Dead Line (11 page)

And he looked up. Up past her twisted lips and arched eyebrows. Up to her clenched fist. To the object she was holding. White plastic. A stick. There was a tiny greyscale display on it. A symbol on the display. It was a perfect circle with a facsimile grin. A smiley face.

‘Wake up,
papa
,’ Aimée cooed, and then she reached for her phone on the bedside table and snapped this image of Trent – the very one he was holding in his hand inside the locket – looking startled, dazed, a big stupid grin on his face.

‘For me,’ she whispered, and her smile was as bright as the sunlight streaming into the room. ‘A memory to keep. The day our lives changed for ever.’

Later, outside on the misted lawn, Girard was saying, ‘Let me contact the right people.’ He was talking in an urgent rush, his hand on Trent’s shoulder, his voice at his ear. ‘I’ll speak to the best detectives I know. Honest men and women. They’ll arrest Moreau. They’ll pressure him until he tells us what happened here.’

Trent’s head pitched forwards and he spat up more bile onto the rain-swamped grass. He was listing to one side, the torch gripped limply in one hand, the locket held tightly in his other fist.

‘You said it yourself. ’ Trent’s voice was trancelike. Weak. ‘He pays the right people. He has influence. Protection.’

‘He
has
Aimée.’

Girard didn’t say that she was likely dead. He didn’t need to.

‘No police,’ Trent told him. He stared mournfully at the tricksy darkness out at sea. The swirling waters and hidden tides. The dark mysteries lurking beneath. ‘Promise me. We search this place. The house. The grounds. All of it.’

‘And if we can’t find her? What then?’

‘Then I’ll get to him,’ Trent said. ‘I’ll take him. And I’ll force him to tell me what I need to know.’

The sky was a barely-there blue by the time Trent reached the Peugeot. The damage wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. The front bumper was cracked and hanging down close to the flattened tyre, and the catch on the bonnet had sheared away so that the bent metal lid was raised upwards like a gaping mouth. A few splintered fragments of headlamp remained, but most of the clear plastic was sprinkled on the dusty ground amid the remnants of the fake number plate he’d attached.

Trent had seen many vehicles in a worse state of repair being driven round Marseilles on a daily basis. The French often used the bumpers of other cars to help them park. They thought nothing of scratching a door or denting a panel. So he didn’t foresee a problem with driving the Peugeot back into the city, provided he could patch it up.

The car was equipped with a jack and a wheel-nut wrench and a spare wheel, so the puncture wouldn’t be a problem. And he had other tools at his disposal. They were mostly stashed in the rear, where he’d folded the seats down, leaving plenty of space for a man to be laid flat and covered over with the tarpaulin and the blankets he’d spread out. There were ropes there. Plus cuffs for ankles and wrists, as well as a roll of high-tensile duct tape that he could use to lash the bonnet shut and the bumper back into position.

He unlocked the car and climbed in behind the wheel, moving aside the ski mask and his new pair of black leather gloves, eyes drifting to the scarred wooden stock of the shotgun that was wedged into the footwell.

All of the equipment he’d diligently assembled was useless for now. He’d acquired it and laid it out so carefully and it looked sort of forlorn, like a buffet for a party guest who’d failed to show up.

He grunted. The same way Alain tended to grunt. Maybe it was catching.

He was hot and sweating copiously. He was very thirsty.

There was a bottle of water in the glove box. Some snack food, too. Potato crisps and a pack of cold pancakes and some chocolate. It was no feast but it would have been enough to sustain him if the abduction and interrogation he’d planned to carry out had gone on for any length of time.

He drank the water, listening to it glug down his throat, wishing he had some fresh coffee. He felt drained and sluggish from lack of sleep. The blunt aroma of dried sweat rose up from his body. It had soaked into his denim shirt. He lowered his window, reached into his pocket and removed his wallet. He flipped it open. Thumbed out the picture of Aimée.

He smoothed his fingers over the worn surface. Over her dazzling smile. He allowed himself, just for a moment, to remember how he’d removed her sunglasses and she’d cried, only an hour or so later, when he’d dropped to one knee on the burning sand and opened the blue felt box with the ring inside. How he’d uttered those fateful words, asking her to spend the rest of her life with him. How they’d embraced and kissed. How she’d leaned back to slip on the ring and he’d rested his palm on her bronzed abdomen and given the smallest, slightest squeeze to the baby she was carrying.

