The Predators

by Brian Freemantle

  In Poncellet’s pristinely neat office the Justice Minister listened stone-faced, seemingly reluctant to accept copies of everything that had been recorded from Smet’s home telephone and the incomplete transcripts from the lawyer’s office line. He waved the bundle like a flag of surrender and said, his voice jagged: ‘This is inconceivable. Horrifying. I can’t believe it.’

  ‘They’re on their way here now, all except the woman. And they know where the child is,’ said Sanglier.

  There was too much for Ulieff to absorb: too much to think about. It was appalling. A total disaster. Smet was a member of his staff. Someone he personally knew. Someone who’d inveigled himself into an unquestioned position of trust, actually as a liaison in the investigation. Just as, Ulieff reminded himself in further horror, the man had made himself part of a previous investigation into a child sex murder, one that had never been solved. How could he, Ulieff, escape personal responsibility? Distance himself. All he could do. Distance himself by as much as possible. He made another gesture with the transcripts. ‘Does he know you’ve got this?’

  Instead of answering Sanglier said: ‘It was necessary to behave as we did. We didn’t know, in the beginning, who among us was the informer.’

  Doubtful awareness registered upon the face of the no longer urbane man. So occupied was he by personal concern that it never occurred to him to be affronted by what Europol and the Americans had done. ‘Are they admissible?’

  ‘It’s arguable. And we don’t have time to argue. We need to know now, this moment, where Mary Beth is.’

  ‘Of course.’ Getting the child back was the most important factor: it always had been. The quicker they managed that, the better able he would be to confront the scandal: manoeuvre his way out. He’d have to lead, Ulieff decided. Announce the fullest inquiry the moment they recovered the child: recovered her alive, not dead. He wouldn’t be able to survive if she was found dead and one of his own staff was part of whatever had happened to her. He’d have to resign. No choice. No alternative. Destroyed. The bastard! The insinuating, evil, perverted bastard!

  McBride said: ‘I spoke to Washington before coming here tonight. Personally to the Secretary of State. He hoped there wouldn’t be any difficulty in our continued cooperation.’

  Ulieff frowned, realizing he was being told something other than the obvious but not easily able to understand what it was. It sounded like an apology but what did they have to apologize for! ‘I hope that too. I don’t see why there should be.’

  Sanglier looked obviously disappointed. ‘We don’t want Smet hiding behind legal barriers.’

  Ulieff saw a faraway light. ‘I won’t allow that to happen.’

  ‘With so many being the potential informer, having access as they did to every early planning discussion, it would have been difficult obtaining a judge’s order authorizing a wire tap without their knowing it,’ persisted Sanglier. He let a silence grow. ‘You could privately have approved it, in consultation with myself and the ambassador.’ It begged the question of why they hadn’t and Sanglier had an explainable apology if Ulieff challenged him.

  The man didn’t. Instead his face cleared. ‘If it removes an obstacle …’

  ‘Smet is a criminal lawyer. One of the others seems somehow connected with the law from a remark that was made when he arrived at Smet’s house tonight.’

  To McBride the minister said: ‘Is this what your Secretary meant by cooperation?’

  ‘We did not speak in specifics, only generalities,’ said McBride, easing the Belgian’s way. ‘This conversation is between the three of us. As it will always remain.’

  At that moment André Poncellet bustled into the room, stopping uncertainly at finding the other three men obviously well settled ahead of him. Ulieff said: ‘Commissioner Sanglier has something to explain to you.’

  Poncellet remained standing – he had little choice while Ulieff expansively occupied his desk – his face tightening as the minister’s had initially done for different reasons, although Sanglier said nothing about the man’s own house being entered and bugged.

  ‘You actually thought I could have been one of them!’ protested Poncellet, aghast.

  ‘We couldn’t trust anyone,’ said Ulieff, taking up the role he had been offered. ‘It was my decision it should be this way.’

