Momentarily Claudine didn’t reply, looking away from all of them but focusing on nothing. Like so many doctors able to adjust the Hippocratic oath she’d favoured euthanasia long before helplessly watching the mother she’d adored physically eroded by cancer, just a few months earlier. But, incredibly she now realized, she’d never extended that image of physical erosion and that necessary release to include a mental illness. At that moment she did. Strictly obeying her know thyself creed Claudine fully recognized that her overweening professional confidence – the central core around which her life revolved – was what motivated her entire existence. As horrifying and as humiliating and as agonizing as her mother’s physical decline had been, Claudine decided that for her personally to lose her analytical psychological competence – to lose her mind, in fact, as John Norris appeared to have lost his – equally justified the quick release of self-destruction. In her case perhaps more so than an irreversible physical condition. At once there came an unsettling unanswerable question. Did she really feel so strongly about euthanasia because of her mother’s death? Or did her conviction come from what she couldn’t fulfil with Hugo Rosetti because of the permanent, irreversible coma in which his wife existed? Claudine forced herself on, refusing even to attempt an answer, frightened of what it might be.
‘John,’ she said gently. ‘That’s exactly what it is, a position of weakness. We know it. They know it. They’ve got a public forum in which they want everyone else to know it too. We can’t change that position until we get into a negotiating stance. You wrote that, in the text books: lectured on it at Quantico.’
Norris frowned, seemingly unable to remember. He didn’t argue. Harding, alongside, frowned too towards Rampling but it was an entirely different expression for entirely different reasons. There was a long, unfilled silence.
‘John?’ prompted Harrison.
‘It means exposing the ambassador.’ The man tried to recover.
‘Which is better than exposing his daughter,’ said Blake shortly, and Claudine wished he hadn’t.
Harrison said: ‘I could suggest it. I understand the reasoning.’
Smet leaned sideways, whispering to the commissioner. At once the portly, uniform-encased man said: ‘We have some positive sightings of Mary minutes before she disappeared.’
‘Walking? Or getting into a vehicle?’ demanded Blake.
‘Both,’ said Poncellet.
‘Walking first,’ dictated Blake, eager to establish the sequence. ‘How many positive identifications?’
Poncellet hesitated at the intensity of the Englishman’s demands. Claudine withdrew, giving way to a different expertise, interested in watching Blake operate.
Poncellet consulted a folder already set out in front of him. ‘Three.’
‘Absolutely no doubt it was Mary?’
‘A positive identification, every time.’
‘Was she by herself? Or with someone?’
‘By herself.’
‘Anyone close?’
Poncellet hesitated again. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘The question wasn’t asked,’ decided Blake briskly. ‘I’ll need to go back to each witness myself, today. Can we get them in here now?’
‘We could try.’ Poncellet turned at once to the three-clerk secretariat that had arrived with him and Smet. One immediately left the office.
‘How was she behaving?’ came in Paul Harding. ‘Walking normally? Slow? Fast? Agitated? Calm?’
Claudine was alert for any reaction from Norris to the local FBI man’s intrusion and suspected that Harding was, too. There was a faint smile on Norris’s face, the expression of a master watching inexpert pupils attempting to prove themselves. But nothing else.
‘You’ll have to ask them that,’ said Poncellet. He was beginning to colour and his breathing was becoming difficult.
‘How close to the school was the first sighting?’ persisted Harding.
‘Quite close, I think.’
‘Any evidence of a car near her?’ asked Blake.
‘Not that I’ve been told.’
‘Was she seen talking to anyone?’
‘I haven’t any reports of her doing so.’
‘How reliable are these witnesses?’ demanded Harding. ‘Believable or questionable?’
‘I think you should decide that yourselves.’
‘I think we should,’ said Harding, pointedly dismissive. He looked without needing to ask the question to Blake, who nodded.
‘What about the car sightings?’ said Blake.
‘Two, of her getting into a vehicle.’
‘What sort of vehicle?’
‘A Mercedes.’
‘No doubt about that?’ pressed Harding.
Poncellet shook his head. ‘Both are Mercedes drivers themselves.’
‘Registration?’ asked Harding.
‘No.’
‘Belgian or foreign designation?’
‘I’ve no record of that.’
‘Model?’ demanded the American.
‘I don’t have the complete report.’
‘Colour?’ said Blake.
‘Black, according to one,’ said Poncellet, relieved at last to be able to reply positively. ‘Blue, according to the other.’
‘What about occupants?’ said Harding.
‘You really do need to speak to them yourselves,’ Poncellet finally capitulated.
‘We most certainly do,’ said Harding. He needed to discover what the fuck was wrong with the FBI superstar sitting silently beside him, too. The Iceman seemed to be frozen into unresponsive inactivity, unaware of or uninterested in what was going on around him.
The questioning of witnesses was very much a police function but Claudine included herself, without seeking the approval of Peter Blake or anyone else, just as she visited whenever possible the actual scene of a violent crime and the post-mortem examination of its victim. She didn’t consider it an arrogant refusal to trust the ability of others, which she knew to have been a London criticism before her transfer to Europol. Unless she had reason to doubt their competence, as she now definitely had with John Norris, Claudine never intruded into the assigned roles of those with whom she worked. What she didn’t expect and most certainly didn’t want was for those others to think they could do her job for her. One missed question vital to her from someone not examining a situation from her perspective was the difference between success and failure. Professionally it was better to offend than to fail.
She made a particular point of announcing her intention to re-interview the eye-witnesses, fully expecting Norris to stay as well. He didn’t, saying it was more important he return to the embassy with Burt Harrison to prepare the ambassador for the second press conference. Poncellet and Smet did stay, which she had not anticipated. From the fleeting expressions she intercepted between them it seemed to surprise Blake and Harding, too. When Claudine pointedly remarked it would intimidate witnesses to be confronted by so many people Poncellet dismissed the clerks, despite what she was sure were Smet’s whispered objections.
The first person positively to identify Mary walking away from the school was a 28-year-old mother who took her four-year-old daughter along the rue du Canal at the same time every day to feed whatever birds might be on the nearby waterway: that day there hadn’t been any. She definitely recognized Mary from the published photographs and correctly identified the colour – blue, trimmed with red – of the backpack, a detail that had intentionally been withheld from the media release. Because she was such a regular user of the road at such a regular time she was accustomed to seeing children collected from the school, mostly by car, and was mildly curious at a child walking away unaccompanied. There was no one close or in conversation with Mary, who’d been
