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

by Simon Toyne

  ‘Amand is the man in charge of your grandfather’s case.’

  ‘Yes. He’s a friend too. He was my husband’s best friend. They worked together.’

  ‘Your husband was a gendarme?’

  Marie-Claude nodded. ‘It was Benny who arrested Baptiste. I think it broke his heart.’

  ‘What made your husband flip?’

  Marie-Claude took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. ‘Because he found out that I’m Jewish.’

  ‘Did he not know?’

  ‘No. I didn’t even know myself. My background is … complicated. I was never brought up Jewish. Never had any idea. My mother died giving birth to me, my grandmother brought me up. I have no idea who my father is. My mother was pretty wild, by all accounts. A bit of a rebel. She was eighteen when she … when she had me. My grandfather was around when I was growing up, but he was always a distant figure, always working in his atelier. This was my family, until Léo came along.’

  ‘Tell me about Jean Baptiste.’

  ‘Jean Baptiste was history repeating itself, I think. My own rebellion. I’d known him since school and he was always a bit of a bad boy. He was captain of the rugby team, which is a big deal round here. All the girls liked him. But the girl he liked best was me.

  ‘I was kind of geeky and awkward and felt weird because my grandparents were bringing me up and they seemed ancient compared to everyone else’s parents. I was flattered that this hot boy was interested in me and we had a kind of teenage fling, which was … wonderful, actually. I had no expectations it would lead anywhere because I was determined to leave Cordes and do something with my life. I broke up with him when I was about to go to university, telling him I couldn’t spend the rest of my life hanging off the back of his motorbike and drinking vin en vrac while watching the sun go down from the top of Cordes. So off I went to university in Marseille and I thought that was it.

  ‘But Jean Baptiste had other ideas. He came to see me most weekends, five hours down the péage on his motorbike each way. I think me going away opened his eyes too, showed him that there was something else out there apart from rugby and joy-riding and getting drunk with his wild friends. He had one sensible friend who was quieter and more thoughtful than the rest who’d joined the police straight from school. Baptiste decided to do the same. That friend was Benny Amand.

  ‘By the time I graduated, Baptiste was a changed man and rising fast through the ranks of the police force. I came back to Cordes and worked for my grandfather to save up enough money to go and live in Paris, and we all hung out again, doing the things we’d done before – me, Jean Baptiste, Benny Amand and a few others from school. Then I fell pregnant, total accident. I expected Baptiste to be freaked out – I was freaked out – but instead he cried and asked me to marry him. The money I’d been saving to move to Paris went on a small ceremony instead. We didn’t need the big church wedding because we were happy and we had Léo on the way, what more proof of love did anyone need?

  ‘Baptiste put in for more work so we could start saving for a place of our own, and he got a placement in Toulouse, which meant staying over with friends a few nights a week because of the shift patterns. That was when he started to change. I don’t know if it was the pressure of work or becoming a father, but he started drinking again and ranting about all the filth he was seeing on the streets, the beurs flooding the suburbs with their swarming families and ruining France, the Muslims, the blacks, the Jews. This was when he joined the PNFL – Parti National de la France Libre. He said it was a career thing, networking with the right people to help him climb the greasy pole. But it wasn’t only about that. The PNFL was a marginal party back then, but they were starting to grow, catching people young to slowly build their power base. I wonder how many people like Jean Baptiste they courted: ambitious, well-placed young men on the rise, whose patriotism they harnessed and twisted to help drive the party forward. It worked, because now the PNFL are serious contenders, riding a toxic wave of nationalism and fear along with far-right parties all over Europe. They certainly got their hooks into Jean Baptiste. They turned his head until I hardly recognized him any more. He was so full of hate, for anyone who was different. Then I discovered that I was Jewish.’

  ‘How did you not know?’