  Welcome to the club, thought Sanglier, waiting for the obvious demand about his own home to come from the still incensed policeman. It didn’t. Quickly Sanglier said: ‘Your credibility – your authority – has not publicly been questioned or impugned. Nor will it ever be: there is no reason why it should be. You were personally present much earlier today at the discovery of a murder victim. The men being brought to this building tonight are unquestionably involved. They are also part of the kidnap of the ambassador’s daughter that has yet to be resolved. When it is, again tonight, you’ll be there as the representative of Belgian authority: of the Belgian police.’

  ‘I greatly resent being doubted; being suspected.’ The protest wasn’t as stiff as it should have been.

  ‘Until we had positive proof I couldn’t make any exception,’ said Ulieff. ‘I would like now personally to apologize. Which I do, unreservedly.’ The police commissioner would leak the apology to restore his credibility, guessed Ulieff. And by so doing confirm his knowledge as minister from the beginning of the trap. Everything had settled perfectly.

  Poncellet accepted the regret with a short head jerk. As he did so the intercom on his desk announced the arrival of the first arrests from the rue de Flandres. Ulieff said: ‘Let’s get the child back. End the whole unfortunate business.’

  As the lift descended Sanglier decided that diplomacy was like a child’s early comprehension exercise. All you had to do was fit the pieces into their correct shapes to make a smooth, unbroken picture.

  Everyone had been brought in by the time they reached the ground floor. The vestibule was in chaos. There had been no advance warning of any arrests on any charge and once again there were too many people milling about, virtually all with no idea what to do. Poncellet at once took officious charge, loudly declaring the detentions were connected with that morning’s murder and without prompting ordered that each man should be detained in an individual cell.

  Charles Mehre screamed, loud enough to startle, when he realized he was being parted from Gaston, who instinctively reached out a comforting hand. Charles’s escort hesitated, looking to Poncellet for guidance. Claudine had anticipated the moment, manoeuvring herself next to the commissioner. Quietly she insisted: ‘By himself. Solitary.’

  Charles immediately began to fight, violently, scattering everyone around him. He head-butted his escort, bursting the man’s nose, and split the eye of one of the three policemen it finally took to subdue him. Claudine was among those thrown back by the outburst, close to where Rosetti had remained, against the wall.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘Both of them have got red hair and misshapen teeth,’ the pathologist pointed out. ‘The orthodontic cast should be conclusive but one of them’s the most likely candidate.’

  ‘Something easy at last,’ remarked Claudine.

  Little else proved to be.

  Smet’s cosseted briefcase did contain an address book. There was also a diary. The book carried the names and addresses of the five men seized with him in the rue de Flandres house, as well as that of Félicité Galan. Only the house they’d already entered and found empty was listed against the woman’s name. The diary appeared strictly limited to business appointments but Claudine quickly isolated the simplistic code, red-inked stars dotted alongside various dates, the majority at weekends. One star, however, was against the mid-week date of Mary Beth’s disappearance.

  The only other contents of the briefcase, apart from every record of their planning meetings, were three separate and undesignated keyrings. One ring, gold-coloured, held a single key.

  The ideal psychology – indeed virtually a universal practice among police in
terrogators seeking incriminating confessions from a gang – would have been to leave them separated overnight, for each man to be eroded by his fear of what the others might admit or accuse him of. That night, with everyone’s eyes constantly drawn to the ever-moving police station clocks, it was difficult for Claudine to argue restraint for longer than an hour. Sanglier agreed to her sharing Rampling’s questioning of Jean Smet.

  Claudine guessed at once that the psychology was totally skewed. A gap of twenty-four hours would probably have broken the lawyer. Leaving him alone for just one had given the man the opportunity to recover and prepare himself. It was clearly forced but when they entered the interview cell there was even an unworried languidness about the way Smet was sitting, right arm lolled over the back of his chair.

  The room was bare, except for the table at which Smet already sat and upon which the apparatus was assembled to record the interview. Alongside was a second tape machine that had been installed in each interview room in the intervening hour. Claudine saw, uncomfortably, that they faced the clock. She made much of putting a folder on the table in front of her, which Smet made just as much effort to ignore.

