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

by Simon Toyne

  ‘Find anything?’ LePoux asked as he got in the car.

  ‘Maybe.’ Baptiste held the small white tile up.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘An opportunity.’ He slid down in his seat and pulled his cap back over his face.

  ‘Where now?’ LePoux asked.

  ‘Anywhere I can get free Wi-Fi,’ Baptiste replied. ‘And a decent cup of coffee.’

  49

  ‘This car is cool,’ Léo said, running his hand along the leather seats of the Audi.

  ‘Don’t get used to it,’ Marie-Claude said. ‘We’re only borrowing it.’

  Marie-Claude liked the car too. They were driving north out of Toulouse, using the péage now they’d switched cars, and the Audi purred along the road in soft comfort. She’d always thought these luxury SUVs were pointless, four-wheel drive on a car that was only ever going to travel on roads, but now she was driving one she was starting to get it. The engine hummed smoothly and they flashed past the other traffic as if it was crawling. It felt luxurious and solid and made her realize how ratty and shabby her own car was. There was no mess inside either and she felt a pang of guilt because this was a family car too, with two children to mess it up, yet it looked and smelled like it was fresh out of the factory. It was so nice, such an unexpected bubble of luxury in the general struggle of her life, that she was already feeling anxious at the prospect of having to give it back. She turned to Solomon. ‘How long can we keep it?’ she murmured.

  ‘The owners are on holiday for the next week at least,’ Solomon said, angling his head and checking behind them in the passenger mirror.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because they had too many cases for a short trip.’ He twisted round and scanned the road behind them. ‘And all the flights leaving Toulouse in the next few hours are long haul, apart from one to Brussels and one to Frankfurt.’

  ‘They might be going on a mini-break.’

  ‘Would you take your kids with you on a mini-break, or pick Frankfurt or Brussels as a family destination?’

  Marie-Claude shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. Mini-breaks are not really on my radar.’

  ‘They’ll be gone for a while, I think.’

  ‘You think but you don’t know.’

  ‘Everything is relative. We, for example, are relatively safe. Safer than we were ten minutes ago.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we are no longer being followed.’

  ‘What?! Who’s following us?’ She jerked her gaze to the mirror.

  ‘There was a black Toyota on the road behind us heading out of Cordes and an identical car in the airport car park. That’s why I asked you to stay low when we switched cars. Anyway, the car’s gone now.’

  ‘Did you see the driver?’

  ‘No. He may not have been following us at all – an airport is a fairly obvious destination point and black Toyotas are common. I didn’t see the registration plate.’

  ‘Mama doesn’t like those cars,’ Léo piped up from the back.

  ‘Black cars?’

  ‘Toyotas. She calls them devil cars.’

  Solomon looked over at Marie-Claude. ‘Bad experience?’

  She shrugged, embarrassed by the revelation. ‘It’s the symbol, the two ovals interlocking: they look like horns. Like the devil. I don’t like them.’

  ‘I don’t really like any cars,’ Solomon said, pressing the button to open his window a little more. ‘They all seem evil to me.’

  ‘Bad experience?’ Marie-Claude echoed.

  ‘Maybe. They just seem unnatural. All closed up and confined.’

  ‘Maybe you escaped from a prison,’ Léo suggested.

  ‘Possibly,’ Solomon conceded.

  ‘Or you’re a dangerous criminal who escaped from a dungeon,’ Léo added, warming to his subject.

  ‘A dangerous criminal who has a phobia of cars,’ Marie-Claude muttered.

  Solomon shrugged. ‘Napoleon was afraid of cats. Hitler was afraid of dentists. You can’t judge a man by his fears.’

  ‘I’m afraid of shadows,’ Léo said.

  ‘I’m afraid of you reading and barfing all over this nice car,’ Marie-Claude said, glaring at Léo in the rear-view mirror.

  Léo tried to hide the comic. ‘But I don’t feel sick.’

  ‘Well, let’s keep it that way. Put it back.’

  Léo rolled his eyes and put it in the backpack.

  ‘Zip it up too, and don’t try to sneak another one out.’

