Brian Freemantle - The Predators

‘Didn’t you hear the warning I gave McBride about what would happen to Mary if he annoyed me?’

Once more Claudine shook her head against any interruption from the ambassador. The door on the opposite side of the office opened softly but urgently. Without coming any further into the room Blake gave exaggerated nods to indicate a location followed by one of the familiar rolling gestures with his hands for the woman to be kept on the line. Trying to make the sneer in her voice as obvious as she could, Claudine said: ‘You didn’t actually say annoyed, Mercedes, but then I guess you’re confused-’

‘I’m not at all confused!’ broke in the woman.

Dare she go on? If she were right – and Claudine didn’t doubt that she was – there was another way, a much more effective way, for her to achieve what she wanted. McBride, beside her, was damp with sweat, smelling of it. ‘It’s a common belief…’ Claudine said, letting her voice trail. At the same time she slid another prompt sheet to the man.

McBride said: ‘Let me speak to Mary. Talk to her to know she’s all right.’

‘Where’s Claudine? I want Claudine!’

Claudine allowed the briefest of pauses, aware of the satisfaction surging through her: so much, so quickly. Dismissively, she demanded: ‘What?’

‘What’s a common belief? What are you talking about?’

Quite irrespective of anything else, they’d kept the woman talking for a further three minutes: she had to be surrounded now, on the point of arrest. ‘The ambassador wants to talk to Mary.’

‘You haven’t answered my question!’

‘The only thing we need to talk about is the arrangement for getting Mary back.’

‘I’ll-’ began the woman loudly, but then stopped. There was a sound as if the instrument had been hurriedly dropped, and distant talking, in French too indistinct to decipher, but no police sirens or the shouts and yells Claudine would have expected at a moment of arrest.

‘What…?’ started McBride, but Claudine gestured him down.

For precisely four more minutes, timed by the clock in front of them, the indistinct talking continued. Claudine thought she detected a child’s voice and from the disbelieving look on his face she knew McBride had heard it too. Then there were sirens, a screaming cacophony, and the expected shouting began: there was definitely at least one child’s voice among the screaming before all the noise was drowned by the whuck-whuck of descending helicopters.

‘They’ve got her!’ said McBride, his voice trembling. ‘They’ve got the woman and they’ve got Mary back.’

‘Come on!’ shouted Claudine, already running towards the door.

Way was made for McBride and his wife to squeeze into the communications room, alongside Sanglier against the wall at the very rear. The only sound, the volume adjusted to be properly audible, not deafening, was relayed over an open channel that all could hear. It was in French. There was definitely a child’s cry. Demands, clearly from the arresting officers, for the adults not to move and to keep their hands and arms visible. One voice kept repeating a threat to shoot. Claudine’s first dip of uncertainty came with the sound of a man’s voice, close to hysteria, demanding to know what was happening and pleading that no one shoot. And of a child screaming, hysterical too.

Blake was beside her. She leaned towards him and whispered: ‘It’s gone wrong.’ He frowned back at her, not replying.

She looked intently at Poncellet, on the other side of the blond-haired man. It surely couldn’t be the police chief? She hadn’t thought whom she could continue to trust, until that moment: hadn’t thought about anything, except her conviction. Now she did. She thought about how they could use what she’d learned and how she could keep Mary alive and wondered how much easier or more difficult it made everything. And she wondered who it was. There was only a small possible number. Through all the confusion and conflicting impressions Claudine abruptly felt very confident. She couldn’t risk telling anyone – her biggest and most immediate problem was deciding whom she could tell about anything – but for the first time almost since the investigation started she believed there was a chance of getting Mary back alive. Just as she decided, suddenly, that Mary was still alive. If she’d been dead, it would have been Mary’s toe in the backpack, not someone else’s.

Claudine was briefly thrown off balance, for just seconds, by the implications of that awareness, sickening but at the same time hopeful though it was. I’m not sure I want to give her back yet. I’ve become attached to her. There could be another interpretation of that remark, as obscene but not as life-threatening as her first. Bizarre though it might be to a rational mind – which she already knew the woman didn’t possess – but totally in keeping with the sexual deviancy of paedophilia, Claudine thought it more than likely that the unknown woman had fallen in love with Mary Beth McBride. Which, while posing a terrible sexual danger, meant that she wouldn’t, for the moment at least, be subjected to any other physical danger. Rather, bizarre upon the bizarre, that she would be protected from it.

Poncellet leaned from Claudine’s other side and said: ‘This doesn’t sound right.’

‘It isn’t,’ said Claudine. ‘She’s beaten us.’

The family was brought to the US embassy because that was where the investigation was concentrated, but long before their arrival there was an explanation of crushing disappointment.

There was no reason whatsoever for embarrassment or recrimination, because the location operation had worked perfectly. But there was a squabble of accusations between the Belgian, American and Europol squads, particularly among those who’d first arrived at the supermarket car park in the Ganshoren suburb of the city.

Paradoxically, Hortense, the daughter of Horst and Sonia Eindicks, was the same age as Mary Beth McBride to within a day. The family always did their major supermarket shopping on the last Friday of every month, when Horst got paid. Neither parent could remember the Mercedes parked next to them when they’d emerged to unpack their trolleys, but Hortense said she was sure the nice lady who’d taken one of their trolleys instead of getting one for herself and given her the deposit money had yellow hair. Certainly none of them had seen her drop the telephone, still connected to the embassy, among the plastic bags in the back of the family Ford.

‘And while we all went one way she went the other,’ said Poncellet bitterly.

Harding paid double for the trolley coin to be sent for forensic analysis, along with the abandoned telephone. The Eindicks family, awed by the sensation in which they had become so innocently involved, accepted apologies for earlier being terrorized.

It was not until the family was being escorted from the embassy that Claudine had the opportunity to draw Sanglier aside.

‘We’ve got to have a meeting but without Poncellet,’ she said urgently.

‘What about?’

‘The person who knows who’s got Mary,’ said Claudine simply.

It didn’t take long to organize, after the departure of Andre Poncellet, but there was a lot of questioning impatience from everyone, particularly Sanglier, after Claudine’s dramatic announcement. Sanglier demanded a preliminary explanation, which Claudine avoided by insisting that they needed complete transcripts as well as the tapes of both her conversations with the woman to understand her discovery.

Unable to gauge how serious the leak was and with the bugging of her hotel room very much in mind she asked to remain at the embassy instead of returning to their police headquarters accommodation, claiming it might no longer be safe. That assertion heightened the drama and increased the demands.