The Predators

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘Along the back of the seat, all the time.’

  ‘Throughout the entire time the door was open, for Mary to get in, you could clearly see the woman’s arm along the back of the seat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Claudine saw Blake and Harding exchange glances, aware of their oversight.

  ‘Was she wearing a bracelet?’

  ‘Three gold bands that seemed joined together. I got the impression they matched the earrings.’

  ‘What about rings on her fingers?’

  ‘I didn’t see any.’

  ‘What about her arm? Did she just let it lie there, casually supporting herself? Or did she gesture for the child to get in?’

  ‘She kept it along the back of the seat.’

  ‘What about her free hand? Did you see any movement with that?’

  ‘Not until she reached forward to take the girl’s backpack. The girl took that off before getting into the car.’

  Claudine resisted the temptation to take the direction the answer offered. ‘You were stuck behind their car. Were there any other vehicles held up behind you?’

  ‘One. It was the car that cut in front of me when we started moving again.’

  ‘That’s our next positive witness,’ intruded Poncellet, imagining he was helping.

  Claudine ignored the interruption, wishing the Belgian commissioner hadn’t broken the flow. ‘Had that car sounded its horn?’

  ‘Several times. It made the child look, which put her fully facing me. That’s why I was able to recognize her from the newspaper and television pictures.’

  ‘Knowing that they were causing a traffic jam – irritating other drivers – the woman still sat casually with her arm along the seat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the driver didn’t react, either?’

  ‘Not that I saw.’

  ‘Tell me about Mary. Did you see her walking along the pavement, before the car stopped?’

  ‘I wasn’t conscious of her until the car stopped.’

  ‘Was she carrying her backpack then? Or wearing it?’

  ‘Definitely wearing it. I remember her slipping out of the straps to take it off.’

  ‘She did it herself, quite willingly?’

  ‘Yes. Then she handed it into the back of the car, to the woman. She wouldn’t have been able to have sat comfortably if she hadn’t.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Claudine. ‘Because she turned towards the car behind you could see Mary’s face very clearly. What was Mary’s expression? Was she frightened? Upset? Frowning? Laughing? Crying?’

  Rompuy shook his head uncomfortably. ‘She wasn’t laughing or crying. It’s difficult but I thought she looked annoyed.’

  ‘At the driver behind you?’

  ‘I’m not sure at whom.’

  ‘What about being frightened?’

  ‘That wasn’t my impression.’

  ‘She got quite willingly into the car?’

  ‘Yes. As if she expected it. She simply handed her backpack through the open door and followed it into the car.’

  ‘When Mary did that, the woman still had her arm along the back of the seat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I know the car behind you overtook, blocking your view. But that didn’t happen immediately. In those first few seconds Mary was sitting in the seat along the back of which the woman had her arm outstretched?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Could you see Mary?’

  ‘Just the top of her head.’

  ‘What about the woman? Did she bring her arm down, to put it round Mary?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘In those last few seconds, when you could still see the woman and Mary, how were they sitting?’

  ‘Quite ordinarily. Side by side.’

  Claudine stopped, satisfied at the improvement to her profile. She said: ‘You’ve given us a great deal of your time and a great deal of help. For the moment we’re almost through. Having seen the woman as you did, how old would you think she was?’

  The two detectives exchanged looks again at another oversight.

  ‘I’m not very good at guessing ages.’

  ‘Give it your best try.’

  ‘Fortyish. Early forties.’

  ‘One final question. Could you work with a police artist to create a sketch of the woman you saw lure Mary into the car?’

  ‘I could try,’ agreed the man.

  Claudine thought, uncritically, that by the end of Johan Rompuy’s interview – which had begun so well – Blake and Harding had no longer been able to think with total objectivity, which in both their circumstances was totally understandable.

  For a long time – she didn’t know how long – Peter Blake had not been an investigator, needing to pick and prise the information from others. He had, in fact, been the infiltrated eye-witness assembling the evidence and facts for others to accept and assimilate: the giver, not the hopeful taker.