  ‘Because I wasn’t brought up Jewish. I had no idea. Engel is a fairly common German name. I knew my grandfather had moved to France from Germany after the war, but I didn’t know the real story. He didn’t want me to know. He didn’t want anyone to know. But when Léo was two my grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was too advanced to treat, so she came home to die. I looked after her right to the end, which didn’t take long, and I was with her the night she died. That was when she told me about Die Schneider Lager and how my grandfather had been imprisoned there and was one of only five men who had survived it. She knew she wasn’t going to be around for much longer, and I think she was trying to help me understand why my grandfather was like he was, always so withdrawn and distant. But I think she could also see what Jean Baptiste was turning into and wanted me to know who I really was. She had spent her life denying her own Jewish ancestry for the sake of her husband, who wanted to turn his back on that whole side of himself. She said he was afraid of being defined as Jewish, like it was a curse, and had been forced to do the same. But she wanted me to have a choice. She wanted me to know who I really was. She told me all this in a rush, like a confession, then went to sleep and never woke. I hope she felt at peace for having passed on the family secret. And I’m glad she didn’t live to see what happened next.

  ‘I waited until after the funeral before I told Baptiste. He hadn’t been around much anyway; I think he knew my grandmother didn’t approve of him and had kept his distance while I nursed her. A couple of days after the funeral he came home late from work and I told him. He didn’t say anything, he just looked at me for what seemed like a long time, then turned and walked out of the house. I didn’t know where he’d gone or when he’d be back and eventually I went to bed. He came back late. Drunk. I heard him crashing around in Léo’s room and I went in to find him stuffing Léo’s things into a carrier bag. He said he was taking him away. Said I’d lied to him. Tricked him into mixing my dirty blood with his. He said he was taking Léo so he could …’ Marie-Claude swallowed and blew out a long breath. ‘He said he was going to bring him up “pure”, away from his Jewish whore of a mother.

  ‘Léo was awake the whole time. Crying. Scared. I was scared too. Baptiste picked him up, but I stood in the doorway and wouldn’t let him pass. That was when he hit me – a hard slap across the face that made my ear bleed. But I wouldn’t move. Then he got really angry. I don’t remember much after that.

  ‘Benny told me afterwards that someone heard the screaming and crying and called the police. I think Baptiste must have heard the sirens coming and panicked. He ran off, leaving me on the floor and Léo tearing up tissues to try and make me better. They sent him to prison to make an example of him, and I thought that would be that. But a few weeks ago I found out he’d been released early. I don’t know where he is now.’

  She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and nodded at a line of grey clouds on the horizon. ‘You were right,’ she said. ‘There’s rain ahead. We should stop and get some fuel before the storm breaks.’

  53

  Amand emerged on to the street and took deep breaths to try and flush the smell of the morgue from his nose. Magellan followed him out and headed over to his car. ‘You still think Solomon Creed didn’t do it?’ Amand asked him.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Magellan replied. ‘His implant would have stopped him doing any of what we witnessed in there. He simply wouldn’t have been physically capable of conducting a sustained, controlled attack like that.’

  ‘Why not? What does this implant do exactly?’

  ‘When the body commits violence it undergoes a rapid and complex chemical change. Adrenaline and noradrenaline flood the body, inhibiting insulin and promo
ting glycolysis, leading to an increase in blood glucose and fatty acids. More energy is produced, the heart rate increases, blood vessels contract and air passages dilate. In the brain, the amygdala, the part that deals with emotions, becomes hyperactive. It wants to do something, the instinct we call fight or flight. All of this happens within two seconds. That’s why counting to ten is used in anger management, because it allows this surge of adrenaline to pass. The implant in James’s … Solomon Creed’s arm is an artificial count-to-ten strategy. It’s loaded with a cocktail of drugs and hormones such as acetylcholine, which are triggered when spikes of adrenaline are detected in the bloodstream. They counteract all the potentially violent stimuli by dumping neural inhibitors into the bloodstream, causing acute pain and making the muscles cramp and weaken. You found Solomon at the crime scene, correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what state was he in?’

  ‘He was playing the piano.’

  Magellan smiled. ‘Brilliantly, I would imagine.’

