The Boy Who Saw: A gripping thriller that will keep you hooked

by Simon Toyne

  One attempt remaining.

  He sat back and stared out of the window. He knew he should give up and leave it to the Police Scientifique, but if he turned it over to them it could take days to find out what the hard drive contained, and it wasn’t like the computer was going to self-destruct if he got the password wrong. He imagined the techies could probably hack a locked computer as easily as a password-protected one. He thought of Marie-Claude and Léo, still missing, maybe in danger. What the hell. If there was something locked inside this computer that might help track them down, he needed to try and get it out now, not wait for some teenager in a lab coat and a Star Wars T-shirt to dig it out a week from now when it was too late.

  He leaned back over the keyboard and tried to think like Marie-Claude. He thought about what he had read, the thousands of names on the wall and the red cotton threads converging on the piece of paper. All of it about one thing. He took a breath, typed ‘Die Anderen’ and hit Return.

  The screen blinked, the command box disappeared – and the desktop loaded. It was as neat and tidy as the desk was messy, with five named folders on display arranged on the screen like dots on a dice:

  Herman Lansky

  Saul Schwartzfeldt

  Josef Engel

  Artur Samler

  Die Anderen

  He opened Lansky’s folder. It contained four sub-folders labelled – Early Years, War Years, Post War, Death. Amand opened the last one first and a new window opened, filled with a variety of documents – Word files, PDF files, JPEGS. He opened a PDF and an article from The Hampstead Gazette filled the screen. It was dated 16 June 1949 with the headline:

  Death Camp Survivor Gassed in Own Flat

  Amand scanned the article, his English just about good enough to glean details of how Herman Lansky’s remains had been found in a burned-out flat in the London Borough of West Hampstead. He was described as a Polish Jew who’d resettled in London after the war and had achieved a small degree of celebrity following the publication of a memoir describing his time in a Nazi death camp run by the now notorious Nazi commandant, Artur Samler. A photograph accompanied the article showing Samler looking arrogant in his tailored Nazi uniform. There was no photograph of Herman Lansky.

  Amand opened another file, a copy of the coroner’s court report dated six months after the newspaper article, and scrolled down to the closing statement:

  The partial skeletal remains of a male adult were found in the embers of the flat. The intensity of the fire makes it impossible to positively identify the body but it is consistent with the age and sex of the known resident – Mr Herman Piotr Lansky – who has been missing since the fire.

  Verdict: Death by misadventure.

  There were no documents in the folder relating to the police investigation and he made a mental note to look them up when he got back to the Commissariat.

  He checked through the other folders, scanning the documents they contained, then opened the folder labelled Saul Schwartzfeldt. It contained the same four sub-folders and Amand spent a few minutes in each, working chronologically to build up a thumbnail sketch of the man and his life.

  The Early Years folder was almost empty: a blurry, black-and-white photograph of a dark-haired child and a copy of a Nazi identification document dated 24 DEZ 1938 and stamped with a large red ‘J’ for ‘Jude’ – Jew. It had a head-and-shoulders photograph of a young man and listed his name as Saul Israel Schwartzfeldt, along with Geburtsort – birthplace – Frankfurt, and Beruf – profession – Schneider. Schwartzfeldt had been a tailor, like Josef Engel.

  The next folder – War Years – contained records of Jewish transportations from Frankfurt to Łodź and Warsaw. The name Saul Schwartzfeldt appeared multiple times on different lists and was highlighted in green marker each time. Again Amand marvelled at the amount of work Marie-Claude had done to find these lost people in history, these tiny needles in seventy-year-old haystacks.

  The Post War folder contained various documents from the end of the war right up to the previous year and told the story of a full life lived, mainly through civic records gleaned from the archives of a town called Colmar. Amand recognized the name; he had visited it once and remembered a mountainous and woody place, more German in character than French. Maybe Monsieur Schwartzfeldt had chosen it as a kind of compromise, an ersatz German town where he could make a fresh start instead of returning to an old life in Frankfurt that the war had undoubtedly destroyed.

