The Predators

CHAPTER TWO

They usually got frightened during a drive as long as this, crying, wetting themselves. Hysterical. But this one didn’t. Rather, she was defiantly unafraid – arrogantly unafraid – and Felicite, a constant seeker for anything new, anything not tried before, was excited. Would the child fight, later? None of the others had ever tried, not seriously. Hysteria gave way to cowed, bewildered acceptance: submissive apathy. Boring. It really would be exciting if this one fought back. Defied them. She was small, maybe no older than eight, although that would have been very young to be walking by herself. The prime requirement, to be as young as possible: young but aware. Hair – good, lustrous hair – in plaits. Oscar Wilde’s hair: All her bright golden hair tarnished with rust, She that was young and fair fallen to dust. Felicite mouthed the creed, part of her article of faith. This child’s hair was golden, tarnished by a suggestion of redness. Pity about all that metal clamped in her mouth. Proof, if it were needed, that Mary Beth McBride was an American. Why did all American children have to have the output of a steel mill in their mouths? Never had an American child before. Have to get rid of the brace.

Felicite reached out, to stroke Mary’s cheek, but the girl jerked away although still without fear: it was an impatient, irritated movement. ‘Where are we going?’

‘I told you, an adventure.’

‘I want to go back to Brussels. Now!’

‘If you’re a naughty girl I’ll slap you.’ Part of the fun, the control. The best part. She’d make her cry. Plead. But not now. Too soon now. When she chose to. Maybe just the slightest correction.

‘No one slaps me!’

‘I might. Be careful.’ An idea was forming in Felicite’s mind, a new fantasy. It would give her the sort of absolute, supreme control she’d never had before. Her very own marionette show: a jumping, contorting cast of dozens, if not hundreds, performing to her will as she pulled the strings.

‘I have already told you my name is Mary Beth McBride and that my father is the American ambassador to Belgium!’

‘I heard you.’ So had Henri Cool. Felicite knew he wasn’t excited, as she was, sufficiently aroused for her voice to be fragile. He was scared, very scared, driving erratically out of Brussels until she’d warned him. He was driving erratically again now. ‘You’re going too fast,’ she said sharply. ‘What the hell’s wrong with you!’

He slowed, but only just to within the limit. ‘We’ve made a mistake. We’ve got to get… to do something about it.’

‘Shut up!’ snapped Felicite, wondering how good the American girl’s French was.

‘Take me back to Brussels immediately!’ demanded Mary again, in English, giving the woman no indication of her language comprehension.

Felicite managed to pat Mary’s leg, before the child pulled away. ‘Don’t be a silly girl.’

‘You’ll get into dreadful trouble, both of you.’

Cool took the Beveren road, better to bypass Antwerp, but too abruptly. The tyres screeched, the rear of the car sliding slightly. Felicite said: ‘Almost there now.’ To the man at the wheel, whose eyes were more often in the rearview mirror than on the road in front, she said: ‘I told you to slow down!’

‘Do something! Get us out of this!’ said Cool. His voice was cracked.

‘I make the decisions. You do the driving. So drive.’

‘What’s your name?’ Mary demanded of the woman at the opposite end of the seat.

Felicite laughed. ‘I know yours but you can’t know mine. It’s my secret.’

‘I know what you are! What you’re going to do!’ This was an adventure. Much better than riding the Metro.

‘Do you?’ smiled Felicite, aware of Henri’s startled reflection.

‘My father will pay. He’s very rich.’

The woman’s smile widened; the child’s remark chimed with the idea that had already occurred to her. ‘Of course he’ll pay for someone as pretty as you.’

‘So you understand?’ demanded the child.

‘Totally.’

‘I meant what I said, about no one slapping me.’

‘I’m sure you did.’

‘So don’t forget!’ Abruptly, reading the signpost as they passed, she said: ‘Antwerp. Is that where we’re going?’

‘To a big house on the river. You’ll like it.’

‘I won’t.’

‘We’ll see.’

