Witch Hunt (17 page)

Her finger drew a circle on the table-top. ‘And do you think,’ she said, ‘you can find anything in Calais which we might have overlooked ourselves?’

‘I didn’t know you were interested.’

‘French people were killed, Mr Barclay. Killed by a bomb, a terrorist bomb, we think. Naturally we are interested.’

‘Yes, I didn’t mean—’

‘So now you will answer my question: do you think you can find anything we might have overlooked?’

He shook his head.

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘And let me make some guesses. You have been talking to ... sailors. Just as the Special Branch agent did. You have been interviewing all the people he interviewed. You have read the local police report. You have been concentrating on the boat, on the people who died on it, on people who might have seen it. Yes?’

‘Basically correct.’

‘Yes. We made the same mistake. Not me, I was not involved at the beginning. But now I am here to ...’

‘Assist?’ he offered.

‘Assist, yes, I am to assist you. So, what I say to you is ...’ She leaned forward and lowered her voice. ‘You are not thinking about this the right way.’

‘I’m not?’ He tried to keep the acid out of his voice. She was shaking her head, deaf to nuance.

‘No. The way to work is backwards, backwards from the departure of the boat.’

‘Yes, that’s what I’ve been—’

‘Further back. Much further.’

‘I’m not sure I understand.’

‘I will tell you.’ She checked her watch. ‘You are dressed to go out. You’re eating out?’

‘Yes.’

She was on her feet. ‘I know a good restaurant. Not here, out of town a few kilometres. We can take my car.’ She called over to the hotelier. ‘I’ve told him to put my drink and yours on your bill.’

‘Thank you. So kind.’

She stared fixedly at him through narrowed eyes. ‘Irony?’ she guessed at last.

‘Irony,’ he admitted.

She had a Citroën 2CV, not a recent model. The sides of the car were dented and scraped from years of Parisian lane-discipline. The suspension was like nothing Barclay had ever experienced, and she drove like a demon. The last time he’d been thrown about like this had been on a fairground ride. She yelled to him over the noise from the motor, but he couldn’t make out a word. He just nodded, and smiled whenever she glanced towards him. His responses seemed enough.

By the time they arrived at what looked like someone’s cottage, deep in the middle of nowhere, he felt that he would never eat again. But the smells wafting from the kitchen soon changed his mind.

‘My employers’ treat,’ she said as they took their seats at a cramped table for two. Menus the size of the table’s surface were handed to them, and she immediately ordered two Kirs before gazing over her menu at him.

‘Shall I order?’ she asked. He nodded his head. Her eyelashes were thick but not long. He was still trying to work out whether she dyed her hair. And her age, too, he wondered about. Somewhere between twenty-one and twenty-eight. But why not twenty or twenty-nine? She kept her head hidden behind the menu for a full minute, while he looked around him at the diners occupying every other table in the place. There had been no sign that their table had been reserved, and she’d said nothing to the waiter about a reservation, but he wondered all the same ...

At last she put down the menu. ‘You eat meat?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Good, here in France we are still a little... recidivist about vegetarianism.’

‘Recidivist?’

She looked appalled. ‘That is not the right word?’

He shrugged. ‘No idea,’ he told her. ‘Not only is your French better than mine, I’m beginning to wonder about your English, too.’

This remark seemed to cheer her enormously. She straightened her back and gave another red-lipped smile.

‘For that,’ she said, ‘I order the
second
cheapest bottle of wine rather than the cheapest.’

‘Your employers are very generous.’

‘No, they are very literal-minded, like security organisations all over the world. Do you enjoy Thomas Pynchon?’

‘I don’t even
understand
Thomas Pynchon.’

Barclay was remembering that, foreign territory or not, he had the ability to charm if nothing else. She was still smiling. He thought she probably was charmed.

‘Do you ever read Conan Doyle?’

‘What, Sherlock Holmes? No, but I’ve seen the films.’

‘The books, the stories, they are very different to these films. Sherlock Holmes has an exaggerated power of deductive reasoning. He can solve any case by deductive reasoning alone. To some extent, Mr Conan Doyle has a point.’ She paused, suddenly thinking of something. ‘The Mr Doyle from Special Branch, do you know him? Is he perhaps related to Mr Conan Doyle?’

‘I don’t know him, but I shouldn’t think so.’

She nodded at this, but seemed disappointed all the same. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘Mr Conan Doyle was interested in deductive reasoning, yet he also believed deeply in spiritualism.’

‘Really?’ said Barclay, for want of anything better to reply. He couldn’t see where any of this was leading.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘really. I find that strange.’

‘I suppose it is a little.’

The waiter had appeared, pad and pen at the ready. To Barclay’s mind, it seemed to take a lot of talking for the meal to be ordered. There was much discussion, back-tracking, changing of mind. And glances from both Dominique and the waiter towards him; even, at one point, a conspiratorial smile. The waiter bowed at last and retreated, accepting Barclay’s unused menu from him with exaggerated courtesy. A new waitress had arrived with two glasses of Kir.

‘Cheers,’ said Dominique, lifting hers.

‘Sante,’
replied Barclay. He sipped, sounded his appreciation, and put the glass down. A basket of bread now arrived, courtesy of the original waiter. At a nearby table, something sizzling was being served on to two plates. The diners at surrounding tables looked eagerly, unashamedly, towards the source of the sound, then exchanged remarks about the quality of the dish. When Barclay looked back at her, Dominique was staring at him from behind her tall glass.

‘So,’ he said, shifting his weight slightly in the solid wooden chair, ‘what were you saying about Conan Doyle?’

‘Not Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes. Deductive reasoning. This is my point. We should be working backwards, asking ourselves questions, and deciding on probabilities. Don’t you agree?’

