by Chris Ewan
Two minutes elapsed before Alain started to fast-forward. He scrolled through almost eight minutes in total, then hit PLAY again the moment the cameras picked up something else.
A green Toyota Land Cruiser with a plastic bull bar on the front, its headlamps switched off.
A door was flung open from the back and an interior light blinked on. A gloved hand reached out and took Serge’s holdall. The kid climbed inside.
‘What do you think?’ Trent asked. ‘Do you picture him as one of the guys with the rifles?’
Alain considered it. He uttered a low, guttural grunt. ‘Maybe.’
Trent closed his eyes and visualised the three masked figures who’d leapt out of the jeep. No way was Serge the one who’d advanced on the Mercedes and fired at the windscreen. That guy had been too bulky. Too assured in his movements.
And Trent didn’t see him as the man who’d hauled Jérôme out of the rear window. That job required muscle. It required boldness and composure. Those were two qualities Serge seemed to lack.
He could have been the one holding the rifle on Trent. That was possible, for sure. He’d seen anxiety in the guy’s eyes. Jitters.
But it was nothing conclusive. He could tell himself that Serge had been on the other end of that rifle, but he didn’t know it for sure.
‘Maybe he was the driver,’ Alain said.
Trent made a humming noise. It was a definite possibility. Serge was a driver by trade. And he knew the Mercedes well. Perhaps he’d figured out the best way to take it down.
But someone else had been driving the Toyota when they picked Serge up. So maybe that guy had been behind the wheel. Maybe Serge had fulfilled a different role entirely.
‘One thing’s for sure,’ Trent said. ‘He is involved.’
Alain nodded, distractedly. He was pressing his face close to the monitors. Peering at the screens.
‘What is it?’ Trent asked.
‘Number plate,’ Alain said, placing the pad of his forefinger beside the rear of the Land Cruiser. ‘I can’t read it.’
‘Looks like they smeared it with something. Mud or grease.’
‘And the front is no good, either.’ Alain let the footage spool out, watching as the Toyota passed silently along the fence before moving out of range of the final camera.
‘Irrelevant,’ Trent told him. ‘It’s probably stolen anyway.’ Then, realising he’d said more than he should have – he didn’t want to plant ideas in Alain’s mind – he tapped the monitor screening footage of the shack. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘It’s nothing.’
‘Looks like a summer house.’
‘It’s a wreck. It’s falling down.’
And yet it was under surveillance. Two cameras. First the front view, then the rear.
Alain punched a button, jarring the camera feed back to real time, 03.52. All appeared to be still. All calm.
Trent was fixated on the shack. The discreet location. The loose cluster of trees. Those shutters and planks across the windows.
Abruptly, he became conscious that Alain was watching him again. Assessing him. Gauging him. The fearsome Ruger holstered at his side.
Silence between them. The surveillance monitors whirred and hummed and twitched. The fluorescent light buzzed and flickered. He could hear Alain’s breathing. Feel the heat coming off his body. Waited for him to speak. To accuse him of something. Maybe make reference to the photograph in his wallet.
The silence went on. Eventually, Trent broke it.
‘We should speak to the housekeeper,’ he said. ‘Ask her if she knows anything.’
‘She won’t. There’s no chance of that at all.’
‘Maybe Serge confided in her.’
‘He wouldn’t have.’
‘Why so sure? Only a short while ago you were certain that Serge was ill in bed.’
Alain muttered something under his breath. He shook his head, exasperated, as though he couldn’t quite understand how he hadn’t swung for Trent yet.
Then a telephone started to ring.
The noise was distant and muffled but unmistakable.
It was coming from the far side of the house. From Jérôme’s study.
Chapter Sixteen
Trent burst into the room and circled behind the desk. He wheeled Jérôme’s chair out of the way and snatched up Alain’s pad and pencil. He locked eyes with Stephanie.
The telephone was ringing between them.
‘Ready?’ he asked.
She swallowed, then nodded. Perspiration had broken out across the bridge of her nose. The skin around her eyes was shaded purple.
