match with anything we can recover from Mary’s bed or clothing – hair, for instance – and we could also make a comparison with the parents’ DNA.’
‘Did the toe come from a dead body or from someone who was still alive?’ asked Claudine.
‘Dead, unquestionably.’
‘So we’ve got a separate murder, quite apart from what’s happened to Mary?’
‘I could be wrong, although I don’t think I am,’ said Rosetti.
He wasn’t. There was no match at all with the print that arrived two hours later from Washington.
Felicite Galan had insisted that Jean Smet and August Dehane meet her that lunchtime at the Comme Chez Soi on the Place Rouppe, which they’d both initially welcomed because it was a public restaurant in which she could not openly berate them, but they were immediately terrified when she arrived. Felicite again had her hair in the tight chignon of the day of the abduction and was wearing the same jacket that had been described in the wanted posters and appeals. She strode from the entrance, exaggerating her walk like a model’s catwalk parade, and didn’t immediately take the waiter’s offered chair, smirking down at the lawyer and the telephone company executive.
‘Why not hide beneath the table?’ she said.
‘Sit down, for God’s sake!’ Smet spoke in a fierce whisper.
‘Please!’ added Dehane.
Smet waited for the waiter to leave. ‘You’re mad. She said you’re mad and you are. Totally insane.’
‘And you disobeyed me. Both of you. All of you. You sent Charles to kill her, didn’t you?’
‘No,’ Smet said, keeping to the rehearsed story they’d agreed with Gaston to follow. ‘You know what Charles is like. And he’s getting worse. Has been for months.’
‘How could we have known what he was going to do?’ protested Dehane unconvincingly.
‘You’re a liar. You’re all liars. None of you are to go near her any more.’
‘I don’t want to go near her at all,’ said Smet.
Dehane said nothing.
‘I’m not sure that I’ll let any of you, even when we have the party.’ She wished there was a greater penalty she could impose. Hurt them, disgrace them in some way that wouldn’t involve her.
‘Claudine knows all about you,’ declared the Justice Ministry lawyer. ‘Knows what sort of person you are. It’s frightening, how accurately she’s described you.’
‘Did she really say I was mad?’
‘Yes,’ said Smet petulantly. ‘And she’s right: you are.’
‘Tell me everything,’ ordered Felicite.
‘They’ve excluded me,’ announced Smet dramatically. ‘The bastard Poncellet!’
‘How?’
‘They’re staging a big operation at the embassy for your call. To trap you. The others would have accepted my being there as a matter of course but Poncellet made a fuss about its having nothing to do with liaison: said I’d get a transcript later for the Ministry. I’d have drawn too much attention to myself if I’d argued against it.’
‘To trap me!’ echoed Felicite, looking to Dehane. ‘I hope you’ve got the phone ready!’
‘Don’t do it!’ pleaded the man. ‘I’ve no idea what sort of tracking equipment they’ll have but it’s bound to be state of the art.’
Felicite’s hand was already outstretched. She snapped her fingers and said: ‘Give it to me.’
Reluctantly Dehane passed over the instrument.
‘Whose number is it?’ she asked.
‘A director of a restaurant group. His phone was stolen from his car two nights ago. It hasn’t been recovered yet.’
‘Excellent,’ said Felicite, dropping the mobile into her satchel handbag. ‘Now I need to know everything mat’s happened…’ She paused. ‘But most of all I want to hear her opinion of me.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Only Claudine saw a twisted contradiction in her guiding James McBride in the rudiments of negotiation so soon after what she considered her disastrous attempt to talk John Norris into compliant surrender. She tried to drive the thought from her mind: to drive everything from her mind except preventing the man from making any mistake in the telephone confrontation that was to come.
Her first concern was that it should not be a public spectacle, as it had been with her the previous day. Her attempted insistence that only she and McBride be in the room was met with shouted objections from Hillary, to whom Claudine had to concede. Everyone else was relegated to the communication centre and its audible, two-way reception.
Claudine briefed the ambassador in the sealed office, too, wanting him to become accustomed to the circumstances in which he had to conduct the conversation. It was ludicrous to expect the man to be relaxed but Claudine strived to achieve something as close to it as possible. It didn’t help having Hillary there. Nor did the woman’s sneer that if McBride became incapable she would take over.
There was no way Claudine could know that McBride’s initially intrusive euphoria had almost as much to do with the death of his personal embarrassment along with John Norris as it did with his learning the severed toe was not his daughter’s, although the disclosure led to another brief dispute with Hillary, who complained that she hadn’t been told that a toe had been found and demanded that in future she be informed of everything. ‘Everything! You understand?’
The over-excitement made McBride dangerously confident. It was essential to bring him down to a manageable level of self-assurance without swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction and making him realize the real danger the amputation still represented to his daughter.
‘If the woman keeps to her timing – which I think she will because it’s all part of her control syndrome – in two hours’ time you’ll be speaking to the monster who snatched your child,’ said Claudine. She used the word intentionally.
‘Yes?’ said McBride.
Claudine was pleased at the body language, the way McBride’s lips tightened and he straightened in his chair. ‘A possible sex monster,’ she said, using the word again.
‘Yes?’ The voice was quieter.
‘Someone who’s maimed your child.’
‘But…’
‘We’ve avoided your first mistake,’ declared Claudine. ‘I don’t want her to know we’ve discovered the toe isn’t Mary’s. It’s part of her control: it mustn’t be taken away from her yet.’
‘OK,’ said McBride doubtfully.
‘You hate her,’ said Claudine. ‘You’d like to kill her, wouldn’t you?’
McBride blinked. ‘Yes.’
‘And if she were in the room with you, instead of on the other end of a telephone, you’d probably try.’
‘I would,’ said the man. ‘And I’d do it. I want her dead.’ He’d loosened his tie and taken his jacket off.
‘Good,’ said Claudine, pleased with the admission. ‘Make yourself think hate.’
‘I don’t have to make myself.’
‘You can’t kill her, though.’
‘I will, if I ever get to her.’
‘But you can’t, not today.’
‘No,’ he conceded.
‘So what can you do to her today?’
McBride looked at Claudine uncertainly. ‘What you tell me, I suppose.’
He’d come down as far as she wanted. ‘Use your hate to beat her,’ she said.
‘How?’
‘You negotiated a lot, in business?’