  There were two marriage certificates in the folder, thirty years apart, and birth certificates for three children, all boys, as well as various newspaper articles showing photos of an increasingly older and fatter Saul, opening a school gym his textile-printing company had helped pay for, receiving the key to the town on the occasion of his retirement, campaigning for various local council offices and ultimately being elected as Mayor of Colmar. The photograph of his investiture, with his grown-up family and second wife surrounding him, was a portrait of success, a record of a full life well-lived and a man well-loved. All of which made the contents of the last folder all the more shocking.

  Saul Schwartzfeldt’s Death folder was by far the fullest. It consisted mainly of newspaper reports dated six months ago, where the same local papers that had borne admiring witness to his charmed life now reported his brutal death with equal shock.

  Amand opened one of the longer articles and scrolled past the headline ‘Shocking Murder of Ex-Mayor’ to a photograph of a small cottage by a wide river with a group of gendarmes standing around it. The man in the centre was identified as Commandant Gilles Rapp, lead investigator in the murder case. He scrolled back to the top and had started to read when his phone buzzed suddenly, making his heart twinge with a sharp stab of pain. He snatched it up to answer it. ‘Amand?’

  ‘It’s Henri. Where are you?’

  ‘Still at La Broderie.’

  ‘Well, get back to the Commissariat. There’s someone here you need to talk to.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Magellan.’

  ‘Solomon Creed’s psychiatrist?’

  ‘He just arrived here. Says he needs to talk to you about his missing client. Says it’s urgent.’

  ‘OK, stick him in my office and give him a coffee or something and I’ll be right there. And run a background check on him, we only called him an hour ago. This could easily be a journalist posing as him to try and get information about the case.’

  ‘OK: coffee, background check. Got it.’

  Henri hung up and Amand looked at all the information he had yet to go through. There was too much and it was too important to skim-read. He reached over to the open pack of memory sticks, took one and fitted it into a USB port at the back of the computer. The icon for the stick appeared and he highlighted all five folders on the desktop and drummed his fingers on the desk as the hundreds of files Marie-Claude had meticulously accumulated were copied to the drive.

  He looked at the headline again, ‘Shocking Murder of Ex-Mayor’, and thought about what Magellan had told him earlier, about Solomon having certain toxic memories removed. He wondered again what those memories were and what exactly Solomon had done to end up in Magellan’s facility. Perhaps he had been in France; his French was certainly good enough. Maybe he had visited a little town on the German border called Colmar. He would ask Magellan about it when he saw him. He would ask him a lot of things.

  43

  There were no seats left by the time Solomon reached the bus and he had to squeeze through people to stand where he needed to be, up front and facing backwards. The bus smelled of deodorant, bad breath and the rusty, metallic smell of stress that had oozed from the pores of everyone who’d ridden on it to board planes they didn’t want to catch. The doors closed with a hydraulic hiss and Solomon felt the usual tightening at the back of his neck at being confined. The bus lurched into motion and Solomon rode it, his feet planted apart like a seasoned sailor on a rolling deck.

  The family from the Audi were next to him, t
he father scowling at his phone and the two boys glaring impatiently at their mother, who was busily pulling various electronic devices and tangled earphones from a large shoulder bag. She seemed harried and tired, the lone servant in a retinue of emperors. She was also the only one standing, her husband and two boys having claimed three of a group of four seats and filling the fourth with the large case the man had been carrying. The bus took a corner and the mother stumbled into Solomon.

  ‘Pardon, monsieur,’ she said, looking up but keeping her head tilted down in a way that showed how accustomed she was to submission.

  ‘Not your fault, madame.’ Solomon looked at her husband. ‘Monsieur. Do you think you might move your case so your wife can sit down?’

  The man looked up from his phone and his skin reddened. ‘It’s too heavy to move,’ he said. ‘We’ll be there in a minute. She doesn’t mind standing.’