The telephone kept ringing.
Trent pointed with the tip of the pencil towards the scrap of paper Stephanie had placed on the desk immediately in front of her.
‘Follow the script,’ he said.
The telephone rang some more.
Philippe had positioned himself to the right of Stephanie. He’d turned the spare chair round backwards and was resting his knee on it. His hands gripped the wooden backrest where Alain’s jacket was draped. Alain stood by the side of the desk next to the phone, his bunched fists propped on his waist just below his holstered revolver, his feet spread shoulder width apart.
Trent held the pencil above the notepad. He reached out with his spare hand and hit the tiny rubber button with the loudspeaker icon on it.
A click. A burr. The fuzz of static on the line.
A long moment of silence. Enough for Trent to begin to wonder if he’d cut the caller off.
He checked on Stephanie. She was frozen. She was speechless.
Then he heard breathing on the end of the line. It was ragged. It was harsh.
Trent rolled his hand at the wrist, like a stagehand prompting an actor.
‘Allo?’ Stephanie managed, a dry catch in her throat.
More silence. She opened her mouth as if to talk again.
Then there was a voice.
‘We have your husband.’
The voice was male. It was deep and guttural, almost a growl. It sounded constricted somehow. Sluggish. As if the speaker’s jaw had been broken and wired back together again. As if he was drowsy on painkillers.
It was a distinctive voice. It was memorable.
Trent remembered it for sure.
His heart bucked in his chest like he’d just been shocked out of a cardiac arrest. He clutched the pencil so tightly that it flexed between his fingers. The lead pressed down on the pad.
‘My name to you is Xavier.’
The pencil tip gave out. It crumbled. The jagged lead bore down into the thin paper, punching a hole through the top sheet.
‘You speak only with me. Call the police and we kill your husband. Lie to me or try to trick me and we kill your husband. Understand?’
‘Yes,’ Stephanie replied, her voice rising in panic, as if she were framing a question.
Trent gritted his teeth and made a slashing motion with his hand. Jabbed a finger towards the script.
Stephanie gasped. She fumbled the paper.
‘Is Jérôme alive?’ she said. ‘Is he safe?’
‘If you do not pay what we ask, we kill your husband.’
Trent pointed at the prompt sheet again.
‘Is he alive? Please. Is he safe? Can you—’
‘Enough! If you do not pay what we ask, we kill your husband. Disobey me and we kill your husband. Understand? We kill him.’
‘I don’t have any money. I cannot—’
‘Do not lie to me. Xavier knows when you lie. Lie to me and your husband dies. We kill him. Five million euros. Five million! I will call again within two days. Have the money. No police. Have the money.’
There was a loud clatter and then the phone went dead. A flat tone hummed through the speaker.
Stephanie raised a hand to cover her mouth. She was shaking her head repeatedly.
The telephone continued to hum. Trent ignored it. He scratched a note on the pad with the broken pencil.
5 mil euros. No police. No lies. No tricks. Do not disobey.
Beneath it, he wrote:
Xavier.
He underlined the name twice. The lines were heavy, determined.
Xavier.
A name he knew only too well. A name he’d hoped never to hear again. Especially tonight.
Alain stepped forwards and slapped his hand down onto the speaker. The droning ceased with a fractured bleat. He lifted the receiver and punched in a four-digit code – 3131. He listened for a moment. Frowned. Shook his head.
‘Number withheld,’ he said.
Trent nodded, distractedly. ‘I told you. They’re professionals.’
‘We could install some equipment for next time. Something to trace the call.’
‘I’ll source a digital recorder,’ Trent told him. ‘It can be a useful tool. But there’s no point trying to trace them. These gangs use prepaid mobiles. A new phone for every call. It’s cheap. It’s safe.’
Alain held his gaze for a long beat. His mouth was twisted up in thought.
‘Maybe not this time,’ he said. ‘Maybe they’ll slip up.’
‘They won’t.’
‘But we could try. What does it cost us?’
Trent dropped the pencil. It rolled in a semicircle on the desk.
