Brian Freemantle - The Predators

‘Five sixteen in the evening,’ replied Claudine at once.

‘And the time this was found?’

‘Seven this morning.’

‘How old, exactly, is Mary Beth?’

‘Ten years and four months.’

‘Build?’

‘Small for her age.’

‘The tests will take me a while.’

‘I’ll wait.’ Claudine stripped off the protective clothing and perched on a stool just inside the door, watching him work. He was completely absorbed, seemingly unaware of her presence, muttering the verbatim record of what he was doing into the recorder strung around his neck and pinned out of the way against his chest.

Had last night – the entire time she’d spent with Peter on the inquiry – affected her feelings for Hugo? There was a newness, an excitement, about Peter. And what he’d done in Ireland – and its appalling cost – was incredible. But there surely had to be more than exciting novelty, fuelled by awed admiration? Remaining strictly objective, Claudine didn’t think her feelings went beyond that. Which wasn’t, of course, saying they wouldn’t.

She didn’t want to search now for the answer to a question she didn’t know, Claudine decided. It was too soon. But it wasn’t sex: if she’d wanted sex she could have got it from any one of the dozens who regarded Europol as a harem. She was lonely, Claudine acknowledged, with know-thyself honesty. Lonely and too often sad: fed up not living a proper life, using work as a substitute to subjugate everything else. That was what John Norris had done.

She didn’t want a man to think for her or decide for her or protect her: she could do all of those things by herself. She wanted… she didn’t actually know what she wanted, not fully. All she knew was that she needed a personal life very different from what it was at the moment, because at the moment it was non-existent. Outside work she was non-existent. Last night she hadn’t been.

She became aware of Rosetti crossing the small room towards her, unpinning his microphone as he walked.

‘There’s one thing that I’m sure about,’ announced the man. ‘It was a professional amputation, not hacked off by an amateur. So one of those you’re looking for is a doctor or surgeon…’

‘… which could narrow down the records search.’

Rosetti nodded. ‘We’ll need the confirmation of the footprint, obviously, but I don’t think the toe belongs to Mary. In dimension and length I think it belongs to someone older: certainly not a child just gone ten who is small for her age. According to your time frame, if it came from Mary the amputation occurred within the last fifteen hours. There’s far more than fifteen hours’ decomposition in the toe I’ve just examined: there was a noticeable smell of putrefaction, even before I put a tissue sample under the slide. I’d estimate death four or five days ago.’

‘Mary could have been dead that long,’ Claudine pointed out.

‘I know,’ said Rosetti. ‘That’s why we need the print confirmation. But there’s another guide we can get from the parents. The nail was carefully manicured and kept: there was no scrape residue at all from beneath it. But I got a lot from on top: traces of ethyl acetate and glycols copolymer. Both are constituents of nail varnish: in this case extremely pale pink. The parents can obviously tell us if they had Mary’s feet manicured.’

‘She was a pampered kid but I don’t think she would have been that pampered,’ said Claudine.

‘It won’t be necessary if the prints don’t compare but I’ve naturally got sufficient skin samples for a DNA match with anything we can recover from Mary’s bed or clothing – hair, for instance – and we could also make a comparison with the parents’ DNA.’

‘Did the toe come from a dead body or from someone who was still alive?’ asked Claudine.

‘Dead, unquestionably.’

‘So we’ve got a separate murder, quite apart from what’s happened to Mary?’

‘I could be wrong, although I don’t think I am,’ said Rosetti.

He wasn’t. There was no match at all with the print that arrived two hours later from Washington.

Felicite Galan had insisted that Jean Smet and August Dehane meet her that lunchtime at the Comme Chez Soi on the Place Rouppe, which they’d both initially welcomed because it was a public restaurant in which she could not openly berate them, but they were immediately terrified when she arrived. Felicite again had her hair in the tight chignon of the day of the abduction and was wearing the same jacket that had been described in the wanted posters and appeals. She strode from the entrance, exaggerating her walk like a model’s catwalk parade, and didn’t immediately take the waiter’s offered chair, smirking down at the lawyer and the telephone company executive.

‘Why not hide beneath the table?’ she said.

‘Sit down, for God’s sake!’ Smet spoke in a fierce whisper.

‘Please!’ added Dehane.

Smet waited for the waiter to leave. ‘You’re mad. She said you’re mad and you are. Totally insane.’

‘And you disobeyed me. Both of you. All of you. You sent Charles to kill her, didn’t you?’

‘No,’ Smet said, keeping to the rehearsed story they’d agreed with Gaston to follow. ‘You know what Charles is like. And he’s getting worse. Has been for months.’

‘How could we have known what he was going to do?’ protested Dehane unconvincingly.

‘You’re a liar. You’re all liars. None of you are to go near her any more.’

‘I don’t want to go near her at all,’ said Smet.

Dehane said nothing.

‘I’m not sure that I’ll let any of you, even when we have the party.’ She wished there was a greater penalty she could impose. Hurt them, disgrace them in some way that wouldn’t involve her.

‘Claudine knows all about you,’ declared the Justice Ministry lawyer. ‘Knows what sort of person you are. It’s frightening, how accurately she’s described you.’

‘Did she really say I was mad?’

‘Yes,’ said Smet petulantly. ‘And she’s right: you are.’

‘Tell me everything,’ ordered Felicite.

‘They’ve excluded me,’ announced Smet dramatically. ‘The bastard Poncellet!’

‘How?’

‘They’re staging a big operation at the embassy for your call. To trap you. The others would have accepted my being there as a matter of course but Poncellet made a fuss about its having nothing to do with liaison: said I’d get a transcript later for the Ministry. I’d have drawn too much attention to myself if I’d argued against it.’

‘To trap me!’ echoed Felicite, looking to Dehane. ‘I hope you’ve got the phone ready!’

‘Don’t do it!’ pleaded the man. ‘I’ve no idea what sort of tracking equipment they’ll have but it’s bound to be state of the art.’

Felicite’s hand was already outstretched. She snapped her fingers and said: ‘Give it to me.’

Reluctantly Dehane passed over the instrument.

‘Whose number is it?’ she asked.

‘A director of a restaurant group. His phone was stolen from his car two nights ago. It hasn’t been recovered yet.’

‘Excellent,’ said Felicite, dropping the mobile into her satchel handbag. ‘Now I need to know everything mat’s happened…’ She paused. ‘But most of all I want to hear her opinion of me.’

Only Claudine saw a twisted contradiction in her guiding James McBride in the rudiments of negotiation so soon after what she considered her disastrous attempt to talk John Norris into compliant surrender. She tried to drive the thought from her mind: to drive everything from her mind except preventing the man from making any mistake in the telephone confrontation that was to come.