  Amand shrugged. ‘He was OK.’

  ‘Well, if he had killed your man, you would have found him curled up on the floor in acute pain.’

  ‘Unless he cut the implant out.’

  ‘As I said before, it’s implanted deep – very hard to remove.’

  ‘People are capable of almost anything if they put their mind to it, especially if they’re delusional – you of all people must know that.’ They stopped by the Range Rover and Amand looked up at the red-brick monolith of Albi Cathedral. ‘A few years back, when I was working a street beat in Toulouse, I arrested a young kid out of his mind on PCP. Said he had the evil eye and kept threatening us with it unless we let him go. We locked him up to calm him down and he started screaming. Said he didn’t want to be left alone with the evil eye. When I returned to the cell with the duty psychiatrist about forty minutes later, we found him sitting on the floor with blood all over him and a huge grin on his face. He’d clawed his own eye out and never made a single sound while he did it. So let’s assume that Solomon Creed might have removed the implant. Could he have killed Josef Engel?’

  Magellan waited for a young woman to walk past and move out of earshot. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe he could. Whoever killed Monsieur Engel is very controlled, whereas the man you know as Solomon Creed is chaotic. Impulsive.’

  ‘Is he, though? When he killed his mother and brother, you said he arranged the scene. That sounds pretty controlled to me.’

  ‘Yes, but he had a personal connection to his victims. The violence was spontaneous and the narrative underpinning it was pre-existing. There was nothing planned about it. I don’t believe he went to the house intending to kill his mother. It was only the shock of discovering a brother that triggered his rage and violence. When he killed them, he was improvising; whereas Josef Engel’s killer brought hypodermic syringes loaded with anaesthetic and starved rats and specific tools to inflict distinct wounds. He must have spent time watching the victim, learning his routine and figuring out the right moment to strike when no one would disturb him. It must have taken weeks to prepare, and Solomon Creed has only been in France for three days. He must only have arrived in Cordes this morning.’

  ‘You know this for a fact?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been tracking him since he escaped my facility twenty-five days ago. He surfaced in a small Arizona town almost three weeks ago, which was how I discovered the name he’s travelling under.’ Magellan unlocked the car, reached into the back and pulled a file from his briefcase with Solomon’s mugshot clipped to the front. ‘The police in Arizona had him in custody for a while.’ He removed a bundle of police evidence photographs and handed them to Amand. The top one showed a detail of the label in the pale suit jacket Solomon wore, the address of Josef Engel’s atelier embroidered on it in gold thread. ‘This is why I thought he might be heading here.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call to warn us?’

  ‘I thought I might be able to intercept him. I travelled east from Arizona and managed to track him to a Hong Kong container vessel that had sailed out of Galveston on its way to the Far East, stopping at La Rochelle. I flew there, hired a car, drove to the port and showed his photograph around. He’d passed through there two days ago. I hoped I would get here before him because he was travelling on foot. I was wrong.’

  Amand flicked through the rest of the photographs, the dappled sunlight from the trees lining the street making them seem alive. ‘I don’t see a passport. No credit cards or cash either. How did he manage to get passage on a ship without those?’

  ‘I imagine he agreed to work his passage for no pay and no questions asked, or maybe he got hold of some money and bribed his way aboard. He’s extraordinarily resourceful and slippery, as you know from your own experience. Incidentally, how did he escape from your custody? It would be useful for me to know the details.’

  Amand stared at his reflection in the dark, tinted window of the Range Rover. ‘It was my fault. I left a junior officer with him to take a statement and when I went down to check on him, Solomon Creed was gone and the officer was in some kind of trance and convinced his hands were stuck to the table.’

  Magellan nodded. ‘Hypnosis. Autosuggestion. All part of the therapy regime we use to rehabilitate our patients.’

  ‘You taught him hypnosis?’

