Brian Freemantle - The Predators

She couldn’t – wouldn’t! – give the slightest indication that they’d been right, of course. They hadn’t been right. It was the investigators who had been better: investigators she still had to confront to prove who, ultimately, was best.

‘We’ll further confuse them, beyond Menen,’ she announced. ‘Now they’ve got so much manpower invested in e-mail, we’ll change our approach.’ She turned to Dehane. ‘How many Belgacom mobile telephones get stolen every day, not just here in Belgium but throughout Europe?’

Dehane snorted in disbelief. ‘Thousands. Tens of thousands.’

‘And all the losses – and the numbers – get recorded, to prevent their unauthorized use, don’t they?’

The telephone executive shifted uneasily. ‘Eventually.’

‘Exactly!’ smiled Felicite. ‘I want you to programme newly reported stolen numbers into unprogrammed telephones for me. We’ll only use a number once, before switching to another. Even if a number is scanned and the holder identified, it won’t lead to us. All it will do is compound the confusion we started at Menen.’ Her smiled widened. ‘Now isn’t that the cleverest thing!’

No one replied immediately.

Smet said: ‘Who’s going to make the telephone contact?’

‘Me, of course! Unless any of you want to volunteer.’

The silence this time was longer.

‘That’s settled then,’ said Felicite, hurrying now as she came to another decision: it would be easy enough to bring forward that night’s dinner with Pieter Lascelles. Everyone ate unnaturally early in Holland anyway. ‘And I’ll go to the house again tonight to look after Mary.’

‘What about tomorrow?’ asked Cool.

Felicite extended a wavering finger, moving it back and forth between the assembled men before coming back to the schoolteacher. ‘You!’ she decided. ‘Unless, that is, I change my mind.’

‘We were all agreed, even before what happened today,’ reminded Smet. ‘So there’s nothing more to discuss, is there?’

‘Except who’s going to do it,’ said Gaston Mehre.

‘He likes it,’ said Smet, looking at the man’s brother. Gaston was holding Charles’s hand comfortingly. Charles appeared to have retreated into his private world, unaware of the discussion around him.

‘We’re all part of it, whoever actually kills her,’ said the other lawyer.

‘When?’ asked Gaston Mehre.

‘Tomorrow,’ said Smet. ‘We don’t know how long Felicite will stay at the house tonight.’

‘You’ve got to get rid of the body,’ insisted Gaston. ‘Charles can kill her but the rest of you must get rid of the body.’

‘Of course,’ said Blott, too eagerly.

‘I could have come to Antwerp,’ offered Lascelles. He was extremely thin as well as being tall and he held himself forward, so his body appeared concave. He had a soft, cajoling voice.

‘It won’t take me long to drive back.’ Their table was in a cubicle shielding them from the rest of the diners. She passed the brochure of the Namur chateau across to him. ‘This is it.’

Lascelles studied the illustrations and said: ‘It looks magnificent. Have you shown Lebron?’

‘Two days ago. He was impressed. He’s probably bringing as many as ten of his people.’

‘I’ll probably have around the same. Maybe more. They’re looking forward to it.’

‘When will you make your snatch?’

‘Not until you give me a definite date.’

‘Certainly the weekend after next. Maybe sooner.’

‘You’ve caused a sensation.’

Felicite smiled. ‘It’s exciting.’

‘You will be careful, won’t you?’

‘Don’t you lose your nerve, like the others.’

It was still only nine o’clock when Felicite reached the Antwerp house overlooking the Schelde river. She smiled at the child waiting anxiously just inside the heavy door.

‘Hello, darling,’ said the woman. ‘Are you pleased to see me?’

‘Very glad,’ said Mary. She liked the woman being kind to her: kinder than her mother and father, who didn’t seem to care what was happening to her.

In Brussels Blake finally got a call from Henri Sanglier, who said that after picking up the message from his secretariat he’d decided to go to Menen personally to ensure the surveillance was properly in place. He rang off before Blake could transfer the call to Claudine.

At the city’s Zaventem airport the American embassy’s diplomatic bag arrived from Washington carrying the information John Norris had requested about McBride’s armaments corporation.

At the cafe on the rue Guimard that the FBI had made their own Duncan McCulloch said: ‘If you won’t talk to Blake tomorrow I will. It’s fucking ridiculous.’

‘I’ll do it,’ undertook Harding, finally overcoming his reluctance. He was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t, he decided. And just three years before he would have been out of it all.

The depression was tangible at the first gathering of the day, people talking because they had to but knowing they weren’t offering anything to keep alive the brief hope of the previous day. The clandestine surveillance had produced nothing. Henri Sanglier had agreed with the Belgian squad at Menen that the cafe proprietor was uninvolved and approved direct questioning with the computer-drawn images of the wanted man and woman. The proprietor, a retired Customs officer, recognized neither. Nor did any of his regular users, whose names he’d offered before being asked. None of them resembled the couple or recognized them.

Poncellet said the Belgian police record search had been extended to cover the entire country, not just Brussels. There was no computer graphic match with any arrest photograph in police archives. Nor was there on any Europol or Interpol register. Making up for his previous day’s ignorance the police commissioner said there were only two women with child sex convictions – both with boys, not girls – and neither bore any resemblance to the computer pictures. Both had witness-supported alibis for the day and time Mary Beth McBride had been snatched: one had been in Ghent, visiting a sick mother, the other at a hairdressing salon where she was well known. Both had nevertheless been detained for an identification parade that afternoon that both Johan Rompuy and Rene Lunckner had agreed to attend.

There was nothing for Claudine to contribute. Although John Norris was saying nothing, either, there was more animation about the man: having so studiously ignored her the previous day he now appeared almost anxious to catch her eye, twice openly smiling. It was, Claudine decided, typical of the mood swings recorded against the severe obsessional condition from which she suspected Norris to be suffering. Claudine was anxious for Sanglier’s promised arrival that afternoon. She’d been circumspect on the police headquarters telephone but she’d ensured Sanglier understood the importance of coming direct from Menen to Brussels instead of returning to The Hague. By tonight, after the scheduled five o’clock embassy meeting with McBride, the problem with John Norris should be all over. It had been an unnecessary distraction but it had not interfered with what they were there to achieve. Claudine was dissatisfied. She’d drawn every conclusion she could from what evidence there was, which could practically be fitted on to a pinhead with room to spare for a football match with spectators. Until there was further contact there was absolutely nothing more she could think of doing. And if that contact was still by e-mail she was not certain there would be anything to add to the profile she’d already created. Their continued hope would have to be that Volker’s pursuit would be more successful the next time.