‘It costs you Jérôme’s life if you make a mistake. How do you get the equipment? Who do you ask? What if they talk? And what do you do with the information even if it works? I told you, this is a negotiation now.’
‘The police would have the equipment,’ Philippe put in. His skin had taken on a greyish tone but his eyes were alert. He was rocking forwards on his chair. ‘We should call them. We need them.’
‘Too dangerous.’
‘You say. But you also told us the maximum they would ask for is four million. And now they ask for five. We can’t pay it.’
‘You won’t have to. I told you: we negotiate. We talk them down.’
‘How?’ Stephanie had lowered her hand. Her mouth was slack, her lips cracked. ‘How do we do this? He does not listen.’
‘It was a first call.’ Trent could feel his composure leaking away, like a breach in a gas main. ‘They can be that way. Remember, it’s about impact for them. It’s about unsettling you. This is what I told you would happen.’
‘You also told us four million, maximum,’ Philippe said again.
Trent bowed his head. He stifled a groan. ‘So they went higher. We can still negotiate a reasonable sum.’
‘Only if they want to.’
‘No. I told you. It’s a business exchange. The money for the commodity. They need the money.’
‘We should call the police.’ Philippe was staring at Stephanie forcefully. ‘We should call them right now.’
Stephanie glanced at the telephone. ‘What if they kill him?’ she whispered.
‘If they kill him then they were going to do it anyway,’ Philippe told her. ‘They were going to kill him even if we paid.’
‘You’re wrong,’ Trent said.
‘We should call them,’ Philippe insisted. ‘We should ask for their help.’
Stephanie moistened her lips. She glanced at the phone again, then up at Alain. She was pale and she was trembling. She looked like she was suffering from exposure and Trent supposed that in some ways she was. Exposure to the brutality of the situation they were facing. To the gruelling hours and days that lay ahead.
‘What do you say?’ she asked Alain.
The bodyguard was frowning down at the phone, cupping his chin in his hand, stroking his stubble. He was thinking hard. His forehead was creased, one eye half-closed in a squint, the sticking plaster crinkled and beginning to peel away from his sweat-soaked brow. He grunted to himself, then looked over at Trent.
Trent felt his gut go light. His pulse throbbed in his temple. All of his calm, reasoned thoughts seemed to be thrashing against the inside of his skull. The first signs of panic setting in. This was the moment when everything could unravel. Involve the police and he lost control. Lost the last vague chance he was clinging onto.
This stranger who was wary of him, this man who’d voiced his suspicions right from the very beginning, who’d kept his Ruger close at hand in case his distrust proved well founded, was all that stood between him now and the jarring wrench of failure.
Alain lowered his hand with a sigh. Tapped his knuckles loosely on the edge of the desk.
‘I trust M. Moreau’s judgement,’ he said, voice firm. He nodded at Trent. ‘And he entrusted his life to this man. So for now, we do what he says. We don’t call the police.’
Chapter Seventeen
Two weeks ago
‘It’s Moreau,’ Girard said, speaking around the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He pushed past Trent with a brown paper grocery bag clutched beneath his arm.
Trent lingered by the open front door to his apartment. He’d been waiting to hear Girard’s verdict for close to a fortnight. They’d started by working together to draw up a pool of suspects. The list wasn’t long. Trent and Aimée didn’t have a large social circle in Marseilles, a consequence of moving from Paris only three years ago, combined with the secretive nature of their business. There was always the possibility that she’d run into someone random, a figure they couldn’t account for, but Girard had made it clear that the statistics went against it. If she’d been attacked in some way, the strongest likelihood was that the culprit was an acquaintance or one of the clients Aimée had met with in the weeks running up to her disappearance.
A wedge of sunlight slashed Trent’s face. The irregular concrete plaza of Place de Moulins was silent and deserted. It was ringed by dirt-smeared cars parked bumper to bumper, unoccupied benches and crooked pastel townhouses showing no sign of habitation. A laundered sheet draped over the ironwork balcony across from him might have been drying for hours or days. There were bins that needed emptying and wilting palms gasping for water. The entire area could have been evacuated for all Trent knew. He hadn’t ventured outside in more than a week.