  And an embassy posting, like Paul Harding’s, was again different. In a foreign country it was scarcely operational. At best it was a liaison function with in-country law enforcement, with as much unadmitted but tacitly acknowledged intelligence-gathering as possible. It was too much to expect an instant adjustment from a man literally thrust back into the field, as Harding had been.

  It was the most basic of all psychological mistakes, even from professionals, to imagine that because a person had been an eye-witness – had been there, watching everything, seeing everything – they would possess the unprompted gift of total recall. No one did. A hundred people, standing side by side, would give a hundred different accounts of something happening literally in front of them, depending upon their age, attitudes, feelings and personalities: it wasn’t human nature – it wasn’t humanly possible – for two people to see the same thing the same way.

  The commonest failing was investing a situation with a logical progression. There was no such thing as a logic to human interaction. There was even a recognized psychological term, the phenomenon of closure. Nothing was logical – nothing should have happened in the way it appeared to have happened – in the disappearance of Mary Beth McBride. So it couldn’t be investigated logically. The questioning by the two detectives had been copy-book, a building block attempt to perform their function. And Johan Rompuy had been a deceptive one-in-a-million witness: because he had been so good – so observant – he’d lulled them into carelessness. It was incredible, after learning so much, that neither had suggested Rompuy work with a police artist to create a visual impression of the woman: obvious by not being obvious.

  Both men looked sheepishly at her as the second motorist came into the room and Harding said: ‘Do you want to join in as we go along?’

  ‘Let’s stay as we are,’ said Claudine, hoping they did not infer disapproval.

  René Lunckner was an air traffic controller at Zaventem airport and like Rompuy had been late for his afternoon shift. He hadn’t known at first why the cars in front had suddenly stopped and only just managed to avoid colliding with Rompuy’s vehicle. He thought he’d sounded his horn three or four times before slightly reversing to swing round the car in front of him. It was then he’d seen Mary Beth McBride, seeming to look directly at him. The driver of the Mercedes had his window down and was gesturing for him to pass but oncoming traffic was too heavy for him to pull out as far as he needed: for a few moments he had, in fact, caused greater traffic congestion than already existed. The driver had signalled with his hand and his indicator that he was pulling away from the kerb. Lunckner was adamant the car into which Mary got was dark blue, top of the range – ‘definitely larger than a 230’ – and that it had a Brussels registration. ‘I couldn’t believe someone who knew the city would stop like that and block the traffic.’

  ‘Stuck out in the road as you were, could you see the driver?’ demanded Harding.

  ‘Not very well. He was going bald and he wore spectacles; I think they had heavy black frames. And he had a beaked
nose. That’s the best I can do.’

  ‘A thin man? Or fat?’

  ‘Quite heavily built.’

  ‘Did you see enough of him to help a police artist create a picture?’ asked Blake, avoiding their earlier oversight.

  The man shook his head. ‘I really don’t think so. I don’t want to mislead.’

  ‘We’d really like you to try,’ urged Blake. ‘We’ll keep your reservations in mind.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘How old would you say the man was?’ said Harding, also avoiding the earlier omission.

  ‘Again, I don’t want to mislead. Late forties, early fifties. I can’t get any closer than that.’

  ‘What about the woman?’ asked Blake.

  ‘I hardly saw her at all: I was looking at the front of their car, trying to judge the distance to get by.’

  ‘But you didn’t get by,’ reminded Harding. ‘You had to pull in behind.’

  ‘Blond. Hair very tightly pinned at the back. I didn’t see her face at all. I wasn’t really interested: it was a mother picking up her daughter, as far as I was concerned. All I wanted to do was get by and get to work.’

  ‘Is that the impression you had?’ asked Claudine quickly, not wanting to miss the moment. ‘That it was a mother picking up her child?’

  ‘I drive along the road all the time. I know the school’s there and I’m used to seeing the kids picked up. That usually causes jams, too. I try to beat them by coming along earlier but that day I didn’t make it.’

