Brian Freemantle: The Predators

‘It’s too warm here for you to be cold. But take your clothes off if they’re uncomfortable.’ There was harshness in the woman’s voice.

‘No,’ the child said quickly, more through instinct than understanding.

‘We’ve got to talk to the others,’ insisted Cool impatiently, at the doorway.

‘We don’t want her to catch cold, in wet clothes.’

‘Come on!’ protested the man.

Felicite hesitated before shrugging reluctantly. She grabbed Mary’s arm again, holding too tightly, thrusting her towards the blank, peep-holed doors. ‘This is the room where we play games…’ she said as they scurried across it. She opened the door to the left, pushing the child through. ‘… and this is where you’re going to live.’

There were five men waiting in the upstairs room they entered minutes later and the excited expectation was palpable.

‘We saw you arrive,’ said Jean Smet. ‘She’s pretty.’

‘There’s a problem,’ blurted Cool.

The atmosphere was still palpable but very different from when they had entered. Felicite sprawled in the huge, encompassing chair she’d adopted as her own – her throne – when they used this house, not trying to hide her contempt at their instant response to what they had been told.

There were six men in the group that Marcel had brought together, a disparate gathering with only their sexual predilection in common. None, in fact, particularly liked each other. Jean Smet and Michel Blott were lawyers, Smet usefully in the Justice Ministry, Blott in richly rewarding private practice. August Dehane was a senior executive in Belgian state telecommunications, Belgacom, and Henri Cool, who had just identified Mary McBride as an ambassador’s daughter, was a deputy headmaster. Gaston Mehre ran an antique gallery in Antwerp and provided a home – and protection – for his mentally retarded brother, Charles. It was Charles who maintained the beach house when they were using it, a willing slave to them all. He was also the most unpredictably dangerous.

‘No. Definitely no,’ said Smet, leading the opposition. He was a tall, thin, smooth-skinned man whose receding hair was greased straight back from a long-ago forehead.

‘Yes,’ insisted Felicite mildly. The side of the lounge to her left, overlooking the river, was glass and the shutters weren’t closed. It was double glazed, keeping out most of the sound, but the waves churned and crashed to the boundary wall, throwing up spray against the outside pane. Idly, with no intention of provoking any of the men – with all of whom, except Charles Mehre, she’d had sex – Felicite unbuttoned her shirt. She was not wearing a bra and just as casually as she’d unfastened the shirt she began massaging her nipples.

‘She’s seen us, you and me,’ protested Cool, a burly, disordered man whose clothes never fitted. ‘She could identify us. And she was paying attention to how we got here, from Antwerp. I saw her in the mirror.’

‘Who said anything about letting her go?’ demanded the woman.

‘Henri’s right,’ said Blott, a glandularly fat man whose eyes blinked in constant nervousness behind wire-framed glasses. ‘It was a mistake, easily made. It’s no one’s fault. But now she should be killed.’

There was no shock from any of them at the easy insistence upon murdering a child, as there hadn’t been when Cool and Dehane had made the same demand earlier. A year before a boy they’d snatched had died during a party in the house. Since then they had used child prostitutes, usually brought in from Amsterdam. Perhaps, she conceded, the idea upon which she was by now quite determined stemmed from the excitement she’d got then, knowing she was being hunted but always able to evade suspicion or capture because of how cleverly Smet had inveigled himself. Which he could do again now.

‘She knows we’re near Antwerp?’ asked Gaston Mehre.

‘She read a sign out when we passed it,’ confirmed Cool, taking off yet again thick-lensed, heavy-framed spectacles for another unnecessary polish.

‘Then it’s madness to keep her alive,’ said Dehane. He was a slightly built, self-effacing man always eager to follow where others led.

‘It’s an unnecessary danger,’ agreed Gaston Mehre. He and Charles had been born just nine months and seven days apart, both red-haired, their features practically matching, even to identically twisted teeth. It was Charles who had been with the rent boy when he’d died. He’d badly hurt another young male prostitute three months earlier.

‘What danger?’ said Felicite. ‘She’s in a cell, where she’s going to stay. And we can’t be traced to the house in which she’s being held.’ It had been Felicite’s idea that the houses they used should be owned by others with the same interests who lived in conveniently close neighbouring countries. The Antwerp beach house was registered in the name of Pieter Lascelles, a sixty-year-old Eindhoven surgeon. Georges Lebron, a parish priest in Lille, owned the country cottage near Herentals where the Dutch met, and Felicite had a bigger house at Goirle for larger parties.

‘James McBride is the American ambassador!’ implored Smet. ‘It’s his daughter downstairs! You can’t imagine what sort of outcry there’s going to be.’

‘Which is precisely why it’s going to be so exciting!’ said Felicite.

‘Before, it was the son of a bankrupt Jewish shopkeeper in Ghent and the investigation was handled by police who would have been overstrained by a bicycle theft!’ argued Smet. ‘This won’t be anything like that. This will be enormous!’

‘You’re just going to have to be as clever as you were last time,’ smiled Felicite, enjoying the man’s terror. She wondered if she would ever weary of the weakness of these men; the ease of manipulating them. She knew Marcel was becoming increasingly bored just before his heart attack. She still missed Marcel, not only for the loss of the sexual avenues along which he’d led her. Marcel would have seen the thrill – the pleasure – in what she wanted to do: might have tolerated this dispute, as she was tolerating it, but wouldn’t have allowed it to go on for so long.

‘What’s the point!’ demanded Dehane.

‘It’s something we haven’t done before,’ said Felicite simply.

‘The thought doesn’t excite me,’ said the lawyer.

‘Nor me,’ said Cool.

‘But it does me,’ insisted Felicite. ‘I got her. I decide what we do with her. And I’ve decided that before the party at which our ambassador’s little daughter will eventually be the star I’m going to organize the perfect crime, a kidnap.’

‘It’s an insane idea,’ protested Smet. ‘I won’t have it.’

‘You won’t have it?’ challenged Felicite, recognizing her moment.

‘Please!’ muttered the tall man, in immediate retreat.

‘I want you to do what you did before…’ She switched to Dehane. ‘And you must make it impossible for them to trace us when we start making our demands. It’s your chance, August, to show us all how clever you are…’

She let her voice trail, looking around the assembled men, determined to end the dispute. ‘Who’s the link with Lille, taking the risks no one else does?’

No one spoke immediately. Then Smet said: ‘You are.’

‘And with Eindhoven?’

‘You,’ said the Justice Ministry lawyer.

‘What would happen to all of you if I abandoned you?’

Gaston said: ‘Please don’t do that.’

‘Jean?’ she persisted.

Smet shrugged. ‘It’s a good group.’

‘Which you don’t want broken up?’

‘No,’ he conceded weakly.

‘Good!’ said Felicite briskly. ‘So we’re agreed about what I want to do?’

Their ‘Yes’ came as a muted chorus.