‘You haven’t put any u.p.’s on.’
‘I’m not going to.’
The last message Harding got from the communications vehicle before disconnecting his earpiece outside the chateau was that the scanner had monitored the conversation between McBride and Felicite.
They carried overnight grips and bags that could have held masks or fantasy clothing and once away from the cars didn’t stay together. Instead they straggled towards the huge entrance, heads lowered, strangers about to meet strangers. The door opened to Harding’s knock and at once he pushed through, Blake and Rampling now tightly behind him.
The man just inside was small and thin, blinking behind thick-lensed spectacles. In French he said: ‘Who are you with?’
Harding continued walking, bringing the man further into the huge hallway guarded by two pedestalled sets of armour and frowned down upon by the mounted heads of stags and boar and antelope. Behind, those in the second car, including the two Belgian detectives, followed smoothly but didn’t come deeply into the hall. Instead they went immediately sideways, in both directions. Harding said: ‘I didn’t think we spoke of who we were with. You heard from the gatehouse, didn’t you?’
Blake said: ‘I’d like to change. Where can I do that?’ and before the man could answer Rampling said: ‘Yes. Where can we go?’
Both started moving away, in opposite directions. There was a lot of noise and music coming from a room at the end of the hall and two men, one dressed as a clown, the other as a harlequin and both masked by their make- up, turned from the bottom of the stairs towards the sound.
‘I took the call,’ said a voice.
Harding turned, guessing the figure to be Lascelles from the physical description they’d got at Eindhoven, although the man was wearing a tight, face-fitting mask.
‘And that’s why I was at the door,’ said Georges Lebron.
Harding started back towards the small man but saw a fairy-dressed Mary Beth descending the stairs, holding Felicite’s hand. The child immediately recognized him. She smiled and said: ‘Hello! Have you come to take me home?’
‘Yes,’ said Harding. He surged forward, spread-eagling Lebron as he pushed the French priest aside. Harding felt Lascelles’ groping hands on his back but jerked free, continuing on.
‘POLICE!’ screamed Lebron, still on the floor, and pandemonium erupted.
Blake and Rampling ran towards the noise further along the corridor. Shouts and screams burst from other rooms and from upstairs there was a gunshot. From outside came the sound of over-revved cars slewing across the gravelled forecourt to block in already parked vehicles. And then helicopters, deafening, thunderous helicopters descending so close to the house the gravel and grass and plants were hurled against the windows in a man-made hurricane. Men and women flooded into the house.
Throughout those first few moments Felicite Galan remained frozen, disbelieving, as the chaos exploded around her in what seemed a slow-motion tableau. Harding was already climbing the stairs before Felicite grabbed out, enveloping Mary Beth. ‘NO!’ came out as a screaming wail. So tightly was the woman clinging to the child, holding her against her own body, that Harding couldn’t immediately get his arms between the two, to pull Mary Beth away. He drove first his right then his left hand into them, careless of hurting either, at last dragging Mary Beth partially free.
The child was screaming, in pain from being pulled between two adults and fear at all the noise and people. As she began to lose her grip on Mary Beth, Felicite freed her right hand and clawed out, hysterically shouting: ‘Mine! She’s mine!’ She missed gouging Harding’s eyes by a fraction too difficult for surgeons later to calculate, but still marked him for life, so deeply did she rake her nails down the American’s face from cheek to chin. The agony drove Harding back, making him loosen his hold, but only by one hand. Which he smashed, as hard as he could, into Felicite’s face only inches away, feeling and hearing the sharply defined nose crush under his fist. The woman gurgled, falling backwards, finally releasing Mary Beth.
A green-masked man wearing a matching green tunic that ended at his waist, below which he was naked, ran towards the main door yelling: ‘It’s a trap! It’s a trap!’
McCulloch said: ‘I know. I’m part of it,’ and doubled the man up with just one forearm side-swipe.
‘Let me out!’ wheezed the man.
‘I will if you tell me where all the children are,’ said McCulloch.
‘In the party room,’ groaned the man. ‘Two upstairs, in the first bedroom.’
‘I tell lies,’ said McCulloch, hitting him again although not intending to break the man’s jaw, which he did. He fractured two of his own knuckles as well. Wim no need any longer to keep the door open the Texan took the stairs two at a time, leaping over the moaning Felicite, and found a boy and a girl dressed as wood nymphs cowering in the first bedroom. ‘We’re going home,’ he said, scooping them up. Both began to fight him. The girl wet herself.
McCulloch held one child under each arm as he plunged back down the stairs. The groaning Felicite made what could have been a gesture to trip him but McCulloch kicked past.
Only when he got out into the forecourt was it established that the children he had rescued were Robert Flet and Yvette Piquette, the two snatched in Eindhoven. Blake had found a boy, later identified as Jacques Blom, a nine-year-old who had disappeared the previous day in Lille, in the party room. He, like the other two, was dressed as a wood nymph. All three were immediately handed over to a combined Belgian/American medical team.
Hillary McBride was refusing to surrender Mary Beth. She knelt in the very centre of the forecourt, crying and repeating: ‘Oh, my darling! My own darling!’
What else she said was drowned by the arrival of another helicopter, although it landed further away from the chateau than the others had done. McBride ran from it, arms in the air. He threw himself down to the kneeling woman and child, embracing Mary Beth as best he could without including Hillary. ‘I got you back, darling! I got you back.’
From between her parents Mary Beth said: ‘I want to go back inside and take this silly costume off. It’s got her blood on it, I’ve got some new clothes. I like them.’
Claudine was at the entrance to the chateau when the swollen-faced, bloodied woman was led out. She said: ‘You didn’t win after all, Felicite. You were never going to. I was never going to let you.’
Felicite took away the surgical dressing she had pressed to her face and spat, bloodily, but it missed.
‘Christ, you’re ugly,’ said Claudine.
A total of thirty-three men, including the man at the gatehouse, were arrested at the chateau and three more at the outside road block. Felicite Galan was the only woman. Among them were two tax inspectors, unknown to each other, another priest and a police inspector, from Lille. The gunshot had been an attempt by an airline pilot to kill himself. He failed but the bullet lodged in his brain, destroying the left lobe and his mentality.
The finding of the medical team, later confirmed at Namur hospital, was that none of the children had been sexually abused, although all of them, apart from Mary Beth McBride, were severely traumatized.
‘Makes you believe in miracles, doesn’t it?’ said Blake.
‘Only just,’ said Claudine. ‘They’ll still need a lot of counselling.’
‘Bastards!’ said the man. ‘At least we got them.’
‘There’re still too many left,’ said Claudine.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
A disgruntled Henri Sanglier had to share the platform and the limelight with McBride and his wife, Miet Ulieff and the police chiefs of Brussels and Namur for the following day’s press conference. McBride described the operation as a brilliant example of international police co-operation and Ulieff said it proved the worth of an organization like Europol. A very dangerous, cross-border crime conspiracy preying upon children had been irrevocably smashed. Proceedings against those detained would take months, maybe even years. Hillary McBride said that although her daughter had been recovered completely unharmed she intended taking the child back to America to recuperate from what had been a horrifying experience, and thanked the media for the restraint she
