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

by Simon Toyne

  Amand frowned. ‘But why torture him almost to death, then try and save his life?’

  She shrugged. ‘My job is only to tell you what happened. The “why” is your department.’

  ‘If I might suggest something …’ Magellan moved round the table. ‘All of this suggests to me that your killer had a script, a specific order of what he wanted to do to the old man. The heart attack messed up his plans and the CPR was an attempt to get things back on script. Maybe the rats were supposed to be the grand finale. I think your killer is very controlled, very organized. Look at the hands.’

  Amand looked. Josef Engel had the hands of a much younger man, lithe and nimble. A rat had gnawed away the tip of the little finger on his left hand and there were a few other bites, but other than that they were untouched. ‘What am I looking at?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Magellan replied.

  Amand looked again and nodded. ‘No defence wounds.’ He switched his gaze to the old man’s wrists. ‘No signs of ligature bruising, either. Why didn’t he fight back or try to protect himself? Was he unconscious, maybe?’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Zimbaldi replied, ‘until I saw this.’ She pointed at a mark on the old man’s neck, a red spot with a ragged-edged hole in the middle, like a wasp sting. ‘It’s a needle mark. A dose of the right drug administered there would take effect instantly. Lots of blood flow, up into the brain, down into the heart.’

  Magellan nodded. ‘Some killers like to immobilize their victims. It’s a cat-and-mouse power dynamic; they like to toy with their prey before the kill.’

  Doctor Zimbaldi nodded. ‘I’ve sent off blood and tissue samples to toxicology. I should get the results back in an hour or so. Now look at this.’ She twisted on her penlight and shone the light along Josef Engel’s side. It was covered with two distinct types of cut: long, deep slashes and circles of puncture marks. ‘The straight cuts are the lash marks,’ Zimbaldi explained. ‘They’re clean, no splinters, so I doubt they were made by your bamboo cane. The force and repetition of these lashes would have splintered any cane thin enough to make them, therefore I would suggest they were made by something thin and springy, something that doesn’t shed like leather or plastic.’

  ‘What about the blood on the cane, does that match?’

  She looked up and Amand noticed redness around her eyes, like she’d been crying. ‘I haven’t seen it,’ she said. ‘I thought you might be bringing it with you.’

  Amand felt a surge of annoyance. ‘I specifically asked for it to be … I’ll chase it up.’

  ‘OK, as soon as I get it, I’ll fast-track the bloods and fingerprinting, but I’m sure that will only help rule it out. Now, take a look at this.’ She moved the torch beam across to one of the other marks, a rough circle made up of different-sized puncture holes.

  ‘Dog bites,’ Magellan said.

  ‘Yes. Have you had any reports of dogs barking last night at the crime scene, Commandant?’

  Amand shook his head. ‘We’re continuing to knock on doors, but nothing thus far.’

  ‘But when a dog attacks they generally bark, yes? First a warning, then the attack.’

  ‘Usually.’

  ‘And it’s ferocious, more barking, snarling, growling, and that doesn’t even include whatever noise the person they’re attacking makes. When dogs attack, they go all in and you have to drag them off. Dogs don’t savage someone in silence. Yet no one heard anything. Take a look at this.’ She turned to the instrument stand next to her, tapped the space bar on a laptop and the screen lit up with the photographs she had been taking. She selected a couple and enlarged them. ‘What do you see?’

  Both photos were red and lurid, taken as part of the initial examination before the body was washed. The first showed the Star of David, bloody and ragged. The second was the bite she had just shown him. ‘Blood,’ Amand said. ‘I see lots of blood.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘The wounds were inflicted while he was alive.’

  ‘Correct. All that blood shows that the heart was still pumping. And look at the direction of blood flow from the bites. He was upright when they were inflicted. Some anaesthetics can paralyse the muscles but leave neural activity largely unaffected. Which means this man may well have been fully aware of everything that was happening to him but incapable of doing anything about it, hence the lack of defensive wounds or any signs of a struggle.’ She turned to Magellan. ‘Does any of this match your patient’s profile?’

