‘We’ve established that she’s strong-willed.’
‘That will have helped at first. Made it easier for her to convince herself she isn’t frightened. Which she will be, of course. Terrified. Gradually – there’s no way of predicting how gradually – the terror will replace the resistance. When that happens she’ll start wanting to ingratiate herself. Think that if she does what they want they’ll treat her kindly. Let her go, even.’
‘Making it easier to convince her about the sex?’
Claudine nodded, abandoning the rest of her meal.
‘You haven’t eaten much.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘That all?’
‘It’s been a long day. I’m tired.’
‘It doesn’t show.’
It would have done, if she hadn’t concentrated upon her make-up, more than once rearranged her hair after showering and taken the time to choose between three dresses before coming out. She was glad she had. He’d changed too, she realized. ‘I’d like to believe it.’
‘After the knife attack on the last case you were authorized to carry a weapon?’
Claudine was startled by the abrupt change of direction. ‘Yes?’
‘You carrying it now?’
She was still bewildered. ‘No. I’m embarrassed about it: it was an over-reaction.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Back in The Hague, in my safe.’
‘Not a lot of use there, is it?’
‘What about you, after Ireland?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you carrying?’
He smiled sheepishly. ‘I left it at the hotel. Which is not just stupid but a very good reason for me to be disciplined.’
‘Touché!’ What the hell was this all about?
‘You enjoy Europol?’
Now which way were they going! They’d had this conversation, surely? ‘I didn’t want to stay in England after my husband died. I wish there was more to do.’
‘Lots of opportunity to meet people.’
‘If you want to meet people,’ she agreed.
‘Which I hear you don’t.’
‘From whom?’ At least he’d held off for the first few days. She supposed she should have been irritated now but she wasn’t. Oddly the tiredness was easing, too.
‘Just talk.’
‘I’m not interested in one-night stands. Any sort of stand, for that matter.’
Blake pushed his own plate aside. ‘Is there anyone?’
Claudine realized, surprised, that she hadn’t thought of Hugo Rosetti since the Brussels case began. ‘There’s a friend. Nothing serious.’ Why had she said that, dismissing the situation with Hugo? She loved him and knew he loved her: was prepared – anxious even – for the affair that his rigid, self-imposed rules prevented his entering into. So maybe the dismissal had been justified after all, although not describing it as ‘nothing serious.’ Bizarre was more accurate. How long was she prepared to go on with it? Until Flavia really died, instead of remaining suspended in a living death? The question was as repugnant as the actual prospect. No matter what she felt for Hugo, she couldn’t tell him that. It would sound like an ultimatum: which it would be, she supposed. The way to end it, even. She didn’t want to end it, unsatisfactory though it was, nor did she want it to drift on indefinitely. Impasse. What was the clinical word to describe someone supremely confident of their professional ability whose private life was an insoluble mess? Idiot came easily to mind.
‘I think I’ve overstepped the boundaries,’ said Blake.
‘Perhaps you have.’
‘Are you offended?’
‘No.’
‘I’m still sorry. Embarrassed, too.’
Claudine didn’t think he was. ‘We should be getting back.’
‘Kurt’s got this number, if anything comes up.’
‘I’d still like to get back.’
‘So you are offended.’
‘Tired.’
Claudine thought Blake was going to protest at her paying her share of the bill – shifting the colleague-to-colleague understanding – but he didn’t and she was glad. On their way back across the square he kept even further away from her than he’d previously done. There were two telephone calls from Rosetti logged at the reception desk.
‘Anything?’
‘Personal.’ She didn’t feel like returning them tonight.
‘Goodnight, then.’
‘Goodnight.’
He nodded towards the corridor bar, holding her eyes. ‘I thought I’d have one last drink.’
Claudine answered the gaze. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’ She wasn’t offended, she decided, as the open-sided elevator took her upwards. There wasn’t any possibility of a personal situation developing between them, but the suggestion she might have responded to one was flattering. He was, in fact, a very attractive man.
‘You looked very grand on television. Autocratic, like de Gaulle.’ Françoise was totally naked, examining herself in the full length mirror. She did it most nights when she slept there, which wasn’t a lot. It went beyond narcissism to become a permanent taunt directed at him.
Sanglier had collected the Europol masterfile on the McBride disappearance on his way from the railway station. He didn’t bother to look up from it until he became aware of the woman, close to his bed.
She turned with a model’s grace, jutting out her left hip. ‘What do you think?’
There was still some distorting soreness around the small tattoo of a yellow and blue bird, high on her thigh. ‘What is it?’
‘A love bird. Maria’s got one to match.’
‘Who’s Maria?’
‘She makes films: sometimes very special films. I love her very much.’ Gauging his sudden interest, she said: ‘But not enough to leave home. It suits me to be married to you, just as it suits you to be married to me. We adorn each other.’
Once but not any more, thought Sanglier. How – and when – was he going to tell her about returning to Paris? Not yet. She’d probably be glad to be going back. She hated The Hague. ‘I was with Claudine Carter in Brussels.’
‘One of the few to get away,’ pouted Françoise, in mock regret. ‘Why did you bring us together?’
