The Martyr’s Curse

Chapter Twenty-One

Ben had a way to walk before he was able to thumb a lift from a passing car. His rescuers were two elderly and quite batty sisters in a Renault 5 who obviously weren’t afraid of picking up lone male hitch-hikers carrying military haversacks, somewhat dusty and battered and smelling faintly of petrol and smoke. Ben smiled and tried not to look like someone who’d just disposed of a dead body in the woods. The only occupant of the Renault who seemed suspicious of him was the cantankerous white miniature poodle who sat guarding him in the back seat and bared its teeth at his every move.

After listening politely to their life stories for a dozen kilometres, Ben parted ways with the sisters on the edge of the village where they lived. They drove off with big smiles and waved goodbyes, and he watched the Renault disappear before setting off in search of a bus stop. His map told him he was still sixteen kilometres from Briançon, which was where he was headed on his next set of errands.

He found the bus stop and spent half an hour waiting on a bench in the sunshine, hunched forward with his elbows on his knees and his bag between his feet, systematically working his way through the pack of Gauloises. They tasted good, and he needed the lift they gave him. By the time the silver Autocars Resalp coach finally rolled up the dusty road and halted by the stop with a squish of airbrakes, he was buzzing and light-headed from the nicotine. He flicked away his half-smoked cigarette, boarded the bus and settled in a vacant window seat near the back, then closed his eyes and didn’t open them again until he was in Briançon.

The town’s main bus station was a busy place, the hub of routes radiating in all directions, to Grenoble and Avignon, all the way north to Paris, south-eastward into Italy and north-eastward into Switzerland. Ben made his way to the exit through the crowd of travellers and headed on foot towards the centre of town. His bruises ached and the weight of the bullion in his bag was pulling on his shoulder. His body was telling him he was hungry, but he had no stomach for food.

He soon found the place that was to be his first port of call. The office supplies store was empty, cool and airy. Beyond the racks of shelves for computer sundries and print cartridges and stationery, various kinds of paper and packaging materials, there was a separate workstation area offering do-it-yourself photocopy and fax services. The shop was staffed by a young woman with a pleasant smile and shoulder-length fair hair. Hers evidently wasn’t a very busy job, as Ben could tell from the half-read romance novel propped open on the desk in front of her. He smiled back and did his best to look friendly and inoffensive.

He bought the thinnest sheaf of plain white general-purpose office paper he could find on the shelf, a black permanent marker pen and a little set comprising a stamp and inkpad. He asked if he could use the workstation, and the pleasant young woman said that of course he could, showed him a sheet of tariffs and gave him brief instructions on how to use the all-singing, all-dancing combined photocopier and fax machine.

He walked over to where the machine sat just below chest height on a worktop surface and dumped his bag at his feet, glad to be relieved of its weight for a couple of minutes. It had been a while since he’d used technology like this, but he knew more or less what he was doing. The copier was a large cream-coloured plastic cube with rounded edges and a top lid that opened to expose the flat glass scanner screen. He flipped it up to hide behind, then dug nonchalantly in his pocket, took out five sausage-sized packages rolled in absorbent paper towel and laid them in a little row on the worktop. Then he opened the stamp and inkpad set and placed it beside them. He wouldn’t be requiring the stamp, only the pad, which was just a rectangle of some kind of felt material soaked in black ink. He tested it with his fingertip. It was moist and his finger came away stained black. He wiped it on his jeans. Next, he opened up the thin sheaf of office paper, drew out a single sheet and laid it down beside the other items. Finally, he took out the phone he’d inherited, turned it on and scrolled through the menu to bring up its own number.

So far, so innocuous.

Before he went any further, he glanced over the top edge of the open lid at the woman behind the counter and saw that she was engrossed in her romance novel and not paying him any attention. He unrolled the first package.

The severed finger was pale and bloodless. The small amount of fluid that had leaked from its raw end had been absorbed into the paper. Index finger, right hand. Ben casually picked it up, like the uneaten cold chipolata left over from last night’s barbecue. He pressed the fingertip into the pad, made sure it was good and inky, then carefully applied it to the paper, rolling it gently left and right the way cops did when they were fingerprinting suspects. Lifting it away, he saw that it had made a pretty good impression, the minute lines and grooves and whorls showing up neatly on the paper. One down, four to go. He replaced the ink-stained finger in its wrapping, laid it to one side and moved on to the next, and repeated the operation until he had a row of prints that any jailhouse duty officer would be proud of. One hand was enough, for his purposes.

As he waited a moment for the ink to dry, he noticed the shop assistant glancing up from her book and smiling at him. He smiled back. This could turn into a beautiful friendship. He picked up the marker pen and wrote in capitals beneath the line of prints: THE LONE WOLF SAYS HELLO. Below that, he copied out the number of the phone.

He placed the sheet on the scanner, made sure it was properly squared up, then lowered the lid. Took out his wallet and riffled through the pocket containing the various business cards he’d collected over the years, found the one he wanted and slipped it out. It had been waiting in there for a long time. The top right corner of the card bore a little emblem of a blue globe nestling in a laurel wreath, superimposed over a set of golden scales and pierced vertically by a golden sword. The scales and sword of justice: at least, that was the principle. It was the emblem of Interpol. The name on the card was Commissioner Luc Simon.

Luc Simon was that rarest of creatures, a senior police officer whom Ben had worked with and come away liking and respecting. When Ben had first crossed paths with him, Simon had been a simple Detective Inspector in Paris. Nowadays he was well up the food chain and riding a desk somewhere on the top floor of the Interpol HQ in Lyon, almost exactly a hundred miles north-west of Briançon. His promotion hadn’t come as any surprise to Ben at the time: the guy wasn’t just a flashy dresser. He was as skilled and clever and rigorous as they came. Good-looking bastard, too, oozing Gallic charm like a leading man from the heyday of French cinema.

It had been Luc Simon who’d once said to Ben, ‘Men like us are lone wolves.’ He hadn’t been talking about solitary lupine predators; he’d been talking about their dealings with women, and the sad plight of men whose difficult occupations and single-minded direction in life seemed to doom them to eternal bad luck and trouble when it came to relationships. Luc had been having marital troubles back in those days. Ben knew the feeling.

Lone wolf. He had never forgotten that conversation, and he was pretty sure that Luc would remember it, too.

Luc Simon was the one cop in the world Ben would turn to at a moment like this. If not for help, then for information. There was a fax number in tiny print at the foot of the card. Ben keyed it into the machine, pressed the button the woman had instructed him to press, and the technology went into action. There was some humming and clicking from the works, and then a message appeared on the digital readout to tell him his fax was winging its way to the recipient. He lifted the lid, pulled out the sheet of paper and folded it into his wallet. Gathered up his stuff, paid for the fax, exchanged a last smile with the nice young woman behind the desk and stepped back out into the sunshine.

He dumped the fingers and the stationery in a waste bin up the street.