  Magellan shook his head. ‘My patient doesn’t really have a pattern of behaviour. The nearest thing he has to a pattern is the lack of one. He is more a creature of chaos and impulse. I would suggest that whoever did this is the exact opposite. Your killer is meticulous and controlled and acting out a careful ritual. Everything they did has meaning.’ He turned to Amand. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if he hasn’t done this before. Possibly several times, perfecting his routine each time.’

  Doctor Zimbaldi nodded. ‘I agree.’ She turned to the laptop and clicked open a new file. ‘Look at this.’ More photos opened, bright blood made vivid by the flash of the coroner’s camera. ‘This was a case I processed three years ago. The deceased was a thief who broke into a warehouse guarded by a pack of Rottweilers trained to attack anyone they didn’t recognize. They didn’t recognize this man, so … Anyway, look at the bite pattern.’

  She selected a photograph and enlarged it. It showed a close-up of one of the bites, the teeth marks clear and deep, the flesh around them ragged and torn.

  ‘See how messy these bites are and how deep the teeth went? Dogs are carnivores, they don’t have side-to-side jaw movement like herbivores, they bite on to something and thrash their heads around to tear the flesh away.’

  Amand looked back at the body of Josef Engel. The bites on his back were neat, no tearing, no sign of any trauma at all, just neat circles of shallow puncture marks. ‘So what happened here?’

  ‘I don’t believe he was attacked by a dog. That’s a fairly decent-sized bite radius, similar to the Rottweiler, but narrower, which suggests a different breed, one with a more pointed snout.’

  Amand remembered what he’d read in the memoir. ‘An Alsatian?’ he suggested.

  ‘Yes, or a Doberman. And any dog this big has a powerful bite, it’s their primary weapon, their main means of feeding and hunting in the wild. These bites should be much deeper and more violent, but they are controlled, which matches Doctor Magellan’s suggested profile of a meticulous and organized killer. I found some residue in a couple of the bites, tiny fragments of tooth or bone; I sent them to the lab along with the bloods and marked it all as urgent. I’ll have the results by the end of today. The thing that strikes me about all of this – the rats, the drugged subjugation, the Star of David cut into his chest, the dog bites – is that none of it is accidental, everything here is deliberate. Everything has a meaning and a reason.’

  Amand felt as though a hand had grabbed the back of his head and started to squeeze. He knew the reason, the killer had written it on the wall in Josef Engel’s own blood.

  Finishing what was begun.

  51

  The McDonald’s in Gaillac was busy with the late-morning, pre-lunch trade, though not so busy that they couldn’t get a four-person booth. Baptiste had asked for somewhere with decent coffee and free Wi-Fi and LePoux had brought him here. He was sitting opposite, drinking a beer straight from the can and ogling the students ducking school and taking selfies with their burgers. It was a different world from the one Baptiste had known before prison. The dark-skinned girl who’d served him had such a thick accent he’d barely understood her. France was disappearing and no one seemed to care. He prised the plastic lid off his paper cup and took a sip of thin, bitter coffee. Hopefully the Wi-Fi would make up for it.

  He opened his laptop and while it searched for a signal, he sorted through the stack of mail he’d taken from Marie-Claude’s kitchen. Most of it was junk, a letter from the Mairie about planned roadworks, a wat
er bill, a phone bill. He studied this one. It listed services for a landline, internet, TV and a mobile phone, the number was included in the breakdown, showing what calls Marie-Claude had made and how much data she’d used. She was a pretty heavy user, which was good. The more she used her phone, the more likely it was that Baptiste would be able to find her.

  A connection window opened on the laptop asking for a name and email address. Baptiste typed in ‘Thomas Martin’ and a Gmail address with the same name. It was the most common name in France, someone was bound to have the address. Sure enough, the window reloaded with a welcome message. He Googled ‘DARKLE’, hit Return and clicked on the top result.