  ‘No, but the man you know as Solomon Creed has a remarkable mind. He can master things as fast as they’re explained and recall things in intricate detail after seeing them only once. He picked up hypnosis techniques along with every other therapy we practised on him. His mind is quite extraordinary – broken, but extraordinary.’ He shook his head. ‘You’re right, I should have contacted you the moment I knew he was in France to inform you that he might be heading your way and warn you about how slippery he can be. It’s not your fault he escaped, it’s mine.’

  Amand’s phone buzzed and he frowned when he saw the message.

  ‘Problems?’

  ‘Only unavoidable ones. I’m being chased by the secretary of the juge d’instruction assigned to the murder case. I need to brief him on where we are with the case.’

  ‘You have to report to a judge already?’

  ‘It works like a District Attorney in the States: they issue any warrants and help guide the investigation to make sure everything is legally robust if it comes to court. At least, that’s the theory.’

  ‘Do you need a lift?’

  Amand shook his head and pointed at a white stone building beyond the trees. ‘His office is right there.’

  ‘I’m happy to wait and drive you back to Cordes afterwards, if you like.’

  ‘Thanks, but I might stick around here for a while.’

  Magellan nodded and produced a thick white card with his name and contact details on the back. ‘Well, if you change your mind, give me a call. And please let me know as soon as you have news of Solomon Creed. We’ve both let him slip through our fingers once. Maybe together we can find him again and keep hold of him this time.’

  Amand pocketed the card and held out one of his own. ‘Likewise, if anything occurs to you about where he might be heading, don’t keep it to yourself.’

  Magellan smiled and took the card. ‘Deal.’

  Amand turned away and crossed the street, heading for the white building that housed the judge’s chambers and mentally preparing for his briefing. He had four possible suspects now and he arranged them in his mind based on what he knew and what he believed, starting with the one he thought least likely to have killed Josef Engel and ending with the one he believed the most. Four suspects:

  Madjid Lellouche

  Günther Samler – Artur Samler’s son

  Solomon Creed

  and Jean Baptiste.

  54

  Jean Baptiste walked into the main airport building at Toulouse and looked around. The last time he had been here they had been knocking down the old buildings to make way for the airy steel-and-glass hangar he now stood in. He spotted th
e departure board and counted the different airlines listed on it. There were eight. If Marie-Claude and Léo had taken a flight, it would require a lot of legwork and smiling and flashing his out-of-date badge to check every desk and passenger manifest. He checked his watch. Thanks to LePoux’s driving, they had got here in under half an hour, making up some lost time. But he still had to find them.

  He walked over to the escalator and headed down to the check-in desks. There were even more carriers down here, different logos and names, most of which he’d never heard of. Some desks were empty but most had uniformed staff manning them, chatting to passengers or each other. As he scanned the hall, trying to decide where to start, he spotted a sign on a pillar that gave him an idea.

  He pulled the laptop from his satchel, moved over to one of the empty desks and searched for the Free Wi-Fi the sign advertised. It had been thirty minutes since he’d last checked the GeoTracker and something new may have popped up that could spare him the legwork. He waited for the laptop to connect, launched the GeoTracker and clicked the Bluetooth icon.

  The unique code of the tile was still in the search box and the map refreshed when it picked up the signal of the tile in his pocket and showed it as a blue dot at the centre of the main terminal building at Toulouse–Blagnac. The map began to expand, looking for matching signals from other tiles. It beeped as it found the cluster in Cordes and continued to zoom out.

  Baptiste looked across at the Air France desk, trying to gauge which member of staff might be the best one to approach. He noticed one of the women was wearing a head scarf in the Air France colours and felt a wave of disgust. They should be enforcing the uniform, not relaxing it to accommodate immigrants.

  The laptop beeped again.

  A new dot had appeared, way up at the top of the map. It was lying on the thick orange line of the A20, the main highway that ran north to south through almost the entire country. Baptiste zoomed in on it and place names appeared on the map, showing the nearest towns and cities. The new dot was about twenty minutes south of Limoges and, given the way LePoux drove, about a two-hour journey from Toulouse.