  Rampling started the machine and identified everyone in the room before at once listing dates and times that tapes he intended to produce had been made. And then pressed the second play button.

  Smet was visibly shaken by the greatly amplified sound of his own voice echoing into the interview room, involuntarily pulling his arm from the chair back to come forward over the table. He half opened his mouth but didn’t speak.

  ‘You know what a voice print is?’ demanded the American briskly, trying to indicate the encounter was a formality.

  Claudine admired the quick ploy to get a voice comparison at the very beginning but it wasn’t successful. Smet remained silent.

  Rampling said: ‘It’s as accurate as a fingerprint or DNA. Scientifically we can prove mat’s you, talking to someone we now know to be August Dehane, about the kidnap of Mary Beth McBride.’

  Smet stared tight-lipped across the table.

  ‘Now what have we got?’ Rampling pressed on. ‘We’ve got you talking to Dehane about killing the child. We’ve got Félicité mentioned and the mobile phones. In fact, Jean, I think we’ve got you pretty tightly parcelled up and tied in ribbon. What do you think?’

  Claudine liked the mocking technique.

  ‘My home has clearly been illegally entered,’ said the man at last. ‘I don’t know what any of this is about but it was blatantly illegally obtained. I demand a lawyer, at once.’

  ‘What do red stars in your diary signify?’ asked Claudine. ‘Particularly on the day Mary Beth vanished. Are the red-star days those when you all got together? The days you abused children you snatched or rented?’ She tried to infuse as much contempt as possible into her voice.

  Smet just stared.

  ‘Why’d you put a gun in your mouth and try to blow your head off?’ demanded Rampling. ‘You want to tell us about that?’

  ‘I demand a lawyer.’ Smet was controlled again – polite – not showing the hysteria of the bugged telephone exchanges. Or, even, the anxiety of their planning meetings.

  ‘Félicité is going to kill the child, isn’t she?’ said Claudine.

  ‘I don’t know anyone called Félicité.’

  ‘Who’s Félicité Galan, listed in your address book?’

  ‘Going into my briefcase was an illegal search. Please get me a lawyer.’

  ‘It was Charles Mehre who killed the rent boy, wasn’t it: smothered him during the act of buggery.’

  Smet didn’t reply.

  Claudine took the photographs of the anal distension from her folder, pushed them across the table. ‘That’s what he looked like after Mehre finished with him. That’s what the jury are going to see when you’re arraigned with Charles Mehre, accused of complicity to murder.’

  Smet gave no facial reaction. ‘I know nothing about this.’

  It was nine thirty, Claudine saw.

  ‘Charles Mehre was arrested in your house,’ said Rampling. ‘It’s on suspicion of murder that you’re all being held.’

  The tapes of the intercepted conversation were as always marked at relevant passages. Claudine made her selection, starting the playback. Into the room came Smet’s voice. ‘… Gaston called … He said he doesn’t give a shit what Félicité says. He’s going to get rid of the other thing. It’s beginning to stink …’ Claudine said: ‘That’s timed and dated before the body was found. You knew about it in advance.’

  ‘You’ve got to find some way of helping yourself,’ urged Rampling. ‘You’re a lawyer, for Christ’s sake. You can judge how bad things are for you.’

  ‘Were my house and office burgled with the approval of a judge?’

  Formally Claudine said: ‘Miet Ulieff, the Justice Minister – your superior – authorized both.’

  ‘He doesn’t have the legal authority.’

  ‘He does for anything that’s done within the ministry he heads, involving a ministry official suspected of serious crime. Which you are.’ Elliot Smith, the American embassy lawyer, hadn’t been that adamant. At most he had conceded it was possible, but a brief flicker of uncertainty showed on Smet’s face.

  ‘I have nothing to say apart from repeating my demand for a lawyer.’

  The mocking clock showed nine forty-five. Why wouldn’t Smet break! thought Claudine desperately. Because his position was so hopeless, she decided, answering her own frustrated question.

