The Last Witness

PROLOGUE

April 4 th, Montreal, Canada.

There are times when all hope seems lost. When every precept and foundation previously held as true seems to have been torn down or to have faded into insignificance, and all that surrounds and lies ahead is grey desolation. And while those feelings may not last long, perhaps only moments, when they hit they are all-consuming, they form a high, impenetrable wall beyond which nothing else can be seen.

Elena Waldren was gripped by such dark contemplation, darker than she’d ever known before, as she sat parked in Montreal’s Rue St-Urbain, thousands of miles from her home in Dorset, on probably the most important quest of her forty-five years, her passenger a ten year-old Romanian girl who at one time had been as close as her own daughter, though had become practically a stranger the past two years. She shook her head; that was part of the problem right there. But she couldn’t keep them all under her wings forever.

She’d pulled in hurriedly to the side, and the afternoon traffic flowed past, becoming heavier now towards the rush hour. Rain pattered against her windscreen, slanting slightly with a fresh breeze off the St Lawrence. Elena remained oblivious to everything beyond her own thoughts, her head buried in the crook of her right arm braced against the steering wheel.

How could she have been so wrong about everything? She’d always thought she’d seen so much, lived so many roller-coaster troughs and peaks, that there could be few surprises left; the one advantage of the over-forties. And now in only two days, half of her past had been completely re-written.

‘Are you okay?’ Lorena asked.

‘Yes… I just need a minute. I’ll be fine.’ Fine? The police wire had been out for a while now, probably since their trail through France, and no doubt soon her face would be on TV news bulletins. And for what? Her own quest now at a dead-end, and the danger that had led her to take such drastic action and drag young Lorena on this odyssey — as so many people kept telling her all along — was probably imagined. For the first time Elena woke up to just how much she was out of her depth: she was just an aid worker from a backwater Dorset village home shared with her pipe-smoking, unassuming husband and two children; running the gauntlet with police across two continents was far removed from any past experience she could draw upon.

But at least she now knew his name: Georges Donatiens. Twenty-nine years, and she’d missed him by only days. Never to be seen again. Cruel fate. All she had, or would ever have, was his name on a scrap of paper and the few brief reminiscent stories from the Donatiens.

‘Georges. Georges Donatiens.’ She whispered the name almost as an incantation, as if that might suddenly bring a clearer image to mind beyond the few stark, smiling photos she’d scanned at the Donatiens’. Something to help fill that twenty-nine year void. She felt nothing now but cold and empty, and she braced her head firmer into her arm to quell her body’s trembling. Tears were close, but she swallowed hard, biting them back. Lorena had been through enough, half of it imagined or not, to see her now so distressed.

She took a fresh breath and sighed it out. It would probably have been just as bad if she had met him, started to sow the first seeds of attachment, only for him then to be taken brutally away. Either way, the pain now would have been the same.

She started to shake off her dark mood, lift her head — but Lorena’s muttered ‘Ele!..’ and her suddenly aware of a figure by the car, made her look up sharper: brown uniform, one hand by the gun holster, the other reaching out.

The RCMP officer tapped at her window, signalling for her to wind it down.