It was too much. He could still remember the feel of her skin, the taste of sun lotion as he bowed his head and kissed her just below her navel. He jammed the photo away, the wallet in his pocket. He tossed the water aside and twisted the key in the ignition, and the engine coughed and spluttered, then fired up no problem at all.

Trent slapped the dash. The chassis vibrated and shook beneath him. The diesel unit rumbled. He slipped the Peugeot into first and edged across the dusty road in a looping arc, the punctured tyre slapping wetly against the tarmac. He stopped at the opposite side, then reversed towards the edge and finally set off in the direction he’d come from the previous night.

He didn’t drive fast. Third gear was enough. The Peugeot was slumped down on the left. The flattened rubber pattered limply.

He crouched forwards over the wheel, scanning the ground on his right. It was mostly rock. Some scrub and weeds and isolated pines. He was thinking back in his mind to the night before. He was trying to recollect the exact sequence of events and figure out how far the Mercedes had managed to go on after the Land Cruiser had bashed into it the first time.

Not far. He found what he was looking for within a couple of hundred metres. There was a steep sandy slope on his right. Tyre tracks in the dirt.

Trent eased the Peugeot to a halt and cut the engine, then stepped out and got down on his haunches. The tracks were clear and distinctive. Off-road tyres. The treads had bit hard into the loose earth. The dry night air hadn’t disturbed them in the slightest.

He pushed up from his knees and followed the tracks up the slope. The incline was steep and the sandy earth was loose underfoot. It rushed down in tiny avalanches and stony cascades from around his feet. No way could the Peugeot make it up here. Even the Land Cruiser must have struggled. Trent could see deep gouges in the dirt where the wheels had locked and slipped. On the way up or the way down? Impossible to tell. But the gang’s choice of vehicle suggested a reasonable amount of planning. It implied they’d chosen this spot deliberately and had selected the Land Cruiser to make good use of it. Maybe Serge had helped with that.

He scrambled his way to a rocky shelf some twenty feet up. The area was broadly circular in shape and there was enough space to turn a vehicle between the sparse collection of pines that ringed the front edge of the plateau and the giant boulders and limestone cliff-face that teetered over it from behind. There were tracks here, too. A series of parallel, curving tyre treads that bisected one another, describing a three-point turn. And there were footprints. More than one set. They were large and very clear. Heavy boots, Trent guessed. Not so dissimilar from the prints his own boots were leaving. They were mostly concentrated around the tyre tracks, although some headed off in other directions.

Trent followed a set that led towards a knot of pines. He palmed aside a branch and stood still for a moment, listening hard and breathing slow. The scent of resin was strong. He could hear the hum of distant traffic and the buzz of summer insects. The broad valley was laid out beneath him. Fields and vineyards and low, flat buildings, colours bland in the early morning light. He could see the autoroute, and much closer still, almost the entire length of the narrow ribbon of cracked asphalt that slanted up the side of the escarpment towards where he was standing. It was a terrific view. An excellent surveillance point.

He glanced down at his feet. The prints he’d followed stopped right where he was standing. In front of him, a patch of damp wild grass and herbs had been flattened, as if pressed down by something long and thin, like a log. Trent dropped to his knees. He laid himself out in the space, face down. His body fitted inside the impression almost perfectly, except it extended a little way beyond his feet. He rested his elbows on the ground and raised his curled hands to his eyes, miming a pair of binoculars. His view along the road was unobstructed. And he was about as well hidden as it was possible to be.

So this was where their lookout had been positioned. He’d lain prone here and he’d watched the road very carefully, very intently, until he’d seen the first blip from the headlamps of the Mercedes, followed by the visual echo of the Peugeot’s lights. And then what? He’d pushed himself up and called to the driver to start the Land Cruiser’s engine? He’d instructed the gang to jump inside the vehicle? He’d kept watching until the last possible moment, then hauled on his ski mask and jumped inside the jeep with an assault rifle clutched in front of him, waiting for the sudden fast plunge down the loose shingle slope?

It seemed feasible. But it was no concrete lead.

He stood and brushed strands of grass from his shirt and elbows and the knees of his jeans, looking down at the imprint in the grass. It could be the lookout was taller than him by half a foot or so. Or perhaps he’d wriggled a little. No way of knowing.

Turning, he made his way back to the tyre treads and stared at them once more. He pictured the scene. The tense, dark silence. The abrupt acceleration. The flash of headlamps. The weightless, risky slide and the crunching, jolting impact.

