Hidden Faces

I

Bannerman stirred sluggishly among the sheets, the thickness of sleep still in his head and throat. His mouth felt dry and furry from the drink the night before and he had the faintest pleasurable recollection of having fallen asleep with a woman beside him. But now she was gone.

His immediate inclination was to turn over and pull the sheets tightly around him and slip back into the world of dark, shallow dreams from which he had just emerged. But there was an annoying flicker somewhere in his subconscious that took several seconds to surface. Something had woken him. The sleep had not been broken naturally. He was not quite sure why that should worry him. He pulled himself up on one elbow to look at the clock and felt the cold bedroom air rush in below the covers. It was nearly a quarter to eleven. Slater had had a meeting with Gryffe at nine-thirty, he remembered, and had said he was taking the child with him. Bannerman frowned and listened carefully. There was someone in the living room. Perhaps Slater was back already.

He cleared his throat of phlegm and slipped out of bed, feeling the first pain in his head. He sat for a moment on the edge of the bed rubbing his eyes then blinking and looking out of the window across the roofs of the tenements and terraces. He had forgotten to close the shutters the night before. A vague memory of Sally in the dark of the room returned to him, bringing a rush of regret. Had he really slept with her? He had no recollection of it. He stood up and pulled on his dressing gown.

The hall was still in darkness and he padded to the living room door, scratching his head. ‘Hello,’ he called. There was no reply. He pushed open the door and saw that the curtains were still drawn. Above the fireplace a painting of hunters on a snow-covered hillside was swung out from the wall where it was fixed with hinges. A wall safe concealed behind it stood open. He had taken no more than two steps into the room when something struck him hard on the back of his head. The pain shot down his spine and through his head like long needles, and the floor swung crazily towards him, striking him with a sickening force that hammered the breath out of his lungs. The moan that escaped his lips sounded strange in his ears, disembodied, as though it was not he who made the noise. It was far, far away in some other world into whose darkness he was now falling. Darker. Darker.

Kale looked down at the still body on the floor. He was breathless and tense. For just a few seconds it crossed his mind that he should kill this one too. But he quickly dismissed it. There was little point in drawing more attention to the incident than was necessary. Still, it irritated him. It was untidy, the only loose end in the affair. He had been told the flat would be empty, and he had taken that on trust. He was a fool. He should have checked first. He pulled the body over to have a look at the face. It would be as well to remember it. Already the right cheek and temple were bruising where they had struck the floor. It was a wide, hard face that you would remember without difficulty. A little blood was oozing from the mouth where the man had bitten his lip on impact. Kale let the body drop back and kicked the prostrate form viciously in the side. It was unnecessary, but there was a grim satisfaction in it and it released a little of Kale’s tension.

He stepped over the body and crossed to the safe, lifting out the black briefcase and closing the door. He swung the picture back against the wall and pushed his gun into his coat pocket. Then he re-crossed the room and slipped quickly down the hall to the front door. He closed it behind him, carefully replacing the key below the mat.

Bannerman felt the pain of consciousness slowly returning. The dull, hard ache at the back of his head increased to the point where it seemed almost numb. He felt as though he had been kicked in the face and there was the bitter iron taste of blood in his mouth. He forced his eyes open and they hurt sharply even in the half-light. He screwed them shut, opening them again a little more slowly. A light groan came up involuntarily from his throat as he tried to turn himself over. More pain. This time right down one side of his chest. Now it hurt even to breathe.

He lay for several minutes before he tried moving again. This time he gritted his teeth against the pain and pulled himself heavily up onto his knees. Immediately the blood rushed to his head and he felt giddy and sick. He dropped one hand to the floor to give himself support and he swayed slightly back and forth until the sick feeling passed. His breathing was rapid and shallow and everything about his body was, he discovered, stiff and sore to move. What the hell had happened? He fought to remember. Even that seemed to hurt. But it came back slowly. The dark hall, the sounds of movement in the living room. The open safe above the fireplace. He looked over and saw that it was closed now, the painting flush with the wall. He waited yet another few minutes before trying to get to his feet. Then he leaned against the door jamb breathing hard, feeling the pain wash over him time and again. With a slight shock he saw that the clock on the mantel read after twelve. He must have been out for over an hour.

