The man wasn’t fighting back any more. He was standing with his arms cupped about his head, trying to protect himself but mostly just standing there, letting himself be beaten. And the woman was beating him, aiming her blows, kicking him, and shouting in French. The man began to retreat towards the door under the onslaught and she kept up the attack, driving him from the room and disappearing through the door, still clamouring at him in French.
It was only then that Mary saw there was someone else, a man she hadn’t seen before, standing just inside the entrance. He was very tall and oddly thin, his stomach curved in instead of out, the strangeness made more obvious by the way his shoulders humped, bringing him forward. His mask was frightening, black leather cut with spaces for just his eyes and his mouth but very tight, like a skin over his head and face. He carried the sort of bag that doctors used.
In bad English he said: ‘Poor little one. Poor, poor little one.’
‘Don’t hurt me,’ pleaded Mary, her voice catching in a sob. ‘Please don’t hurt me.’
‘I won’t,’ said Pieter Lascelles. ‘I promise I won’t hurt you.’
Mary was sick and she’d wet herself and there were tiny blood spots inside her knickers that frightened her but the woman said she wasn’t ill but that it was growing up, becoming a woman, and she wasn’t to worry. Until they dried, after she’d washed them, she didn’t have to worry about u.p.’s.
The woman had showered her and afterwards cuddled her on the cushioned bench. Mary lay with her legs curled up, wanting to be held, wishing the man with the skin mask wasn’t in the room with them, spoiling it. Mary didn’t want anybody else with them: she liked it with just her and the woman.
It took some time for the catch to go out of Mary’s voice as she told the woman what had happened and all the time the woman held her and smoothed her hair and several times Mary felt the woman press her lips to her head, kissing her. Over and over she kept repeating ‘poor baby’ and ‘my poor darling’ and ‘poor love.’
‘He wanted to hurt me,’ sobbed Mary. ‘Said Gaston said it would be all right. Wanted me to dance. Shower and dance.’
‘It’s all right. All over now. He won’t come here ever again.’
‘I want you.’
‘I know you do, my darling. I’ll take care of you now: I’ll always take care of you.’
‘Please don’t leave me alone.’
‘I’ve got to: there are things I have to do. But you’ll be safe.’ She pulled away from the child. ‘I want your backpack: the one we looked through last night.’
‘Why?’
‘I want to use it for something.’
‘All right.’ Mary felt important being able to lend the woman something she wanted.
On their way into Antwerp Lascelles said: ‘She’s very pretty.’
‘And she’s mine!’ declared Félicité.
The gaunt man looked across the car towards her. ‘Would he have killed her?’ There was no emotion in his voice.
‘I think so.’
‘He’s a liability: all your people are. Can you stop him coming back again?’
‘Yes,’ said Félicité shortly.
‘I think we should get it over with soon.’
‘When I’m ready, not before.’
‘She’s not just pretty,’ mused the doctor. ‘Remarkably brave considering what she went through back there.’
Félicité was at the Mehre gallery, confronting the brothers. Charles sat even more huddled than before in the upright chair, crying. Gaston stood defensively by the window, as if he saw it as a way of escape. There was no pretence of drink-offering hospitality.
‘I didn’t know he’d gone. I sent him to collect a bureau in Ghent.’
‘Liar!’ accused Félicité. ‘You sent him to kill her!’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
Gaston stopped protesting.
‘Who of the others knows?’ Félicité demanded.
‘All of them.’
‘Bastards!’
‘What are you going to do?’
Félicité didn’t know. That realization made her even angrier. They weren’t obeying her any more. ‘Wait,’ she said inadequately. ‘You can wait – all of you – to find out.’
‘Gaston said I could,’ mumbled Charles from his isolated seat.
