The interrogator’s voice was gentle. “None of this is really necessary, Leclerc. Why don’t you help yourself? I give no promises, but we may find ways and means of letting you go elsewhere than France … the world’s a big place, and if you’re helpful to us … I’m sure you understand. And of course no more pain. It’s a better thought, isn’t it?”
The knotted rope tightened a little more. Sweat poured. Leclerc shook all over. He asked, “What exactly do you wish to know, m’sieur?”
Eight
He had become a pricked balloon, the air escaping fast. It was total collapse of a tough guy into a gibberer pleading for mercy. How often, I wondered as I watched the disintegration, had Louis Leclerc put his victims through something like this, Leclerc the blackmailer who had held all the cards. He was a pathetic sight but I couldn’t feel the least bit of sympathy: I was remembering Mandy Askew, drowned in Shoreham Docks. Nothing was bad enough for Leclerc.
Having said that, having listened to him snivelling out what he had say, I was in some respects not much farther forward. Leclerc was not fully in the know. He could have been putting on an act, of course; but I didn’t believe that was the case. He was on the fringe of events and the impression I got was of a man with a personal vendetta against Neskuke and, as matters had turned out, against me – I’d always known he meant to get me, but having been as it were brought into fresh contact by his sight of me through the Zonguldak’s porthole, he was onto me with renewed hatred. He admitted he’d gone to West Witton to sort out Neskuke’s sister and go through the house, Neskuke’s only known pied-a-terre in Britain, with a view to finding scope for further blackmailing of top diplomats and politicians in the future. But he hadn’t, he insisted, killed Mrs Sillitoe. That had been the man who’d gone down the Buttertub.
*
“He would say that, of course,” was Max’s comment when I reported. “Nice and handy. However, we’ve plenty to hold him on. Or for the police to hold him on. I shall have to turn him over now.” Max paused. “You say he confirmed the kidnap as projected. Only projected.”
“Yes,” I said. “I believe it was really news to him that it had taken place. Or may have taken place.”
“We could still be jumping to conclusions, Shaw.”
I agreed. A child’s cry was no positive evidence. All children cry sometimes and the reason doesn’t have to be a kidnap. Just the same, I had that strong personal belief and I meant to act on it. It was going to be difficult; I’d told Max that Leclerc couldn’t place that house with any precision; and, of course, if anything had leaked about the kidnap being known to us, they wouldn’t be lingering long. Neither Max nor I believed any leak could have taken place, but the mere fact of my own escape could have been enough to make the birds fly the nest. As against that, they had taken enough precautions to ensure that I didn’t know where the nest was other than very widely indeed.
Max had asked for names: Leclerc had talked about three persons, two men and a woman. I discovered later – too late – that he’d held back on one important name, the most important. The men he did speak of were from the Middle East – Iran. The woman was Russian, by name Tanya Perevernik. Leclerc’s description of her, scar and all, had tallied with the woman in the house, as did the name Tanya, which made my hunch the more viable. Behind them, Leclerc had said, were the big men, Kulachev’s enemies in the Kremlin.
Max, of course, would put a check on the revealed names. I asked him what his next move would be.
“Prime Minister,” he said. “Direct. I’ll let you know the result soonest possible. Meanwhile you’d better get some sleep. You’re going to need it.”
Max was right; whatever the urgency I had to be fresh. I left the suite and collected Miss Mandrake. It was time for lunch, but it would have to be a quick one. We took a taxi to one of my favourite eating places – Martinez in Swallow Street, where I liked the Spanish atmosphere. A drink first in the tiled bar, a La Ina for Felicity, a large Scotch for me. After lunch it was back to my flat. It was a longish while since Felicity and I had been together. I don’t know that much actual sleep took place; but I was in fact in a deep sleep when my security line burred in my ear. That didn’t wake me; Felicity did, thrusting the handset at me.
Max.