He walked a slow, watchful circle around the area until his eyes were snagged by another set of footprints, leading off towards the base of the limestone cliff. A shallow trench was gouged into the earth alongside them. He followed the markings, quickening his pace as they curved gently to the left, then disappeared behind a pile of boulders. He clambered over the rocks. There was a tight channel in behind. Some kind of natural gulley had been formed out of the chunks of limestone that had settled under the lee of the jagged cliff. He could hear a faint droning that reminded him of the static from a set of stereo speakers.

Then he saw the shoes.

Old white trainers, coated with red dirt and dust. They were attached to a long pair of legs in grubby jeans, crossed at the ankles where Trent could see blue cotton socks. He shifted to his left. The rest of the guy came into view. He was lying face down beneath a pulsing haze of flies. His chequered shirt had hitched up from the waist, exposing the silky black skin at the base of his spine. The flannel material was torn and ragged in the middle of his back, stiff with a congealed reddish stain. His head was clamped between two sandy rocks, like they’d grown up around him.

Trent scrambled his way over the craggy ground until he was standing above the body, one leg on either side. He closed his mouth and pinched his nostrils and reached down through the flies to grasp a weedy arm, taut with rigor.

The body twisted stiffly at the shoulders and neck but not at the waist, and the flies rose up in an angry swarm. It was enough for Trent to confirm what he already feared.

Serge, the missing chauffeur.

The whites of his eyes were yellowed, pupils blown, staring dumbly up at the featureless sky. A track of dried blood had adhered to the side of his mouth. His face was alive with ants, his skin covered in dust and debris, his nostrils and lips ringed with sand. His hair was coated in a fine layer of grit.

But it was the sight of his chest that made Trent rear backwards. The crater was very big and very deep, exposing blood and organs and arteries and glistening flesh. Someone had scooped the very life from the poor guy. They’d stood close and fired a shotgun and blown a hole through his heart and lungs.

Trent buried his face in the crook of his arm. He inhaled his own scent and bit down on his flesh. He glanced behind him, then bent low and delved quickly through Serge’s trouser pockets. He didn’t find anything and there was no shirt pocket left to be searched. It was gone with the rest of his chest cavity.

Trent let go and watched the corpse slump to the ground and the flies spiral up and then settle. He climbed past the body and up onto a much larger boulder. He scanned the immediate area. Nothing. He extended his search, stepping between rocks, clutching tight to the brittle cliff-face. But there was no sign of the blue holdall Serge had been carrying when he’d sneaked out through the security gate. Trent supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. The gang were a professional outfit. It wasn’t the kind of thing they’d be likely to overlook.

He returned to the narrow, stony crevice and stood looking down over the body and the swirling insect mass. It was no fancy resting place. It was a hard, barren spot.

He mopped the sweat from his face with the tail of his shirt and listened very hard for the sound of an approaching engine. But there was nothing other than the flat insect buzz and the eerie desolation and the humid, awful stench coming up from below.

Trent supposed there was a reasonable chance that the corpse could lie here for weeks or even months before it was discovered. There was the outside possibility the body might never be found. Perhaps it would be picked apart by birds or gnawed beyond recognition by scavenging animals. But it wasn’t a risk he was prepared to run. Alain might venture up here to assess the terrain for himself. And Trent couldn’t afford more distractions, or worse, risk the chaos of police involvement.

He crouched on trembling knees and set his hands around a boulder by his feet. It was a sturdy, misshapen rock, about the size of a rugby ball. His fingers dug into the sandy exterior. He bared his teeth and heaved it from the ground. Staggered forwards, bent double with the weight. He held it over the narrow chamber. Then he gulped a mouthful of the fetid scent, snatched his head away and let go.

A muffled, wet
thump
came up at him, accompanied by an urgent hum.

He wafted a stray fly away and bit his tongue. Squinted hard. Found another rock. Then some more. He lifted them and he threw them. He nudged them over the edge with the toes of his boots and he levered them into the chamber with his heels. The soggy thumping sound became more hideous with each repeat. But in time, the noise changed. He heard the clatter of stone hitting stone. The dry clack of boulder meeting boulder. The stirring of the flies reduced to a low murmur. He risked a glance. It was almost done. He scooped up handfuls of dirt and stones and flung them into the channel, working in a frenzy until his nails were jammed with soil and his hands were grazed and scratched. He kept at it until the body was fully covered. Until you couldn’t see a finger or a foot or a single curl of hair.

He paused and took one last glimpse of the terrible thing that he’d done. Then he licked the sweat from his lips and finally turned his back on the familiar, predictable guy he used to be, and went off in search of a branch that he might use to scrub away the prints and markings that had led him here.