Lateral thinking, following an idea all the way through ... that was how Dominic Elder had put it. Barclay nodded. ‘So what would
you
do?’

She leaned forwards, resting her elbows on the table-top. ‘The assassin, we think probably she is a woman, yes?’

‘Agreed.’

‘Now, think of this: how did she come to arrive in Calais?’

‘By train or by road.’

‘Correct. Which is the more probable? Road.
Perhaps
she came from Paris. But trains are very public, aren’t they? While assassins are not. So, it is
more
probable that she arrived by road. Yes?’

He shrugged. ‘If you say so.’

‘Then either she drove or she was driven. She is said to enjoy working alone. An independent woman, self-sufficient.’ She paused, waiting for his nodded agreement that she had chosen her words correctly. ‘Probably therefore,’ she went on, ‘she did not have an accomplice. She may have hitch-hiked, or she may have driven to Calais by herself. Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now, the easiest hitch-hiking is by lorry. Lorry drivers will more probably pick up hitch-hikers than will car drivers. I know this from experience.’ A flickering smile at this, but she was too busy concentrating on her English for the smile to last. ‘So,’ she said, ‘this woman probably either hitch-hiked by lorry or else drove here herself.’

Barclay, slow at first, was picking it up quickly. ‘So we shouldn’t be talking to fishermen,’ he said, ‘we should be talking to lorry drivers?’

‘Freight terminals, haulage firms, yes. And also, we should check for abandoned vehicles. Cars left in car parks or set fire to in fields, that sort of thing. There is always the chance she arrived here by other means ...’

‘But the laws of probability dictate otherwise?’

She took a second or two translating this. ‘If you say so,’ she said finally, just as the tureen of soup was arriving.

Wednesday 10 June

The fair had yet to open for the day, but the front of Barnaby’s Gun Stall had been unlocked and drawn back. The machine-gun had been connected to its compression pump, and it had been loaded with pellets too. Keith was now fixing a three-inch square target (half the size of the usual scorecards) to the heart of the life-size metal figure. He glanced back warily to where she was standing, balancing the gun’s weight in her hand, finding its fulcrum. Rosa’s girl: that’s who she’d always been, Rosa’s girl. Little was ever said about her. There were shrugs, and the acceptance that she had once been part of the fair. Keith couldn’t remember that far back. But he knew he fancied her now. Which was why he didn’t mind opening the gun range for her, even though the locals might complain about the noise this early in the day. She’d even put her two one-pound coins down on the counter.

‘Don’t be daft,’ he’d said. But she’d shaken her head.

‘Keep it, I’m quite well off at the moment.’

‘Lucky for some.’ So Keith had pocketed the money.

He stuck the last pin into the last corner of the target. She was already lining up the gun. He could feel its sights on him like a weight pressing the back of his head. The compressor was hissing somewhere behind him.

‘Okay,’ he cried. ‘That’s it.’ And he stumbled backwards away from the silhouette.

But still she did not fire. She stood there, her eye trained along the sights, the barrel of the gun barely wavering by a millimetre. Then she pulled the trigger. There was furious noise for ten seconds, then blessed silence. Keith stared at where dust was rising from in front of the silhouette figure. The edges of the paper target were still intact, like a window-frame. But everything inside the frame had been reduced to a haze in the air.

He gave a loud whistle. ‘I’ve never seen shooting like—’

But when he turned around she had vanished. The machine-gun was lying on its side on the counter. Keith whistled more softly this time, grinning at the target and rubbing his chin. Then he stepped forward and began carefully removing the tacks from the corners of the target. He knew exactly what he was going to do with it.

Thinking back on the evening, running the dialogue through his head, Barclay saw that there had been a great deal of competitiveness during the meal. Which wasn’t to say that it hadn’t been fun.

He was breakfasting - milky coffee and croissants in the hotel bar - while he waited for Dominique. She’d driven him back last night with beady determination. She was probably half his weight, yet she’d drunk the same as him during dinner. She’d dropped him off outside the hotel, waving and sounding her horn as she sped off. And he’d stood there for a moment, searching for his door-key and wondering if he should have said something more to her, should have attempted a kiss.

‘Not on a first date,’ he’d muttered before dragging the key out of his pocket.

A shower before breakfast, and he felt fine. Ready for the day ahead. He even noticed how a Frenchman, eating breakfast standing at the bar, dunked his croissant into his coffee. So when Barclay’s croissants arrived without butter, he knew just what to do with them, and felt unduly pleased with himself as he ate.

The door opened and in breezed Dominique. Having met the hotelier yesterday, she was now on hailing terms with him, and uttered a loud
‘Bonjour’
as she settled into the booth.

‘Good morning,’ she said.

‘Hello.’

She looked as though she’d been up for hours. She had clipped a red woollen head-square around her throat with a gold-coloured brooch. The scarf matched her lipstick, and made her mouth seem more glistening than ever. White T-shirt, brown leather shoulder-bag, faded blue denims turned up at bared ankles, and those same sensible laced shoes. Barclay drank her in as he broke off a corner of croissant.

‘Thank you for last night,’ he said. He had rehearsed a longer speech, but didn’t feel the need to make it. She shrugged.

‘Come on,’ she said, looking down meaningfully at his cup, which was still half full. ‘We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.’

‘Okay, okay.’

‘Now listen, I’ve been thinking.’ She took a deep breath before continuing. ‘I’m looking for my sister. That’s the story I will tell to the drivers. She has run away from home and I think maybe she is heading for England.’

‘That’s good, we’ll get their sympathy if nothing else.’

‘Exactly, and they may like the idea of two sisters. It may make them remember something.’