“Sorry to interrupt,” he said, sounding tongue-in-cheek. “I want you here, pronto.” He didn’t give me a chance to say anything: the click sounded like the crack of doom. I cursed but got out of bed. I looked at my watch: seven-thirty p.m. I must have slept longer than I’d thought.
Felicity asked, “Do I come with you?”
“Max didn’t say. But the answer’s yes. If you want to. You’re supposed to be on leave.”
“On stand-by,” she corrected. “I’ll come.”
*
Max had contacted the PM. A meeting of the cabinet had been called that afternoon and had broken up only half an hour before Max had phoned me. The implications of our knowledge had thrown the government into a panic. If anything was to go wrong now, the repercussions would rub off on the party in power – the Opposition would see to that, naturally. Never mind the actual facts, which were right outside the control of the government. The government was always the whipping-boy.
Max said, as he’d said before, that the first priority was secrecy, the withholding of everything from the media. He wasn’t going to have the gutter press poking its dirty fingers into this and aiding the kidnappers. He added, “Also, we have to think of the boy’s safety. We don’t want to provoke anything. We can’t assume the boy will be handed back on a plate when the kidnappers’ plans come unstuck.” He lit a cigarette and blew smoke towards me. “In the meantime, there’s been consultation with Washington and our American HQ has been called in for talks with the administration – with the President personally. So far, the administration’s with us – with Whitehall. For the time being at any rate, it’s being left with our set-up. With you, Shaw.”
“For the time being?”
“That’s what I said. The arms talks are expected to end in seven days from today. Assuming agreement’s reached, which it shows every sign of being, there’ll be a big hoo-ha made of the signing of the treaty. Big celebrations. The signing will be live on TV, worldwide by satellite. Seven days. But they’ve given us only seventy-two hours to cut out that young boy and find out the facts behind the kidnap.”
“And after that?”
Max said levelly, “There may be a rethink.”
I asked Max what that was supposed to mean.
He said, “God knows.”
The cabinet, it seemed, had not been specific. They had never been faced with a problem of this kind, where world unity, or the hope if it, might for reasons as yet unknown depend on one small American boy. And, by that token as it seemed, on me. I asked Max why the French Government, or Interpol, or somebody official, couldn’t mount an extensive search for that house in the south, surround it and hook the boy away. His answer was that if within seventy-two hours I hadn’t come up with anything, then to ask for that might be in the collective mind of the cabinet, though they hadn’t said so and indeed in the earlier discussion had rejected the idea. When I asked if the Kremlin was being informed Max said it was not. No one knew whom they could trust in the Kremlin, who was with Kulachev and who was against him. Even Kulachev himself couldn’t be sure of that.
I was about to leave and collect Miss Mandrake while Max fixed our transportation back across the channel – we would be helicoptered direct from the pad on the roof of Focal House to Clermont Ferrand – when Max’s telephone rang. It was North Yorkshire Police. When the body had been lifted from the Buttertubs Pass it had been taken to the police mortuary and as a routine operation the clothing had been gone through. At first nothing of special interest had been found but later a WPC had found a scrap of paper blowing around the station. It was a roughly-drawn map, with road directions marked by arrows leading to a filled-in square, which was probably a house. There was an arrow pointi
ng up at an angle, north-easterly, and on the shaft of the arrow were the letters C-F. Clermont-Ferrand? It was; the map had been drawn on the back of an advertising handout from a supermarché in Clermont-Ferrand, France – and the connexion with Louis Leclerc had struck the local police brass. Would we be interested? Max’s tone was brief and peremptory enough to ensure immediate delivery: it would be put through as soon as possible by fax machine. The voice from North Yorkshire, Max told me, had been apologetic; somebody’s head would be rolling for mislaying what might be vital evidence. It meant some delay and I went along meanwhile to the map section where I studied road maps all around Clermont-Ferrand south-westerly. And south-westerly I found the high ground, the mountain passes where I’d been involved in that crash.