Then he tensed as he heard voices in the landing outside, and a key sounded in the lock. He turned to look down the length of the hall as the door opened. There were three men, one in uniform. The uniformed man pulled a gun clumsily from a black leather holster and raised it towards Bannerman. He shouted a warning in a language that Bannerman did not understand. It could have been Dutch.

II

It was dark now, the wind battering sleet against the window. Inside it was warm and stuffy, insulated against the inhospitable night that had descended over this grey Belgian city. The office was small and cluttered, an anonymous place in a vast building of concrete and glass that men without a sense of history had annexed to the Palais de Justice — a building blackened by the years but still vast and impressive in its brooding grandeur. The annexe housed the police headquarters through which all life passed, under glaring fluorescent lights and through long, drab corridors.

On reflection, Bannerman thought that perhaps this office had a little more character than the others he had been through. A large old oak desk sat at an angle across one corner. Wire trays were piled high with ageing reports, a dog-eared blotter was scribbled with a hundred phone numbers, names, doodles. There were two overflowing heavy glass ashtrays, a fountain pen, a broken pencil. On the wall behind the desk, maps of Belgium and Brussels and charts and a girlie calendar. Beside the door stood a tall, old-fashioned coat stand from which hung two long, dark raincoats that had seen better days, and an old tweed jacket. A broken umbrella leaned against the wall beside a pair of muddy gum boots. Along the door wall and the far wall, filing cabinets of different heights, some wooden, some a grey painted metal, were pushed together, yet more documents piled untidily on top. The room was lit by an anglepoise lamp on the desk.

Bannerman sat waiting on a hard wooden chair in front of the desk. He had been waiting for nearly three hours. The doctor had examined him first, dressing the wound on the back of his head. There were no ribs broken, but they were severely bruised. He would suffer the effects of slight concussion for some time, the doctor had said. He should have plenty of rest, plenty of sleep.

Then he had spent a gruelling half hour in a room with two plain-clothes men who spoke English badly. They had obviously not listened to the doctor’s advice. Who was he? Who did he work for? What was he doing at Slater’s flat? Who had attacked him? What had been taken from the safe? What did he know about Robert Gryffe? Bannerman had answered everything they asked without ever seeming to satisfy them. They, in turn, had told him nothing. His curiosity had been dulled by his own discomfort and he had not pressed for information. He had been brought a meal and a cup of cold coffee then taken to this office where he had sat watching darkness descend on Brussels.

He checked with his watch. It was six thirty. He was hungry, enormously weary, stiff, the pulsing in his head still painful. He ran his tongue over his lips where the blood had dried leaving dark brown rims. Whatever they told him eventually, he thought, would not surprise him, though he had given little conscious thought to what might have happened. There was an unreal quality about it all, dreamlike; a sequence of events through which he had passed without ever feeling that he was an actual participant.

The door opened and a thin man in a baggy brown suit stepped briskly into the office. He was bald across the top, with dark, wiry hair growing in bushy abundance round the sides, and he wore round-rimmed tortoiseshell spectacles over a long, thin nose with flaring nostrils. He would be in his fifties, with a grey, deeply-creased face from which peered two small, very dark eyes behind the spectacles. His suit was well-worn and looked about two sizes too big for him. His waistcoat was open, a thin brown tie hanging from an open-necked white shirt. He carried an air of age and defeat about him, like a schoolmaster who, nearing the end of his career, reeks of chalk-dust and blackboards and thankless years. He closed the door behind him and nodded seriously at Bannerman. It would have been obvious to anyone that this was his office. He rounded the desk and sat down in a round-backed wooden chair, pressing the tips of the fingers of each hand together. Long, thin fingers on big-knuckled hands. He seemed lost in thought and Bannerman noticed the tiny bushes of hair that grew out of each nostril. Finally he swung round and leaned his elbows on the desk and said, ‘Well, monsieur, your story seems to check out.’

The phone on his desk rang and he snatched the receiver. ‘Oui.’ He spoke rapidly in French so that Bannerman could not follow what he said. Then he hung up and studied Bannerman before rising and extending his hand. ‘My apologies,’ he said. ‘I am Inspector Georges du Maurier of the Judicial Police. Homicide.’ His handshake was dry and firm. He sat down again and considered his next words carefully.’

