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

by Simon Toyne

  ‘Three strikes,’ Bull said, raising his size fourteen boot. ‘You’re out!’

  He kicked the door so hard that the lock broke free and smashed a mirror hanging on the opposite wall. Bull charged through the door and into the cheap, rented flat, ducking to avoid the lamps that always hung too low for him in these crummy, low-ceilinged dives. The place was sparsely furnished with the kind of shitty, mismatched stuff you bought at the Troc. Some people never had anything, no money, no taste and no common sense either, or they wouldn’t take out street loans and neglect to keep up the repayments.

  Bull headed to the bathroom because they always went to the bathroom, and that was always next to the kitchen because it was cheaper to put the plumbing all in one place. He spotted a Baby Alive doll on the floor next to a closed door, surrounded by bits of toilet paper folded into nappies. He picked it up and raised his boot again. No three strikes when you were inside, that let them know you were outside and you risked getting shot through the flimsy door or walls. He kicked hard, too hard, and his boot went straight through the door. Someone screamed inside and he drew his foot back, kicked again and this time the door broke in half.

  ‘He’s not here,’ a woman screamed.

  Bull barged through the wreckage of the door and stared down at the scrawny woman cowering in the bath, hugging a terrified young girl in her heavily tattooed arms.

  ‘He’s not here,’ she screamed again.

  ‘I’m not interested in him,’ Bull said, ‘only in what he owes.’

  ‘He’s getting it. He said he’d get it and bring it to you later.’

  ‘That’s not the way it works.’ He held up the doll, twisted off its head and tossed it into the bath. The little girl started crying and Bull looked at the mother. ‘You know these things are harder to pull apart than real babies.’ He grabbed an arm and yanked that off too. ‘You wouldn’t think it, but it’s true.’ He tossed the arm into the bath next to the head.

  ‘Rent money,’ the woman screamed. ‘I can give you the rent money.’

  ‘It’s only rent money if you give it to your landlord. Until then it’s just money. Where is it?’

  ‘Microwave.’

  ‘Microwave!’ Bull shouted and he heard Roberto clattering around in the kitchen.

  ‘Eighty euros,’ Roberto called out.

  Bull shook his head. ‘What else you got?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  Bull pulled a leg off the doll with a pop and tossed it into the bath. The little girl was sobbing now.

  ‘You got a phone?’ The mother nodded. ‘Where?’

  ‘Handbag. Bedroom.’

  ‘Handbag in the bedroom!’ Bull called out and there was a loud crash as Roberto pulled something on to the floor in the kitchen on his way out.

  Bull held up what was left of the doll and looked at the little girl. ‘You gonna be a good Mummy and make her all better?’ She was having trouble breathing now, her snotty sobs ragged and desperate as she held the mutilated remains of her baby. Bull dropped the doll into the bath and she hugged it while her mother hugged her. She had at least a thousand euros’ worth of ink on her skin and that was only the bits he could see.

  ‘You got any piercings?’ Bull asked. She hesitated. Nodded.

  Roberto appeared behind him with a fake Louis Vuitton handbag in one hand and assorted items in the other: ‘Driving licence, passport, iPhone 4.’

  Bull nodded. ‘OK, you can keep your jewellery for now. We’ll take your bag and give it back when your boyfriend pays what he owes. See you later.’ He winked at the little girl and left.

  Outside on the street, Bull opened the boot of his BMW with the button on his key fob and dropped the handbag inside next to several others. The bags were all fakes but their contents had value. Phones were like cash cards now, you could pay for all sorts of things with the credit on them or sell them to the dealers, who always needed phones. Passports and driver’s licences could be sold for identity fraud. He dropped the cash into a shoebox, along with the rest of the day’s take, and added eighty euros to the running total in his notebook. They were already at almost three thousand – not bad for a weekday. He closed the boot, got into the passenger seat, took his phone from the glove compartment and checked his messages. He had one and he frowned when he read it and dialled a number from memory.

  ‘I got your message,’ he said. He listened and jotted some things in his notebook: Solomon Creed, Marie-Claude, Léonardo. A20. Heading north.