  There was the sound of a door opening behind them. At once Rampling recorded Blake’s entry. The man bent to Claudine’s ear and whispered: ‘Not one of the bastards is saying anything: Charles Mehre has had to be sedated. Smile, like I’ve just told you something you’ve been waiting to hear.’

  Blake straightened, isolating the three sets of keys from the diary and the address book that had been in Smet’s briefcase. ‘Charles was the weak link. Had to be. He said you know all about it and that you’ve got the key.’

  The lawyer hesitated, swallowing. Then he said: ‘Dear Jesus …!’ He began to shake. ‘It was Félicité. She made us do it. Always her ideas … I didn’t have anything to do with the murder.’ And finally he pushed across the single key on its gold ring.

  Blake picked it up, dangling it in front of the man. ‘That’s the way. Now tell us where the house is.’

  Smet stared at the fair-haired detective. ‘That was a trick … it isn’t …’

  Blake looked directly towards the recorders. ‘Let the record show mat Jean Smet isolated from a choice of several the key mat fits the house in which Mary Beth McBride is being held.’ He smiled broadly. ‘You just forgot your own advice and convicted yourself.’

  She’d forgotten the kamikaze legacy of Ireland, Claudine thought, following Blake from the interview room. In the corridor directly outside she said furiously: ‘What if it hadn’t worked!’

  ‘I’d have tried something similar on all the rest until it did,’ admitted Blake easily. ‘Now we haven’t got to waste any more time.’ He grinned. ‘You didn’t smile when I told you to.’

  The helicopters were utilized at last, to fly the advance group to Antwerp. The party included Miet Ulieff as well as the tense ambassador and his safari-suited wife. Sanglier had wanted to be the most senior judicial figure at the child’s recovery but the Justice Minister’s presence guaranteed that every local need was instantly provided.

  By the time the American back-up arrived by road the entire Antwerp detective division had been mobilized and there were three of the city’s river police boats on the Schelde opposite the house with their engines muted, just holding them against the current, and far enough away for them not to be obvious. Officials in the planning, land registry and rating departments of Antwerp City Council had been located and returned to their offices. The original architects’ drawings for the house’s construction, incorporating the wartime Nazi bunker, had been located for their inspection and Pieter Lascelles, an
Eindhoven surgeon, identified as its owner.

  Lance Rampling accompanied Peter Blake in the three-car cavalcade that went to Eindhoven. From a radio car Sanglier alerted the Eindhoven police to their impending arrival – until which no approach was to be made to the doctor’s home – and gave a fuller explanation to the awakened Dutch Justice Minister after Ulieff ended his conversation with the man. Into their car as Rampling and Blake drove towards Holland was radioed the message that a ten-year-old boy named Robert Flet and a girl of eleven, Yvette Piquette, had vanished in Eindhoven the previous day.

  It was eleven thirty-five when Harding and McCulloch led the assault upon the riverside house, which was in total darkness. Claudine remained at the head of the drive, drawn against a clump of trees with Sanglier, Ulieff and the ambassador and his wife. There was remarkably little noise from so many men spreading out through the grounds. Only occasionally was she able to pick out the shape of someone becoming part of the encirclement.

  Lights suddenly blazed on ahead of them. Abruptly there was a scurried rush of men pouring into the house. Lights pricked out as room after room was entered. McBride began to run and immediately Hillary sprinted after him, literally racing. Everyone followed at a run. Claudine was directly behind the ambassador when he went into the house. A grave-faced Harding was waiting in the hallway, the basement door open behind him.

  ‘Down there,’ he said.

  McBride got to the basement just ahead of Hillary. Claudine followed. Men already in the bunker basement shifted away from an open door, as if embarrassed.

  Mary Beth’s school hat was on top of the neatly made bed. Her brace was on the sill of the sink. On a bathroom stool some shells and water-bleached stones were laid out in a pattern. On the wall, by the bed, were drawn two stick figures. ‘Dad’ was in uneven print beneath the bigger, ‘mom’ beneath the smaller. Their arms were raised against each other.

  It was five minutes to midnight.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT