Witch Hunt

by Ian Rankin

  His fingers pressed against something. But it wasn’t the switch. It was warm, soft, yielding. It was a hand. He started and almost fell back down the stairs, but another hand grabbed his arm and pulled him upright. At the same time, the lights came back on. The hand his own hand had touched had already been resting on the light-switch. He found himself facing a young woman, small, with short black hair and very red lips. Her face was round and mischievous. She smiled wryly.

  ‘Pardon,’ she said: the French word, not the English. He attempted a light laugh which came out as a strangled snuffle. Then she brushed past him and descended the staircase. He watched her go. She was wearing baggy trousers and a sort of cotton blouson, the trousers dark blue and the blouson sky blue. And lace-up shoes, quite rugged things. Her fingers touched the stair-rail as she went. At the bottom, unexpectedly, she turned back and caught him looking at her, then opened not the door to the street but the one leading into the bar. The voices from inside were amplified for a moment, then the door closed again, muffling them.

  ‘Christ,’ he said to himself. He walked unsteadily along the corridor and was just trying to fit his room-key into the lock when the lights went out yet again.

  Inside the room, he threw his bag of cassettes on to the carpet and sat down on the springy bed. Then he lay back across it, left hand gripping right wrist and both resting on his forehead. He should make a start on his report, at least get his notes in order. But he kept seeing the girl in his mind. Why had she given him such a start? He managed to smile about it after a bit, rearranging his memory of the incident so that he came out of it in a better light. Well, at least he hadn’t tried to say anything in his inimitable French.

  He had a shower, humming to himself all the time, then dried himself briskly and lay back down on the bed again. After a moment’s thought, he reached down beneath the bed and pulled out a bulging cardboard document wallet marked in thick felt pen with the single word WITCH. It had arrived by motorbike courier at his flat in London, less than half an hour before he’d been due to leave to catch the ferry. A large padded envelope, and the helmeted rider saying: ‘Sign here.’ He’d torn the envelope open, not knowing what to expect - certainly not expecting Dominic Elder’s crammed but meticulously organised obsession. There was a note pinned to the dogeared flap: ‘I have the feeling your need will be greater than mine. Besides, I know it by heart. I’ll be in touch. Good luck. Elder.’

  Biked all the way from deepest south Wales to London. The bike charges must have been phenomenal, but then Barclay surmised that the department would be paying.

  He’d read through the file on the trip across the Channel. It contained plenty of detail; the only thing missing was factual evidence that any of the operations and incidents outlined in two dozen separate reports had anything to do with an individual codenamed ‘Witch’. It seemed to Barclay that Dominic Elder had latched onto any unsolved assassination, any unclaimed terrorist outrage, and had placed the name Witch beside it. A woman seen fleeing the scene... a telephone call made by a female ... a prostitute visited ... a girl student who disappeared afterwards... these shadowy, ephemeral figures all turned into the same person in Elder’s mind. It smacked of psychosis.

  Barclay wondered why. He wondered what had spurred Elder on, why had the mere idea of Witch gripped him in the first place? He got the feeling Elder knew more than he was saying. Flicking through the file for a second time, he caught a single mention of Operation Silverfish. It was noted in passing, no more. Operation Silverfish. No clue as to what it was, just that it had occurred two years before. The year, in fact, that Elder had ‘retired’ from the department. The year, too, that Barclay had joined: they’d missed one another by a little over five weeks. A slender gap between the old and the new. He would ask someone about Silverfish when he got back. Joyce Parry perhaps, or Elder. It might be that he could access the operation file without prior consent anyway. He’d be back tomorrow, back to the reality of technology, back to his role as Intelligence Technician.

  His phone buzzed. This in itself was surprising: the apparatus looked too old to be functional. He picked up the receiver.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Barclay? It’s Dominic Elder. I said I’d be in touch.’

  ‘How did you get my ... ?’

  ‘Joyce passed it along. I’m in London now. Anything to report?’

  ‘Nothing Special Branch haven’t already found.’