The child looked away, to stare out of the car. The rain had started almost as soon as they left Brussels and the clouds were thicker, heavier, nearer the coast, ushering in the night-time darkness. Felicite lounged back, as far away on the seat as she could get, studying the girl’s mirrored image in the window glass. It was a good idea: would be an experience she hadn’t enjoyed before but had to savour now she’d thought of it, as she had to taste every forbidden fruit. The others probably wouldn’t like it – they’d be frightened, like Henri – but they’d do as they were told, as they always did. She’d have to rearrange things with the estate agent in Namur. And speak to Eindhoven and Lille to tell them everything was postponed. Simple reorganization. She was good at organization. That’s why everyone had been so happy – relieved – for her to take over, after Marcel’s death. Yes! Felicite decided. She’d definitely do it.

Cool was forced to slow by the volume of traffic on his back-street negotiation around Antwerp but it wasn’t until he was almost clear of the city that he was brought to a positive halt at traffic lights. Felicite didn’t move when Mary snatched for the door handle, exaggerating her laugh at the child’s helpless yanking on the useless, unconnected lever. The woman did react, though, when Mary opened her mouth to scream. Sure of not being seen from the outside, rain-sodden gloom, she lashed out, hard, before the cry was formed, catching the unsuspecting girl fully in the face to strangle the sound into a whimpering gasp, as much of astonishment as of pain.

‘I told you I’d slap you, didn’t I?’ said Felicite casually, as the flat grey ribbon of the sluggish Schelde river broke occasionally to their left through the vast skeletal forest of cranes and container rigs of the port. ‘You’ve got lessons to learn. Rules to obey.’

Mary glared malevolently across at her, lips tight against any blood leaking from the split inside her lip and cheek.

‘You’re still not going to cry, are you?’ demanded Felicite hopefully.

‘No,’ Mary allowed herself, tongue against the cut. The blood tasted nasty: metallic.

‘I’m going to enjoy you,’ said the woman. ‘Enjoy you a lot.’

Mary didn’t understand the remark and couldn’t think of anything to say, although she wanted to, so she tightened her mouth again. She was very proud of not crying, despite the pain in her mouth where the brace had cut. She didn’t have anything really to cry about: be frightened of. Dad would pay. And he’d punish them. He had men to do that: men with things like hearing aids in their ears and sometimes little knobs pinned to their jacket lapels that they talked into. She’d have to be careful not to miss anything out, when she got back to school. It really would be difficult for the rest of the class to believe.

The beach house wasn’t really on a beach, although there was a shoreline and shingle and a bathing hut collapsing from neglect and the constant battering from North Sea winds. The main building was just short of the Dutch border where the river fanned out into the Westerschelde, isolated by at least two kilometres from its nearest neighbour, a major consideration for its use. Its basement encompassed and utilized, with specific modifications, the impregnable blockhouse constructed by the Nazis in the Second World War to protect such an essential waterway.

The North Sea gale was driving the rain horizontally by the time the Mercedes reached the three-storey, shutter-protected house in front of which three other cars, all Mercedes, already stood. Henri Cool had to stand against the rear door to hold it open to release Felicite and the child. As she got out, Mary was caught by the force of the wind and became entangled in the straps of her backpack; she would have fallen completely if the woman hadn’t grabbed her. Wide-armed and protective, Cool propelled them towards the house.

In its lee the wind was only slightly less fierce, and still more than enough to defeat the sudden dash that Mary had intended. She didn’t even try, allowing herself instead to be shepherded through the unlocked door into the vaulted, high-ceilinged entrance hall. The relief was abrupt and disorientating – Felicite and Mary staggered afresh without the need to brace themselves against the storm – although the wind continued to hammer at the closed shutters as if trying to get at them.

Felicite still clutched Mary, a hand on each of the child’s shoulders. She hurried her across the hall, not giving her the chance to recover. Alongside, Cool had the basement door already open. Mary was gasping, finding it difficult to breathe, when they got to the bottom of the stairs.

She stood there, trembling from the cold wetness but still, she told herself, not from fear. She felt, instead, bewilderment and she did her best to hide that too, not wanting the woman who had hit her to misunderstand: not wanting to give her any satisfaction.