‘Shortly after ten o’clock this morning,’ he began, ‘a passer-by in the Rue de Pavie heard a child screaming in the house at number twenty-four. He rang the bell several times and knocked repeatedly on the door but no-one came to open it and the child continued screaming. The gentleman concerned called the Gendarmerie from a telephone at the Residence Ambiorix at the end of the street. Two uniformed officers forced entry to the house and found an eleven-year-old girl screaming hysterically in the back room on the ground floor. In the study there were two bodies. Timothy Slater, a journalist, had been shot through the heart. Robert Gryffe, a Junior Minister of the British Government was shot through the forehead. There were two guns. One belonged to Monsieur Gryffe. It was lying beside him and bore his finger prints. We have been unable to trace the origin of the second gun as yet, but it was found in Monsieur Slater’s right hand which was folded in beneath his body. There were no signs of a forced entry into the house, no traces of a third party, except of course for the child. Conclusion?’ He paused and then answered himself. ‘They killed each other. On the surface, everything points to it. Trajectory of the bullets, position of the bodies, prints on the guns.’

Bannerman sat in stunned silence. He had thought himself prepared for anything, but not this. For the first time for many hours he was no longer aware of the places where he hurt. He remembered Slater’s file of cuttings on Gryffe, the tension between the two men at the party the night before. He leaned forward. ‘Then your case is closed?’

For the first time, du Maurier smiled. ‘At present we are treating both as suspicious deaths.’

‘And?’ Du Maurier raised his eyebrows but said nothing, waiting for Bannerman. ‘You said everything points to them killing each other... on the surface.’

The Inspector’s smile broadened. ‘Yes, there are other factors to be considered.’ Now Bannerman waited as du Maurier lit a cigarette. ‘Apart from the three or four clear prints on the gun Monsieur Slater was holding, the gun is clean. There are no other prints, no smudges. But more importantly Monsieur Slater, it would appear, was left-handed. It is very unlikely that he would be able to place a shot so accurately with his right hand.’ The smile was gone now, and he drew distractedly on his cigarette. ‘Also, the bullet that killed Monsieur Slater entered the heart centrally. Monsieur Gryffe, we discover, has owned a gun for many years but has never had any formal training in its use. A remarkable piece of shooting for two untrained men. And we must also consider that each shot would have been instantly fatal, so that unless they were fired at precisely the same instant the man who shot first would have survived. In addition we found a suitcase in a cupboard off the study. It contained two hundred and fifty thousand American dollars in used notes. And, of course, there was the attack of your own person in Monsieur Slater’s flat within an hour of the shooting, and whatever was taken from the safe, if anything.’

Bannerman frowned. ‘Murder?’

‘Ah, well, none of these things, either in themselves, or collectively, is conclusive. But they do raise the question.’

Bannerman tried to sort it all out in his mind through a haze of pain and fatigue. None of it seemed to make sense. ‘What about the child, Tania?’

Du Maurier pulled thoughtfully at the whiskers growing from his nostrils and stared into the darkness beyond the ring of light from the anglepoise. In the silence both men heard the soft slapping of the sleet against the window. At length the policeman turned his gaze on Bannerman and Bannerman wondered at his openness. ‘The child was only brought under control finally by the use of sedatives,’ du Maurier said. ‘We brought in the girl who normally looks after her...’

‘Sally.’

‘Yes, and one of the teachers from the child’s school. We tried to question her, but as you might imagine it was hopeless. She was sufficiently drugged to keep her calm, but she was totally withdrawn. There was no communication. We provided her with a pencil and pad in the hope that she might be able to write something, anything. But she refused even to take the pencil.’ He stopped and fumbled for another cigarette. ‘We left her alone in the room for, I would say, no more than half an hour while we had a brief conference. That was late this afternoon. We discussed the case with our police psychiatrist. He told us there was no hope of ever learning from the girl what had happened. He, in fact, suspected that the trauma of whatever it was she saw will probably have done irreparable damage to her mental state. Set her back years. It was decided that meantime she should be taken to a residential hospital for mentally handicapped children on the outskirts of Brussels, at least until her future is decided. The teacher from her school went back to fetch her and interrupted the child in the middle of this...’ He reached into his pocket and drew out a folded sheet of white paper. He held it out for Bannerman, and the reporter took it and opened it out.