  ‘Flagging already, eh?’

  Barclay bristled. ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Good. Listen, Special Branch are policemen, they’ve got policemen’s minds. Don’t get stuck in their rut.’

  Barclay smiled at the image, remembering his retread tyre. ‘You’d advise lateral thinking then?’

  ‘No, just deep thinking. Follow every idea through. All right?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I’ll call again tomorrow. And listen, don’t tell Mrs Parry. It would only get us both into trouble.’

  ‘I thought you said she’d given you this number?’

  ‘Well, she told me which hotel you were in. I found the number for myself.’

  Barclay smiled again. Then he remembered something. ‘I’ve been reading the file, I wanted to ask you about Operation Silver—’

  ‘Talk to you soon then.’Bye’.

  The connection was dead. It was as though Elder simply hadn’t heard him. Barclay put the receiver back. He was quite getting to like Dominic Elder.

  He had brought a couple of paperbacks with him, expecting to have time to kill. He’d been struggling with one of them for weeks, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. A computer buff friend had recommended it. He’d unpacked the book and left it on the bedside cabinet, beside his French Grammar and travel alarm. He picked up the book now. He still had an hour before wandering off in search of dinner. Maybe he could pick up the thread of Pynchon.

  He opened it where his leather bookmark rested. Jesus, was he really only up to page forty-nine? He read halfway down the page, sure that he’d read this before. He was much further on ... page sixty-five or seventy at least. What was the bookmark doing left at a page he’d read before? He thought for a couple of minutes. Then he examined the corners of the book. There was a slight dent to the bottom right-hand corner of the cover, and to a few of the pages after it. The book had been bought new, pristine. The dent was the kind made by dropping a book. Picking it up to flip through it ... dropping it ... the bookmark falling out ... replaced at random...

  ‘Jesus,’ he said, for the second time in an hour.

  Dressed for dinner, in lightweight cream suit and brown brogues, white shirt and red paisley tie, Barclay opened the door to the bar. It was busier, five men leaning against the bar itself and deep in discussion with the hotelier who filled glasses as he spoke. Barclay smiled and nodded towards him, then made for a table. There was only one other person seated, the young woman from the landing. He pulled out a chair from opposite her and sat down. ‘Do you mind if I join you?’ he asked.

  ‘Comment? Vous êtes anglais, monsieur?’

  ‘Anglais, oui.’ He stared at her without blinking. ‘Are you staying here, mademoiselle? Restez-vous ici?’

  She appeared not to understand. The hotelier had come to the table to take Barclay’s order. ‘Une pression, s’il vous plaît.’ Barclay’s eyes were still on her. ‘Would you like another?’ She had an empty glass in front of her. She shook her head. The hotelier moved back to the bar.

  ‘So,’ said Barclay quietly, ‘did you find anything interesting in my room?’

  A tinge of red came to her cheekbones and stayed there. She found that she could speak English after all. ‘I did not mean to ... I thought I would wait there for you. Then I changed my mind.’

  ‘But we bumped into one another on the stairs. Why not introduce yourself then?’

  She shrugged. ‘It did not seem the right moment.’

  He nodded. ‘Because I would know you’d been to my room?’

 
; ‘It was the book, yes?’ She needed no affirmation. ‘Yes, the book was stupid. I thought it would... pass time.’

  ‘It was clumsy certainly.’ His beer arrived. He waited till the hotelier had returned once again to the bar before asking, ‘How much did you give him?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She dug into the pocket of her blouson. ‘I had only to show him some identification.’ She handed him a small laminated card, carrying a photograph of her with her hair longer and permed into tight curls. Her name was Dominique Herault. As she handed the card to him, he checked her fingers. She wore four ornate but cheap-looking rings; there was no ring on her wedding-finger.

  ‘DST,’ he read from the card, and nodded to himself. Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, the French equivalent of MI5. Parry had warned him that once DST knew a British agent was on his way to France (and she would have to inform them - it was a matter of protocol) they would almost certainly send one of their agents to ‘assist’ him. He handed back her card. ‘You’re not quite what I had in mind,’ he said.