  ‘Was there anything other than your knowing there was a school that made you think it was mother and daughter? Anything unusual about the way the child was behaving?’

  Lunckner shook his head. ‘She was scowling, as if she was annoyed.’

  ‘Annoyed?’ persisted Claudine. ‘Not frightened?’

  ‘Annoyed,’ insisted the man. ‘I thought it was because her mother was late and had made her walk. Or that she was being told off.’

  ‘When you were driving behind them did you see the woman drop her arm, to put it round the child, which would have been a natural thing to do if she’d been late and her daughter was upset?’

  ‘It wouldn’t have been comfortable,’ the man pointed out. ‘She was too small against the woman in the back seat. If she’d put her arm down it would have been round the child’s neck, not round her shoulders or her back.’

  ‘And the woman definitely didn’t do that, reach down to hold Mary?’

  ‘Not that I saw.’

  ‘While they were in your view, did you get any impression that Mary didn’t want to be there? Any indication of their arguing or Mary fighting: trying to get out?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘How long were they in your view?’

  ‘Only a few minutes. At the rue de Laeken they turned left and I turned right.’

  ‘This is very important,’ warned Claudine. ‘You could see Mary’s head, above the top of the seat.’

  ‘Just.’

  ‘The whole of her head, down to her neck? Or just the top: her hair?’

  ‘Not much more than her hair.’

  ‘How far up the woman’s arm was the top of Mary’s head?’

  The man put the flat of his hand virtually at his shoulder. ‘About there.’

  Poncellet summoned an aide to take Lunckner to a police artist, waiting for the man to leave the room before saying: ‘I think that was very good.’ He spoke as if he were personally responsible for the success.

  ‘I agree,’ said Claudine. ‘We’ve got a lot to work from.’

  ‘I think so, too,’ said Harding. ‘Rompuy particularly: I prefer his recall to the other guy’s. Rompuy’s drawing will be important.’

  ‘But will it really take us that much further forward?’ asked Jean Smet, coming into the discussion for the first time.

  ‘Very much,’ predicted Claudine. ‘I’m getting to know who it is I’m up against.’

  ‘Well?’ asked Norris impatiently. He was leaning forward intently over Paul Harding’s desk in the embassy’s FBI office.

  ‘Nothing much so far,’ apologized Duncan McCulloch uncomfortably. A towering, raw-boned man, he was a Texas descendant of a Scottish immigrant whose given name he disdained in favour of Duke. ‘Quite a lot of newspaper cuttings about her involvement in some serial killings a few months back: Chinese gangs terrorizing illegal immigrants into prostitution and drugs. There was a failed hit on her. It was at a railway station. A knife attack. She caught it in the arm but the Chinese went under a train.’

  ‘What about personal stuff?’ insisted Norris. That was where he’d find the lead to her association with the kidnappers.

  Robert Ritchie said: ‘She’s described as a widow in some of the cuttings. Apparently she was Britain’s lead profiler before she transferred here.’

  ‘Anything between her and Blake?’

  ‘It doesn’t look like it,’ said McCulloch.

  ‘You lying down on this?’ demanded Norris, abruptly accusing.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, John! We’ve only just started!’ protested Ritchie.

  ‘I don’t like being sworn at. And I don’t like being told there’s nothing dirty when I know there is.’

  ‘What is it?’ demanded McCulloch. ‘If you’ve got a lead give it to us to follow.’

  ‘I’m talking instinct. I’ve given you the job of finding it. You fixed a wire?’

  ‘Yes,’ said McCulloch. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘We got her personal Europol file?’

  Each man waited for the other to respond. Finally Ritchie said: ‘We haven’t got any assets inside Europol, which would be our only chance. Getting hold of a personal Europol file cold, from outside, would be as impossible as getting any of our stuff out of Pennsylvania Avenue. Which you know as well as I do can’t be done.’