‘Another mistake,’ conceded Sanglier.
‘You’d never think of involving me in a situation to get rid of me, would you?’ demanded Françoise.
‘With a member of my own staff? Hardly!’
‘Don’t even think about it,’ she warned.
She would embarrass him one day, Sanglier knew. And he did want to get rid of her, so very desperately.
CHAPTER TEN
The message said MARY, MARY QUITE CONTRARY IS MISSING BILLY and at the first combined gathering of the day Claudine stressed that she might have missed the identification without Norris’s complete background on the McBride family. Initially she actually held back, hoping the American himself would isolate what was so glaringly obvious from the ten other possibilities thrown up by Kurt Volker’s fast-track word-recognition selection, but Norris didn’t. He didn’t respond to her praise, either.
The success anyway was more Kurt Volker’s than hers. He’d filleted Norris’s background information of trigger words for his tracer program, which had instantly flagged the only reference to Mary’s pet in any of the incoming e-mail. It also activated a print-out, and timed the duration of the message precisely at sixty seconds – confirming Volker’s earlier estimate – before clearing.
‘What about a trace on the source?’ demanded Norris, hiding any approval he might have felt, which Claudine didn’t think was much.
Volker shook his head. ‘There’s still too much incoming, slowing down any possible response. All the key words – in this case “contrary” “Mary” and “Billy” – spelled with an “ie” as well as with a “y” just in case – had to be matched by my comparison program. It’s like trying to swim against a tide.’
‘Could you get a location if t
he traffic eases?’ asked Poncellet, responding to Jean Smet’s obvious prompting.
‘Yes,’ said Volker, immediately and confidently.
Poncellet went sideways, to a fresh nudge from the ministry lawyer, before asking in apparent disbelief: ‘In as little as sixty seconds?’
‘I think so.’
Looking invitingly at Norris, Claudine said: ‘They’ve maintained contact!’ Come on, she thought, hopefully: analyse it as you should be able to and show me I haven’t done as much harm as I think I have. Harding, Rampling and Harrison were all looking expectantly at the FBI supervisor.
‘Not properly,’ complained Norris. ‘There should have been a negotiating link established by now. They’ve been frightened off by the publicity.’
‘Don’t you think we might still be in the power stage, their showing us they’re calling the shots?’ she suggested. How could she hope to help this man – treat this man – when saving the child took precedence over everything?
‘They already know that.’
‘But psychologically they need to prove it, to themselves more than to us at the moment. It’s the predictably established formula: your formula,’ said Claudine. By trying too hard to be kind she was coming close to exposing the man’s mental limitation!
‘The longer it goes on, the more dangerous it gets for Mary,’ insisted Norris.
‘I agree,’ said Claudine at once. ‘Today’s message was important.’
‘How?’ demanded Blake. He was the only one in the room aware of how much reconciliation Claudine was attempting with Norris and he was professionally impatient with it. Having operated alone for so long in Ireland Blake was unused to working with or considering the feelings of over-sensitive committees. It was diplomatic bureaucracy and that wasn’t the way to solve crime. He was anxious to start an investigation he wasn’t yet prepared to discuss with anyone, not even Claudine, and he was personally unsettled by the previous evening. He certainly wasn’t prepared to discuss that with her, either. He’d hoped, perhaps stupidly, that the days of having to carry the Beretta in his belt-line, where it was chafing him now, were past, too.
‘It wasn’t composed by the same person who wrote the first Mary, Mary rhyme,’ declared Claudine, grateful for the opportunity Blake created. ‘The first approach was considered, measured: a look-at-me, aren’t-I-clever message. Today’s wasn’t. It was hurried: impatient or nervous. But that’s important. The immediate significance of their knowing the name of Mary’s pet is that they’ve begun mentally to work on her: to confuse her by how they treat her, so that she won’t know what’s going to happen next: what’s right or wrong, real or unreal. They’re talking about her pet: might even have told her the sort of message they were going to send—’
‘And having started to build up a trust, they’ll break it,’ interrupted Norris.
‘That’s the pattern,’ agreed Claudine, pleased. It hadn’t all gone!
‘So what do we do?’ asked the American chief of mission. ‘We’re pretty strong on psychological theory but I don’t see anything practical coming from it, like getting Mary back.’
‘We wait for the next message,’ declared Norris. ‘That’ll take us forward: they’ll give us the link the next time.’
Claudine sighed, sadly disappointed. ‘I don’t think we should wait. I think we need to bring them forward. The ambassador publicly cried yesterday—’
‘And is as embarrassed as hell about it,’ disclosed Harrison.
‘He shouldn’t be,’ insisted Claudine. ‘He did a lot to help Mary, breaking down like that. They reduced an ambassador of the United States of America, the most powerful nation on earth, to helpless tears. The power – their ability – to do that makes Mary very valuable to them. Protects her.’
‘So what should we do?’ persisted Harrison.
‘I think the ambassador should meet the media again: television particularly, to enable Mary’s abductors to see the effect her disappearance is having. With Mrs McBride, too—’
‘I’m not sure either will be prepared to,’ intruded Harrison again.