  ‘You were expecting perhaps Peter Sellers?’

  He smiled. ‘No, no, I was just expecting someone more ... mature.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘I mean,’ he went on, ‘someone older.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘No, Mr Barclay, you are not senior enough to merit someone ... older.’

  ‘Touché,’ he murmured, raising his glass to his lips.

  Now it was Dominique Herault’s turn to smile.

  ‘So,’ he went on, having swallowed the ice-cold beer, ‘now that you’ve ransacked my room, I suppose that puts us on a footing of mutual trust and cooperation.’

  ‘I was only—’

  ‘Waiting for me. Yes, you said. Forgive me, but in Britain we normally wait outside a person’s room. We don’t break and enter.’

  ‘Break? Nothing was broken. Besides, MI5 is famous for its breaking and entering, isn’t it so?’

  ‘Once upon a time,’ Barclay replied coolly. ‘But we draw the line at sinking Greenpeace ships.’

  ‘That was the DGSE, not the DST,’ she said, rather too quickly. ‘And it too was a long time ago. What do you say... water under the bridge?’

  ‘Ironic under the circumstances, but yes, that’s what we say. Your English is good.’

  ‘Better than your French, I think. I saw the grammar book in your room. It is for children, no?’

  He shifted a little, saying nothing.

  Her finger drew a circle on the table-top. ‘And do you think,’ she said, ‘you can find anything in Calais which we might have overlooked ourselves?’

  ‘I didn’t know you were interested.’

  ‘French people were killed, Mr Barclay. Killed by a bomb, a terrorist bomb, we think. Naturally we are interested.’

  ‘Yes, I didn’t mean—’

  ‘So now you will answer my question: do you think you can find anything we might have overlooked?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘And let me make some guesses. You have been talking to ... sailors. Just as the Special Branch agent did. You have been interviewing all the people he interviewed. You have read the local police report. You have been concentrating on the boat, on the people who died on it, on people who might have seen it. Yes?’

  ‘Basically correct.’

  ‘Yes. We made the same mistake. Not me, I was not involved at the beginning. But now I am here to ...’

  ‘Assist?’ he offered.

  ‘Assist, yes, I am to assist you. So, what I say to you is ...’ She leaned forward and lowered her voice. ‘You are not thinking about this the right way.’

  ‘I’m not?’ He tried to keep the acid out of his voice. She was shaking her head, deaf to nuance.

  ‘No. The way to work is backwards, backwards from the departure of the boat.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I’ve been—’

  ‘Further back. Much further.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

  ‘I will tell you.’ She checked her watch. ‘You are dressed to go out. You’re eating out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She was on her feet. ‘I know a good restaurant. Not here, out of town a few kilometres. We can take my car.’ She called over to the hotelier. ‘I’ve told him to put my drink and yours on your bill.’

  ‘Thank you. So kind.’

  She stared fixedly at him through narrowed eyes. ‘Irony?’ she guessed at last.

  ‘Irony,’ he admitted.

  She had a Citroën 2CV, not a recent model. The sides of the car were dented and scraped from years of Parisian lane-discipline. The suspension was like nothing Barclay had ever experienced, and she drove like a demon. The last time he’d been thrown about like this had been on a fairground ride. She yelled to him over the noise from the motor, but he couldn’t make out a word. He just nodded, and smiled whenever she glanced towards him. His responses seemed enough. By the time they arrived at what looked like someone’s cottage, deep in the middle of nowhere, he felt that he would never eat again. But the smells wafting from the kitchen soon changed his mind.

  ‘My employers’ treat,’ she said as they took their seats at a cramped table for two. Menus the size of the table’s surface were handed to them, and she immediately ordered two Kirs before gazing over her menu at him.