He closed the door and pressed his forehead against the smooth timber. Hope seeped out of him like blood from a wound. He turned in a strange kind of daze – as if his body was somehow disconnected from his mind, or as if every bone had been secretly removed and replaced in completely the wrong order – and shuffled, slump-shouldered, along a hallway that seemed as dark and airless as a subway tunnel.
He found Girard standing behind the breakfast counter, shifting the scree of litter and dirty crockery to one side with his arm. Today, the polo shirt he had on was pale blue, his trousers tan. He set his grocery bag down in the space he’d cleared, like an explorer planting a flag and claiming new territory.
‘Clean plates,’ he said, and removed a pack of white paper plates. ‘And something to drink from.’ He showed Trent a tube of clear plastic cups.
Trent stared at him blankly and collapsed onto his couch. Magazines and newspapers crinkled beneath his weight. He was wearing a white T-shirt that was yellowed with age over a pair of blue cotton boxer shorts. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d dressed properly.
Cigarette dangling from his mouth, Girard pulled food from the bag like a magician performing an astounding illusion. A crusty baguette, a rounded cheese wrapped in wax paper, some grapes, some olives, a bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice and a clear plastic tub loaded with steaming paella. He delved inside the bag one final time for a plastic fork and paper napkins.
‘Eat,’ he said, and prodded the paella across the counter.
Trent let his head fall slackly to one side. He stared at the silent telephone. The inert recording equipment.
‘Tell me,’ he said.
Girard’s pouched eyes were wet, the whites tinged yellow, as though stained by nicotine. Whatever he saw in Trent seemed neither to impress nor surprise him. He plucked the cigarette from his lips and set it to rest on the wrapped cheese, then prised open the plastic tub and scooped a forkful of perfumed y
ellow rice into his mouth.
‘Tell me,’ Trent said again. ‘Why Moreau?’
‘Many reasons,’ Girard replied, rice tumbling from his lips.
‘Such as?’
Girard lifted the plastic tub to his chin. He shovelled paella into his mouth.
‘Aimée’s appointment diary shows she met with him three times.’
‘That’s not so unusual.’ Trent’s voice was flat and emotionless. To his bemusement, he felt the same way. It was like he was watching the scene unravel before his eyes. He pictured himself sitting alone in a darkened cinema, scooping popcorn into his gormless mouth as the Trent on the big screen said, ‘Some clients need reassuring about our policies. They don’t like to face up to the idea that a kidnap could happen to them.’
And, he thought to himself, a lot of their male clients liked to spend as much time with Aimée as they could possibly justify, perhaps kidding themselves that she was there for reasons other than business. He’d never had any problem with that. He understood her appeal better than anyone. She was very beautiful. Strikingly so. She was given to flirtation and she was funny and sweet. On a couple of occasions, clients had misread her signals. One time, Trent had been forced to step in and insist that a client cool his advances. But it was a risk they were prepared to run. The market they were in was tough. Much bigger firms were often wooing their prospective clients. If Aimée’s allure gave them a competitive edge, it was one they were willing to exploit.
‘She met with him for dinner once,’ Girard said. ‘Another time was drinks, on the terrace of the Intercontinental.’
The Trent in the movie continued the dialogue, even as it rang tinny and untrue in his ears. ‘She’s never worked set hours. It’s the nature of the business. She meets clients when and where they choose. We don’t have a separate office. And we don’t bring clients here.’
In truth, Trent rarely met their clients at all unless something went wrong for them. He was good at crisis management, bad at small talk. Aimée was different. She excelled at client liaison. She was courteous and patient and charming. She was willing to spend hours going over the small print of an insurance policy. She was prepared to court clients for as long as it took for them to sign on the dotted line. Complementary skills. A strong partnership. Aimée was the public face of their operation, and for most clients – the lucky ones – she was the only representative they’d ever meet. Trent was the guy in the background, in the shadows. His natural habitat.