  ‘Where are they now?’ He listened some more. Nodded. ‘OK, send me the details. I’ll let you know when it’s done.’ He hung up and turned to Roberto. ‘You feeling patriotic?’

  Roberto shrugged and unwrapped one of the aniseed sweets he’d become addicted to since giving up smoking. Bull’s phone buzzed again and he opened the message and studied the attached photographs of the people whose names he had written down. He lingered on the woman. She was dark-haired, fine-featured, pretty. At the bottom of the text was a sequence of numbers and he leaned forward and copied the coordinates into the satnav. The map on the display changed and plotted a course from their current position. They were forty minutes away, but the target was heading north, coming towards them. Bull studied the map, working out the best place to intercept. ‘Head to the péage,’ he said.

  ‘What we doing?’ Roberto asked, the aniseed lozenge clacking against his teeth.

  ‘Our duty for a free France,’ Bull replied, pointing at the tattoo of the black boar on his arm. He’d got it in prison when he was young and stupid and the Brotherhood had taken him in and protected him and made him one of their own.

  61

  Solomon smelled salt and turned to Marie-Claude. Her cheeks were glossed with tears, showing she had been crying for a while, though she had not made a sound. She noticed Solomon looking and turned away, wiping her face with her hand.

  ‘Do you want to stop?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she said, her eyes flicking to the mirror and the sleeping form of Léo. ‘I want to get to where we’re going, find out what the fuck all this is about, then go back home and get on with my life.’

  He could smell her anger beneath the salt – ash and smoke – as well as the solid stone smell of her guilt, like the foundation upon which she had built herself. ‘You may not get answers,’ he said. ‘Or they might not be the answers you want.’

  She nodded. ‘I know.’

  ‘Is that why you’re upset?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m crying because I’m tired, because I’m angry, because my grandfather was murdered and it might have been my fault, and because I’m afraid that I’ve put my son in danger. And I’m crying because the only way I can see to possibly explain any of this is by driving halfway across the country in a stolen car to talk to a man I’m not even sure will tell me anything. Frankly, if Léo wasn’t asleep I’d be screaming right now.’ She turned to Solomon and he felt the heat of her gaze. ‘How can you stay so calm? If this Otto Adelstein doesn’t know you, you’ll have wasted your time too.’

  Solomon stared at the road ahead. ‘I stay calm because it’s the best place to think from – and because calm feels safe.’

  ‘Safe? What do you mean?’

  Solomon rubbed his hand across the brand on his arm and felt the raised skin beneath the fabric of his jacket. ‘Whenever I feel things too strongly, something stirs inside me, something painful and dark and powerful. It’s deep down and locked away and I want to know what it is, but I’m afraid of it too. I feel that maybe, if I know more about myself, I could let it out – like wanting to know what kind of creature is inside a box before deciding whether to let it out or not. At the moment, I don’t know enough, so I keep calm and I keep it contained. But I’m also afraid of what it might reveal about who I am. Knowledge is not always power. Remember what your grandfather wrote in his note to you? “… knowledge is sometimes a curse. And you can never unlearn something once it is known.” That stands as a warning for both of us, because we
both potentially have monsters in boxes. You want to know yours and crystallize your sense of identity by learning about your grandfather’s past. But what if this man we’re driving to see tells you something awful, something that your grandfather did in the camps to survive? You’ve read the stories. You know the lengths people had to go to, the depths they had to plumb just to stay alive.’

  Marie-Claude shook her head. ‘Things were different in the camps. Normal laws and morality didn’t apply. My grandfather was not a bad man and even if he was forced to do bad things, I know that’s not who he was and I will not judge him for it.’

  ‘But what if he didn’t only kill one person, what if he killed thousands? They used the prisoners to run the ovens, you know that, the Sonderkommandos who serviced the death machine under threat of their own execution. What if your gentle grandfather was one of these, reassuring the new arrivals and telling them everything was going to be fine as he led them to the gas chambers? What if he only survived because he killed hundreds of men and women, and children like Léo? Would you want to know that? Would that help inform your sense of self? Would you tell Léo that he was only born because thousands of others exactly like him died? Or would you rather not know? Because right now, you have a choice. You can choose not to know because this knowledge is not your truth. You are removed from it, and perhaps that is how it should stay. It’s different for me. I’m afraid of this rage inside me but I know I must face it and own it one day because it’s part of me. But you don’t have to. Maybe that’s why I’m here. Maybe that’s how I can save Léo.’

  Marie-Claude glanced in the mirror again, checking Léo was still asleep. ‘You keep saying that. Why do you think you need to save Léo? Save him from what?’

  ‘Have you ever heard of Sin Eaters?’ She shook her head. ‘It’s a tradition dating back to the Aztecs and beyond, but found in many cultures where a person assumes the sins of the dead. Sometimes this is by a verbal process of confession and absolution, as in the Catholic Church, and sometimes it is a physical thing. In Scotland there is a tradition of placing a piece of bread on the chest of a dying person. The bread is believed to absorb the sins of the dying and is consumed by someone known as a Sin Eater. This person is often an outcast, a pariah in the community. Jesus Christ was a Sin Eater of sorts. Maybe I’m one too.

  ‘I can’t tell you how I know that I’m here to save Léo – some things I just know. But it seems that the unknown story of your grandfather’s past is my story too. And I have to know mine, I have no choice. But you do, and perhaps this is how I can save Léo: by taking on the story of his past so that he may never be tainted by whatever it is we discover. Maybe that’s why I’m here, right at this moment, taking this journey with you. Because I’m your Sin Eater.’

  62

  Amand found a notebook in the desk, tore out a blank page and made a list of all the things he’d asked Henri to do:

  1. Search alerts for Marie-Claude / Léo / Solomon

  2. Bamboo cane to Albi morgue

  3. Look up Saul Schwartzfeldt murder and check details against Josef Engel’s

  4. Ditto Herman Lansky

  There was the scrape of a chair against floorboards and the ancient sergeant rose to his feet. ‘I got to head up to the courtroom for ten minutes. Could you answer the phones while I’m gone?’

  Amand nodded. ‘No problem.’

  He waited until the sergeant had gone before turning his attention back to his list. He put a tick next to the first item and a question mark by the second. Henri had said someone at the morgue was looking for the cane, but he now doubted it. He would head over and check it out for himself. For the third item he took out his phone and opened the notes he’d made in Marie-Claude’s office and opened the National Police directory on his borrowed computer. He typed ‘Colmar’ into the search field and dialled the number that came back.

  ‘Commissariat de Colmar,’ a woman answered.

  ‘Hello, this is Commandant Benoît Amand calling from Albi. Could I speak with …’ he checked the notes on his phone, ‘Commandant Rapp, please.’

  ‘Can I say what it’s regarding?’

  ‘It’s about Saul Schwartzfeldt.’

  There was an intake of breath and a short blast of Alpine music before a man answered. ‘This is Rapp. I understand you wish to talk about Monsieur Schwartzfeldt?’

  ‘Yes. I’m investigating a murder and believe that my victim was a survivor of the same Nazi camp as Saul Schwartzfeldt. I’m calling because the manner of his death was unusual. I apologize if you’ve already spoken to someone in my office about this.’

  ‘No. This is the first I’ve heard of it.’

  Amand wrote ‘Henri’ at the bottom of his notes and drew a heavy circle round it.

  ‘You said the manner of death was unusual,’ Rapp asked. ‘How exactly?’

  ‘Well, none of this is being made public but – he was tortured before he died.’

  ‘Tortured how?’

  ‘A Star of David was cut into his flesh, for one.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus, not another one. Were there rats too? Starved rats?’

  Amand felt as if the blood had drained from his head. ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s the same. Monsieur Schwartzfeldt was the same.’

  ‘Could you send me a copy of your murder file so I can compare them?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Amand gave him his Gmail address, along with the same excuse about a faulty server.

  ‘Please, monsieur,’ Rapp said. ‘Find whoever did this. Saul was a good man, everybody liked him. My town has not been the same since his death. People used to leave their doors unlocked, now there are houses with bars on the windows. I feel I let my town down by not catching this monster, this … devil. Good luck, monsieur. Anything you need that will help with your investigation, just ask.’

  Amand hung up and looked down at his notes. He drew a line between Saul Schwartzfeldt’s name and Josef Engel. Magellan had been right. Josef had not been the killer’s first victim. He switched his attention to the last name on the list – Herman Lansky. Lansky had died in London almost seventy years earlier and it had not been classed as a murder, so he doubted the files would have been kept. But there had been a police investigation, he had seen the verdict of the coroner’s inquest, which meant there was a chance.

  He opened the contacts on his phone and started scrolling through, looking for the name David Munroe, someone he’d met a few years back at an international crime symposium in Toulouse. Munroe had worked for the Metropolitan Police in London. Amand hoped he still did. He found his number and hesitated. He had meant to call him many times over the last few years but had always changed his mind. The English detective represented a side of his life that he’d been forced to keep hidden because of where he lived and the small-town attitudes that prevailed there. He’d often wondered if that was why he felt such empathy with Marie-Claude. They both had secret identities. They were both outsiders. He took a breath and dialled the number, hoping Munroe might recognize the name and answer. It started to ring, a foreign-sounding tone that went on for a long time before someone answered.

  ‘Benny?’

  Amand smiled at the sound of that familiar voice. ‘David. Long time.’

  ‘Too long. How’s France?’

  ‘Lots of bread, lots of wine – the same. Listen, David, I’m ringing for a favour.’

  ‘Personal or professional?’

  ‘Police business.’

  ‘Always with the business,’ Munroe sounded a little disappointed. ‘What do you need?’

  ‘Any information you may have relating to an old case, a death in London.’

  ‘Name and date?’

  ‘The name is Herman Lansky. The date is June sixteenth, 1949.’

  ‘Whoa, when you said “old” I didn’t realize you meant prehistoric!’

  ‘I know. That’s why I called you instead of going through the channels. There’s probably nothing, or the files will be in a box
in some huge warehouse somewhere.’

  ‘They won’t be. The Met sold off the old Scotland Yard archive building a couple of years back. What was once a huge warehouse in Docklands is all luxury flats now. There are no boxes full of old files any more.’

  Amand circled Herman Lansky’s name and put a question mark next to it. ‘I thought it was a bit of a long shot. It was nice to talk to you again, David.’

  ‘Hold your horses.’ He heard typing. ‘Just ’cause there’s no boxes doesn’t mean there’s no archive. Part of the deal when they sold the old warehouse was that the money had to be used to update everything, so all those old documents were digitized. No more rooting through boxes. All the files were indexed and archived, which means they’re now searchable from any terminal. I’m looking at Herman Lansky’s file right now. Death by misadventure – some kind of fire. Give me your email and I’ll send it over.’ Amand gave Munroe his Gmail address and heard the whooshing sound of an email being sent. ‘And what do I get in return? You should come over to London and take me out. The scene here is a bit more lively than yours.’

  Amand remembered the drunken nights of the conference. The freedom of being away from Cordes and everyone he knew. The freedom to be himself. He had been carrying some extra weight back then but Munroe hadn’t minded. He hadn’t minded at all. ‘I will,’ he said, and he meant it. ‘As soon as I’ve squared away this case I’ll take some time off and come to London. I promise. Be great to see you again.’ He wanted to see what Munroe would make of the new, slimmer him and felt a sudden, strong urge to get away from Cordes and all the small-town eyes filled with curiosity and judgement at anyone who was different.

  ‘Deal,’ Munroe said. The email appeared in Amand’s inbox as he hung up.

  The Lansky file was fairly small and consisted mainly of PDF scans of old documents. There were a couple of black-and-white photographs showing a burned-out flat, a copy of the same coroner’s court report he had already seen, and a whole load of handwritten notes from the beat cops. Amand struggled to read the old-fashioned handwriting that looped and swirled across the lined pages, his rusty English not helping either. It seemed to be mostly witness statements from neighbours saying the usual things about how Herman Lansky had kept himself to himself and seemed nice – despite being foreign. One resident said she’d heard raised voices in Lansky’s flat on the night of the fire and had thought it odd because she’d never known Mr Lansky to have a visitor before, but no one else had heard anything and that line of enquiry had not been followed up.