It was a huge room extending the length and width of the house, which was in effect a lid put over the entire original German bunker. Its metre-thick concrete, concealed now behind lighter wood panelling than that in the upstairs hall, totally silenced the outside tempest. More important, it contained any sound from what now regularly occurred inside, making its remoteness from neighbours unnecessary. The floor was thickly carpeted, too, except for the very centre where there was a cleared wooden circle, for dancing. The ceiling was entirely glassed. There were lounging divans around three walls. Dominating the fourth was a huge television or movie screen. On either side there were five separate doors. All were closed. Two were solid, their only break an eye-level sliding metal viewing strip. Both were shuttered. In the furthest corner was an array of music-playing equipment, incongruously surrounded by disco and strobe lights. It was very warm – almost too hot – and there was a cloying, perfumed smell.

Mary shivered, for the first time positively uncertain. Quickly she said: ‘I’m cold. My clothes are wet.’

‘It’s too warm here for you to be cold. But take your clothes off if they’re uncomfortable.’ There was harshness in the woman’s voice.

‘No,’ the child said quickly, more through instinct than understanding.

‘We’ve got to talk to the others,’ insisted Cool impatiently, at the doorway.

‘We don’t want her to catch cold, in wet clothes.’

‘Come on!’ protested the man.

Felicite hesitated before shrugging reluctantly. She grabbed Mary’s arm again, holding too tightly, thrusting her towards the blank, peep-holed doors. ‘This is the room where we play games…’ she said as they scurried across it. She opened the door to the left, pushing the child through. ‘… and this is where you’re going to live.’

There were five men waiting in the upstairs room they entered minutes later and the excited expectation was palpable.

‘We saw you arrive,’ said Jean Smet. ‘She’s pretty.’

‘There’s a problem,’ blurted Cool.

The atmosphere was still palpable but very different from when they had entered. Felicite sprawled in the huge, encompassing chair she’d adopted as her own – her throne – when they used this house, not trying to hide her contempt at their instant response to what they had been told.

There were six men in the group that Marcel had brought together, a disparate gathering with only their sexual predilection in common. None, in fact, particularly liked each other. Jean Smet and Michel Blott were lawyers, Smet usefully in the Justice Ministry, Blott in richly rewarding private practice. August Dehane was a senior executive in Belgian state telecommunications, Belgacom, and Henri Cool, who had just identified Mary McBride as an ambassador’s daughter, was a deputy headmaster. Gaston Mehre ran an antique gallery in Antwerp and provided a home – and protection – for his mentally retarded brother, Charles. It was Charles who maintained the beach house when they were using it, a willing slave to them all. He was also the most unpredictably dangerous.

‘No. Definitely no,’ said Smet, leading the opposition. He was a tall, thin, smooth-skinned man whose receding hair was greased straight back from a long-ago forehead.

‘Yes,’ insisted Felicite mildly. The side of the lounge to her left, overlooking the river, was glass and the shutters weren’t closed. It was double glazed, keeping out most of the sound, but the waves churned and crashed to the boundary wall, throwing up spray against the outside pane. Idly, with no intention of provoking any of the men – with all of whom, except Charles Mehre, she’d had sex – Felicite unbuttoned her shirt. She was not wearing a bra and just as casually as she’d unfastened the shirt she began massaging her nipples.

‘She’s seen us, you and me,’ protested Cool, a burly, disordered man whose clothes never fitted. ‘She could identify us. And she was paying attention to how we got here, from Antwerp. I saw her in the mirror.’

‘Who said anything about letting her go?’ demanded the woman.

‘Henri’s right,’ said Blott, a glandularly fat man whose eyes blinked in constant nervousness behind wire-framed glasses. ‘It was a mistake, easily made. It’s no one’s fault. But now she should be killed.’

There was no shock from any of them at the easy insistence upon murdering a child, as there hadn’t been when Cool and Dehane had made the same demand earlier. A year before a boy they’d snatched had died during a party in the house. Since then they had used child prostitutes, usually brought in from Amsterdam. Perhaps, she conceded, the idea upon which she was by now quite determined stemmed from the excitement she’d got then, knowing she was being hunted but always able to evade suspicion or capture because of how cleverly Smet had inveigled himself. Which he could do again now.

‘She knows we’re near Antwerp?’ asked Gaston Mehre.

‘She read a sign out when we passed it,’ confirmed Cool, taking off yet again thick-lensed, heavy-framed spectacles for another unnecessary polish.

