The Burning (19 page)

They walked across the square, past small groups of people gathered around the many street performers that juggled, tumbled and mimed in front of the building. As they drew closer, they could see that the transparent tubes zigzagging diagonally across the outside of the building carried people to the upper floors. Rachel was looking up to the roof when Morag tugged at her sleeve.

“There’s the nasty man, Rachel,” she said, drawing Rachel’s attention to another gold-painted “living statue,” who was waving mechanically at tourists across the cobbled square.

“Oh, I think there’s more than one of those guys in Paris,” Rachel said, laughing as they moved through the automatic sliding doors into the airy foyer of the building.

The Englishman shook the bottle and emptied a dozen pills into his reddened palm. He tossed them into his mouth and crunched them, swilling them down with his last gulp of beer. He waved his glass, signalling to the bar for another. The chime from his laptop computer alerted him to the arrival of an email. He studied it, replied quickly, then, with shaky fingers, launched an internet search engine and typed in some words. Within seconds he had skipped the home page and the list of forthcoming exhibitions, and the live webcam from the forum of the Pompidou Centre appeared on his computer screen. Small figures moved jerkily across the screen, updating every five seconds.

The Englishman clicked his keypad and zoomed in…

The two sets of twins and Gabriel wandered around the floor of a gallery and past the re-creation of an artist’s studio. The bronze sculptures of elongated, skeletal figures reminded Rachel of twisted and mummified bodies: images buried deep in her psyche. When the younger twins became bored, they decided to ride the escalator in the tubes they had seen from the outside and go up to the cafe on the roof.

The square grew smaller below them, the clusters of people, scuttling around the central giant sculpture of a
gilded flowerpot, becoming progressively more ant-like.

None of them had noticed that the golden figure had left his plinth and was entering the building.

The children arrived at the top floor and went outside to look out over the zinc roofs of Paris: the Eiffel Tower on one side and the white dome of the Sacré-Coeur on the other. Very few others had ventured out as it was cold and windy so high up. Gabriel disappeared off with Adam to find them some drinks.

“You can see everything from up here,” Rachel said, holding hands with each of the small twins. A maternal nervousness made her keep them back from the edge, even though it was protected by the thick, white struts of the building’s external structure.

“I can see the nasty goldy man again,” Morag said, gripping Rachel’s hand tight.

“What from all the way up here?” Rachel leant over to try and see the square below.

“No, he’s
there
,” Morag said, pointing to the top of the escalator where it arrived at roof level.

Rachel turned in time to see a golden hat before the man wearing it rose into view and walked briskly off the escalator towards them. Rachel instinctively felt that he shouldn’t be here – and that if he was, they
definitely
shouldn’t be.

“Quick!” she said. “Come with me.” She dragged Morag and Duncan across the roof towards a pair of
ventilator ducts that ended in big white trumpets, like those on a ship’s deck. She looked around wildly for Gabriel and her brother, catching a glimpse of the golden man talking on his phone and scanning the roof terrace for them.

Rachel pushed the younger twins behind the ducts, allowing herself a view across the roof through a gap between the outlets. She could see the top of the escalator and watched as another performer from the square joined the gold-painted man on the roof.

This one was dressed as a robot: painted in silver and black, his arms covered in extra-long sections of corrugated tubing that waved about as he danced. A metal funnel was pushed on top of his head, which made him look like the Tin Man from
The Wizard of Oz
. Rachel edged herself out a little to see the pair better. Perhaps she was being paranoid, maybe they were on a tea break. These thoughts quickly evaporated, though, when the gold man caught her eye.

“Là-bas!”
he shouted, running quickly towards the ventilator ducts, the robot a few steps behind him.

Rachel pushed Morag and Duncan along the roof. “Through there,” she hissed, pointing towards a mesh fence. A small gate led through to a caged inspection area under a red metal box that housed the workings of a lift. The whole caged area hung over the edge of the building and was supported by thick, steel girders. Rachel threw herself into it after the little twins.

The two street performers had split up in an attempt to
corner the children on the roof, and within seconds a golden face appeared at the gate that Rachel and the twins had just squeezed through. There was just room for him to stand in the opening.

“Here you are!” he said. “I’ve got you now.”

“Leave us alone!” Rachel pressed herself and the twins back against the wall of the cage. She looked down at the mesh decking. Through the gaps, she could see the square, some thirty metres below.

The golden man grinned as he pushed into the cage after them, his gold lips pressed against his yellow teeth. Seconds later, the robot followed him, long arms flailing and clanking against the steel cables of the lifting gear. Rachel caught sight of a pair of vicious-looking pliers protruding from the end of one tube-covered arm and from the other, a length of wire.

Rachel struggled as the golden man grabbed her arms and twisted them up behind her. The wound on her back made her shriek with pain, and the man slapped her face.

Huddled in the corner of the steel cage, Morag and Duncan began to squeal too, like trapped mice, their high-pitched voices drowned by the whistle of the wind through the steel.

The man was so close Rachel could smell cigarettes on his breath, which came hard and fast as they struggled in the confined space. Suddenly another, deeper scream joined that of the twins. From nowhere, Gabriel had appeared in
the cage and grabbing the robot’s coil of wire, he looped it up and hooked it round the robot’s neck. The golden man turned to see his friend strung up, his own wire round his throat and looped over one of the crossbars and then pulled taut from behind.

Rachel saw Gabriel tying the wire to a huge metal cog and, seizing her moment, she kicked out, her foot crashing into the golden man’s stomach and winding him.

