Dead Line (12 page)

Trent faced his front door. He’d grown to dread returning home. It wasn’t because of the hollow sound of his key in the lock or the silence of the hallway. It wasn’t because of the tide of loneliness that swept over him as he stepped inside. No, what he loathed most of all was the way his mind betrayed him, his breath catching in his throat as he indulged a faint residue of hope. Hope that Aimée would come rushing to greet him, weak and disoriented, her clothes dirty and her hair tangled in knots. Hope that a light would be blinking on his answering machine with a message from the kidnappers he’d once felt so sure had snatched her. Hope, even, that he’d find her curled up on the sofa in her favourite baggy jumper, flicking through music channels on the television as if none of this were really happening.

It was a hateful, traitorous urge, one that was followed by the savage mule-kick of reality. His hallway was empty. His living room, too. There was no flashing light on the recording equipment he’d connected to the telephone.

No Aimée.

Trent approached the phone and lifted the receiver to his ear. A long flat tone. Still connected, then. He set it down, hand lingering on the cool plastic casing.

The apartment was tidy. Sterile, almost. He’d shoved the stinking wash of mess and litter into bin bags in a sudden frenzy more than a week ago, on the night of his return from Jérôme’s coastal villa. He’d tied the bags off and slung them outside. And all the while he’d been developing his plan, the first steps towards reclaiming control over his life.

Now the plan had changed. It wasn’t a shift he welcomed but he’d been forced to adapt. The odds against him learning exactly what Jérôme had done to Aimée were growing longer all the while. But he felt more determined than ever. Desperation, maybe. Stubbornness, perhaps. Or simply a reluctance to move on to whatever his life might become without her. But he wasn’t beaten yet and he didn’t intend to quit until he was certain of the outcome, whatever it might be.

There were no days now when he had any sense of equilibrium. His moods swung wildly, hour by hour, minute by minute. Sometimes he was convinced that she must be dead. Felt certain, with a cold twisting in his gut, that Jérôme must have killed her. But then there were the spells of surging optimism when he allowed himself to believe in an alternative scenario. Like perhaps Jérôme was holding her captive somewhere, or maybe Aimée had felt the need to flee and conceal herself for reasons that were presently unclear to him. And so it went on, an erratic spectrum of emotions, veering from the blackest despair to zealous faith and back again, leaving him feeling as if he were teetering on the edge of lunacy.

His hand slid away from the telephone and he moved into the master bedroom. The bed had been made with military precision, the covers tucked in tight. Blades of pearly light streamed through the Venetian blinds.

Hesitantly now, he eased open the door of the closet, then craned his neck to check behind the side of the bed. He couldn’t remember when the habit had first formed. Three weeks ago? Four? And he couldn’t readily explain what he hoped it might achieve. He didn’t seriously believe he might find Aimée here, as if she were engaged in some outlandish game of hide and seek. He was aware that it pointed towards some kind of mental frailty on his part. The beginning of a breakdown. Maybe not even the beginning. And yet the compulsion to hunt for his phantom fiancée was one he found impossible to ignore. Since the first time, he’d started to believe it would be a bad omen if he didn’t search. And so it had become part of his routine.

Dropping to his knees, he lifted the cover on the bed and peeked underneath. He saw the same thing as yesterday. The same as the day before that. Dust bunnies and an expanse of beige carpet, a shade darker than the rest of the sunbathed room.

He replaced the cover and backed out to enter the bathroom. He looked behind the door and swished back the shower curtain over the bath. A few shirts and some shrivelled underwear were drying on the retractable laundry line that was fitted over the tub – signs of his attempts to convince himself that he’d return to a life worth living once he’d confronted Jérôme, one where clean clothes would be something worth concerning himself with again.

He shied away from his pitiful reflection in the mirror over the sink, paced back into the lounge and hauled aside the curtains by the window. He scanned behind the armchair where Aimée had always preferred to read her celebrity gossip magazines and then finished up by peering over the kitchen counter.

He found nothing untoward. Saw no disturbance.

Only one place remained. The space he always checked last of all.

It was a small, windowless boxroom that filled a recess in the middle of the apartment. The previous tenants had used it for storage but Aimée had converted it into a home office for their business. She’d also insisted on squeezing a camp bed inside, claiming that their friends might like to stay over from time to time. In truth, the bed had only ever been used on the rare but spectacular occasions when some minor row triggered an eruption of Aimée’s fierce temper and Trent found himself in need of a place to sleep.

Now, the flimsy bed and thin mattress were propped up against one wall, leaving a narrow pathway towards a compact desk and a folding chair. A laptop and printer were stationed on the desk, concealed beneath layers of papers. An open road map of the area around Marseilles had been ringed with several locations. Aimée’s broken necklace, the one Trent had recovered from Jérôme’s bedroom, was draped over an anglepoise lamp, the locket firmly closed. The lamp was pointed up at the far wall. The wall was covered in photographs.

Trent clicked on the bulb and light blazed upwards.

There were prints of Jérôme and Stephanie entering a restaurant; of Alain leaning against the parked Mercedes in a backstreet alley; of Serge with the driver’s window down, wearing sunglasses and smiling toothily at a tune on the stereo. There were blurred images taken from a moving vehicle of the imposing gate outside the Moreau family home and the perimeter fence and security cameras that surrounded the estate; telephoto zoom shots of Jérôme standing on a wooden jetty in a cream linen suit, beside a gleaming super-yacht; snatched glimpses of Stephanie walking through the crooked alleyways of the Panier, glancing in the windows of artisan craft shops not far from Trent’s home.

The wall to the right featured plans and diagrams and more maps, logging the route the Mercedes tended to follow on its return to the Moreau estate and highlighting potential weaknesses. One of the vulnerable locations was the exact spot where Trent had readied himself to make his move and where the green Land Cruiser had appeared as if from nowhere to beat him to it.

The left-hand wall was filled with notes. Trent hadn’t bothered with paper. He’d scrawled with a marker pen straight onto the magnolia paint. Across the top of the wall he’d set out a timeline of the key events since Aimée’s disappearance. Below and to the left were the names of the suspects Girard had identified. There was an asterisk alongside Jérôme Moreau’s name. The others had been crossed out. Further to the right was the list Trent had compiled of the equipment he’d need to abduct Jérôme and force him to talk, as well as detailed recordings of Jérôme’s movements during the past week. Down on the floor was a paint tin and brush. The simplest way of covering his tracks. Useless for now.

Trent snatched up a marker pen from beneath the road map on the desk. He uncapped it, releasing a sweet, gluey aroma, and stooped near a bare patch on the wall. He wrote one word, the nib of the pen shrieking against the gloss paint.

Xavier.

He stared at the name, then added the date and time of the gang’s first call. Beneath, he wrote:
Second call: 48 hours?
Ransom: €5 million?

He leaned back and considered the sum until his eyes strained and his sight blurred, and then he shook his head roughly, tossed the pen onto the map and paced back through to the kitchen. He lifted his phone. Punched in a number. Smoothed his fingers over the dust that had collected on the recording equipment as he waited for his call to connect.

There was a click. A pause. Then a tiny red light on the digital recorder was replaced by a bright green diode. The counter on the illuminated display was set to 00.00.00. The digits began to creep upwards.

There was no greeting on the other end of the line. Just the suck and rasp of breathing.

‘It’s me,’ he said, and heard the burr of feedback from the recording equipment.

He clamped his hand around the receiver, skin wet against the smooth plastic.

Finally, he heard a response.

‘I told you not to call.’

‘I had no choice.’

‘Is it done?’

‘The situation has changed.’

Trent waited. He watched the digits on the electronic display count upwards.

‘We need to talk.’

Another pause. Longer this time. Trent endured it for nine seconds.

‘You’ll want to hear what I have to say,’ he pressed.

‘Where?’

Trent’s lip twitched. A trapped nerve. He felt the need to clear his throat. He always did when he was nervous.

Trent gave a location. He added a request. He explained exactly what he needed and he interpreted the silence on the other end as a form of consent. ‘You can buy me breakfast,’ he added. ‘I’m hungry.’

‘When?’

‘An hour. Sooner if you can make it.’

He lowered the receiver into its cradle and watched the recording equipment power down. The counter froze at 00.01.37. Then the green light went out and the red light bloomed.

He moved aside the headphone wires and rested his finger on the button marked
ERASE
. He waited a beat. Pressed it.

He rapped his knuckle on the counter. Squeezed his hands into fists and tried to fight temptation. But he couldn’t resist. He snatched up the receiver one last time. Checked the dial tone was still good. The low droning sounded bleak and off-key. It resonated with something loose and unstable inside his troubled mind as he paced towards his bathroom and wrenched on the taps to heat up the shower.

The young man who was located behind a window in a studio apartment on the opposite side of the square, one floor up, one building along, eased back in his wooden chair. The chair was old. It creaked. One of the rear legs was shorter than the others and the chair tipped sideways, then back, in a familiar tilt. The young man had slipped a cushion behind his back for comfort. At night, he took that same pillow and he spread it out on the fold-up card table in front of him and he crouched forward to sleep, arms crooked around him, like a kid who’d dropped off in the middle of class.

And just like a school pupil, he had a notepad and pencil on the table in front of him. Next to the notepad was a digital camera with a zoom lens. Next to the camera was a prepaid mobile phone. The young man had yet to switch the mobile on. Had rarely powered it up. Beside the phone he had a set of car keys and beside the keys a book. It was a vintage detective novel with yellowing pages that he’d picked up from a market stall just a few streets away. Times when he grew tired of watching Trent’s apartment, he’d crack the window to make sure he didn’t miss any sounds that might alert him to something, and he’d scan a few pages. He’d finished the book once already. He was almost a third of the way through again.

There was bread and cheese if he got hungry. He had bottled water and energy sodas to drink. There was an air mattress down on the floor for those occasions when he got too sleepy to see straight.

He’d watched Trent go in. He’d jotted down the time in his notepad. Now he was waiting for him to come back out. It might be many hours before he appeared. Days, even.

The waiting was no fun. The whole experience was miserable. But he was capable of enduring unpleasant situations. He’d had plenty of practice. And he was prepared to wait as long as necessary. He’d thought about it carefully, weighed up the pros and the cons, and he’d made a decision – he was going to follow Trent the next time he emerged.

Trent tore into a chunk of baguette and smeared it with butter and jam. He took a bite. Then another. He was eating fast. Chewing vigorously.

He washed the bread down with strong black coffee. He needed the caffeine to fuel his brain just as he needed the food to fuel his body. He hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours but he hadn’t rested properly for weeks now. His thinking felt sluggish. It was as though he was somehow distanced from himself, able only to acknowledge the thoughts he was having and hear the things he was saying on some kind of fractionally delayed feedback. Sometimes he was astonished by his own behaviour. Other times, appalled. This new Trent, the one forged by the strain and desperation of his situation, was no longer someone he could easily predict.

‘You eat like a pig,’ Girard said.

‘Told you I was hungry.’

Girard lowered his voice. ‘Killing a man makes you this way?’

Trent ripped more bread free with his teeth. He checked over his shoulder. ‘There’s been no killing,’ he said, while chewing.

‘You couldn’t do it?’

‘No.’ His throat bulged as he swallowed. ‘But not for any of the reasons you have in mind.’

Girard was sitting on the opposite side of the café table, wearing dark sunglasses that made it impossible for Trent to read his expression. He was reminded of an old-fashioned police mug shot, the glasses like a black slash obscuring the eyes of some dough-faced hoodlum. It didn’t help that the morning sun was high in a sky marred only by faint streaks of cumulus. The blinding glare shimmered on the marina waters and bounced off the sleek hulls of the yachts behind Girard and the aluminium table between them.

The café occupied the ground-floor terrace outside a magnificent Haussman-style building, one of many similar restaurants that lined the Quai du Port. Mid-morning, they were mostly frequented by Marseillais drinking a quick espresso, a
café crème
or an
orange pressé
. Trent’s breakfast – crusty bread, a croissant, three types of jam, some sliced cheese and a small dish of mixed fruit – was an anomaly. He felt like one himself. All these ordinary people around him, living their ordinary lives, unaware of just how easily their worlds could irrevocably change.

‘Then why did you fail?’ Girard asked. He sounded as if he was quizzing himself as much as Trent. ‘It wasn’t the planning.’

‘The planning was fine. We identified the perfect spot.’

Girard raised his coffee to his lips and Trent leaned forwards over the table until he could smell the fumes rising from the cigarette Girard clutched in his spare hand.

He said, ‘Unfortunately, somebody else identified the spot as perfect, too.’

Girard gulped his coffee too fast. He reacted as if scalded, dropping his cup with a clatter.

‘Moreau was kidnapped,’ Trent explained. ‘Right in front of me.’

Girard said nothing and Trent went on to share the rest of his story, chewing his way through the remainder of the bread as he talked. He wasn’t concerned about being overheard. The tables and canvas chairs near to them were unoccupied, Girard was careful to signal him whenever their waiter came within earshot, and though pedestrians, dog-walkers and street beggars passed by, there was ample noise to mask what he had to say. Traffic was snarled up on the quayside – the result of the construction work that never seemed to cease in the city – and between the shouts of men in luminous vests and hard hats, the brash pneumatic rattle of a jackhammer, the bass putter of a generator and the revving of engines, Trent found that sometimes even Girard struggled to hear.

He was spooning the last of the fruit into his mouth by the time he was done.

There were only two pieces of information he hadn’t shared with Girard. One he never planned to – finding Serge’s corpse. Girard had helped him up to this point, it was true, but he was still a former police detective. Who knew where he might draw the line, especially now that Trent had stepped so far beyond it. And besides, Trent was ashamed of burying the chauffeur’s body. He had no desire to speak of it.

The second piece of data he’d held back because he wanted to share it at just the right moment. It was absolutely crucial.

‘So . . . what do you plan to do now?’ Girard asked, taking a lingering hit from his latest cigarette.

‘Get Jérôme back.’

Girard nodded, a look of shrewd calculation on his face, as if the process required nothing more than a period of calm reflection and considered thought. ‘And afterwards?’

Trent shrugged. ‘Nothing has changed.’

‘The family have accepted you?’

Trent pushed his fruit dish aside. ‘They’re listening to me. For now. I’m returning to the house this afternoon. But the bodyguard could be a problem. Tell me: the girl you talked to, the one who knew the dancer Jérôme attacked in Cassis, did she mention if the bodyguard was there at the time?’

‘She did not say.’

‘Did you ask her?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Can you contact her again? I need to know if he could have seen Aimée.’

Girard nodded his consent. Drank more coffee.

‘Did you bring what I asked for?’ Trent asked.

Girard reached inside his jacket. He removed a tan leather case. It was flat and compact, like a pouch for a set of competition darts. He slid it over to Trent. Watched Trent cover it with his palm, then ease it off the table and slip it into his pocket.

Girard sucked on his cigarette, head over to one side, eyes hidden by his dark glasses. Way above him, high on the hilly ridge overlooking the city, sunlight glinted off the gilded statue of the Virgin Mary atop the candy-striped facade of the basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde. Some locals considered the statue to be the city’s guardian. Trent felt like he could use her protection right now.

‘You didn’t just meet me for this,’ Girard said. ‘There’s something more.’

Trent squinted into the flinty sunshine. He lowered his gaze from the church and the tumbling cascade of rickety buildings on the far side of the quay, to the dun-coloured Fort St Nicolas. The complex rigging on a tall ship tilted in the corner of his vision. A maritime flag snapped and fluttered.

‘You mind?’ he asked, gesturing toward Girard’s cigarettes.

He reached out and freed one, tamping it down on the table to hide the shake in his hand. He fired Girard’s lighter. Inhaled the fumes. Plucked a stray thread of tobacco off his tongue.

‘There is something,’ he said. ‘Something important. I didn’t tell you who the ransom demand came from.’

