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

by Simon Toyne

  90

  Jean Baptiste sipped bitter coffee from a paper cup. LePoux smoked and drank beer from a can like he was holding a grudge against it. They were sitting in the car next to a fluorescent service station close to Bruère-Allichamps, the town at the exact centre of France. Baptiste figured it was as good a place as any to wait until they got another hit on the Bluetooth tile. So they sat, hooked on to the free Wi-Fi, like a spider at the centre of a giant, silent web waiting for a twitch.

  A little after ten, a police alert pinged into the email account informing them that Madjid Lellouche had been found dead in his cell in Gaillac, apparent suicide, a confession note found at the scene. Ten minutes later the search alerts for Solomon Creed, Marie-Claude and Léo were downgraded from a 1 to a 3 – still active, but no longer urgent. No one would be looking for them that hard any more. No one but Baptiste and LePoux.

  They found them a few minutes after eleven when the service station was closing. Baptiste was semi-dreaming of living in a house surrounded by fields with a cherry tree and a swing in it, and a bike lying on its side beneath it like the one he’d seen behind Marie-Claude’s house. It was a nice dream, a dream of his possible future. The beep snapped him out of it and the screen on his laptop lit up the inside of the car as the map zoomed out showing a new blue dot way to the east of them, right by the German border.

  ‘Where are they?’ LePoux asked, throwing his cigarette out of the window and leaning in to look. Baptiste checked the location and distance. ‘Place called Mulhouse,’ he said. ‘Three, maybe four hours’ drive.’ He watched the dot for ten more minutes, until the service station closed and the Wi-Fi cut out. ‘Looks like they’re settled somewhere for the night. Let’s get going. We can get there while they’re still asleep.’

  X

  ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.’

  Martin Luther King Jr

  Extract from

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

  By Herman Lansky

  I stayed with the KRO into the spring of 1945. There were a couple more Samler sightings that turned out to be dead ends, but there were a lot of rumours flying around at the ragged end of the war. Lot of people chasing shadows.

  The war in Europe officially ended on 8 May 1945 and the KRO was disbanded. I was finally free – and I had never felt more elated or more wretched in my life. Everyone I had ever known was dead and my home town of Łódź was gone, occupied by the Red Army, who had seized all of Poland in the end, not just the Eastern half promised by Hitler. Since I had nothing and no one, I decided to try and find the other survivors of Die Schneider Lager, the ones known as The Others, my brothers in tragedy. All I knew was that they had been transported away from the camp by an American unit. After that, they disappeared amid the chaos of post-war Europe. I didn’t even know their names, but I searched for them regardless. I search for them still.

  I moved to London, where some old business contacts were kind enough to offer me work and a friend found me a small flat in Hampstead, close to where he lived and overlooking the Heath. I have a job I enjoy, money of my own, and no one asks for my papers on my way in to work, no one points guns at me or makes me witness inhuman atrocities on a daily basis. And every day I try in my own small way, through my designs and my clothes, to make the world beautiful again.

  It would be easy to give in to these gentle rhythms, let the past fade and the flow of my new life wash away my ugly and terrible memories. But I cannot. I must not. To have remained alive despite the evil that conspired to end me and my kind must have meaning and reason. As a survivor, I have a duty to honour the life I still have and remember those lives the Nazis stole. I have a voice when many do not, and I must speak for them, and remember for them – because they can do neither. And that is why I have written this memoir, to record what happened while it burns fresh in my mind, to ensure it can never be forgotten. For those of us who survived have a duty to remember and to guard against this ever happening again. We live because others died and suffered – and if we forget that, it will happen again.

  It haunts me that there were other survivors of Die Schneider Lager whom I cannot find. It seems from the research I have undertaken that they do not wish to be found. Though I understand their desire for privacy, I believe they need to tell their story, or at the very least let me tell it for them.

  It also haunts me that I was never completely sure if it was Artur Samler lying dead in that barn near Karlsruhe. It bothers me greatly that there were sightings of him afterwards, and also of his son, Günther. I feel it as a deep truth that, until I can be absolutely certain they are both dead, I cannot rest. So I search for them too. For if the root of the poisoned vine is not pulled out and burned away, if the seeds are allowed to scatter, the plant will grow again.

  91

  Marie-Claude woke with a start. She was lying on a bed in a dark room with a slash of light spilling through a partially opened door. Léo lay next to her, his breathing deep and steady. She listened to the silent house, gradually remembering where she was, and how Solomon had carried Léo up the stairs and laid him on the bed, and how she had tucked him in and lay on the bed next to him for a second and that was the last thing she remembered. She looked over at the window to see if the sky was getting light but the shutters were closed and the room was deep in darkness.

  She sat up, careful not to wake Léo, and spotted her backpack lying on the floor next to the bed where she’d left it. She reached over and felt around inside for her laptop and froze when she felt something else. She pulled out the object and held it up to the light coming in through the door. It was the gun Solomon had taken from the big man at the rest stop. It was heavier than she thought it would be. She turned it over in her hand, noticed a small lever by her thumb set to ‘safe’, and aimed at a chair in the corner of the room. She closed one eye and shook her head, dropped it back in the bag and pulled out her laptop instead.