It was a drawing. There was no shading in it. It was a line drawing whose perspective gave it depth. In the foreground the figure of a thin man in a long, heavy coat, was coming through a doorway. There were scribblings on the wall in the foreground that seemed to form a pattern. Perhaps wallpaper. Through the door, and behind the central figure, you could see a large stone or marble fireplace, part of an armchair, a framed picture on the wall with the sketch outline of a head. The drawing was strangely fine and yet distorted as you might see something through a fisheye lens — or a disturbed mind. There was something sinister in the foreground figure. It seemed to be stepping right out of the page. But most striking, was the man’s lack of facial detail. There was only the vague outline of the head and ears. Everything else was so finely observed, detail that you would not have thought a child capable of retaining, never mind reproducing. Bannerman was drawn by it, fascinated, confused. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

Du Maurier lit a third cigarette from his second one and blew a jet of smoke at the anglepoise. ‘The picture on the wall in the background,’ he said, ‘represents a head-and-shoulders portrait, a Rubens copy that hangs above a marble fireplace in Monsieur Gryffe’s house in the Rue de Pavie. If you stand in the cloakroom in the hall and look through the open door into the back room you can see almost exactly what the child has represented in the drawing, including part of the armchair. The scribblings on the foreground wall seem to represent the patterned paper in the hall. The drawing is uncannily accurate. I have just returned from the house after checking on it.’

Bannerman thought about it for a few moments. ‘And the face of the man?’

Du Maurier bowed his head. ‘Yes,’ he said bitterly. ‘If our meeting had lasted only a few minutes longer the child might have had time to complete the face. But she was interrupted before she had finished and nothing would make her go on. As you can see, almost everything else is so detailed. Buttons, pockets, hands. The girl, Sally, told us that the child often begins her drawings with an outline and then works inwards.’

Bannerman looked at the drawing again. It was hard to believe that it had come from the hand of an eleven-year-old. He looked up to find du Maurier watching him. ‘And who does the figure represent?’ he asked.

The Inspector stubbed out his cigarette and lit yet another. He sighed. ‘The man is of too slight a build to be Monsieur Gryffe, and the jawline is clearly drawn in, so it cannot be Monsieur Slater or surely she would have indicated the beard.’

‘So there was a third party.’

‘Possibly.’

‘Who didn’t know the child was there?’

‘Hmmm. I find that difficult to understand.’ Bannerman sat back and dropped the drawing on the desk. ‘Surely you can’t believe there wasn’t another man there? The man the child drew?

‘Then why didn’t he take the money?’

‘He didn’t know it was there.’

‘Then what was the motive?’

Bannerman had no answers, but already he knew he was being sucked into this whole thing, inextricably, whether he wanted to or not. He found it difficult to understand why du Maurier should be telling him all this. But the policeman broke into his thoughts almost as though he had been reading them. ‘You see, Monsieur Bannerman, this is not just a straightforward case of suspicious death. It involves a high-ranking British Government Minister and the affair must embarrass your Government when there is an election less than three weeks away. There could be moves, over my head, at a political level you understand, to close the case and simply let it die its own death.’ He hesitated for a second then took the plunge. ‘You see, there is no doubt in my mind that Monsieur Slater and Monsieur Gryffe were murdered. By whom or for what reason, I do not pretend to know. But I should not like to see the case closed, if you understand me.’ Bannerman watched him carefully. ‘Political expediency, Monsieur Bannerman, is as corrupt as murder. I am a policeman. It is my life. Politics, religion, whatever, are things in which I have no interest. I believe only in the law, the morality of the law, justice.’

Bannerman knew there was more to it than that. The man was being too precise in his reasoning. There was something else, something personal, something bitter in the tightness around du Maurier’s mouth. The policeman seemed to sense that Bannerman might be thinking something of the sort and he said, ‘I have called a press conference for seven thirty, in the conference room downstairs. I shall tell your colleagues most of what I have told you, though not all. I have had copies of the child’s drawing run off and they will be distributed to the press.’

Bannerman raised an eyebrow. ‘What about your bosses upstairs?’

Du Maurier smiled. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The machinery of political connivance grinds slowly. It will be a day, perhaps two, before the men of government step in. Meantime I shall proceed as I think best. I have had no instructions to the contrary.’ He looked at his watch and then stubbed out his cigarette. As he rose to his feet he said, ‘I think we had best go downstairs. Your colleagues await me.’

