‘You were right. It seems to me that if I leave you in Paris, the moment my back’s turned, you’ll be haring after me across France. Correct?’
Jude threw up his arms in protest, then relented. ‘I’ve as much right to find out what’s going on as you have. They were my parents.’
‘I understand,’ Ben said. ‘But I’m serious. You stick close by me and do exactly what I say. No more messing around, or I’ll truss you up like a Christmas turkey and you can spend the rest of the journey shut in the boot.’
‘You’d do that, wouldn’t you?’
‘Like I said, we handle this my way. Promise?’
‘Promise,’ Jude said reluctantly. ‘Does this military regime extend to stopping anytime soon for a bite to eat? I’m starving.’
Lunch was a cold ham baguette and a bottle of mineral water at a motorway service station. They said little, and listened to the drumming of the freezing rain on the car roof. Ben used the Laguna’s sat nav to check his route southwards: the motorway would carry them straight down past Bourges and Clermont-Ferrand, cutting through the Auvergne region and the Massif Central, then finally into the Midi-Pyrenees.
Meanwhile, wheels were in motion and the powerful information-gathering machine that was the Trimble Group was doing its work, sucking in data from contacts most government agencies could only dream of, processing it at light speed and siphoning it directly through the appropriate channels. The encrypted email landed with a little ping on Rex O’Neill’s screen on his desk in Capri at precisely the moment Ben Hope was using his credit card to pay for the rental car at the Hertz office in the Port of Calais. O’Neill opened it and saw the names Hope and Arundel, together with the details and exact times of their clearing passport control into France.
He had a decision to make. He could either keep this information to himself, refuse to cooperate with the plans of a man he now believed to be a lunatic, or else he could do what his job required him to do and notify his boss that his current number one target had just reappeared on the radar along with a very interesting travelling companion.
O’Neill stared at the screen for a long time, undecided and wishing fervently that he had never been given this assignment. He reached across his desk, picked up the little framed portrait photo of Megan and gazed tenderly at it for a moment, thinking how beautiful she was and how much he longed to be back in London with her instead of stuck in this gilded cage serving the egomaniacal whims of a man like Penrose Lucas.
‘What should I do, Megan?’ he said out loud. There was no reply. Rex O’Neill sighed, then stood up, walked out into the cool sunlight and made his way across the villa complex towards Penrose’s office.
Chapter Thirty-Three
It was getting on for eight o’clock in the evening as they approached their destination. The rain had stopped, and snowclouds were gathering thickly in the night sky. Ben bought a local map from a service station outside Millau, then drove on a little way to the tiny village of Compregnac where a quick enquiry at a bar-restaurant yielded two key pieces of information: firstly, it provided him with directions to the late Father Fabrice Lalique’s nearby home; secondly it confirmed what Ben had already suspected, that the priest’s name had become virtually unmentionable locally since the child porn outrage had erupted across the media.
The village of Saint-Christophe nestled at the foot of towering cliffs close to the bank of the River Tarn. The oldest buildings dated visibly back to medieval times, when the village’s population had probably never exceeded a hundred people. Some centuries later, the village had begun to sprawl outwards along the banks of the river, sprouting a latticework of narrow cobbled streets. But Saint-Christophe’s most striking and least picturesque architectural development hadn’t happened until much, much more recently. The illuminated span of the massive, towering Millau Viaduct, cutting across the valley several kilometres away, dominated the entire landscape. As Ben drove around the outskirts of the village, he kept glancing at the distant bridge. Its ugly presence was inescapable, and a constant brutal reminder of what had happened there just weeks earlier. It would be years before the local community would be allowed to forget the scandal of their disgraced priest.
Less than a kilometre outside the village limits, ringed by an ivy-covered stone wall, was the simple eighteenth-century country residence where the now infamous Fabrice Lalique had spent most of his life. Ben drove the Laguna in through the pillared entrance. He’d half-expected the place to be deserted, but a light in a downstairs window prompted him to walk up to the old house and rap the heavy iron door knocker.
Several chilly minutes went by before his repeated knocks finally drew the attention of whoever was inside. The door opened, and Ben found himself looking down at a tiny, gnarled old woman in a black gown that did nothing to disguise her dowager’s hump. Her face was as brown and wrinkled as a walnut shell, and its expression was openly hostile. ‘Qui etes vous? Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?’
Ben told her his name and explained in French that they were very sorry to disturb her at this time of night, but that they were friends of one of Father Lalique’s most trusted colleagues. The old woman seemed utterly unmoved by this, but Ben pressed on, saying that he had a few questions about Father Lalique’s work and that he’d be very grateful for a few moments of her time.
‘Allez,’ the old woman rasped. ‘Allez-vous-en!’
‘What’s she saying?’ Jude asked.
‘That’s French for “piss off”,’ Ben told him.
‘I get it now,’ Jude said as the old woman began shooing them away from the doorstep, threatening to call the gendarmes and doing everything but hawk and spit at them. ‘Charming wife this guy had.’
‘He was a Catholic priest, Jude. They remain celibate. She must have been his housekeeper.’
‘Whatever,’ Jude said, backing away from the ferocious old woman. ‘I think I can grab her, if you find something to tie her up with.’
Ben looked at him. ‘What do you think I am?’ He graciously thanked the housekeeper for her time, apologised again for the disturbance and said he’d be staying locally for a few days in case she changed her mind. He knew she wouldn’t.
‘That wasn’t much use, was it?’ Jude said as they drove off. ‘All this way to be scared off by the priest’s resident bulldog.’
‘I don’t blame her,’ Ben said. ‘I’d have done the same, in her position. She’s probably had a million journalists sticking their noses into her life since her employer’s death. She’s alone and vulnerable.’ The truth was that he had every intention of returning to the house, but he wanted to do it alone, and discreetly. His way.
‘I’d hardly describe her as vulnerable. So what now, boss?’
‘Don’t call me “boss”,’ Ben said.
The late priest’s housekeeper, Cecilie Lamont, peeked through the window at the disappearing taillights of the car, then tutted loudly in disgust and marched over to the phone to call her elder sister in Perpignan. ‘Can you believe what the world’s coming to, Claudette?’ she complained bitterly. ‘Now it’s two rosbifs coming round here to pry into poor Father Lalique’s affairs. As if there hadn’t been enough injustice done to that man already!’
‘You should report them,’ Claudette croaked. She was eighty-seven and full of emphysema. ‘Did you get their names?’
Cecilie thought for a moment and said yes, the older of the two had given his name — she pronounced it ‘Ope’. Spoke almost perfect French, hardly a trace of accent, and it had only been when they’d started talking English that she’d realised they were rosbifs. They’d told her they were staying nearby, and perhaps she should call her grandson Philippe at the gendarmerie in Millau. Philippe would know how to deal with their kind.
Cecilie ranted on a while longer about foreigners, then returned to the subject of all the terrible intrusions she was having to endure now that dear Father Lalique was gone. She couldn’t wait until January, when his replacement Father Girard would arrive along with a new housekeeper, and she could finally retire and move to Perpignan to be with Claudette. There was nothing like family, the two sisters agreed.
After a few minutes, the operative monitoring the phone call from much further away than Perpignan decided he’d heard all that was going to be useful. He turned off his earpiece and let the two old ladies natter on. The details of Madame Lamont’s two foreign visitors were information he needed to relay immediately.
Earlier that day, the team had acquired the details of the ferry booking made by Ben Hope, minutes after it had been made; just over eight hours ago, they’d learned that Hope and Arundel had cleared passport control into
