Brian Freemantle - The Predators

‘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.

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 Francoise 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 Felicite’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.

‘You had the conversation with the woman,’ said Harrison, to Claudine. ‘Do you really think they would have mutilated the child like that?’

Claudine hesitated, aware that all of them round the table were trying to push reality away with self-deception, clinging to the hope the toe did not belong to Mary, as they had tried to avoid admitting any sexual element in her original disappearance.

‘Yes,’ she said shortly, wanting positively to shatter any false hope. ‘In addition to all the other opinions I’ve formed about her – and there’s no doubt, of course, that the person on the telephone is the woman seen by the eye-witnesses to pick Mary up – I think there’s a dangerous clinical psychosis that makes her capable of extreme violence.’ She allowed another pause. ‘And this morning’s find answers your question anyway. It isn’t an adult’s toe. If it isn’t Mary’s it belongs to another youngster, one we don’t yet know about, who’s been maimed by the same people who’ve got Mary. If they’re prepared to maim, they’re prepared to kill.’ She focused on Burt Harrison. ‘Which puts our chances of getting Mary Beth back alive, even if we comply with every demand, at less than fifty per cent.’