  The screen lit up when she opened it. She tapped a key to notch down the brightness and squinted at the time. A little past five: too late to go back to sleep, too early to wake Léo. She closed the laptop and looked out at the hallway. She could hear something, a faint noise outside somewhere in the house, and wondered if it might be Solomon. She swung her legs off the bed and headed out into the bright hallway.

  A staircase led down to the ground floor and up to another storey with a landing and two doors. One had a key in it, the second was slightly ajar and showed a dark bedroom beyond. She moved up the stairs and listened at the open door for the sound of breathing then pushed the door open to spill a light into the room. The bed was empty and un-slept in and she felt a twinge of disappointment that Solomon wasn’t there. He was such a strange contradiction of a person – distant but intimate, apparently disinterested yet incredibly observant, like the way he’d spotted the open shutters from across the valley and realized what they might mean. She liked how he was with Léo too, the way he didn’t talk down to him, the way he was interested in how he saw the world and celebrated his uniqueness – something she often struggled with.

  She heard the sound again, a faint tearing sound, coming from the bottom of the stairs. He must be down there, looking through Hamilton’s research. She followed the sound down the stairs and through the connecting door into the main house. There was a light on in Hamilton’s study and the noise was definitely coming from there. She could smell something too, something sharp and chemical and getting stronger as she moved across the hall. She reached the door, looked into the office – and froze.

  A strange man was by the desk, grabbing paperwork and throwing it on to a huge messy pile on the floor. There was a fuel can next to it, the cap removed, and a shotgun propped against the desk. The man turned with a handful of paper and saw her. ‘Where’s the list?’ he demanded.

  Marie-Claude recognized him. He was one of Jean-Luc Belloq’s cronies.

  ‘The
list,’ LePoux repeated. ‘Tell me where it is.’ He reached for the shotgun and Marie-Claude’s mind flared in fear. She ran. Across the hallway and back through the door to the gîte. She slammed it shut behind her and twisted the key to lock it just as something heavy crashed into the door on the other side. She leaped back and scrambled up the stairs, back to the bedroom where Léo slept.

  Another bang echoed up the stairwell as LePoux kicked the door. He had a shotgun but she had a gun too. She remembered how it had sat heavy in her hand as she sighted on the chair. She had to get to it. Get the gun and drag Léo to the floor, hide behind the bed and wait for LePoux to come. She would have to fire the moment he appeared; he wouldn’t expect her to have a gun, which meant she could take him by surprise while he was framed in the doorway. She didn’t know if a mattress could stop shotgun pellets and couldn’t afford to give him the chance. She had to get the gun, get down and shoot first. She burst through the door with all this running through her mind, ready to grab Léo and shake him awake if he wasn’t already. But Léo was already awake. He was sitting up in bed, eyes wide and frightened. A man with a gun sat next to him with tears in his eyes. He held Léo tight and stroked his hair.

  Jean Baptiste. Reunited with his son.

  92

  Solomon walked the dark, silent streets of Mulhouse. He had tried to sleep but his mind wouldn’t let him. It kept returning to the camp. There was something familiar about it, something that tugged and niggled until it finally pulled him off his bed and into the night, drawing him on until he stood once again by the gates of Die Schneider Lager.

  He studied the darkness beyond the barbed wire. The wind had dropped now and there was a stillness to the place. It felt colder here too, a steady breeze at his back flowing steadily into the camp, and he recalled something Lansky had written in his memoir:

  … there was someone else there on that final day … 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.

  Solomon focused on the memory. Tried to think himself into it and summon one of his own. He laid his hand on the locked gates and they shifted and rattled, creating ripples in the darkness beyond the fence as if something had been disturbed by the sound and was now swirling and eddying into form as the chill breeze at his back thickened, like it was the cold memory of all the souls who had flowed into this place.

  He could see the buildings now, sketching the shape of the camp on the surface of the night: the guard houses and the loom sheds and a vast empty space where the main factory had stood. Beyond it, piles of rubble showed where more recent excavations had taken place and a new memory surfaced along with a sharp pain in his arm as Solomon realized what it was. They were digging where the cellar had been, the place where The Others had been found. And there was something there, he was sure of it, something hidden away and waiting for him to come and reclaim it.

  Rain started to fall, a soft sighing in the night, and Solomon moved along the fence, searching for a way inside. He reached the foot of a guard tower and the night exploded into brightness. He turned to the light, shielding his eyes against the painful glare of twin headlamps, and saw a figure move in front of them, a gun visible in his hand.

  ‘Marie-Claude and Léo – where are they?’

  Solomon recognized the voice. ‘Commandant Amand,’ he said. ‘You’re a long way out of your jurisdiction.’

  ‘I’m still in France, which means I have more authority than you. Where are they?’

  Solomon nodded back down the road. ‘In town.’