Claudine lay with her head into Blake’s naked shoulder, liking the way his arm felt holding him to her: liking the whole feel of his body along the length of hers. It had been wonderful. She couldn’t remember how long it had been – couldn’t remember sex – but she didn’t think it had ever been like this. He’d been incredible. Always thinking of her before himself, her pleasure before his, but at the same time there’d been a frenzy, an urgency more than passion the first time and then he’d taken her again, twice, and each time she’d come. She’d forgotten that, too. Now she felt wonderful. Relaxed, from the sex and the Librium, but with no tiredness. Instead her mind was pin-sharp and her skin burned, tingling against his.
‘You OK?’
‘Wonderful.’ There had to be another word! ‘You?’
‘You wouldn’t know.’
It seemed an odd thing to say. It didn’t matter. ‘Now we’ve joined the Europol club. I guess it’s like the mile high club.’
‘No!’ he said.
Despite the darkness she was conscious of his seriousness. ‘I don’t think we need to analyse it,’ she said. Which for her would be a change.
‘Perhaps we do.’
‘It happened, Peter. Because of a lot of outside things, but it happened and it was …’ she stopped, refusing to use the word yet again ‘… and it was sensational but I don’t expect you to propose marriage. If you did I’d refuse.’
‘I used you,’ he said.
‘I don’t remember complaining. Or fighting,’ she said, trying to lighten his mood. He was spoiling things.
‘I want to tell you something … need to tell you something … but I’m frightened.’
‘What of?’
‘What you’d think of me.’
‘Does it matter what I think of you?’
‘I think so.’
‘Your choice,’ she said.
Blake didn’t speak for a long time. When he did it was with difficulty, the words uneven, disjointed. ‘There were two of us. I didn’t know that. I wasn’t told. Neither was she. That’s the system, you see. If one gets blown there’s still another one in place, but you can’t bring him down because you don’t know …’ He lapsed into another long silence.
Lying as she was Claudine was conscious of his breathing becoming shorter. ‘What was her name?’ she prompted, knowing his need.
‘Anne. Her family were from Kildare …’ He grunted, bitterly. ‘I suppose that’s how it started with her and me. Like you, tonight. Frightened, not wanting to be alone after seeing someone killed. We had to take part in operations, of course. Prove ourselves. Our initiation was a bombing in Enniskillen. A British soldier died. We both saw it happen: saw him blown to pieces …’
‘But it became more than fear and sex?’ Claudine prompted again, when he didn’t continue after several minutes. It all had to come out, brutally if necessary. Blown to pieces echoed in her head: briefly she had a mental image of a crimson explosion and a body without a head.
‘We still didn’t know about each other: not properly, I mean. We used to have long conversations about how we’d get married when it was all over – when the cause had been won and there was just one Ireland, I mean – and all the time I knew it would never be possible because of who I really was and she would have been thinking the same because of who she really was, neither of us knowing that we could have got together when we were withdrawn …’
‘What went wrong?’ said Claudine.
‘There was to be another operation on the mainland. The strategy of bombing the City of London, hitting the country’s financial centre, was judged a success so it was decided to keep it up: force a lot of fore
ign banks to relocate in Frankfurt. My contact was a barman at the Europa Hotel, in Belfast. We used to drink there, Anne and I. She knew him by sight. The Semtex movement into Britain was decided at the last minute: more than a ton. The devastation would have been greater than either Canary Wharf or the Baltic Exchange. I hadn’t used the emergency system before – actually met him away from the hotel – but I had to, for the van carrying the explosive to be identified and followed from its arrival at Holyhead. I made the call from her flat: I went there ahead of her from the planning meeting and decided I couldn’t wait or risk a public kiosk, that Anne’s phone was safer. She must have come in sooner than I thought and heard me, although I didn’t think she had. I didn’t think she was in the house. She must have followed me – can you imagine it, doing her proper job! – and I saw her, just after I passed the details …’
His breathing became even more difficult and Claudine guessed he was crying and was glad for his sake they were in darkness. ‘Don’t stop, not now.’
