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

by Simon Toyne

  ‘Those men of yours,’ the Leader said, as soon as Belloq answered. ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘They’re heading north on the A20. I decided not to recall them until I was sure our problem had been dealt with. When I last spoke to them fifteen minutes ago, they’d passed junction 11. Should I call them off?’

  ‘No,’ the Leader said, widening the map on the laptop and finding junction 11. ‘They switched cars and changed direction. Your people are close. Ten minutes away, twenty at most.’ He gave Belloq the location and description of the new car. ‘Let me know when they have them.’

  He hung up and smiled. This was why they were going to reclaim France, because of good people like Jean-Luc Belloq, people who could think for themselves and were not afraid to lead. He had an army of them in every department across the country. He rose from his chair and walked over to a display cabinet containing a ragged uniform, neatly folded, the stripes on the rough material picked out by the glow from the overhead light. He stared at the yellow star stitched to the front of it, looking almost like a flower to his age-blurred eyes. It reminded him of how far he had come.

  77

  Baptiste pulled off the péage, following the directions on the satnav. Belloq had sent them the coordinates in a text, along with details of the car they were looking for.

  ‘Must be in there,’ LePoux said, pointing at a large car park in front of a row of superstores. ‘Needle in a fucking haystack.’

  They entered the car park and started cruising up and down lanes looking for the black BMW. They finally found it after a couple of false alarms, parked in the middle of a row, right in the centre of the car park. LePoux backed into a space close by and switched off the engine. They sat for a moment with their windows open slightly to stop them steaming up, watching the car and listening to the soft drum of rain.

  ‘You think they’re in the supermarket?’ LePoux said.

  Baptiste shook his head. ‘I think they’ve gone. Look at the windows – no steam. The car’s been here a while.’

  He opened his door, stepped into the rain and breathed in air that smelled of tarmac and earth. He moved towards the BMW, scanning the wider area in case Marie-Claude was heading back with a few bags of groceries, but the rain had emptied the car park. He reached the BMW and walked around it, checking there was no one inside. The interior of the car was spotless: no clutter, no empty wrappers, not even a loose parking ticket. He moved to the front, put his hand on the bonnet and felt the faint trace of heat from the engine. They weren’t too far ahead.

  He scanned the car park, looking for a bus stop or a taxi rank. They might have stolen a car, but he doubted it. Cars were only left in supermarket car parks for short periods of time, so if they took one it would be spotted quickly. He looked along the line of stores – a supermarket, a DIY shop and a McDonald’s. He looked over at LePoux, pointed at the McDonald’s and started walking. He’d rather stay in the rain than get back into the rugby changing room smell of the car again and he’d left the keys in the ignition. He pulled his phone out as he walked, opened the text Belloq had sent them and typed a reply.

  ‘Found the car. No one inside but they’re close. We’ll find them.’

  And he would. Because the BMW was empty, which meant that, wherever they’d gone, they still had the Bluetooth tile with them.

  78

  Marie-Claude could feel herself sweating though it was air-conditioned almost to the point of chilly in the Hertz office. A driver’s licence that wasn’t Marie-Claude’s lay face up on the desk and she was forcing herself to stay calm while the perfectly coiffed and painted young woman went through the paperwork. Léo was playing with a water cooler in the corner, squirting water into a plastic cup. Ordinarily she would tell him to stop but today she was grateful for the distraction.

  ‘OK, I just need to take a card for payment,’ the woman smiled, red-painted lips stretching across whitened teeth.

  ‘Cash!’ Marie-Claude said, a little too forcefully.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I’d like to pay cash.’

  The perfect make-up cracked for an instant before the smile returned. ‘Cash is fine for payment, but I’ll need to swipe a card for the security deposit and excesses.’

  ‘Right.’ Marie-Claude opened the bag they’d found in the back of the BMW and rummaged around inside, trying to hide the fact that it contained five phones and seven purses. She found the one the driving licence had come from and almost gasped in relief when she discovered a credit card inside. She handed it over with a stiff smile.

  ‘Thank you, madame.’

  They had taken a taxi from the supermarket to the nearest car-hire place while Solomon explained what she needed to do. He had convinced her that the driving licence belonging to someone called Julie Dreyfus looked enough like her to work and he’d been right. But he hadn’t prepared her for all this additional stuff that was now making her want to run screaming from the building. She would make a lousy criminal. She didn’t have the nerve for it. Only the fear from what had happened at the rest stop and the screaming instinct to run had driven her to even attempt it.

  The card terminal seemed to be taking an age and fresh panic rose as she wondered if the card was about to be declined. What would she do if it was? Try another card with someone else’s name on it? Run? As she turned to check how close Léo was to the door, the machine beeped and spat out a curl of paper. The woman handed it to her and the panic returned as Marie-Claude stared at the blank space on the bottom and realized she needed to sign it. But what was her signature? She knew what Marie-Claude’s signature looked like but she had no idea what Julie Dreyfus might look like written down. She took the pen, wrote a J, a D, followed by a side-to-side movement that crossed everything out, and put the pen down.