Claudine decided it wouldn’t be difficult to become thoroughly pissed off by the overbearing, opinionated diplomat. Restraining the temptation verbally to push the man back into his box, she said: ‘Why don’t we explain the purpose – which is to prove just how helpless we are and how much in command they are – and give them the chance to make up their own minds? If Mrs McBride cries, even better.’
‘Mrs McBride doesn’t cry,’ said Harrison simply.
‘Any emotion the McBrides publicly display will help,’ insisted Claudine. ‘We’ve got to establish a two-way dialogue as quickly and as effectively as possible. And the way to do that is for the ambassador to announce verbally, in public, that there has been another message …’ she stopped, not wanting any misunderstanding ‘… but not, in any circumstances, saying what mat message was. Not, even, that it arrived by e-mail. That goes way beyond keeping the computer route into the embassy as free as possible. We’re inviting them – conceding that they rule our world – to take that one step forward and begin a dialogue.’
‘From a position of weakness,’ challenged Norris at once.
Momentarily Claudine didn’t reply, looking away from all of them but focusing on nothing. Like so many doctors able to adjust the Hippocratic oath she’d favoured euthanasia long before helplessly watching the mother she’d adored physically eroded by cancer, just a few months earlier. But, incredibly she now realized, she’d never extended that image of physical erosion and that necessary release to include a mental illness. At that moment she did. Strictly obeying her know thyself creed Claudine fully recognized that her overweening professional confidence – the central core around which her life revolved – was what motivated her entire existence. As horrifying and as humiliating and as agonizing as her mother’s physical decline had been, Claudine decided that for her personally to lose her analytical psychological competence – to lose her mind, in fact, as John Norris appeared to have lost his – equally justified the quick release of self-destruction. In her case perhaps more so than an irreversible physical condition. At once there came an unsettling unanswerable question. Did she really feel so strongly about euthanasia because of her mother’s death? Or did her conviction come from what she couldn’t fulfil with Hugo Rosetti because of the permanent, irreversible coma in which his wife existed? Claudine forced herself on, refusing even to attempt an answer, frightened of what it might be.
‘John,’ she said gently. ‘That’s exactly what it is, a position of weakness. We know it. They know it. They’ve got a public forum in which they want everyone else to know it too. We can’t change that position until we get into a negotiating stance. You wrote that, in the text books: lectured on it at Quantico.’
Norris frowned, seemingly unable to remember. He didn’t argue. Harding, alongside, frowned too towards Rampling but it was an entirely different expression for entirely different reasons. There was a long, unfilled silence.
‘John?’ prompted Harrison.
‘It means exposing the ambassador.’ The man tried to recover.
‘Which is better than exposing his daughter,’ said Blake shortly, and Claudine wished he hadn’t.
Harrison said: ‘I could suggest it. I understand the reasoning.’
Smet leaned sideways, whispering to the commissioner. At once the portly, uniform-encased man said: ‘We have some positive sightings of Mary minutes before she disappeared.’
‘Walking? Or getting into a vehicle?’ demanded Blake.
‘Both,’ said Poncellet.
‘Walking first,’ dictated Blake, eager to establish the sequence. ‘How many positive identifications?’
Poncellet hesitated at the intensity of the Englishman’s demands. Claudine withdrew, giving way to a different expertise, interested in watching Blake operate.
Poncellet consulted a folder already set out in front of him. ‘Three.’
‘Absolutely
no doubt it was Mary?’
‘A positive identification, every time.’
‘Was she by herself? Or with someone?’
‘By herself.’
‘Anyone close?’
Poncellet hesitated again. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘The question wasn’t asked,’ decided Blake briskly. ‘I’ll need to go back to each witness myself, today. Can we get them in here now?’
‘We could try.’ Poncellet turned at once to the three-clerk secretariat that had arrived with him and Smet. One immediately left the office.
‘How was she behaving?’ came in Paul Harding. ‘Walking normally? Slow? Fast? Agitated? Calm?’
Claudine was alert for any reaction from Norris to the local FBI man’s intrusion and suspected that Harding was, too. There was a faint smile on Norris’s face, the expression of a master watching inexpert pupils attempting to prove themselves. But nothing else.
‘You’ll have to ask them that,’ said Poncellet. He was beginning to colour and his breathing was becoming difficult.
‘How close to the school was the first sighting?’ persisted Harding.
‘Quite close, I think.’
‘Any evidence of a car near her?’ asked Blake.
‘Not that I’ve been told.’
‘Was she seen talking to anyone?’
‘I haven’t any reports of her doing so.’
‘How reliable are these witnesses?’ demanded Harding. ‘Believable or questionable?’
‘I think you should decide that yourselves.’
‘I think we should,’ said Harding, pointedly dismissive. He looked without needing to ask the question to Blake, who nodded.
‘What about the car sightings?’ said Blake.
‘Two, of her getting into a vehicle.’
‘What sort of vehicle?’
‘A Mercedes.’
‘No doubt about that?’ pressed Harding.
Poncellet shook his head. ‘Both are Mercedes drivers themselves.’
‘Registration?’ asked Harding.
‘No.’
‘Belgian or foreign designation?’
‘I’ve no record of that.’
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