‘He must have had an English watcher, too: someone compartmented like we all were who saw her and thought he was blown. I never knew. But he was withdrawn: took the information with him. We made a big thing about it in England. Followed the van to London, swept up the entire cell that was going to plant the bombs. The head of the anti-terrorist unit gave a press conference. And the stupid bastard talked about inside information: actually used the word infiltration. There were only ten people who could have known, Anne and I two of them. They had a source inside the Belfast telephone exchange I didn’t know about. They traced the call from Anne’s flat to the Europa bar: the bar from which my man had been withdrawn …’
Claudine waited.
‘I don’t want to go on.’
‘Yes,’ she insisted.
‘They got her.’
‘That’s not it, is it?’
‘That’s enough.’
‘Not for you it isn’t.’
Blake’s voice was flat, as if he was reading words that had been written down. ‘There was what they called a trial: Anne in front of every one of us who’d known about the Semtex shipment. She denied it, of course. Said she didn’t know about a hotel barman, which was true. Never once looked at me … They took her away, after finding her guilty. They decided to torture her, to find out if there were any others … we were all to gang rape her, then she was to be tortured.’
‘You didn’t let them get to her, did you?’
‘She was already naked when I went into the room, spread-eagled on the bed. I went mad. Intentionally. Screamed and shouted that she was a whore and a slut: made myself uncontrollable, which wasn’t difficult, although not for the reasons they all thought. She never said a word to betray me. Only looked directly at me at the very last minute. I shot her dead, before they realized what I was doing.’ Blake moved slightly away from Claudine, who for the first time became aware how wet her cheek was, from his tears. ‘I killed her twice. Once by being careless and then by pulling the trigger. She let it happen, to save me … And they all said what a good and loyal soldier I was: forgave me for spoiling their fun before they could find out if there was any other infiltrator.’
For once in her over-confident life Claudine didn’t know what to say. ‘The proper English trial at which you appeared?’ she groped. ‘They were the men?’
‘Six of them. They all got life. But they’ll be released, of course.’
‘If you and Anne made up two who knew and there were six properly tried, that leaves two missing.’
‘We were to put a bomb in Belfast city centre: our reprisal for the interception of the Semtex and the arrest of the cell in London. We were going to use the sewers: crawl in and crawl out. Devastate the place and kill God knows how many above. It was to be an hour fuse. I shortened it to two minutes. They went into the sewer ahead of me and I shouted down that there was a patrol and I had to close the manhole. It made a crater twenty metres deep and forty metres across.’
‘You were believed, by other people?’ queried Claudine.
‘I didn’t run: knew I couldn’t if it was to be accepted as the sort of mistake they often made. The explosion broke my left leg and right ankle …’
‘Were you trying to die?’
‘The other six hadn’t been sentenced then.’
‘What if they had been?’
He didn’t reply.
‘Peter?’
‘I’d have gone into the tunnel with them.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t. And I’m glad you told me. It’s better …’
‘I haven’t finished. Since then I haven’t been able to do this. Not until tonight.’
Oh God! thought Claudine. They weren’t talking love – love didn’t come into it – but there could be a dependency here.
‘That’s what I meant by using you. Are you angry?’
‘No,’ she said cautiously. ‘But let’s not think about what happened as anything more than it was.’
‘I won’t,’ he said.
He would, she knew.
The first of the early morning cleaners found Mary Beth’s rucksack just inside the school entrance and imagined it had been left there by a pupil the previous day, although it was rare for things to be left lying about. Madame Flahaur recognized it immediately for what it was and fortunately told her secretary to call the police before opening it. The school principal collapsed immediately with severe heart palpitations at the sight of its sole content, a child’s severed toe.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
She had been desperately trying to prevent herself from getting shot, and she wasn’t in any case capable of treating the man, but Claudine denied herself any excuse, hollowed by the guilt of failing sufficiently to identify John Norris’s mental deterioration. The remorse was inevitable – tangible almost – and close to that she’d known after not recognizing Warwick’s problems. Less easy to quantify was the psychological effect of seeing a man blow his head off right in front of her. She was sure, however, that neither remorse nor effect prevented her from functioning to the fullest of an ability it unsettled her to question.