  A new window opened with a download icon in the centre. Baptiste clicked it to start downloading and picked up the white plastic tag he’d taken off Léo’s coat. He ran his finger over the raised lettering, spelling the brand name of the device – tile. It was a Bluetooth tracker, a small, localized device with a unique identity code that paired with a nearby transmitter, a phone or a computer to keep tabs on valuables using geo-location. They used them in prison to keep tabs on the inmates because they were cheaper than ankle bracelets and more efficient than having some bored guard staring at TV screens all day. They were worn on the wrist, sealed inside plastic hospital bracelets – easy to put on, impossible to remove without it looking like it had been tampered with. Anyone who strayed too far from the central transmitter would be detected, an alarm would sound and the guards would come running. Cheap and effective. Except a guy inside had figured a way round them.

  His street name was Le Serpent, another member of the Brotherhood, doing ten years for robbing banks using laptops instead of shotguns. He’d figured out a way to hack the Bluetooth security tags and had written a piece of software that cloned their signals. He’d also introduced Baptiste to the Dark Web.

  The download finished and Baptiste installed the DARKLE software. A new search window opened that looked like a black version of Google. He typed ‘GeoLocate’ into the search box and a new window opened with a map of the world on the right and a search box on the left with two option buttons next to it – a phone icon and a Bluetooth symbol. He highlighted France on the map and copied the mobile number from Marie-Claude’s phone bill into the search box and clicked the phone icon.

  The cursor arrow turned into a hand with drumming fingers as the app searched for the phone’s GPS records and cross-referenced it with coordinates on the map. Le Serpent had once explained how it worked, but it was too technical for him. It worked, that was all that mattered.

  Baptiste drummed his fingers in time with the icon. Back in his police days, he would have had to jump through all kinds of hoops in order to run a trace like this: drawing up a warrant with clear legal reasons justifying why the search was necessary, presenting it to the juge d’instruction, who may or may not have signed it. If his time inside had taught him anything it was that his previous life as a policeman had been largely pointless. It didn’t matter how well resourced the police were, the criminals were always way ahead: better tech, better information, more money, and no bureaucracy to waste their time or hold them back. Law enforcement in its current state was like a Band-Aid on an arterial wound. You needed a police state and a strong hand. A dictatorship. Democracy didn’t work because most people were stupid. You only had to spend five minutes in a place like this, watching the students with their pouty poses taking pictures of their fries, to see just how stupid. There was no democracy in prison. It was survival of the fittest, human nature stripped down to its purest form. And he had survived. Now he wanted his reward – a new life, for him, for his country and his son.

  The screen flashed and the map reloaded, showing where Marie-Claude’s phone had last been detected: Toulouse–Blagnac Airport, somewhere to the northwest of the terminal building. The time stamp said the signal had been lost over an hour ago, which meant she’d either turned her phone off or the battery had died.

  Baptiste picked up the white tile and pressed the ‘e’ with the end of his wooden stirrer to activate its connectivity. He clicked the Bluetooth symbol next to the search box and the phone number was replaced by a sequence of numbers showing the app had acquired the tile’s signal. The map reloaded, showing a blue dot at the edge of Gaillac, roughly where the McDonald’s was, then the map began to widen as the app searched for other tiles with the same signal.

  The downside of Bluetooth devices, Le Serpent had explained, was that they were designed to be used in a very localized network, up to a hundred feet maximum. Which was fine if you were trying to locate a lost phone or a set of keys in your house, not so great if you were trying to track down a missing person somewhere in France. Baptiste knew this particular brand of tile, however, was the most popular and offered a ‘Find my Tile’ option that allowed users to tap into its large and growing network so other phones and devices running the app would automatically look for missing tiles and send a locater if they found one. The company’s website contained several testimonials from people who’d recovered property using the function. Baptiste was hoping he could now do the same thing to locate Marie-Claude and Léo.