  ‘Shall I order?’ she asked. He nodded his head. Her eyelashes were thick but not long. He was still trying to work out whether she dyed her hair. And her age, too, he wondered about. Somewhere between twenty-one and twenty-eight. But why not twenty or twenty-nine? She kept her head hidden behind the menu for a full minute, while he looked around him at the diners occupying every other table in the place. There had been no sign that their table had been reserved, and she’d said nothing to the waiter about a reservation, but he wondered all the same ...

  At last she put down the menu. ‘You eat meat?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good, here in France we are still a little... recidivist about vegetarianism.’

  ‘Recidivist?’

  She looked appalled. ‘That is not the right word?’

  He shrugged. ‘No idea,’ he told her. ‘Not only is your French better than mine, I’m beginning to wonder about your English, too.’

  This remark seemed to cheer her enormously. She straightened her back and gave another red-lipped smile.

  ‘For that,’ she said, ‘I order the second cheapest bottle of wine rather than the cheapest.’

  ‘Your employers are very generous.’

  ‘No, they are very literal-minded, like security organisations all over the world. Do you enjoy Thomas Pynchon?’

  ‘I don’t even understand Thomas Pynchon.’

  Barclay was remembering that, foreign territory or not, he had the ability to charm if nothing else. She was still smiling. He thought she probably was charmed.

  ‘Do you ever read Conan Doyle?’

  ‘What, Sherlock Holmes? No, but I’ve seen the films.’

  ‘The books, the stories, they are very different to these films. Sherlock Holmes has an exaggerated power of deductive reasoning. He can solve any case by deductive reasoning alone. To some extent, Mr Conan Doyle has a point.’ She paused, suddenly thinking of something. ‘The Mr Doyle from Special Branch, do you know him? Is he perhaps related to Mr Conan Doyle?’

  ‘I don’t know him, but I shouldn’t think so.’

  She nodded at this, but seemed disappointed all the same. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘Mr Conan Doyle was interested in deductive reasoning, yet he also believed deeply in spiritualism.’

  ‘Really?’ said Barclay, for want of anything better to reply. He couldn’t see where any of this was leading.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘really. I find that strange.’

  ‘I suppose it is a little.’

  The waiter had appeared, pad and pen at the ready. To Barclay’s mind, it seemed to take a lot of talking for the meal to be ordered. There was much discussion, back-tracking, changing of mi
nd. And glances from both Dominique and the waiter towards him; even, at one point, a conspiratorial smile. The waiter bowed at last and retreated, accepting Barclay’s unused menu from him with exaggerated courtesy. A new waitress had arrived with two glasses of Kir.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Dominique, lifting hers.

  ‘Sante,’ replied Barclay. He sipped, sounded his appreciation, and put the glass down. A basket of bread now arrived, courtesy of the original waiter. At a nearby table, something sizzling was being served on to two plates. The diners at surrounding tables looked eagerly, unashamedly, towards the source of the sound, then exchanged remarks about the quality of the dish. When Barclay looked back at her, Dominique was staring at him from behind her tall glass.

  ‘So,’ he said, shifting his weight slightly in the solid wooden chair, ‘what were you saying about Conan Doyle?’

  ‘Not Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes. Deductive reasoning. This is my point. We should be working backwards, asking ourselves questions, and deciding on probabilities. Don’t you agree?’

  Lateral thinking, following an idea all the way through ... that was how Dominic Elder had put it. Barclay nodded. ‘So what would you do?’

  She leaned forwards, resting her elbows on the table-top. ‘The assassin, we think probably she is a woman, yes?’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘Now, think of this: how did she come to arrive in Calais?’

  ‘By train or by road.’

  ‘Correct. Which is the more probable? Road. Perhaps she came from Paris. But trains are very public, aren’t they? While assassins are not. So, it is more probable that she arrived by road. Yes?’

  He shrugged. ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Then either she drove or she was driven. She is said to enjoy working alone. An independent woman, self-sufficient.’ She paused, waiting for his nodded agreement that she had chosen her words correctly. ‘Probably therefore,’ she went on, ‘she did not have an accomplice. She may have hitch-hiked, or she may have driven to Calais by herself. Yes?’