashed with the colours of the words. Red Skull was nearing completion of the Sleepers, the gigantic Nazi war machines designed to destroy the world if Hitler failed to conquer it. And only Captain America could stop him.

  12

  Solomon felt the man approaching. He felt the vibrations through the soles of his bare feet like a distant heartbeat, soft and regular and strengthening with each footstep until it smothered all other vibrations – the intermittent rumble of traffic on the road outside, the soft hiss of water through a fracture in the rock deep beneath him, the hum of electricity through thick cables that snaked across the surface of every wall. Solomon put his boots back on and placed his hands on the surface of the table. He could hear the footsteps now, sharp and anxious, like someone in a hurry or someone who was eager or excited. He doubted they saw much in the way of interesting crimes in a small place like this, and there was nothing more exciting than murd
er. He breathed in, trying to catch the scent of whoever was approaching, but the thick walls and trapped air of the cell returned nothing but dust and hints of his own travels.

  Solomon closed his eyes again and the footsteps grew louder then stopped outside the door. He heard the cylinders click in the barrel of the lock and the faint suck of rubber seals as the door opened inward, bringing a puff of outside air and the scent of the man who had opened it. He smelled of coffee and hair wax and stress and Solomon recognized him as surely as if he were looking at him. It was the less senior officer from the murder scene.

  ‘Monsieur,’ the gendarme said, and Solomon pictured him standing hesitantly in the doorway. ‘Are you OK?’

  Solomon took a deep breath and frowned. ‘I’ve been going over what I saw at the house,’ he said, keeping his eyes closed, ‘trying to remember what I saw.’ He opened his eyes and looked up. ‘And I did see something. On the steps outside the house where the old man died.’

  ‘What?’ the officer said, closing the door with a locking click and pulling out the second chair with a sharp scrape of steel on stone. ‘Tell me what you saw.’ He laid the envelope containing Solomon’s few possessions and a blank witness statement form on the table.

  ‘It’s kind of strange,’ Solomon said. ‘Let me walk you through it. Tell you everything I saw, so you can see what I mean. So you can understand.’

  The man nodded, his pupils dilated slightly despite the white brightness of the overhead strip lights, a small physical indication of his willingness to see what Solomon was about to show him.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Solomon asked.

  ‘Parra,’ the man said, then shook his head like he’d made a mistake. ‘Emile. Call me Emile.’

  Solomon nodded. ‘Hello, Emile. I’m Solomon. Let me talk you through everything first, before you write anything down.’

  Parra glanced down at the witness statement and Solomon saw his artery pulsing softly beneath the skin. A sudden, violent feeling surged through him. He could leap across the table, throw his arm round this man’s neck and press hard against that thin, shivering skin, shut off the blood and airflow until he blacked out. He could keep the pressure on if he chose and ensure he never woke. Or he could throw his arm out, swing straight through his neck like he was striking a baseball, enough speed and surprise to rupture the artery. He would bleed internally, massively –

  … subcutaneous haematoma …

  – the pressure of all that blood and the rapid swelling of damaged tissue would make him black out too as his brain was starved of oxygen.

  … Cerebral hypoxia. Anoxaemia …

  The Latin words glittered like jewels in Solomon’s mind and his shoulder began to burn in warning. He sucked in air and gripped it.

  Parra looked up, drawn by the movement and the vein in his neck was hidden from sight. ‘You OK?’

  Solomon rubbed at his shoulder where the burning pain was now fading as quickly as his violent thoughts. He could feel the two parallel lines of raised skin through the material of his jacket. ‘I’m fine,’ he said, massaging away the pain and the scarlet visions that had accompanied it, ‘I don’t like being confined, that’s all.’

  Parra smiled. ‘Who does?’

  ‘And this place has vibrations, don’t you think?’ Solomon looked at the white walls he had imagined painted in blood. ‘Do you never think about who they kept down here when the cells were fresh cut? Or how dark it must have been? Or about the screams that must have soaked into these walls?’

  Parra shivered though the room was not cold. ‘There’s lots of history here. The whole town is built on it. There’s a big mediaeval pageant every summer where we all get dressed up – torchlight processions, knights on horseback, that kind of thing. It’s for the tourists mainly, but you can really feel the history of the place. Like it’s still alive.’

  Solomon nodded. ‘Then maybe what I’m about to tell you won’t seem so strange. There’s a long flight of stone steps behind the tailor’s house.’

  ‘The Rue des Chevaliers.’

  ‘Yes, the Rue des Chevaliers. I was walking down it, from the top of the hill and down into the mist. The mist was glowing in the morning sun. You know what that looks like, Emile?’

  Parra nodded.