We were getting warmer. It would be a case of picking up the roads from the sketch, which was in fact, as I saw when it came through from North Yorkshire, fairly detailed with street names and so on, not as rough as I’d imagined it might be. The target area might well be a long way from Clermont-Ferrand; no mileage was given and I knew I’d had a long drive from that house, if it was the same one. I was going to need transport and Marcus Bright would provide that; orders went through for him to meet me on touchdown at Clermont-Ferrand. He would drive down from Barfleur through the night.
I believed that the sketch-map did show the house where I’d been held. But why hadn’t Leclerc known? Maybe he had, after all. Or maybe I was barking up the wrong tree. Somehow I didn’t think I was. I looked at my watch: there would be time for another word with Leclerc, now being held at a secure nick in north London. I got myself a car with a driver and went along. Leclerc shrugged the sketch-map off. He’d never seen it before, he said. He insisted he didn’t know where the house was. The man on whose body it had been found always had a number of addresses up his sleeve. He’d been a womaniser. That house could just have been a brothel, Leclerc said, but I didn’t believe him. I fancied he’d been shaken though he’d covered up well.
*
By midnight I was in Max’s helicopter with Miss Mandrake and heading for Cherbourg across the dark water of the channel.
Marcus Bright was already there, with car. He asked if I wanted him to stay around. That, I said, would be a help; I’d like him to be handy in Clermont-Ferrand, a link with Focal House. I showed him the map from North Yorkshire but it didn’t convey anything to him.
“You’re going there?” he asked.
“If I can find it, which won’t be easy. And not a direct approach. But I’m going there all right.”
“You’ll want help.”
“Not in the first instance. I’m going to do a recce. After that, we’ll see. Max won’t have the police brought in at this stage.” I paused; there was a keen wind and I saw that Felicity was shivering. “Can you rustle up assistance if I ask for it, Marcus?”
He said he thought that could be arranged. Then he said there was someone he’d like me to meet before I went for that house. It was someone who knew the area south and west from Clermont-Ferrand well, and might be able to save me a lot of time. This person lived in Clermont-Ferrand, Marcus Bright said. So we went into the city, which stood at the foot of an extinct volcano, Puy-de-Dome, overlooking the Limagne. Marcus told me the cathedral had been built of lava from the volcano; he chatted away, mostly to Felicity, I not paying much attention, concerned as I was with the time factor. That seventy-two hours was already slipping away and I might well need an extension. We drove into the sleazier part of the city, through streets that seemed filled with sandy dust and rubble, with little shops selling bread, cheese, fruit, sausages and so on. Near a cattle market Marcus stopped outside a hovel that stank of drains and outside which an old crone was seated, dressed wholly in black with a sort of bonnet over white hair, a bonnet secured by a ribbon tied beneath her chin. Toothless, she chewed and grinned up at Marcus Bright, who after a mutual greeting and some conversation turned to me and said this was Madame Gallepe and she wanted us to go into her house.
I saw the look on Felicity’s face and I understood but it couldn’t be helped. As we entered, having to bend through the doorway, the stench hit like a sledgehammer, age-old dirt and decay added to the drain smell to such an extent that merely breathing was a penance. We were led to a room at the back where an old man lay on what looked like a raised plank for a bed, and sacks for bedclothes.
Marcus Bright addressed him as M’sieur Gallepe, the old crone’s husband as he introduced him to me. The two held a conversation in a patois that I found extremely hard to follow, catching only a word or phrase here and there. Bright summarised it by turning to me and telling me Gallepe had been a member of the Resistance in the department of Puy-de-Dome during the war and had an intimate knowledge of the countryside for many miles around. Or had had, when last he had been mobile. He was now a sick man; he certainly looked it. The face was haggard, the eyes haunted. He was all skin and bone, no apparent flesh.
Marcus showed him my sketch-map and he nodded. Marcus interpreted what ensued.
“He knows the place. Montignac, about 250 kilometres south-west from here. There is a house that could be your target, a big house outside the town, a mansion though not quite a chateau in the accepted sense. It was once the property of a family who had made their money in corn. During the war it was the headquarters of the local Gestapo. If this is the house, Gallepe knew it well.”