Bannerman sat at the back of the conference room. It was like a small lecture theatre with rows of fabric-covered seats stepped back in steep tiers. Du Maurier took the conference, accompanied by a younger, plainclothes man, in the glare of the television lights. A bank of microphones was mounted centrally on the rostrum for the dozen different radio and television stations that would give the deaths widespread European coverage. There were more than fifty scribes straining not to miss a word, scribbling their shorthand outlines in tattered notebooks, cigarettes tucked in the corners of mouths, eyes screwed up against the smoke, the occasional cough. Du Maurier delivered his terse statement in French and then English amid the heavy silence. He covered most of what he had told Bannerman, though in less detail, and as yet he had made no mention of the child or the drawing, or made any reference to Bannerman.

Then came the questions, thick and fast, confused in French and English.

‘Are you treating this as a murder case?’ — ‘At the moment we regard both deaths as suspicious.’

‘What was the journalist doing at Gryffe’s house?’ — ‘We do not know.’

‘Do you believe the motive was political or financial?’ — ‘We do not know.’

‘How were the bodies discovered?’ — ‘The alarm was raised when a passer-by heard a child screaming in the house.’

There were a few seconds of stunned silence, then a barrage of voices out of which no one question was distinguishable. Du Maurier raised his hands. ‘Monsieur Slater’s daughter was found in the house.’

‘She saw what happened?’ — ‘We do not know. The child is mentally handicapped. Autistic. She is unable to say.’

The excitement among the scribes had risen like a fever. Seats were being left, newsmen jostling for position, questions fired willy-nilly. They smelled a better story, though, my God, it was good enough. Bannerman imagined how tomorrow’s headlines would read. Already he could see excited reporters battering out copy on well-worn typewriters, dragging out the clichés, dreaming up the colour, the emotive catchlines and intros. Packaged and served up to be digested at breakfast along with the cornflakes.

‘How old is the girl? What’s her name?’ — ‘She is eleven years old. Her name is Tania.’ Du Maurier was impassive. He was making them work for it, orchestrating the conference, leading it in the direction he wished it to go.

‘Where can we get pics of the girl?’ — ‘No photographs.’

‘Oh, come on!’ A chorus of voices was raised in protest. Again du Maurier lifted his hands. ‘The child has been able to tell us nothing.’ He paused. ‘However, as a result of a drawing she made showing a man, clearly in the hall of the house in the Rue de Pavie, we are now working on the assumption that there was a third party involved.’ The silence was absolute. The possibilities were turning over in the minds of the scribes. Du Maurier lifted a folder from the bench and handed it to the young man beside him. ‘Copies of the drawing have been made. Monsieur Lousière will distribute a copy to each of you.’

Lousière fed the hands that reached out like the beaks of chicks stretching for food from their mother’s mouth. Bannerman watched with a vague distaste. There was something undignified about it all, but he was unable to separate himself from it. He was one of them, one of those who fed the ugly millions their daily diet of death, tragedy, sex and intrigue. He checked his bitterness and thought, cynicism is too easy. There is so much more to it than that. But right now, he still hurt in a lot of places and he took the easy option. Two men had died, a child had lost nearly all hope for the future, and all any bastard could think about was what a good story it would make. It didn’t touch any of them. The figures they wrote about were only cardboard clichés, not real people. It is always that way, he thought, when it does not touch you personally. And when you are a reporter it takes even more to pierce your hard shell to protect your human softness. You have no right to blame them. He remembered the years of chapping doors for collect pics — ‘And how do you feel about your son being killed, Mrs. Smith?’ Sometimes you got there before the police and while you broke the news you were searching out and removing every picture of the dead boy so that no other damned newspaper would get one. That was not how you wanted to do your job, but that was the way things were. Either you accepted that or you got out. No, he thought, I have no right to blame them. He took a copy of the drawing from Lousière. After all, he would do a story himself.

‘I am sorry. No more questions,’ du Maurier was saying. He collected his papers and began for the door. Immediately he was surrounded by the radio and television people. They all wanted their pounds of flesh; individual interviews, pics, the hope of more than the others had. ‘Why is there no face in the drawing?’ Bannerman heard a voice asking. Stiffly he pulled on his coat and pushed his way towards the door, a cigar clenched tightly between his teeth.