  ‘Good. It’s important that you picture it, so you can understand what I saw: the steps and the mist getting thicker as I descended into it. Step by step. One after another. Can you picture it, Emile? Can you see the steps?’ Parra nodded. ‘That’s very good, Emile. Now let me tell you what I saw.’

  13

  Marie-Claude sat on the edge of her unmade bed and listened in numbed shock as Amand told her in his calm, low voice how her grandfather’s body had been discovered. She could tell he was choosing his words carefully, telling her what he could without going into specifics, but she didn’t need the detail to know the truth. Her grandfather had been murdered and whoever had done it had made him suffer before he died. And she felt responsible. She was responsible.

  When she had first told her grandfather she wanted to find the last remaining survivors of Die Schneider Lager and record their memories, she had hoped he might understand and see how she was seeking to honour what had happened there and what had happened to him. She had hoped he might even help her. She had been wrong.

  Leave it alone, he’d told her, his anger sudden and shocking.

  It’s old history, painful history. You don’t know what you’re getting into. It’s a cursed subject. A dangerous subject. Remember what happened to Herman Lansky? Remember what happened to Saul Schwartzfeldt?

  She did remember. Lansky’s memoir was the only first-hand account of life in the camp and an explosion in his apartment had killed him while he was writing a more detailed follow-up. The fire had destroyed his unfinished book and all his research and Die Schneider Lager had become a footnote, an almost forgotten name lurking in the shadows of other camps whose stories had been told, their names now infamous – Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Treblinka.

  But as the seventieth anniversary of the end of the war approached, Marie-Claude had begun to feel more and more strongly that the history her grandfather had lived through and the experiences he’d had in the camp needed to be recorded. They did not belong to him alone, they belonged to everyone, to her and also her son. So despite his reservations she had started to search. Lansky’s memoir recorded that there were four other survivors of the camp, the ones known as Die Anderen – The Others. Her grandfather was one of them. Marie-Claude had set out to track down the other three.

  It had been a huge amount of work, sifting through old history trying to pick up the trail of people who had disappeared at the end of the war. But after months of work she had found one, Saul Schwartzfeldt. She had even spoken to him. Once. He had told her to leave the past alone, just as her grandfather had. She had ignored them both and now they were dead. Dead because of her.

  She became aware of a silence and realized Amand had stopped talking. ‘I’m sorry, did you …?’

  ‘I asked if your grandfather had been upset about anything recently?’

  Marie-Claude flashed back to the last time they had spoken, two days earlier in La Broderie. Her grandfather had asked if he could store something in the tiny room she used as a studio. She had been surprised by the request, because he had a huge storeroom of his own in the building and had done his level best to ignore her presence in La Broderie entirely, along with her work. She’d thought maybe it was a ruse to take a peek inside her office and her suspicions had been confirmed when all he’d brought with him was one canvas suit-carrier. She recalled the look on his face as he stepped into her office, a mixture of fear and anger as he studied the evidence of her industry displayed on every wall. He had begged her again to abandon her project and stop looking for Die Anderen.

  There is a great evil and sorrow in our past, he had told her. Far greater than you realize. I keep it buried for your sake and for Léo’s. Please do not dig it up again.<
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  She had read a lot about survivor’s guilt, where those who lived through the Holocaust felt unworthy, but to her the story of her grandfather’s survival was miraculous, something to be celebrated and shared. She’d tried to reason with him again, get him to see it from her point of view, but they had ended up arguing like they always did and he had thrown the canvas suit-carrier on the ground and stormed off with the words:

  Remember this conversation when I’m dead. Then you’ll understand.

  She had hung the suit-carrier on the back of her door to give him a reason to return once he’d calmed down, but he never did. And now he was dead, and with the marks of the death camp upon him.

  She became aware of silence again and looked up. ‘Sorry, I was …’

  ‘I said I need you to come with me to the station and make an official statement. You’ll also have to identify the body at some point.’

  Marie-Claude nodded, only half listening. It hurt that her last words with her grandfather had been angry ones and that they had never made up. It was uncharacteristic of him. He was usually quick to anger and quick to forgive. It all felt unresolved and unbearably sad. She thought of how the next time she would see him now was when she identified his body and tears sprang to her eyes.

  ‘I need to tell Léo,’ she said, rising from the bed and opening the door, suddenly desperate to get out of the room. ‘They’re very … they were close. He’ll be upset. I’ll come to the station afterwards.’

  Amand stood and followed her. ‘Of course. Take as long as you need. I’ll keep someone posted outside. They can escort you to the station when you’re ready.’

  ‘That’s not necessary.’

  Amand leaned in and lowered his voice. ‘I don’t wish to alarm you, but whoever killed your grandfather was looking for something. And until we have more information I want to make sure that you and Léo are safe.’

  Marie-Claude blinked in surprise. ‘What were they looking for?’