  ‘OK,’ he said. Then he grabbed the white tile on the zipper and pulled it shut.

  VII

  ‘… yet from those flames

  No light, but rather darkness visible.’

  Paradise Lost

  John Milton

  Extract from

  DARK MATERIAL – THE DEVIL’S TAILOR: DEATH AND LIFE IN DIE SCHNEIDER LAGER

  By Herman Lansky

  Living in hell is one thing. Escaping it is something else.

  Liberation came on the night of 23 November 1944. We heard it coming for days, like a storm rumbling, and saw flashes in the western sky, getting louder and brighter. We had heard the sounds of distant battles before, but never this close and never so constant, and we knew it was serious when the guards ordered us to start burning all the factory records, the first time the incinerators had ever been used for something that mundane.

  A fight broke out between two guards at the main gate and we all stopped and watched, shocked that these cold, inhuman creatures were displaying such raw, human emotions. I thought the bigger one, a Lithuanian sadist called Aras, was going to kill the other, until Commandant Samler appeared and calmly ended it by putting a bullet in his ear. Death was common in Die Schneider Lager, but I had never witnessed the death of a guard before. Samler ordered the other guard back to work but his face was bloody from the fight and he coughed as he got up and some blood went on Samler’s uniform so he shot him too. Right in the face in front of us all.

  Looking back now, we could have killed him then. Samler had a gun but he was alone and there were hundreds of us. We could have overpowered him, but we didn’t. We watched him pick up the rifles of the dead guards and walk away to the officers’ quarters. I am still tortured by this memory. I wonder, if we had killed him at that moment, whether we might have prevented the slaughter that followed.

  After the death of the guards, the day continued as normal. We went to the factories and made the cloth and cut the patterns and stitched the uniforms. We were making our own uniforms by then; the striped material for all the camps came from the looms of Die Schneider Lager. The sheer amount we produced gave us an idea of how many other camps like ours there were out there.

  Every day the sound of shelling grew louder until we could see flashes in the daylight sky and feel the ground tremble like something huge was coming. On the last day, a British plane flew overhead, low enough that we could see its markings. The guards looked afraid when they saw it. There were very few of them at the end, a skeleton crew left behind to run the factory, most of them new, brought in to replace the original guards who had been sent to new battalions to help defend the Reich. A lot of these new guards had been drafted in from essential industries and were either old or very young. Some had been sent to Die Schneider Lager because they had been tailors or apprentices who’d been working in textile factories. They were not much different from us – terrified they might die with the end of the war so close.

  Those last few days were the longest and hardest, I think. Until then I had lived entirely in the moment, existing from breath to breath, from shift to shift, measuring my days in mouthfuls of stale bread. Survival was a simple case of luck and keeping going, living merely a habit I couldn’t seem to break. But now, with the sudden prospect of a future, I wanted to live more than I had ever wanted anything. And I became terrified of dying.

  I knew a man in camp, Janusz Kryński, a marathon runner who had been part of the Polish athletics team in the 1936 Berli
n Olympics. He said it was the last few miles of a marathon that were the hardest. Everything that went before, the miles already run, the training you had done, all of it meant nothing. Those last few miles were all about character and luck, and you either had it or you didn’t. That’s what it felt like for me during those last few days at Die Schneider Lager. Staying alive became an act of defiance, each new heartbeat an act of rebellion. Stamping out that rebellion was the last order Artur Samler ever gave, if indeed it was him who gave it. Because there was someone else there on that final day, someone I only glimpsed through the window of the factory. He walked right in through the main gates with such command that the guards let him pass unchallenged. He wore a beautiful pale suit, perfectly cut, and I remember thinking he must be some high-ranking officer and that his arrival must mean the end was close – either surrender or evacuation. It was neither.

  About an hour after I saw this pale man, the doors to the factory opened and more prisoners flooded in. It was not time for a shift change and those of us already working stayed at our posts. There were murmurs that we were being gathered together to be transported out. Prisoners continued to file in, so many that we shut down the looms for fear of someone falling into them. We were expecting angry shouts to come from the guards, ordering us to turn them back on again, but none came. That was when we realized there were no guards in the shed and the doors had been locked.