There were a lot of other contributing uncertainties. Last night, for instance. Nothing that had happened affected how she felt about Hugo. To imagine it had, to think of it as anything more than a one night stand, would be ridiculous. Things like that happened a million times every day. It would be important, though, not to let it happen again. She didn’t want it to happen again. Know thyself. She did want it to happen again but she wouldn’t let it. It wouldn’t be fair. Not to Peter, which was the chief consideration, nor to Hugo, peculiar though their situation was. She had to put it behind her. Not forget that it had happened – she certainly didn’t want to forget – but not invest it with meaning and significance it didn’t have. And anyway, Hugo would be in Brussels by midday to examine the grisly discovery in Mary Beth’s backpack.
Which brought Claudine’s thoughts back to yesterday’s telephone conversation. She remained convinced that somewhere in the events of the preceding twenty-four hours she’d missed something of importance.
She’d left Henri Sanglier’s breakfast review ahead of everyone else to arrive early at their police headquarters incident room to examine chronologically all the previous day’s material, forcing herself through the tape of her conversation with John Norris and men her recorded exchanges with the woman. There was something! She couldn’t decide what it was but neither could she lose the impression that it was there, waiting to be found.
She was still surrounded by dossiers, painstakingly going through them word by word to ensure she hadn’t made the psychological mistake of closure – wrongly completing a picture by automatically inserting an expected fact or conclusion that wasn’t there – when the rest of the control group arrived, virtually together. She abandoned the search, joining the others in the larger conference room.
‘Anything?’ asked Sanglier quietly, as he took a chair beside her. He’d listened to the Norris tape and
heard the shot and was close to incredulous not just at her bravery but at her apparent recovery. It had been his decision that the Europol pathologist assigned to the investigation should be Hugo Rosetti, knowing as he did from his absurd mistake of exposing Claudine to Françoise at a dinner party at his Delft house that there was a relationship of sorts between her and the Italian.
Claudine shook her head without replying. She’d talked at breakfast of her lingering belief that something had been overlooked, and suspected they thought it imagination, a traumatized reaction to the suicide.
Jean Smet felt himself at a disadvantage in the presence of Henri Sanglier, nervous of trying to exercise the virtual chairmanship none of the others in the group had opposed. He didn’t know exactly what had happened the previous night at the American embassy, only that John Norris was dead but there was going to be no public announcement or any Belgian involvement whatsoever. It had all been arranged, without his knowledge, in late night meetings between the Europol commissioner, McBride, Belgian Foreign Minister Hans van Dijk and Miet Ulieff, the Justice Minister who was supposed to be so reliant upon him. Smet was still furious – incredulous – at Ulieff’s dismissal that it had been a matter to be decided at an upper government level, with no connection to the investigation and therefore nothing that he needed to know. An unexplained, officially concealed death of someone introduced into the investigation as its star negotiator – quite irrespective of all the doubts that he’d personally had about the strange man – had to have some bearing on the case, a bearing he had to discover if he and the others were to remain safe. His problem was finding out without drawing undue attention to himself. Equally worrying was not knowing what was going to happen when he obeyed Félicité’s telephone-screamed insistence to meet after this conference.
Sanglier began the meeting by announcing that a Europol pathologist was arriving to examine the school find. The Americans at once followed the lead. Burt Harrison described the ambassador as devastated and disclosed that at that stage Mrs McBride hadn’t been told. For that reason he was asking for the complete media black-out imposed upon the personal contact to be maintained and extended. Harding added that foot and hand prints were automatically taken at every birth in America and that Mary Bern’s footprints were being wired for comparison, hopefully within hours.
The Predators Page 24