John Matthews - The Last Witness

April 4 th, Montreal, Canada.

There are times when all hope seems lost. When every precept and foundation previously held as true seems to have been torn down or to have faded into insignificance, and all that surrounds and lies ahead is grey desolation. And while those feelings may not last long, perhaps only moments, when they hit they are all-consuming, they form a high, impenetrable wall beyond which nothing else can be seen.

Elena Waldren was gripped by such dark contemplation, darker than she’d ever known before, as she sat parked in Montreal’s Rue St-Urbain, thousands of miles from her home in Dorset, on probably the most important quest of her forty-five years, her passenger a ten year-old Romanian girl who at one time had been as close as her own daughter, though had become practically a stranger the past two years. She shook her head; that was part of the problem right there. But she couldn’t keep them all under her wings forever.

She’d pulled in hurriedly to the side, and the afternoon traffic flowed past, becoming heavier now towards the rush hour. Rain pattered against her windscreen, slanting slightly with a fresh breeze off the St Lawrence. Elena remained oblivious to everything beyond her own thoughts, her head buried in the crook of her right arm braced against the steering wheel.

How could she have been so wrong about everything? She’d always thought she’d seen so much, lived so many roller-coaster troughs and peaks, that there could be few surprises left; the one advantage of the over-forties. And now in only two days, half of her past had been completely re-written.

‘Are you okay?’ Lorena asked.

‘Yes… I just need a minute. I’ll be fine.’ Fine? The police wire had been out for a while now, probably since their trail through France, and no doubt soon her face would be on TV news bulletins. And for what? Her own quest now at a dead-end, and the danger that had led her to take such drastic action and drag young Lorena on this odyssey — as so many people kept telling her all along — was probably imagined. For the first time Elena woke up to just how much she was out of her depth: she was just an aid worker from a backwater Dorset village home shared with her pipe-smoking, unassuming husband and two children; running the gauntlet with police across two continents was far removed from any past experience she could draw upon.

But at least she now knew his name: Georges Donatiens. Twenty-nine years, and she’d missed him by only days. Never to be seen again. Cruel fate. All she had, or would ever have, was his name on a scrap of paper and the few brief reminiscent stories from the Donatiens.

‘ Georges . Georges Donatiens.’ She whispered the name almost as an incantation, as if that might suddenly bring a clearer image to mind beyond the few stark, smiling photos she’d scanned at the Donatiens’. Something to help fill that twenty-nine year void. She felt nothing now but cold and empty, and she braced her head firmer into her arm to quell her body’s trembling. Tears were close, but she swallowed hard, biting them back. Lorena had been through enough, half of it imagined or not, to see her now so distressed.

She took a fresh breath and sighed it out. It would probably have been just as bad if she had met him, started to sow the first seeds of attachment, only for him then to be taken brutally away. Either way, the pain now would have been the same.

She started to shake off her dark mood, lift her head — but Lorena’s muttered ‘Ele!..’ and her suddenly aware of a figure by the car, made her look up sharper: brown uniform, one hand by the gun holster, the other reaching out.

The RCMP officer tapped at her window, signalling for her to wind it down.

February 11th, Montreal, Canada.

‘Two minutes over now. He’s late.’

‘Don’t worry, he’ll show.’ Michel Chenouda sounded confident, but inside it was just one more worry to stack with the mountain of others that had built excruciatingly over the last hour of the set-up.

Four of his RCMP team were with him in the 2 ndfloor of the warehouse overlooking the St Lawrence dockside, the other three in an unmarked car around the corner, and dead centre in their night-sight binoculars’ frame was their mark Tony Savard, waiting on Roman Lacaille and his men. It was -7?C that night and Savard’s breath showed heavy on the air. Three years tracking in the shadows of the Lacailles, Montreal’s leading crime family, and now hopefully, finally, Michel would nail them.

The Lacailles had put up a strong legitimate business front over recent years, but Chenouda was convinced they were secretly behind Eastern Canada’s largest drugs supply network. Then eleven months ago with the murder of Eric Leduc, one of the network’s key men, he had the confirmation he wanted: Roman Lacaille was responsible for the murder, had pulled the trigger himself in a fit of rage. They heard it first from the car’s driver when pressured over a vice bust; but he refused to officially testify and finger Roman Lacaille, and five months later he was dead. A ‘boating’ accident. That left only two other witnesses: Tony Savard and Georges Donatiens. But Donatiens was too much ‘family’ for them to hope he’d testify, so they’d piled on the pressure with Savard: if he didn’t come forward, he’d be next to go the same way. Finally Savard cut a deal.

The only problem was that unlike Donatiens — who was in the back of the car when Leduc was shot — Savard was standing outside the car on watch. He hadn’t seen Roman Lacaille actually pull the trigger. There was also the problem of Roman Lacaille’s likely plea of self-defence.

The plan now was therefore a meeting with Roman Lacaille to discuss general business, and almost jokingly, by-the-way, Savard would comment about the mess of cleaning up after Leduc. ‘Couldn’t you have shot him out of the car? We were still finding bits of him there two days later.’

Once Roman Lacaille opened up about the shooting, Savard would then press a bit about the gun on the floor not being Leduc’s normal piece to try and break his self-defence story, and they’d get it all on tape. Enough hopefully to…

‘ Attends! Something’s happening. Vehicle approaching… fast! But it’s not Lacaille’s Beamer, it’s a black van. Stopping. Back doors opening… two men getting out. Something’s wrong. They’re wearing ski masks!’ Chac, his closest aide in the RCMP, was main look-out. Chac moved quickly aside and let Michel Chenouda look through the binoculars.

Michel watched as a startled Tony Savard was bundled into the back of the van, looking sharply over his shoulder; a silent plea for help. Michel reached for the radio mike.

‘Move now! Two men have just grabbed Savard. Black Chevy Venture. No sign of Lacaille, and we’re not even sure it’s his men. So get close so that you’re ready to cut in on them when I say.’ Michel had switched to English for the command. The driver, Mark, was only three years up from Ottawa, and Michel liked to use English with those for whom, like him, French was a second language. Now more than ever: he couldn’t risk even a split-second delay for the driver to understand.

As the back-up car swung into view, a faint night mist swirling opaque in its beam, the van was already heading off. A gap of maybe eighty yards between them, Michel estimated, but closing quickly with the car having gained momentum. Sixty yards, fifty…

But as they came to the end of the warehouse block and the first inter-section, Michel watched in horror a large double trailer cut suddenly across just after the van had passed. The squad car braked hard and slued to an angle, stopping just yards short.