  The map continued to expand and he nursed his thin coffee but no new dots appeared. He knew that locating them this way was a long shot. It assumed that Marie-Claude or Léo had one of these tiles with them and that they would pass close enough to a device running the same app and for long enough for the signal to be acquired. The laptop beeped and a cluster of new blue dots appeared. Baptiste frowned. They were in Cordes, clustered around Marie-Claude’s house. For a moment he wondered if they’d doubled back, then realized that the GeoTracker had picked up the tiles he’d already seen in her house. At least it proved the search app was working. He watched it for another five minutes but no new dots appeared. He switched back to the phone search and studied the map. Toulouse airport was less than an hour away, quicker if the traffic was good. He could run the search again when they got there. He’d find her. He had to.

  52

  Marie-Claude rolled her shoulders and pushed her hands against the wheel to try and squeeze out some of the tension the hours of driving had put there. Léo was asleep in the back. Solomon had his eyes closed, his head tilted towards the open window. She took her hand off the wheel and squeezed her left shoulder, her thumb working at the knot of scar tissue above her crooked collarbone.

  ‘Does it ache before the rain?’ Solomon murmured.

  Marie-Claude looked over at him, his eyes remained closed. ‘Did you say something?’

  ‘Your fused clavicle. Does it hurt whenever a storm is coming?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  He opened his eyes and looked ahead at the road. ‘It’s air pressure. It drops before rain and any inflammation in your body worsens. Old people feel it in their joints, young people around the sites of old injuries. You can smell it coming too. Or I can, at least. It even has a name – petrichor. Was it a person?’

  ‘Was what a person?’

  ‘The cause of your broken collarbone?’

  All the tension returned to her shoulders. ‘What makes you think that?’ Her eyes darted to the rear-view mirror to see if Léo was awake.

  ‘He’s asleep,’ Solomon assured her. ‘I can hear his breathing and heartbeat, slow and steady. I waited until he was sleeping before asking. It was Léo’s father, wasn’t it?’

  ‘What!? Jesus, you’re … what makes you think …’ She stared ahead, eyes fixed on the horizon. ‘Things didn’t work out between us.’

  ‘But why is he totally absent from your life. Is he dead?’

  ‘No, he’s … What makes you think he’s absent?’

  ‘In your grandfather’s house there were photographs of you and Léo on the wall but no one else. You also said earlier that you would leave Léo with someone if you could, but there wasn’t anyone. Therefore you’re on your own and I’d like to know why.’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Because I’m here to
save your son but I don’t know how or what from yet, so I’m trying to identify potential areas of threat.’

  Marie-Claude opened her mouth then closed it again. She had been trying to convince herself that Baptiste wasn’t a threat, that he wouldn’t come and cause trouble again, not after everything that had happened. But deep down she knew that he was a threat. Because of Léo, he would always be in her life and he would always be a threat. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was my husband who broke my collarbone. He also cracked my skull, broke two fingers, a rib and burst my eardrum. His name is Jean Baptiste.’

  ‘How long ago was this?’

  ‘Almost five years.’

  ‘And where is he now?’

  ‘Up until three weeks ago, he was in a prison in the Midi-Pyrénées.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘I don’t know. He was released early.’

  Solomon studied the horizon. ‘Could he have killed your grandfather?’

  Marie-Claude had been half avoiding and half asking herself the same question. The person she had fallen in love with couldn’t have done. But that person wouldn’t have beaten her bloody in front of their son either. And Baptiste had spent almost five years in a tough jail since. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know him any more.’

  ‘Does Léo remember him?’

  She glanced in the mirror at her sleeping son. ‘He was tiny when it happened. Just turned two. He was there when … when Jean Baptiste – flipped. I remember in the hospital afterwards, Benny – that’s Commandant Amand – he said when the medics found me, I had pieces of ripped tissue all over me, like confetti. They didn’t know what it was at first, then they realized that …’ She turned away as tears came with the memory. ‘They realized Léo had been trying to put plasters on me. He had been trying to make me better.’