  A set of handcuffs thudded on the ground at Solomon’s feet. ‘Put those on and take us to them. And by God if they are hurt or distressed in any way I’ll shoot you myself and save the cost of a trial.’

  Solomon picked up the handcuffs, snicked them over his wrists and stood with his arms crossed in front of him. ‘You said “take us to them”. Who else is with you?’

  He heard a car door open and the headlights shifted slightly as someone got out. Solomon tilted his head back, sniffing the air for a hint of who was there and caught something beneath the smell of rain and ancient bone, something hard and metallic and chemical. ‘I know you,’ he said, and the mark on his arm flared in sudden pain.

  The other figure stepped in front of the headlights and Solomon squinted at the silhouette. He couldn’t see the man’s face but his outline was familiar, the bulk of him, the way he moved – ursine, bear-like. ‘Magellan!’ he said, and the pain in his arm doubled at the mention of his name.

  ‘You remember me,’ a voice answered, deep and low and familiar.

  ‘Doctor Cezar Magellan,’ Solomon murmured and his feeling of déjà-vu shifted away from the camp and on to the dark figure in front of him. He remembered being in a situation like this before, with Magellan silhouetted by a different light, and pain, great pain, not only in his arm but deep down in his core, like something was being burned out of him. ‘You took something from me,’ he said. ‘I remember the pain of it. I remember wanting to get away, as far away from you as possible.’

  ‘And you did,’ Magellan replied. ‘But now it’s time to go back again. I can help you remember who you are and return what you have lost. I can give you back what you seek. Your identity.’

  93

  Jean Baptiste stared up at Marie-Claude with eyes that were cold despite the tears that glazed them.

  ‘Where’s the boyfriend?’ he said.

  Marie-Claude looked at Léo, captive in his father’s arms. Where was Solomon? Where was Hamilton? Surely someone must have heard all this noise? ‘He’s not my boyfriend,’ she said, trying to reassure Léo with her eyes. ‘I don’t know where he is.’

  ‘Bullshit. Don’t you protect him.’

  ‘Or what? What will you do, beat me up in front of your son again? Shoot me?’ There was a splintering sound below as the door gave way. ‘Let him go. Let Léo go, you’re frightening him.’

  ‘And why is that? Why is he frightened of his own father? What poison have you been telling him about me?’

  ‘I haven’t been telling him anything. What am I supposed to say? I don’t know you any more.’ She stared at Léo, his eyes huge even without his glasses on. He hadn’t made a sound the whole time and his silence brought back painful memories. ‘Did you know that Léo didn’t talk for two years after you beat me?’ she said. ‘The doctors said it was PTSD. What you did to me gave your two-year-old son such a severe psychological trauma that he shut down for two years. I don’t need to tell Léo anything to poison him against you. You did it yourself. When you broke my bones, you broke this family too.’

  Baptiste pulled Léo closer, his hand flexing around the gun. ‘I didn’t break the family, you did, with your lies. But I can fix it. I’m not having some Jew whore fill his head with shit about me or how the world works. A boy needs a father. He’s coming with me.’

  LePoux appeared on the landing behind her. ‘There’s no one else here,’ he said. ‘I say we burn the place down and get out.’

  ‘What about the list?’

  ‘Fucking place is full of lists. The big man said bring it back or destroy it. I say we torch the place and maybe the fire will flush the others out from where they’re hiding. Kill two birds with one stone.’

  Baptiste nodded and continued to stroke Léo’s hair. Marie-Claude could imagine what he was thinking. If they were going to burn the place down, they could easily do it with her inside, like Lansky’s flat all over again. That way, Baptiste would be Léo’s only surviving parent. Without proof that he was involved in her death, he’d probably get custody. And there would be no proof. Baptiste was an ex-cop, he knew how to get rid of evidence. She looked at Léo and thought about grabbing him and running. Then she heard the car, coming up the hill and getting closer. Baptiste heard it too. ‘Someone’s coming,’ he said. ‘Could be the old man or the boyfriend. Turn off the lights, l
et’s wait and see.’ He put his hand over Léo’s mouth to keep him quiet and looked up at Marie-Claude. ‘I hope it’s the boyfriend. Him I would really like to meet.’

  LePoux flicked the switch in the hallway and plunged them into darkness.

  Me too – Marie-Claude thought, remembering what she’d seen Solomon do at the rest stop – I’d love for you to meet him too.

  94

  Solomon sat in the passenger seat of the Range Rover, a confusion of thoughts and feelings churning inside him and clouding his mind. The short chain of his handcuffs was threaded through the seat belt. Amand was in the rear, his service pistol pressed into the back of Solomon’s seat. Magellan drove.

  Magellan.

  The name had risen in Solomon’s mind along with the mark that continued to burn on his shoulder at his presence. He had assumed it was another half-memory surfacing, a clue that might lead him back to remembering who he was. And yet now he had found him he felt an instinctive fear towards this man – fear of what he might tell him, fear of what he had already done – and his urge was to get away from him again, as fast and as far as possible.