  Norris patted the table at which he sat. ‘You think Paul might have a contact inside?’

  McCulloch shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. But I thought this was a sealed operation?’

  ‘It was,’ said Norris. ‘Now maybe you guys need help.’

  McCulloch managed to restrain himself until they reached the rue Guimard and the bar to which Harding had introduced the FBI’s Washington contingent. ‘Jesus H Christ!’ exploded the Texan. ‘Where the fuck does the asshole think he’s coming from!’

  Ritchie, a laid-back survivor of California’s flower power era, was as angry but better controlled. ‘I don’t think the sonofabitch knows where he’s coming from. You ever hear of James Angleton?’

  ‘The CIA’s master spycatcher,’ remembered McCulloch. ‘Internal counter-intelligence. Only he never caught a single fucking traitor in the Agency – although they were there – broke every law there ever was and ended up a paranoid basket case.’

  ‘I think we’ve got ourselves the son of Angleton.’

  ‘The story is that Angleton destroyed as many people as Stalin if it just crossed his mind that they weren’t on his side.’

  ‘And Norris has just started to have doubts about us,’ declared Ritchie.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It would probably have occurred to each of them, at some stage, but it was Peter Blake who suggested it first so the credit went to him and in Claudine’s opinion more than made up for any earlier oversight. It was admittedly prompted by the appearance of Kurt Volker in the main operational room just as Johan Rompuy and René Lunckner re-entered with the police artist, but it was still Blake’s idea. Most encouragingly of all, Paul Harding at once acknowledged it as such.

  They’d had to promise Poncellet and the Justice Ministry lawyer a full profile and copies of the artist’s drawings by the end of the day before either of them accepted that Claudine and the detectives needed to work through the information, and even then the reluctant Jean Smet had tried to argue his right to remain.

  ‘Videofit!’ declared Blake.

  It was Volker who responded, spurred by the word. ‘Of what?’

  ‘The man and the woma
n who snatched Mary,’ announced Blake. He smiled, sure of his proposal and pleased with it. Quickly, almost too staccato, he recounted the physical description given by the two motorists and offered the sketches.

  Volker said, casually: ‘Easiest computer graphic in the world. I can draw the faces as they appeared to both witnesses and then enhance them three-dimensionally. It’ll be counter-productive if either of them has any obvious facial disfigurement but gambling that they don’t I can make a right and a left profile and a full frontal.’ He smiled. ‘We established our own web site with the serial killing. We can post the images on our own home page and then advertise, through the main providers. Include a digitalized picture of Mary, too …’ He hesitated, nodding back to his communications set-up. ‘It’ll start a fresh avalanche. The first one’s dwindled, incidentally, down to a trickle.’

  ‘Do we want to start it up again?’ wondered Harding. ‘Both our witnesses think it’s a Belgian car: Brussels maybe. Here’s where the concentration needs to be, not worldwide.’

  Claudine wished the Belgian motorists weren’t hearing a conversation they might later repeat. ‘There won’t be any facial disfigurement: Mary wouldn’t have got so readily into the car if there had been. And we need to emphasize it worldwide. It’ll feed their power need but at the same time it will be the beginning of the pressure I want to impose.’ To Volker she said: ‘The graphics could be shown on television, couldn’t they?’

  ‘Of course. In colour and actually moving, from profile to full face.’

  ‘That’s how we’ll guarantee the saturation here in Brussels.’

  According priority to the computer graphics Claudine and the two detectives concentrated upon the physical descriptions of the man and woman to accompany Volker’s drawing, which the German began from the artist’s impressions and built up from the prompting of the two motorists blocked by the kidnap Mercedes. Volker had already created the three-dimensional portrait of the woman by the time Claudine delivered her suggested statistics with the undertaking for more, specifically the estimated height of both.

  It was Blake again who suggested a way of calculating that from the known seat height of Mercedes up to and including the 300 range and the rough approximation of where Mary’s head came, against the woman’s shoulder, from Mary’s known height.