‘Bannerman, Bannerman!’ There was a hand on his shoulder. He turned to see Platt at his back. ‘Good God!’ Platt exclaimed. ‘You look as though you’ve been in the wars. What the hell happened to you?’

Bannerman glared at the small, shabby reporter who beamed at him with such false bonhomie. ‘None of your fucking business,’ he said. But Platt would not be deterred.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘We could maybe work out something together on this story. You knew Slater. I know Brussels.’

‘Piss off.’ Bannerman turned to go.

‘I’ve got good contacts,’ Platt shouted after him. But Bannerman was gone. Platt turned away angrily. Cocky bastard, he thought. He’ll come to me yet. He wondered again what Bannerman had been doing in Brussels. He couldn’t have known. And yet... he must know something. It would be a good idea to keep an eye on him. Yes, a good idea.

Outside, the temperature was still falling. The wind blew the wet sleet up the Rue des Quatre Bras into the darkness of the Place Poelaert, swirling around the foot of a tall, black monument. Bannerman stepped out across the cobbles, pulling his collar up, and headed down towards the lights of the Boulevard de Waterloo, crossing the tramlines, past a group of people huddled below a shelter at the tram stop. The cold reached him even through the thickness of his coat. He thought about the child, and felt deeply depressed. He remembered the night, only two days before, when she had come into his room, standing there in her nightdress watching him and then leaning over to touch his face. What horrors were there locked up inside that little head?

Inside a large fashionable restaurant, prosperous people were seated at tables round a huge open fire, drinking wine, laughing, untouched by it all. Bannerman looked in at them through the wide window and saw his drawn white face, patched with bruising, reflected in the glass. He turned away and crossed the boulevard and walked up to the Metro at the Porte de Namur. He rode the underground to Arts Loi and then changed for Schuman where he came out under the shadow of the Berlaymont. For several minutes he stood looking up at the endless rows of darkened windows, wondering if the answers might lie behind them. Then he began with heavy steps down the Rue de la Loi towards the Rue de Commerce.

Slater’s apartment was dark and still when he let himself in, and he half expected to find Slater sitting in the half-light of the living-room as he had two nights earlier. That seemed a long time ago now. The living room was cold and empty. He went into the child’s room and stood in the darkness. An old rag doll lay in the armchair by the dead fire. He bent over and picked it up. It was soft and pliable and he lifted it to hold against his face. Life was so unfair to those who deserved more. He threw the doll back in the chair and returned to the living room. He switched on the light and lifted the phone and began dialling wearily. The number rang three times. It had that distant hollow ring of an international call. ‘Edinburgh Post.’ The voice was polished thin by all the miles in between.

‘Neil Bannerman. Give me the editor.’

‘One moment Mr. Bannerman.’ A phone lifted a few seconds later.

‘Tait.’

‘Neil Bannerman.’

‘Jesus Christ, Bannerman! Why the hell have I not heard from you before now?’

III

Kale opened the shutters on the first light of morning and looked out on the cold, grey mist that hung over the city. He had his coat on already and his bag was packed and sitting on the end of the bed.

It had been a bad night with little sleep. He had dreamt of the long, cold dormitory, the voices of little boys crying huddled under the covers. The harsh discipline, the loneliness of the place; both had left their mark on him. But he had never cried as the others had. He had never bent to the authority of the housemasters. Rather, it had strengthened in him that which set him apart from others. The boys had known it, and so had the masters. He sensed their fear of him. They did not know how to cope with his sullen, silent rebellion against their establishment. The beatings, the solitary confinement, the withdrawal of privileges had all met with the same silent acceptance that so baffled them. The dark eyes that blazed such hatred; a boy who was only nine. Yes, it had all left its mark, and none of it had been without pain. But they would never know it.

He turned away from the window and lifted his bag from the bed. He was unsettled, anxious now to be away. However, there were still four hours to pass before he could collect the remainder of the money from the locker at the Gare du Midi. He left the room and got into a lift that hummed and clattered its way slowly down to reception. The desk clerk looked up as he swung the lift gate open.