  ‘But I mind,’ Solomon said. ‘And she’s not the only one having to stand. Here,’ he grabbed the handle of the case. ‘Allow me.’ He hoisted it from the seat and across the aisle to an empty space high on the luggage rack opposite. ‘Madame,’ he said, indicating the vacant seat. ‘No point in standing now.’ She looked at the empty seat as if it were a trap before slowly sitting in it.

  The man grunted and returned his attention to his phone. His wife smiled nervously at Solomon then resumed her frantic mission to provide electronic amusement to her children. She had managed to furnish them with iPads and earphones when the bus pulled up at the terminal.

  Solomon stood aside to let other people off first, trapping the family in their seats behind him.

  ‘You going to let us get off or do we need your permission?’ the man huffed behind him.

  ‘Just letting the people off,’ Solomon said, turning to him with a broad smile. ‘I have a thing about good manners. Here, let me help you with your luggage.’

  He turned and lifted the case clear of the high shelf as easily as he had put it there and carried it down the steps to the pavement. The mother shepherded her boys after him, carrying their cases while they clutched their screens. The man followed, taking his time, making it clear he was not being ordered around by anyone. He stepped on to the pavement and drew himself up to his full height. He was as tall as Solomon and twice the size, something he had clearly noticed too. He tilted his head back, jutted his chin out and looked down at Solomon as if deciding whether to punch him or not.

  ‘Sorry if I offended you,’ Solomon said, offering his hand.

  The man glanced at it and smiled. ‘I’ll shake your hand,’ he said, loud enough that everyone around would see him being the big man. Then he took Solomon’s hand – and he crushed it.

  Solomon saw the glint in his eye as he gave him his best locker-room knuckle-breaker. He took the pain for a second, allowing the man his moment of satisfaction as he ground the bones in Solomon’s hand. Then he squeezed back. The victory glint in the man’s eyes vanished and was replaced by surprise. Solomon continued to squeeze, his long, pale fingers wrapping fully round the man’s fist and tightening steadily. A fork-shaped vein swelled in the man’s temple and he snorted, an involuntary noise in his throat, the closest he could allow himself to acknowledging the pain he was experiencing. He was trapped in the handshake now, snared in his own locker-room rules. He couldn’t pull away, that wasn’t how these things worked, he couldn’t yelp or plead with Solomon to stop either. All he could do was suck it up and stay quiet until Solomon released him. Solomon leaned in, using the handshake to pull them close enough that their chests were touching and his mouth was right by the man’s ear. ‘Thank you for accepting my apology,’ he whispered. And let go.

  The man almost jumped backwards, flexing his hand but trying not to show it hurt. He nodded, still acting as if he was the big man, but his chin was down and when he glanced at Solomon he was effectively looking up at him. He grabbed the handle of his wheelie case with his uncrushed hand and hurried away, snapping at his wife and kids to keep up. Solomon watched him leave.

  ‘Bravo, monsieur.’ He turned to the voice and looked through the open doors of the bus at a man somewhere in his sixties with a thick moustache that made him seem mournful. ‘I drive this bus back and forth, four days a week, six trips an hour, eight hours a day, and there’s not one day yet I haven’t gone home at the end of a shift wanting to strangle some kid or punch some guy for being rude. The women aren’t much better, talking on their phones and cursing like sailors.’ He shook his head and smiled at Solomon. ‘If I wore a hat, I’d take it off to you, monsieur, for what you just did, but they cut the hat from the uniform about ten years back. We don’t even have to wear a tie any more, but I do. Just because the world’s going to hell in a hurry doesn’t mean I have to go along for the ride. But today you restored my faith a little. I’m sure tomorrow I’ll go right back to hating everyone, but thank you for giving me a rare day off.’

  Solomon smiled. ‘When are you due to return to the car park?’

  The driver checked his watch. ‘Five minutes. Why?’

  Solomon held up the key to the Audi he’d lifted from the man’s pocket while he’d been distracted by the pain in his hand. ‘I left something in my car.’

