on any previous occasion. Claudine tried to involve herself – although not goading, alert to the change and careful to avoid antagonizing her – but the woman told her, without anger, to get off the line. Claudine did. After her earlier debacle, Hillary didn’t attempt to grab the telephone.
‘It’s a million.’
‘I know,’ said McBride.
‘It’s ready?’
‘Yes.’
‘Cash?’
‘Yes.’
‘Deposit it at a branch of Credit Lyonnais. You choose which. Tomorrow, precisely at 11 a.m., I’ll give you a bank and an account number into which it’s to be transferred. If it’s not in the account I designate by 11.30 a.m. Mary Beth will be killed. Understood?’
‘No, wait…
‘Shut up! You there, Claudine?’
‘Yes.’
‘Pay attention and you’ll learn how a ransom exchange can be made to work.’
The line went dead. The scanner failed to isolate the source of the call. It was, the technicians later insisted again, because it had been long distance, nowhere within the city limits.
In his study McBride looked sideways to Claudine and said: ‘She didn’t sound the same.’
‘No,’ agreed Claudine. It wasn’t right: not right at all.
‘Am I going home?’ asked the child, urgently, as Lascelles entered the beach house.
‘Yes. But you’ve got to be very good,’ said Felicite.
‘I will be. Honest I will be.’ She smiled up at Lascelles and said: ‘Hello.’
‘Hello.’
‘Are you going to take me home?’
‘Both of us,’ said the man.
‘Can I wear my new clothes?’
‘Yes,’ said Felicite. ‘But hurry.’
‘Why are you crying?’
‘I’m not crying. The wind flicked my hair into my eyes.’ She’d actually been hoping the Luxembourg lawyer would tell her mat the bank chain hadn’t been established.
As they got into Lascelles’ car Felicite said, in French: ‘You’re quite sure it won’t hurt?’
‘Positive. Pills will be best. For all of them.’
‘Mary Beth first,’ insisted Felicite. ‘I want to be the one to do it. It’s got to be me.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
James McBride chose the nearest convenient bank, on the rue de Louvain, and Claudine used the absence of both the ambassador and the accompanying Harrison to issue the warning. Only Rosetti wasn’t there to hear it, back at the mortuary to conclude his finding with the Belgian pathologist. She replayed that afternoon’s brief tape and Blake said: ‘Yes. She sounds very different.’
‘It’s resignation,’ identified Claudine. ‘Practically from the time she snatched Mary Beth she’s been living a fantasy, her own private idyll. She’s fallen in love with the child, convinced herself she’s protecting her from everyone else – it will have been the rest of the group at first, now it’s probably me as well – but today some reality has come back. There’s still more fantasy than anything else but she’s accepting, although she probably doesn’t want to, that it’s coming to an end.’
‘How bad?’ queried Harding.
‘As bad as it could be.’
‘You want to spell that out a little clearer?’ asked Rampling.
‘I hoped the ransom would be enough. That making her hate me and then letting her have the money – beating me – would be sufficient…’ Claudine hesitated, the admission thick in her throat. ‘I don’t think that any longer.’
‘So the ransom’s not important any more?’ frowned Rampling.
‘Yes it is! She still has to beat me with that. But when the money’s handed over, she’s won.’
‘So by paying it we kill Mary Beth?’
‘We were always going to,’ reminded Claudine. ‘That’s why I argued against it from the beginning: turned it instead into a way of delaying things until we found her. She’s beaten us by getting out of her house.’
‘But you say she loves Mary!’ protested Rampling. ‘You don’t kill people you love!’
‘You do, if that love is absolute, to prevent them falling into the hands of the enemy. I’m the enemy.’
‘That’s fan-’ started Harding, stopping halfway through the protest.
‘Biblical, romantic fantasy,’ agreed Claudine. ‘I know. I wish I wasn’t so convinced I’m right.’
‘We don’t wait any longer,’ declared Harding. ‘We’ve got her house as tight as a drum, although she’s calling from some place outside the city. And we know where a bunch of them are going to be tonight. If Felicite isn’t back by then we hit Smet’s place. They’ll know where she’s got the kid. And we’ve got enough proof of murder to interrogate the shit out of them. They’ll tell us. And then we hit her.’
‘Tonight,’ agreed Rampling. ‘And we know Mary Beth’s safe until eleven thirty tomorrow morning. Everything’s going to work like clockwork.’
‘Let’s hope,’ said Claudine. It was five o’clock. It was going to be a long two hours.
Smet arrived home at 5.30 p.m. There was the familiar sound of decanter against glass. The television was switched on, in anticipation of the main evening newscast.
By then McBride had returned from depositing the $1,000,000 ransom to endorse (‘about goddamned time!’) the decision to raid the rue de Flandre and insist on being present at the rescue of his daughter. Hillary announced she would be there too. Claudine, concerned at the easy assumption that Mary Beth’s recovery was a foregone conclusion, didn’t explain her reasoning for recommending the assault and McBride didn’t ask. Instead he announced that he was going to speak to both State and the President by telephone. That guarantee of Washington support failed to reassure Elliot Smith, who remained uncertain of legal jurisdiction despite the assurance from Peter Blake that Europol, which he represented and from which, additionally, Commissioner Sanglier would shortly be arriving, had power of arrest in an EU country in which a serious crime had been committed and that the murder of the rent boy provided the justification.
‘After we get Mary Beth back the courts can argue about legality for as long as they like,’ dismissed McBride. ‘Do it!’
To provide his promised legal authority Blake went with Harding physically to take part in the entry. That wasn’t to be until Rampling, who remained as liaison at the embassy, was satisfied from what he overheard that everyone whom Smet expected had arrived. A speaker was installed in the ambassador’s suite to relay from the communications room every sound picked up from the bugged house. Smet’s listening to the six o’clock news, upon which that day’s press release predicting major developments within the next twenty-four hours in the kidnap of Mary Beth McBride was the lead item, provided the sound test. It was perfect.
Claudine attended each hurriedly convened discussion and contributed when asked – doubting there would be any physical resistance, although not ruling out a panicked suicide attempt – but fully accepted her subsidiary part in what was an operational field situation. She wasn’t, either, as affected as everyone else increasingly became by a tense, almost nervous, expectation. It wasn’t any real danger here, at the embassy, but on the ground mistakes were more likely in a nervous atmosphere.
Still with almost an hour to go before the gathering at Smet’s home, Claudine decided to combine the background Kurt Volker had compiled from what had been taken from Felicite Galan’s house with what she had suggested before the woman had been identified. Practically all of it dovetailed. Even the video-fit pictures created from the descriptions of the two kidnap witnesses were reasonable representations of the four actual photographs that had been copied.