“Torture?” I asked.
“Yes, I – ”
“Times don’t change all that much,” I said. “Does he know who lives there now?”
“Yes, he does. He says it’s a family named Perro. M’sieur Perro is a retired civil servant from Paris. A very respectable family, Gallepe says.”
This was a blow. “He’s sure of this, Marcus?”
“Apparently, yes. He admits it’s hearsay.” Marcus paused. “He hasn’t been out of his bed for some years, but – ”
Old Gallepe had interrupted him. He listened and nodded and then turned to me again. “He says there’s a cemetery nearby, a disused one. Does that fit?”
I said I really wouldn’t know. I hadn’t had the opportunity of looking around. But now I had the feeling I was on a bum steer. Retired civil servants don’t harbour the sort of people I’d encountered, nor do they, I imagine, use strongarm methods or keep people locked up in dungeons. Or kidnap children.
I was impatient now to get away and in fact soon after that Marcus began to take his leave, a slow process because the old man was garrulous and had lain a restricting hand on Marcus’s arm. Then Marcus said old Gallepe had come up with something that might be interesting: one of the Perro sons, who’d been in the French Foreign Service, middling senior in the Quai d’Orsay, had retired somewhat suddenly and unexpectedly and soon afterwards had left France, going, it was believed, to New Zealand.
*
“That,” Marcus said as we drove away, “seemed to ring some sort of a bell with you. Am I right?”
“Yes,” I said. “Leclerc. You’ll remember.”
He gave a low whistle. “Leclerc and his blackmail! Victims diplomats, among others. You think there’s a connexion, do you?”
“Could be. Anyway, I’m not writing that house off after all. It’s worth a visit.”
“After dark?”
“No,” I said. “Right now! It’s quite a way,” I added, “and time’s short.”
“Frontal attack?”
I laughed though there was nothing funny. “Not quite. A little subtlety’s required in the first instance. And I think, if you’re agreeable, Marcus, I won’t leave you here in Clermont-Ferrand after all. I may need you. And your gun.”
“Ready and willing,” he said, and we drove out fast for Montignac. We came quite soon into high ground, climbing and twisting. The views were superb; something I’d missed when coming the other way. So was the colouring: it was very paintable if one had been that way inclined. But I had other things on my mind, one of them being how to gain entry to that house. Perhaps a f
rontal attack of a sort might be the best way to start, just a kind of recce, and then have another think.
Felicity might be the one to do it. I asked her for ideas. “Door-to-door saleswoman?” I asked.
“Pollster. Loan shark. Cowboy builder, arriving with news they’ve lost some slates.”
I grunted. “Have a good think, choose something that’ll suit your personality. Let’s say a stranded female, with a broken-down car. Ask to use the phone. Have a good look round. We’ll be right behind you.”
She raised an eyebrow. “In the broken-down car?”
“That’s about it,” I said. It was as good an approach as any other.
Nine
We drove into Montignac, crossed a river – the Vezere, which met the sea at Bordeaux about 100 miles to the west – and went out again having picked up the right road, or what seemed to be the right road according to the map and Gallepe. Whoever had drafted it had indicated a number of landmarks: a barn, an inn, a filling station. These I picked up. When we came upon a house, I reckoned it fitted. Whether or not it was the house I’d been incarcerated in, it was the one on the map, I felt near enough certain.
I said as much. “We stop,” I said.
Marcus Bright stopped the car near a clump of trees, where it would be visible from the house. He got out and opened the bonnet and delved around inside, getting his hands messed up with dirt and a touch of oil. Felicity and I got out and peered and poked with him, just in case we were under scrutiny. I took care to keep my back to the house, and had put on a beret that I’d found in the car. After a decent interval during which some oil had been transferred from the dipstick to Miss Mandrake I said, “Right. Off you go. We’ll be watching.”
The Boy Who Liked Monsters (Commander Shaw Book 19) Page 9