  I don’t know what made me do what I did next – maybe some kind of sixth sense, a premonition of what was coming. Or maybe it was that thing Janusz Kryński had told me about – the unknown instinct that carries you over the line.

  My job was to package the bolts of cloth and send them to the machine shops or load them on to lorries to be transported to other facilities and my work area was at the back of the factory, close to the delivery bays. We had been producing cloth at the same rate as always but the transports had stopped and on that last day the storage area was piled high with bolts of Tkaniny śmierć – the Death Cloth – with narrow tunnels between the stacks of cloth to let people move between them. As soon as I realized we were locked in, I ran into one of these and had almost reached the end when the first explosion sent a wall of heavy cloth tumbling down on top of me, plunging me into a stifling, airless dark. I was hardly able to move or breathe, but I could feel the vibration of more explosions and hear screams muffled by the thick material. I tried to push forward, towards the factory, but the way was blocked and the only progress I could make was backwards, towards the wall of the factory, so I kicked and squirmed like a swimmer tangled in seaweed until I finally hit the wall and cut my hand on a twisted steel strut where a row of shelves had collapsed. I could smell smoke now and hear the patter of what sounded like rain on the roof. And the screams. Such screams.

  Something primal takes control of you when you smell smoke, something hard-wired into our desire to survive. Trapped there in that suffocating darkness, I turned to the wall and started clawing at it with my bare hands, the old plaster crumbling beneath my fingers. I could feel the pain as my nails split and my fingertips bled, but I didn’t stop, I couldn’t stop. I would have worn my fingers to stumps rather than let the fire claim me, but a small part of my brain that was still rational recalled the twisted shelving I had cut my hand on and I found it again in the dark, wrenched a piece free and used that as a tool to attack the wall instead.

  The poor quality of the factory and the cheapness of its construction was what saved me that day, that and my fortunate position within the factory when the slaughter started. I don’t know how long it took me to break through – it seemed like hours but it can’t have been more than a few minutes – but when I did, it felt like I was breaking out of hell.

  Outside, the guards were preoccupied with the slaughter, machine-gunning anyone who managed to break out of the factory. A large wooden garbage container was stationed by the delivery bay and this had concealed my own escape, or I would surely have been shot too. I knew if I tried to make a run for it I would be seen, so I climbed into the container and buried myself under all the stinking rags and filth.

  I lay there for a long time, listening to the shouts of the Germans and the screams of the dying and the roar of the flames amid the rattle of machine-gun fire. Eventually the screaming stopped and so did the shooting, but the roar of the fire remained. Ash rained down from the sky like grey snow and the smell of burning bodies grew stronger than the smell of the rotting garbage that concealed me. A plane flew overhead, an Allied reconnaissance plane drawn by the fire. They were closer now, closer than they had ever been, and bringing liberation with them – but it was too late. All too late. Everyone was dead. Everyone except me.

  One hundred and twenty-five thousand Jews and other enemies of the Reich had been transported to Die Schneider Lager over the three years of its existence and I was the only one who had survived. The only one. Or so I thought.

  50

  Magellan pulled the Range Rover to a halt in front of L’ancien Hôpital d’Albi where the body of Josef Engel now lay in the same subterranean morgue that had housed corpses from the Black Death, the Revolution, the Napoleonic and two world wars.

  ‘Would you like me to wait and drive you back?’ Magellan asked. ‘Or perhaps …’

  Amand turned to him. ‘What?’

  ‘Well, maybe I could come in with you and give you the benefit of my expertise.’

  ‘You’re not assigned to the case, which means anything you say would not be admissible.’

  ‘Yes, but my opinion may be useful. You don’t have to use anything I say in evidence, but I might be able to help profile your killer.’

  Amand remembered Josef’s ritually mutilated corpse and the rogues’ gallery of killers listed in the articles on Magellan. He nodded. ‘Follow me.’

  They entered the building, signed in, walked down the stairs to the basement and headed down a white-tiled corridor towards the examination room. Amand knocked once and entered.