  The driver looked in his mirrors to check how many people had got on the bus and see if anyone else was coming, then hit a button to close the middle and rear doors. ‘Jump on,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you back right now. Compliments of the house.’

  44

  Marie-Claude stared down the line of parked cars, waiting for the bus to return, wondering if Solomon would be on it. She ran through everything that had happened that morning, from the first knock on her door to sitting here waiting for a man she knew almost nothing about to return.

  When he’d appeared from nowhere and said he had come to save her son, it had touched something in her. Maybe because she wasn’t used to having someone prepared to make sacrifices for her or her son. And Léo had trusted him too, and he never trusted new people, not after everything he’d been through and the way he saw people so clearly. She didn’t fully understand how Léo’s gift worked, the way he could read people like he could. Sometimes she wished he didn’t have his gift because he saw more than a seven-year-old should and it made him withdrawn and odd when all she wanted was for him to fit in and be normal. But it had been her decision ultimately to drive them here and she had been carried along by adrenaline and curiosity, always her curiosity, blinkered by the prospect of finally discovering something of her family history. The psychiatrist she had seen for a while had identified it as her tendency to obsessively focus on only one perspective and react emotionally to it instead of rationally. She had done it again today, jumping in the car when she should have stayed in Cordes. It was only now, in the calm of this moment, that she could see things differently. She closed her eyes, dropped her head down and shook it slowly.

  ‘What’s up?’ a small voice piped up from the back.

  ‘I’m sorry, Léo.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For dragging you all the way to Toulouse with a stranger.’ She shook her head again.

  ‘Monsieur Creed isn’t a stranger. Grampy made the suit for him.’

  ‘Honey, he can’t be the same man.’

  ‘But his hair is all white, like Grampy’s, and he talks like an old person. He knows loads of stuff too. And he came for the waistcoat and it’s got his name in it, so it must be him.’

  Marie-Claude opened her mouth to speak then realized something.

  The suit – Solomon had it: jacket and waistcoat. Maybe he wasn’t planning on coming back at all. Wasn’t this what con men did: win your trust to make you drop your guard before walking off with your credit cards? She had been too trusting. Far too trusting. She looked in the back seat. The note from her grandfather was there, with Otto Adelstein’s address inside it.

  ‘Listen,’ she looked over at Léo, ‘why don’t we head to Dijon ourselves, just you and me?’

  Léo’s face cloud
ed. ‘What about Monsieur Creed?’

  ‘He’ll be fine. You heard what he said: he can make cars disappear. Anyone who can do that doesn’t need us to drive him around. We’ve brought him this far, but I think maybe we’d be better off on our own from now on.’

  Léo looked out of the window towards the empty bus stop, the last place they’d seen Solomon. ‘I think we should wait for him to come back. I think Grampy would want us to stay with him. He said if we kept the suit safe for him, Monsieur Creed would come for it and he would look after us. And he did come. If we go now and leave him, how can he keep us safe? What if the shadow comes back?’

  ‘He won’t come back, honey. There’s nothing to worry about.’

  The man wrapped the black scarf around his face, tucked it under his hat then stepped out of his car. He moved to the boot, removed the bayonet from the folds of grey cloth, locked his car and moved away, keeping the Peugeot in his peripheral vision. The bayonet was long and unwieldy, not the best weapon to use in a confined space like the interior of a car. He would use it to smash the rear window and grab the kid without running the risk of fumbling at a locked door. All that flying glass, the sound of the window breaking, followed by the sight of the big heavy blade against her son’s throat – the woman would tell him whatever he wanted to know, give him whatever he asked for. If she had the list, he would take it. Once he finally had the names of Die Anderen, the Wild Hunt could continue to its end.

  Das zuende bringen was begonnen wurde – Finishing what was begun.

  He reached the end of his row and cut through the lines of parked cars, closing the distance between himself and the Peugeot. The woman was twisted round in her seat, talking to the boy, her focus all on him. He gripped the handle of the bayonet and tasted honey and bitterness in his mouth.

  Then he saw movement beyond the car.