  ‘Thank you, madame.’ The woman ripped off the paper and handed over the bottom copy without even checking the signature against the card. ‘That’s for you. Now it’s two hundred and twenty euros for the car hire and twenty for the child seat.’

  Marie-Claude handed over five fifties, took her change and followed the woman outside to a blue Renault Scenic. She snuck a quick look at the back of Julie Dreyfus’s credit card. The signature looked nothing like the one she had done and she felt slightly annoyed that it had been so easy to commit card fraud.

  She inspected the car in something of a daze, nodding when the woman pointed out slight defects. Once she had signed and initialled the documents wherever the perfect nail pointed, she strapped Léo in and drove away, convinced that the woman would come chasing after her waving the fake signature. But she didn’t.

  Solomon was waiting round the corner at a bus stop and he smiled as she pulled over. ‘See?’ he said. ‘Told you it would be easy.’

  ‘You’re lucky I stopped for you,’ she growled, feeling angry and relieved. ‘Don’t ever make me do anything like that again. Now get in before I change my mind.’

  79

  Jean-Luc Belloq stared out at La Place 26th Aout from the high windows of the private dining room above his café. He finished briefing the Leader about how they’d found the BMW but not the people inside and waited for his response. For a while only the sound of his breathing could be heard. Outside, the men constructing the stage for the seventiethanniversary celebrations had stopped for lunch.

  ‘They’re getting too close,’ the Leader said finally. ‘There’s too much at stake, it’s too close to the election. This man they’re travelling with …’

  ‘Solomon Creed.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘We don’t know. The police don’t either, but they’ve elevated the search alert for him in light of what happened in Vierzon.’

  ‘We need to change that.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The police are primarily looking for him in connection with the murder of Josef Engel, correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We need to make that murder charge go away. If he is no longer a suspect, the p
olice will stop looking for him quite so energetically, leaving the way clear for us to find him ourselves and discover exactly what his connection to all this is.’

  Belloq shook his head. ‘Making the murder charge go away won’t be easy. We have greater control over the investigation now the original lead officer has stepped down, but we can’t rule Creed out as a suspect without good reason.’

  ‘You have another suspect in custody, correct? An Arab?’

  ‘Yes, but there is no real evidence against him.’

  ‘What if he confesses? If he confesses to the murder, Solomon Creed will no longer be a suspect.’

  ‘But the Arab didn’t do it. We framed him to create a smokescreen. How can we get him to confess to a crime he didn’t commit?’

  Belloq heard the rasp of the Leader’s breathing before he answered. ‘Plenty of people take their own lives. Consumed with guilt for the things they have done, they leave a note confessing their crime before committing suicide. He’s just another Arab, after all. We want them out of France anyway, does it matter whether they go on a boat or in a box? It’s all the same to us. Let this one do something useful for the cause.’

  IX

  ‘This is a glorious page in our history that has never been written and shall never be written.’

  Heinrich Himmler

  Speech to SS Group Leaders on the subject of the mass extermination of Jews

  4 October 1943

  Extract from

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

  By Herman Lansky

  When I heard I was not the only survivor of the slaughter at Die Schneider Lager, I wept. It felt like a great victory of life over death. I wanted to travel back to Mulhouse to meet the survivors, but I was too far away and I had important work to do.

  I had been seconded to a unit called the KRO, named after a popular brand of rat poison in America called ‘Kill Rats Only’. The KRO was a Nazi-hunting unit made up of Jewish soldiers fuelled by a deep hatred of what the Germans had done to our people, the full horror of which was rapidly coming to light in the wake of their retreat.

  I was in the unit’s temporary HQ in the captured town of Karlsruhe when I heard the news. The town had been almost destroyed by Allied bombing and the roads around it were virtually impassable. Getting in had been difficult, getting out again almost impossible, so travelling back to Mulhouse was out of the question. Also, at the same time I received news of the Mulhouse survivors, my unit got a report that Artur Samler had been pinned down with a pocket of Nazi fugitives in a barn to the north of us. This was a journey I could take.

  We headed out as fast as the broken roads would allow and arrived at the half-collapsed barn with the Germans trapped inside. The unit commander, Sergeant David Goldman, spoke in German through a loudhailer, explaining how the barn was surrounded and they had one minute to come out with their hands on their heads. We waited. My role was to identify captured Nazis because I’d seen many of them up close. I was both afraid and enraged at the prospect of seeing Artur Samler again.

  The explosion made all of us drop to the ground, a dull thump that blew out the one remaining window in the barn and shook snow and loose tiles down from the roof. Another followed, then two more, then nothing. The KRO troops started to move closer, crawling over the snowy ground, their rifles trained on the silent building. The point man had almost reached it when a bloodied German soldier staggered from the barn, one arm raised above his head in surrender, the other missing. He stumbled forward, tried to say something but his face was a bloody pulp and it came out as a gurgle. He slumped to his knees and died right there, the white snow turning red all around him.