‘Then it’s madness to keep her alive,’ said Dehane. He was a slightly built, self-effacing man always eager to follow where others led.

‘It’s an unnecessary danger,’ agreed Gaston Mehre. He and Charles had been born just nine months and seven days apart, both red-haired, their features practically matching, even to identically twisted teeth. It was Charles who had been with the rent boy when he’d died. He’d badly hurt another young male prostitute three months earlier.

‘What danger?’ said Felicite. ‘She’s in a cell, where she’s going to stay. And we can’t be traced to the house in which she’s being held.’ It had been Felicite’s idea that the houses they used should be owned by others with the same interests who lived in conveniently close neighbouring countries. The Antwerp beach house was registered in the name of Pieter Lascelles, a sixty-year-old Eindhoven surgeon. Georges Lebron, a parish priest in Lille, owned the country cottage near Herentals where the Dutch met, and Felicite had a bigger house at Goirle for larger parties.

‘James McBride is the American ambassador!’ implored Smet. ‘It’s his daughter downstairs! You can’t imagine what sort of outcry there’s going to be.’

‘Which is precisely why it’s going to be so exciting!’ said Felicite.

‘Before, it was the son of a bankrupt Jewish shopkeeper in Ghent and the investigation was handled by police who would have been overstrained by a bicycle theft!’ argued Smet. ‘This won’t be anything like that. This will be enormous!’

‘You’re just going to have to be as clever as you were last time,’ smiled Felicite, enjoying the man’s terror. She wondered if she would ever weary of the weakness of these men; the ease of manipulating them. She knew Marcel was becoming increasingly bored just before his heart attack. She still missed Marcel, not only for the loss of the sexual avenues along which he’d led her. Marcel would have seen the thrill – the pleasure – in what she wanted to do: might have tolerated this dispute, as she was tolerating it, but wouldn’t have allowed it to go on for so long.

‘What’s the point!’ demanded Dehane.

‘It’s something we haven’t done before,’ said Felicite simply.

‘The thought doesn’t excite me,’ said the lawyer.

‘Nor me,’ said Cool.

‘But it does me,’ insisted Felicite. ‘I got her. I decide what we do with her. And I’ve decided that before the party at which our ambassador’s little daughter will eventually be the star I’m going to organize the perfect crime, a kidnap.’

‘It’s an insane idea,’ protested Smet. ‘I won’t have it.’

‘You won’t have it?’ challenged Felicite, recognizing her moment.

‘Please!’ muttered the tall man, in immediate retreat.

‘I want you to do what you did before…’ She switched to Dehane. ‘And you must make it impossible for them to trace us when we start making our demands. It’s your chance, August, to show us all how clever you are…’

She let her voice trail, looking around the assembled men, determined to end the dispute. ‘Who’s the link with Lille, taking the risks no one else does?’

No one spoke immediately. Then Smet said: ‘You are.’

‘And with Eindhoven?’

‘You,’ said the Justice Ministry lawyer.

‘What would happen to all of you if I abandoned you?’

Gaston said: ‘Please don’t do that.’

‘Jean?’ she persisted.

Smet shrugged. ‘It’s a good group.’

‘Which you don’t want broken up?’

‘No,’ he conceded weakly.

‘Good!’ said Felicite briskly. ‘So we’re agreed about what I want to do?’

Their ‘Yes’ came as a muted chorus.

Pieter Lascelles said the postponement was unfortunate: his friends had been looking forward to it.

‘It won’t be for long,’ Felicite promised. ‘You’ll love what I’ve found in Namur. An actual medieval castle, with turrets and towers. And dungeons!’

‘How long?’ asked the surgeon.

‘A couple of weeks, that’s all.’

She gave the same reply to Georges Lebron. The priest said: ‘We’ll wait before we choose someone then. We don’t want to attract attention.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Felicite. ‘Do that.’

Hans Doorn, the Namur estate agent with whom Felicite had agreed the rental of what was, in fact, a sixteenth-century chateau, said he hoped it was only a postponement. Felicite reminded him that he already had the deposit. Doorn, reassured, hoped to hear from her soon. Felicite promised he would.