‘Then tell me now.’

‘It stays between us. I need your word.’

‘You have it.’

Trent exhaled towards his brow, feeling the snag and sweep of the smoke against his skin.

‘Xavier,’ he said, finally.

One word. But it was enough.

Girard swiped the sunglasses from his face. His sunken eyes loomed fat and bulbous.

‘You’re serious?’

‘Why would I make up something like that?’

‘Was it him?’

‘It’s been eighteen months, Girard.’

Girard’s thick eyebrows bunched. He stared at Trent with feverish intensity.

‘But yes,’ Trent heard himself say. ‘It was him. It was Xavier.’

Girard emitted a strange choked noise, like something inside him was slowly deflating.

‘I need to know how close you’ve got,’ Trent said. ‘I need to know where they might be holding Jérôme.’

Girard shook his head dazedly.

‘You must have found something.’

‘Not enough. Little hints. Nothing more.’

‘The theory was that they were using a cave system, wasn’t it? Perhaps they’re doing the same thing again now.’

Girard looked up towards the ranks of fancy apartments above Trent’s head, their ironwork balconies shaded by striped sun canopies. His pouched eyes had an unfocused, dreamlike cast to them.

‘Do you have any idea how many caves there are in France?’

‘But his gang can’t be far away. Based on the drop schedule the last time around—’

‘
Based on the drop schedule
.’ Girard’s jaw was fixed. He was straining to keep it that way. ‘It gives us nothing. You think I haven’t tried? Nobody talks. They’re all afraid of this guy.’

‘So look harder.’

Girard shook his head ruefully. He laid his sunglasses down on the table and scrubbed a palm across his face. He checked over his shoulder. Turned back again. ‘You know what you have to do,’ he said, leaning forwards. ‘Make the family pay. Make it quick. Do it soon.’

‘This could be the best chance you’ll ever get of finding him, Girard. He’s somewhere right now, watching over Jérôme. His location is fixed. We just need to find it.’

Girard laughed faintly, like the entire scenario was some elaborate trick designed simply to frustrate him. ‘You do not want this.’

‘I wouldn’t ask otherwise.’

‘No. You worry. I understand it. The situation is difficult for you.’ He covered his heart with his hand. ‘For me, I cannot imagine it. But please, I know how you feel. How you
really
feel. We’ve talked too many times. You hate police investigations. Hate interference. Especially with this guy. After last time . . .’ He shook his head in a dispirited way. Reached over and gripped Trent’s balled fist. Clenched it hard. ‘So now you must trust yourself. Believe in your approach.’

‘It’s not that simple. There’s a problem with the money.’

‘But the insurance policy?’

Trent shook his head. ‘I
need
you to look, Girard. Regardless of the risks. I know you’ll tread as lightly as you can.’

Girard searched Trent’s eyes for a long time. He looked deep inside them. And what he saw there seemed to sadden him greatly.

‘And if I find him?’ he asked, voice husky.

‘I’m only interested in Jérôme. All I care about is Aimée.’

Girard pushed back his chair and summoned a strained smile, like a patient leaving a doctor’s surgery after receiving a crushing diagnosis. ‘You’ll be at the Moreau estate?’

‘Later,’ Trent told him. ‘I have a couple of things to arrange first. But don’t try to contact me. It’s safer if I call you.’

The young man lowered the camera from his eye. The zoom function had worked perfectly. He’d fired off a whole series of shots at a distance approaching something like four hundred metres. The sun was blazing behind him. It was shining directly in Trent’s eyes. He’d captured Trent squinting in many of the pictures. But that was fine. It was no problem. Trent was clearly identifiable.

It had been trickier with the man sitting opposite. The back of his head had been pointed towards where the young man was standing. Plus he’d been wearing dark sunglasses for most of the meeting. The young man had had to be very patient. But eventually he’d got his reward. There was one short instant, a precious moment, when the man had removed his glasses and turned his head and faced him directly. And the young man had seized his chance and captured it. One fractional compression of his finger. One simulated electronic shutter sound.

One inescapable piece of digital evidence.