  Doctor Evie Zimbaldi stood at the examination table focusing a camera on the brightly lit remains of Josef Engel. She was almost sixty years old but looked forty and had a quiet, cold beauty that made junior doctors stammer and drop things. Her black hair, dark eyes and pale, smooth skin had earned the nickname La Reine des Morts – The Queen of the Dead – though nobody called her that to her face.

  ‘Madame Coroner,’ Amand said, his voice echoing off the enamelled walls. She looked up, her eyes resting on Magellan. ‘This is Doctor Magellan, a visiting criminal psychologist from the United States. Doctor Magellan, Doctor Evie Zimbaldi, Chief Coroner for the commune of Albi.’

  ‘Doctor Cezar Magellan?’

  ‘Indeed, madame. Delighted to meet you.’

  ‘I read your paper on the Electra complex and female serial killers.’

  Magellan smiled. ‘Ah yes, that ruffled some feathers at the ICP.’

  ‘I can see why. I disagreed with most of it.’

  Magellan held his smile. ‘Well, it would be a dull world if we all agreed, would it not?’

  ‘Doctor Magellan has treated a man who is a suspect in this case,’ Amand said, handing Magellan a surgical cap and a face mask. ‘I thought it might be useful for him to consult and see if any of the evident psychopathology matches with his patient.’

  ‘As you wish.’ Doctor Zimbaldi turned back to the body.

  Amand pulled on his own surgical cap and joined her at the table. Josef Engel was on his back, a single piece of gauze draped across his waist. She had not started cutting yet, which Amand was deeply grateful for, and the blood had been cleaned away leaving his skin shining bright and bloodless under the examination lights and the wounds looking dark and violent. ‘Jesus,’ he said, confronted by the stark evidence of the old man’s suffering.

  ‘All these wounds are ante-mortem,’ Doctor Zimbaldi said, pointing at the Star of David sliced into his chest, ‘which means he suffered a great deal before he died. However, the things I want you to focus on are the rat
bites.’ She pointed at the hundreds of tiny puncture marks peppering the old man’s skin. Some were small and some larger where the rats had feasted, which they had done everywhere, even on his face around his staring eyes. Amand wondered why Doctor Zimbaldi had not pulled the eyelids down, then saw the ragged edges of skin and realized the rats had made a meal of these too. ‘Is it usual for rats to do this?’

  ‘Not usual, but not unknown either. I often receive bodies with animal bites on them. Rats are scavengers, opportunists, they’ll always sniff out an easy meal if one is available and take a bite or two out of a body, but not like this. This is more like a frenzy.’

  ‘What would make them behave like this?’

  ‘Hunger,’ Magellan said. ‘The rats that did this were starving.’

  Doctor Zimbaldi looked up at him. ‘Exactly.’

  Amand felt the tightness grow in his chest. ‘We found a container at the scene, a wooden box lined with metal sheeting and with air-holes drilled into the lid. It’s been signed into evidence, but it looks like rats had been kept inside it, which suggests the killer brought them with him, maybe as part of some premeditated torture routine.’

  ‘Except the rat bites are all post-mortem,’ Doctor Zimbaldi said. ‘Which suggests to me that, if the killer did intend to use them, the victim died before he got the chance.’

  ‘Any idea yet about cause of death?’ Magellan asked.

  ‘My hunch is AMI.’

  AMI – Acute Myocardial Infarction – Amand knew all about that. François Verbier had warned him that was what he was heading for if he didn’t slow down.

  ‘See the mottling of the skin on the upper body and around the neck?’ Doctor Zimbaldi used a pencil torch to point out the areas. ‘Also the redness in the face and that slight bluish tinge at the extremities – fingers, nose. That’s all consistent with a massive heart attack. And look at his chest. See this bruising around the sternum?’ She reached out and pressed the old man’s chest lightly with her blue-gloved fingers. ‘See that rib moving?’ Amand nodded, mildly nauseated by the way it bulged beneath the loose skin. ‘It’s broken. That, plus the mild bruising and lack of swelling, suggests it probably happened at around the time of death. My guess is that the killer saw he was going into arrest and attempted CPR.’