The robot continued to thrash around, his arms flailing, desperate to loosen the wire from his neck. But his efforts only made it cut deeper into his throat.

“Aidez-moi!”
he gurgled.

Somewhere below, somebody pushed a lift button.

There was a metallic
“clank”
, a
“whirr”
and the cables began to move, and the dancing robot was lifted into the air, up into the workings of the lift.

The golden man scrabbled around, eager to escape the cage in which he had trapped Rachel and the twins, but where he was now trapped himself: the strange boy with the cold eyes blocking his way.

“Let him go, Gabriel!”

Gabriel turned to see Adam coming towards them. There was a look of horror spreading across Adam’s face as he watched the robot’s feet kicking from beneath the red box. He beckoned to his sister and the twins. Rachel pushed Duncan and Morag out past Gabriel and the gold man before following them herself.

“He might say how he found us, Gabriel,” she said, gesturing at the gold man as if pleading for his life.

“
Oui!
Yes, I will tell you.” The man began crawling towards Rachel and Adam on his hands and knees, begging. “Only please, don’t—”

But they could see that Gabriel had already decided.

He knelt down and grasped the man’s forearms, staring directly into his face, the watery gold-painted eyes darting desperately around until Gabriel fixed them with his own. Suddenly, the man’s body was trembling uncontrollably and his hands began to smoke as the steel mesh beneath him turned red hot. Gabriel’s eyes bore into him and flakes of gold started to peel from his face. His mouth opened in a silent scream as the floor melted away underneath him. Then Gabriel casually let go of his arms, allowing him to fall the six floors on to the square below.

Nobody noticed the five children hurrying away across the square a few minutes later. A crowd had gathered round the groaning, golden figure who had fallen from the top of the Pompidou Centre and miraculously survived. A broken gold-painted statue who now hung limply over the rim of the giant flowerpot.

A few wondered if his fall had been part of some strange performance.

In a caravan park, just outside a pretty sailing port in Normandy, Mr Alfred Brunt, from Stoke-on-Trent, treated
himself to the first glass of French wine of his holiday. He congratulated himself on his careful route planning, delighted that he had made the journey along the coast in under four hours.

He was glad to be away from Calais, where they had parked the camper van overnight in the station car park, only to be disturbed early that morning by a gang of youths on their way to the station.

He was sure that one had fiddled with his petrol cap.

But now, Mr Brunt was on holiday proper and looking forward to his lunch: a steak and kidney ready meal that his wife, Glenda, had brought with them from England and was popping cheerfully into the microwave.

Glenda screamed as the first boot crashed through the skylight above her head, and her husband bellowed in fear as the side window was smashed in, leaving a riot baton tangled in the net curtain. Both of them shouted for help as the door of the camper van was blown off its hinges and meekly raised their hands as two men, wearing dark glasses and headphones, burst in and levelled automatic weapons at them.

T
he Métro thundered into Les Halles and the doors hissed open, allowing the five children on to the crowded train.

Rachel’s knees still felt weak and it was all she could do to support herself by grabbing desperately at the overhead strap. Adam helped Morag and Duncan on board and made for the three available seats, only to be beaten to it by an elderly nun, her face smiling primly from behind a wimple. Adam nodded and gestured for her to sit down, the younger twins taking the two seats beside her.

Morag and Duncan had maintained a traumatized silence since they had escaped from the roof. Gabriel had not said a word, and neither Rachel nor Adam had dared say one to him. In truth, at that moment, they were terrified of him – and what he was capable of.

Rachel decided to break the silence.

“Those men back on the roof – how could they
still
be tracking us? We took those transmitter things out.”

Gabriel was clutching on to the metal handrail above his head. The motion of the crowded train took him close to Rachel as he swayed and fought to keep his balance. “I don’t think they were working for the Hope Project.”

Adam was pressed closely against his sister, one arm stretched out to clutch Morag’s hand. She, in turn, was holding tightly on to Duncan. Adam stared at Gabriel, his eyes wide with confusion.

“Well, did they
look
like they worked for the Hope Project?” Gabriel said.

“They were French,” Rachel said. “We heard them speak.”

“Doesn’t matter where they’re from,” Gabriel said. “There are people like that in every country. People with … extreme beliefs. They keep themselves well hidden, so we’ll need to be careful.”

“So who were they?” Adam asked. He raised his voice just enough to be heard above the rumble of the train as it roared beneath the Paris streets. He did not want to alarm Morag or Duncan. “Who the hell else is after us?”

Gabriel looked from Adam to Rachel. He laid a hand on Adam’s shoulder, reached round to pull Rachel close and spoke to them both without saying a word.

Are you ready to fight?

Rachel’s fingers tightened round the rail. She leant her head against her arm and closed her eyes, wishing that she could open them and find herself back at home, instead of
running for her life through foreign countries, trying to keep one step ahead of people out to hurt her for reasons she did not understand.

She opened her eyes and stared out into the blackness of the tunnel.

Duncan’s eyes were fixed on the adverts above the heads of the passengers sitting opposite him. His lips moved as he mouthed the words and, next to him, Morag knew that he was memorizing every line, every piece of information, how ever trivial. Her brother could remember everything he’d ever read; every picture he’d ever seen. They’d never talked about it, not properly, but she knew that he could remember far more than she could about what had happened all those years before in the loch. The car and the lights and the dark water.

She’d heard him crying out in the night often enough.

Feeling a hand on her knee, Morag looked up to see the nun smiling at her. The old woman had a kind face, Morag thought, even though the clothes she wore were strange and her free hand was furiously twisting the necklace of wooden beads snaked between her thin fingers.