  The point man entered the building and I waited in the jeep, shivering from more than the cold. I kept thinking there would be more gunfire, that it was a trap and Samler would walk out of the barn with a platoon of storm troopers at his back because, to me, he was inhuman, a devil who could not be killed.

  After a while, Sergeant Goldman walked out of the barn and headed over to me.

  ‘They’re all dead,’ he said. ‘We think Samler is one of them, but we need you to try and identify him.’

  I nodded and followed him back to the barn, past the bloody mess of the dead German, wondering why Sergeant Goldman had asked me to ‘try’ to identify him. I knew what the Devil looked like well enough, and if by some divine miracle he was inside that barn I would recognize him as surely as my own face.

  We stepped into the barn. It was dark and smelled of blood, and smoke, and scorched flesh. Sergeant Goldman took a hurricane lamp from one of his men and led me towards the rear of the building, the lamp throwing a circle of light around us that lit up the carnage as we passed. The Germans had committed suicide by grenade, pulling the pins as they huddled, clutching them to their chests until they exploded and ripped out their hearts. It was a mess of scorched uniforms and bloody meat, but I felt nothing. No pity. No disgust. If anything, I was disappointed that they had not suffered nearly enough.

  Sergeant Goldman led me to a horse stall and held the lamp high to cast its circle of light. The body of a German officer lay inside, propped against the wooden walls, and I saw why Sergeant Goldman had asked me to ‘try’ to identify him. His head was entirely gone, along with most of his neck and his hands. The stall walls were a wet mess of blood with bright fragments of bone embedded in the wood. He too had taken the coward’s way out, but instead of clutching the grenade to his chest he had put it in his mouth. I had seen Samler execute people the same way. The first victim was a Russian prisoner who had stolen some food destined for the officers’ mess; Samler had made him eat a grenade ‘for dessert’, but the grenade had fallen out of his mouth, rolling away and only maiming him when it exploded. Samler’s dogs had been dispatched to finish the job. The next time he executed someone this way, he’d made the prisoner hold the grenade in place. He wanted to see the head explode, like this German officer’s head had done.

  Sergeant Goldman asked me if it was Samler. They hadn’t found any identification on him, and clearly dental records or fingerprints weren’t going to help, which meant it was down to me to pronounce the monster dead. I remember looking at what was left of the German officer. He was wearing the right uniform, the black tunic and trousers of a Hauptsturmführer with three silver pips on what remained of his collar, and the Totenkopf Death’s Head insignia on the remains of his cuffs. His body seemed right too: a little soft and going slightly to fat round the middle. I so wanted it to be my words that proclaimed the monster dead, for myself and all those he had killed.

  ‘It could be him,’ I said.

  But I wasn’t sure. I’m still not sure. Artur Samler was a monster, inhuman, and I don’t think monsters can ever really die. Not entirely.

  80

  The Renault Scenic pulled off the main road past the sign saying ‘Myosotis-La-Fleur’ and followed the private drive that wound through trees and over low bridges for about a mile until it reached a small car park and a series of low buildings arranged in front of a high wall. The wall stretched away in both directions and had security cameras mounted at regular intervals along the top. Solomon felt a fleeting sensation of recognition, as though he had been here before or somewhere very similar. ‘It feels like a prison,’ he murmured. ‘Which would explain why they were less than helpful on the phone.’

  ‘I think it looks weird,’ Léo said from the back seat. ‘I don’t like it.’

  Marie-Claude pulled to a stop and switched off the engine. ‘Well, we’re not going to turn around and go home because you two have “bad feelings” about it.’ She opened her door and the smell of damp woodland and hot engine oil billowed in.

  Solomon stepped out of the car and watched one of the cameras slowly turn to point right at them. The presence of several parked cars, plus a picnic table and benches to one side of the main building, confirmed there were people around. Solomon breathed in and listened, trying to catch more
scents and sounds of the place. He could smell cigarette ash coming from a well-used ashtray by the picnic table, and cooked meat and disinfectant and a faint underlying medical smell. Again there was a flicker of recognition, something similar to the sensation he experienced in cars; a sense of creeping confinement and unease that made him feel tight.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, moving towards the main building. ‘If we’re going to get kicked out of here, we might as well get it over with.’

  The reception area was small with uncomfortable-looking sofas around a low table covered with stylish books and magazines. The medicine smell was strong in here and Solomon could hear the rumble of voices and movement in the rest of the building. A severe woman in a dark trouser suit regarded the three of them as they approached the reception desk, her face as impassive and blank as the outside cameras.

  ‘Can I be of assistance?’ she said in a flat tone that suggested the answer was almost certainly ‘NO’. Her name badge identified her as Madame Roche.

  ‘You have a man staying here,’ Marie-Claude replied, ‘Otto Adelstein. Would it be possible to talk with him?’

  ‘Are you on the visitors list?’

  ‘No. Monsieur Adelstein was an old friend of my grandfather, who recently died. He wanted me to pass something on to him.’

  A door opened behind her and a man in black overalls emerged, bringing the noises and smells of the building with him. Madame Roche ignored him. ‘If you give … whatever it is to me, I will ensure Monsieur Adelstein receives it.’