Brian Freemantle - The Predators

Felicite, who had already delayed the call twice, finally picked up the house phone. As usual, Lascelles answered at once.

‘Everything is going to be in place for tomorrow.’

‘Wonderful!’ said the doctor. ‘We’ve got our special guests. The boy is named Robert. The girl is Yvette.’

‘How are they being taken down?’

‘Separately, of course.’

‘Either by you?’

‘No.’

‘I need to get the key from the agents in Namur. And someone to drive me. By myself Mary might try to get away.’

‘You want me to pick you up?’

‘I’ll call McBride at three.’

‘She’ll see my face.’

‘That’s not going to matter, is it?’

‘I suppose not.’

‘I don’t want it to hurt. Is there something? An injection?’

‘Of course. Pills, too: a choice of pills.’

‘There mustn’t be any pain.’

‘There won’t be.’

‘She wouldn’t know?’

‘She’d just go to sleep. Feel nothing.’

‘That’s what I want.’

‘You must have grown very fond of her?’

‘I love her,’ said Felicite.

Although there was a specific understanding between them that Francoise never brought her friends to the house, Sanglier warned her of his return after an hour-long conversation from his Europol office with Lucien Bigot in Paris. He was immediately alarmed by the unknown, Paris-registered Citroen parked at the head of the drive, his first thought was that it might be someone carrying out the background investigation that Castille had talked about, although he would have expected Bigot to have mentioned it and Francoise had said nothing about a visitor.

They met him in the hallway, Francoise with her arm round the shoulders of a startlingly attractive dark-haired girl. She wore jeans and a shirt that was too tight, so that her nipples protruded. Francoise wore trousers, too, part of a black silk evening suit.

‘I wanted you to meet Maria,’ announced Francoise. ‘I told you about her.’

Sanglier said nothing.

‘Hello,’ the girl smiled.

Still Sanglier said nothing, waiting.

‘Aren’t you going to say hello?’ demanded Francoise.

‘I want you to go. Immediately,’ Sanglier told the girl.

‘She was just leaving anyway.’ Francoise kissed Maria lightly on the cheek and said: ‘I told you he was a bore, didn’t I?’

That night the naked body of a boy was found on the edge of a forest near Dilbeek, on the outskirts of Brussels. The big toe was missing from the left foot.

There were too many people. In Claudine’s view there always were at crime scenes and their arrival – the FBI forensic team with Harding, Rosetti and Blake with Claudine – added to the congestion. Poncellet had come on ahead, after alerting them, and established some order but Claudine wished there had been more. A protective evidence tent had been erected over the body and a generator manhandled alongside for floodlights that not only illuminated the body within the tent but lit an area of about three square metres outside.

The body was ten metres along a rutted, dry stone-and-dirt track running into the forest from a minor metalled road. What tyre imprints there might have been in the dirt had been trampled underfoot by the bald-headed man who’d discovered the body while walking his dog and now stood trembling beside the police car that had answered his call so urgently the further obliterating skid marks still stretched from where it had come to a halt. As they approached, the dog, a mongrel, was completing the damage by scratching dirt over its urine puddle.

They’d all been approaching in a single, minimally destructive line along the edge of the track. Over his shoulder the leading forensic officer said: ‘Why the fuck are we bothering?’

The forensic team were already suited. Harding and Blake stood back for Rosetti and Claudine to put on their coveralls and plastic galoshes. Poncellet was standing ashen-faced away from the tent, a handkerchief against his mouth and nose. ‘He’s been dead a long time.’

Claudine said: ‘We know.’

The sickly sweet smell of decomposing flesh engulfed them as they went into the tent. Already inside were a Belgian pathologist and a police photographer. There were greetings in French but no handshakes: the Belgians were already contaminated. They wore nose clamps and their upper lips were smeared with camphor unguent. Rosetti and Claudine both applied cream and clips beneath their totally encompassing masks.

The boy was face down and partially on his left side. The left shoulder was humped and the left arm and hand hidden beneath it. The body was grotesquely ballooned by decomposition gases, the skin split in places and the major lesions moving with maggots. It was on the edge of a sheet of hessian, glued to it in places by congealed body fluid. The anal entry was greatly distended and on both shoulders and the neck were bite marks difficult at first to identify because of the bloated flesh. The eye sockets were wide open and writhed with maggots that had already destroyed the eyes themselves. There was no visible cause of death. The two pathologists stood side by side to heave the body over on to its back. As they did so the stomach split, spilling choking fluid and gas. Rosetti used a magnifying glass to examine what was left of the penis and had photographs taken of it. Maggots had attacked the stump of the missing toe, making it impossible to recognize a professional amputation.

‘Anything extra you want?’ asked Rosetti, his voice muffled and adenoidal.

Claudine shook her head, holding her hand up against any approach from either Harding or Blake as she and Rosetti emerged. Both men had been driven back by the smell from inside the tent.

They took off their masks and nose clips and Rosetti said: ‘We’re badly contaminated. Infectious.’

The Belgian pathologist and photographer had already stripped off their forensic suits, head coverings and shoes and piled them in the middle of the path. Claudine and Rosetti added to the pyre and stood back for the mortuary attendant to soak the bundle in petrol. It exploded into flame at the thrown match, melting plastic adding a new smell.

‘You want to go into the tent?’ Rosetti asked Harding and Blake. Both investigators remained some way away.

Harding said: ‘We’ll take your word for it.’

‘You going to do the autopsy straight away or wait until it’s properly morning?’ called Blake. ‘It’s still only four thirty.’

‘I’ll do it as soon as we get back to Brussels,’ said Rosetti.

‘You want to attend?’ invited Claudine. ‘I’m going to.’ She went towards the two men, away from the stink. Rosetti followed.

‘We’ll leave that to you, too,’ said Blake. ‘And we’ve seen all we want here.’ He shook his head ruefully. ‘Or rather not enough. There’s not a tyre tread to be seen and a herd of elephants couldn’t have trodden the side track and undergrowth any flatter.’

‘And the guy who found the body heard nothing, saw nothing and knows nothing,’ added Harding. ‘It was the dog, obviously, who found it: smelled it.’

‘Maybe there’ll be something from the autopsy,’ said the disappointed Poncellet.

The mortuary attendants emerged from the tent with the remains sealed inside a body bag, leaving it on the ambulance gunney while they added their overalls to the dying bonfire.

Claudine and Rosetti, both long inured to the horror of violent death, returned to the city separately from the others, their bodies cramped together in the front of the ambulance, each aware of the closeness of the other but not acknowledging it. It was, thought Claudine, a bizarre surrounding in which to come physically closer to the man than she ever had before.