Death at the Clos du Lac

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The woman came to with a start. She was shivering with cold and her buttocks and back ached unbearably where the mattress had failed to cushion entirely the ribbed surface of the metal floor. She coughed, her throat painfully dry where her breathing had rasped while lying on her back. She had no idea how long she had been asleep, but it must have been a long time. And no idea whether it was day or night. Instinct, though, told her it was daytime.

She tried to spit. There was a bitter taste on the back of her tongue. Bile, perhaps. Or was it something the man had put in the water? She shook her head. She was definitely light-headed, the same feeling she’d experienced after taking an occasional sleeping tablet.

She held her breath and listened. Not a sound: no voices, no movement, no traffic. Just the pounding of fear in her head. It must be morning, but how late? Or early. She had no way of knowing.

Was that a fluttering of birds somewhere close by? Instinctively she knew the van was inside a building — a shed, perhaps, or a warehouse. The birds were probably sparrows, nesting beneath the rafters. It was somewhere big enough, anyway, to take the vehicle, and removed enough from human habitation or a road to dull any noise.

The idea brought panic. Had they taken her outside Paris? If so, how far? What if they had run off and left her here, tied up like this and unable to escape? How long could she last before being found?

She forced herself to think rationally. She had been kidnapped, and kidnaps only ever happened for ransom. And the men who’d brought her in here and tied her up knew who she was — and who her husband was. That meant she had a value to the people who had taken her. So why would they simply run away and lose the chance of making a lot of money? It would be beyond stupid.

Unless they had been scared off by police activity.

She found it a struggle to sit up, groaning as her back and stomach muscles ached in protest. It reminded her of a camping trip many years ago in the Loire, when Robert had persuaded her to take a weekend away in a tent before they were married. It had been very daring then — even shocking. And the passion they had felt and exchanged that first weekend had not diminished, although it had left her with a wry memory of aching bones and, she recalled with a faint blush, even now, of scraped knees.

She lifted her hands and tried to remove the hood. But the man she had come to think of as ‘Leather Jacket’ had tied it securely at the back with some sort of drawstring, and she couldn’t reach the knot. Then she tested her bonds. The tape was thick and unyielding, strong enough to hold heavy furniture and certainly impossible for her to break or move. She gave up and began to search the inside of the van by touch, starting with the area immediately around the mattress, and widening her probing until she was moving on her buttocks like a mermaid. From mattress to metal floor was a stark reminder of her plight, but she tucked the fears away and stretched out until she made contact with the side of the van.

Wood. A smooth grain, but she could just detect by feel the wavy lines in the surface. Plywood. She ran her hands across until she felt a join, and a horizontal line of nails or screws bisected by another line, this time vertical. The join between the sheets of ply was close, barely enough for her to insert a fingernail. She knocked on the wood with her knuckle. It made a dull sound, muffled and solid. So they had built a baffle. A simple layer of wood, with maybe something stuffed down inside.

She felt a cold shiver that had nothing to do with the temperature. This had been no random snatch of a chance victim, but a well-planned and prepared kidnap. They had known what they were going to do in advance.

This was where she was going to stay. The thought made her stomach heave and she had to swallow hard to avoid throwing up.

She steeled herself and continued her search, shuffling around the van on her bottom. Her skirt and slip began catching on the rough floor, but she ignored that; there was time for dignity later. She stopped now and then to listen. It would do no good to be caught looking for an escape, and would make her situation all the worse. It was a reminder that she was thirsty once more, and desperate for the feel and taste of water. Hungry, too, although that could wait.

She was close to what she thought might be the front of the van’s interior when she heard a noise. A bang, a rattle of a chain, then footsteps. Hard heels on a concrete floor. Coming closer.

Without hesitation she rolled backwards, tumbling over like a child until she felt the mattress cushion her body once more. Quickly arranging herself as best she could, she lay waiting for the door to open.

But there was nothing.

Coward. The word came floating before her, as much a silent curse as self-accusation. So what if he found her sitting up, she asked herself? What could he do that he wasn’t already doing? But she knew the answer to that. He could do far worse than simply keeping her trussed up like this. She didn’t like to think about it, but thoughts of what had been done to other women flooded in on her, and she lay still, waiting.

Then the footsteps moved away, followed by a slamming door and the rattle of chains.

Silence.

Barely five kilometres away, in the district of Pantin, in north-east Paris, Divisional Inspector Drueault was sharing a brief meal with his men in a café near the railway station. They were tired and frustrated, but still upbeat.

They had found a trace.

‘We nearly had her,’ said Sebastien, chewing a hunk of bread. ‘I’m bloody certain of it.’

Drueault nodded slowly, scooping up a forkful of fried potatoes. He wasn’t about to let dismay lower the morale of the small group. They had to keep trying. ‘Close, but not close enough. But that’s better than anybody else would have done.’

Captain Detric had been the first to pick up a scent. After drawing a complete blank on Avenue de Friedland, the last place the woman had been seen, they had spread their search zone further out, looking for any signs of unusual activity. It was a huge task, but one Drueault believed would pay dividends. Digging deep in the normal way, by asking questions from house to house using uniforms and publicity bulletins, would alert the kidnappers and cause them to panic. But this way, merely asking those on the street if there had been anything odd or unusual lately in the everyday traffic in the area, would arouse nobody’s suspicions.

First Detric had chanced on a street cleaner working near the Parc Monceau mentioning a delivery van turning into a side street along de Friedland, where he’d been assigned to cover for a sick colleague the previous day. The day of the kidnap. The van had turned in, then out again almost immediately. It had been early, when most shops had been about to open. But discreet enquiries had revealed that Salon Elizabeth had opened early that morning for two select clients. It had proved sufficient to give them an initial idea of the type of vehicle used, albeit very tentative. But later, Detric had talked to a shopkeeper who’d complained of a furniture van with a smoky exhaust late on the evening of the kidnap, pulling out of a side street where some demolition work had been going on, but where the site had been closed due to the demolition firm going bust.

The street was in the St Denis district, not a million kilometres from Avenue de Friedland.

The team would not have given this incident much thought had it not been for Sebastien mentioning at the next briefing a furniture van knocking over a parked bicycle and driving off. The witness hadn’t got the licence plate, but had said all the police had to do was look for a van by following the trail of exhaust smoke. This had happened in the Livry area, further to the east.

Drueault had relied on his nose. Two delivery vans with bad exhausts were hardly unusual in this city — they had a hard life driven at ridiculous speeds by morons. But you followed whatever clues you had until they proved worthless or fruitful. Further, it made sense that if the kidnappers had gone anywhere, it would not have been further into the city centre, where there was too much risk involved of a random stop by police. Instead, they would probably have made for a prearranged location where the woman could be kept quiet and away from the public gaze.

But why use a delivery van — if that’s what they were doing? Unless they were keeping on the move. He’d known it done before, to good effect. The advantage was that it put them ahead of any police cordon and nosy neighbours. The weakness in the idea was that constant movement put them at risk of being noticed, either because of the vehicle breaking down or a simple road traffic accident.

Then a report had come in from a council worker in Pantin, just a few kilometres further on, saying that a large truck had been parked overnight in the grounds of a war-damaged and disused church. The man had only noticed it because he knew restoration work would be starting there shortly and the truck had driven through a rope barrier to gain entry. When he’d wandered over to take a look, he’d been stopped by a man in a leather jacket, who’d claimed he was resting before continuing his journey.

Drueault fastened on it like a dog on a bone. Delivery van, furniture van, large truck … and using abandoned or unused sites to park up. And each sighting had been on a progressive line from Avenue de Friedland out through the north of Paris to here in the north-east. It wasn’t much to go on, but better than anything else.

‘When we’re done here,’ he said, finishing his meal, ‘we spread out and keep asking questions in this area. Whoever they are, they aren’t moving far. Find empty building sites, warehouses, bomb-damaged lots — anywhere a van can park up without attracting too much attention.’

His men nodded, quietly electrified by his positive manner.