‘Your bill, Monsieur?’ Kale nodded and laid his bag on the floor beside the desk. The clerk lifted the bill off a shelf behind him and pushed it across the counter. ‘Are you not having breakfast?’ Kale shook his head and the clerk shuffled uncomfortably as Kale counted out the notes from his wallet. The clerk had seen them come and go in an establishment like this, but this one was different. He created some kind of space around him. Something dark and vaguely sinister. But nothing you could put your finger on. His wallet was amply filled, but the clothes did not suggest money. The clerk noticed these things. When there is so much time in a day to get through, you begin to look for them. The button missing from the coat, the slightly frayed cuff.

Kale lifted his bag and turned away, but stopped as he noticed a rack with the morning papers. ‘How much?’ he asked nodding towards the rack.

‘Fifteen francs, monsieur.’

Kale lifted the top paper off the pile and felt a touch like icy fingers on the back of his neck. He stared numbly at the drawing that filled the top quarter of the front page across four columns. The doorway, the painting, the chair, the figure in the foreground. There was no face, but he recognised himself with a curious dry horror. The bold headline across a further four columns, read: L’HOMME SANS VISAGE — EST-IL L’ASSASSIN? He looked up to see the clerk watching him curiously. He dropped the paper on the desk. ‘Fifteen francs?’ The clerk nodded. Kale fished in his pocket for the money. He was loath to make conversation, but he had to know. ‘What’s the big story?’ he asked.

The clerk seemed surprised. He glanced at the paper and shrugged. ‘Two men were shot here in Brussels yesterday. The police think the man in the drawing may have been involved. It was drawn by a child in the house where it happened. But she is — what would you say — not right in the head. The police are not saying whether they think it was murder or not. But the papers don’t seem to have any doubt.’ He paused. ‘What’s your interest?’

Kale glared at him and dropped the fifteen francs on the counter. ‘None,’ he said. He lifted the paper and crossed the lobby, pushing open the glass doors and vanishing out into the street. The clerk watched him go and frowned as a tiny nagging thought entered his mind. He rounded the desk and lifted another paper, peering closely at the drawing. The figure was suddenly familiar. There was a button missing from the coat. Quite clearly it was intended. The gap was much bigger than the others. The same button that was missing from the Englishman’s coat. But how could the child have noticed such a small detail? The clerk scratched his head and returned to his seat behind the counter, taking the paper with him. He looked at it some more then looked at the card he had filled out with details of the Englishman’s passport. James Ross was the name he had written. A salesman. Again the clerk frowned and scratched his head. But then, he thought, it was none of his business.

The Gare du Midi was busy. Passengers stood around in knots in the big arrival hall watching the boards for arrivals and departures. A thin, metallic voice made announcements alternately in French and Flemish. Neither meant anything to Kale. He was seated on a wooden bench at the foot of a wide pillar from where he could see through glass doors and along a short corridor to the left luggage lockers. It was not yet eleven thirty, but he had sat here for nearly an hour in the hope of seeing whoever it was who would leave the money, if that had not already been done. The time had dragged painfully slowly, so that all the uncertainty of what was in the newspaper had had time to grow in his mind. Over and over again he had thought about the drawing, stared at it. How was it possible there had been a child in the house without his knowing it? He had remembered the cloakroom. She could have been in there. But it seemed too incredible; or perhaps, he thought, it is only that you don’t want to believe it. He felt certain that no-one could recognise him from the drawing. Only the child could know what he looked like, and she was mentally handicapped.

He had struggled through the story in the paper, trying to make sense of it from the little French that he knew. But it was possible. All that he had got from it was the girl’s name; the daughter of the other man he had killed. He swore softly to himself. Things had not gone well at all. The sooner he got out of this damned country the better.

A stream of passengers emerged from platform six, partially obscuring his view of the glass doors. In that moment he saw a figure at the lockers. A figure he recognised. The white hair of a working man in city clothes. He jumped up and pushed his way through the passengers. Someone shouted at him and he stumbled and felt a hand on his shoulder. He shrugged himself free and ran towards the glass doors. The figure was gone. He hurried down the corridor to the lockers. There was no sign of the man. Where the hell could he have gone? He looked back up the corridor towards the bodies that milled past on the other side of the doors. Gone. Breathlessly he took out his key and turned back to the lockers. Number thirty-nine. He fumbled at the lock and pulled open the door. The black case he had left there yesterday was gone. In its place a white envelope that was neither big enough nor fat enough to contain the money he was owed. He ripped it open with trembling fingers and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. There were three words printed across it in a tight, neat hand. KILL THE CHILD.