The stolen motorbike Henrik rode out of Lyon was powerful enough, though hardly the best vehicle for the wintry terrain – at least, without specialist clothing. He had a helmet but only his normal clothes and winter coat, and the wind blasted against him as he traveled along the snaking, mountainous roads back toward St Ricard.
Why was he there and not in Lyon?
Having persuaded the police – who corralled everyone inside that building to the lobby for ‘sorting’ – that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and gave them his best innocent child look, he’d initially headed back to the Jeep, but Ryker hadn’t been there. He waited. But nerves got the better of him.
He’d left the Jeep and hidden. He’d seen Ryker arrive back there. He’d kind of known Ryker would be okay. The man had a knack for survival, that was for sure. But Henrik hadn’t shown himself. Instead, satisfied that Ryker was safe, he’d left Lyon altogether. For more than one reason.
He liked Ryker. He respected him. He looked up to him. In many ways, Henrik needed Ryker, who’d protected him from harm time and time again. But James Ryker also attracted trouble. It’s how the two of them had met in the first place. And what Henrik had witnessed tonight in that tower block…
He didn’t want to think about that. Ever.
He liked Ryker. He hadn’t abandoned him for good. He’d find him when he needed to. Eventually, he hoped they’d ride away from this place together. But for now, he’d carry on alone. For his own safety, and hopefully for Ryker’s too. As a child, an unassuming one too, Henrik knew he could move more easily, more freely than Ryker. People were less suspicious of him, they noticed him less.
And, honestly, he liked the idea of not having to answer to anyone.
Sunrise remained a couple of hours away as Henrik arrived on the outskirts of St Ricard. The streets were deathly quiet, most of the usually twinkling string lights turned off for the night. Henrik parked the motorbike and trekked up the frozen path into the mountain, shivering badly. Using nothing but the moonlight in the clear sky above, he eventually found the spot in the woods where he and Ryker had left their backpacks… When was that? Barely twenty-four hours ago. He could scarcely believe how much they’d been through in such a short space of time. How many people they’d aggravated and now wanted to do them harm.
Would all that have been avoided if Henrik had done everything his way from the start?
He moved further up the mountain. Not as far as the ridge, but far enough to be well away from the town. He set up a fire, got it going. Didn’t bother to pitch his tent. Instead, he climbed into his sleeping bag right next to the warm flames.
It took a while for his shivering to wane. His eyes remained open. He was tired. About as tired as he could ever remember being in his life. But, as he lay there in the dark, frozen forest, the wind gently whistling around him, branches creaking and cracking, he realized he was also very, very alone.
Despite himself, regret bubbled away in his gut now as he thought about Ryker, and wondered where his friend was.
As he struggled to find sleep, he really wished he had Ryker – his protector – by his side after all.
* * *
Two, maybe three hours of shut-eye. Not much, really, but certainly better than nothing. Henrik didn’t wake with the sunrise feeling refreshed, but he was at least warmer than he’d been after that frigid journey from Lyon. And he was safe, despite the feeling of loneliness which somehow hadn’t left him even when he’d drifted off.
Still, that feeling dissipated with daylight, and as he stretched and then packed up his belongings, he pushed thoughts of Ryker to the back of his mind once more. He had work to do.
He tucked his backpack in the hiding place next to Ryker’s. The spot was easy enough to find again, and, as they’d decided the very first time they put their things there, it was easier to move around the town without the bulk.
Next stop was a patisserie in the town. The first shop that opened. His belly growled viciously as he paid for the pastries. The young shop assistant – well, older than him, but probably only mid-twenties – gave him a warm and welcoming smile. No hint that she had any clue who Henrik was. No hint that she saw any kind of threat in him whatsoever, despite the fact the police had run him and Ryker out of town not long ago.
He stepped out of the shop feeling ever more sure of his decision to come back here alone.
He only took one more step before he stopped and dove into the paper bag and took out the still-warm pain au chocolat. He devoured it in four hungry but satisfying bites. He ate the next two pastries on the move, his belly overly full by the time he’d finished. Perhaps he’d overdone it, but he’d been so hungry…
He spotted the Gendarmerie patrol car turn into the street ahead. He scrunched the empty paper bag in his hand and tossed it into a trash can as he walked. Kept his eyes straight ahead, but watched the car with his peripheral vision. He didn’t let up his pace. Didn’t deviate. Just kept on going. As did the patrol car. Soon it passed him without incident. Henrik smiled to himself.
The walk from there took him forty-five minutes. More secluded even than Monique Thibaud’s grand home, the house where her brother and his family had lived was nearly a mile along a twisting private road that rose high into the hills surrounding St Ricard. Tire marks had created wide gouges in the snow on the road, no signs of footprints, though the heavily compacted snow, which had obviously iced over several times during cold nights, was too hard for Henrik’s modest weight to leave an impression. Had other people walked up here?
He rounded a bend and the stone-built villa came into view. Handsome, but not as big as Monique’s. There was no perimeter wall here, only a set of wrought-iron gates, hedges on either side. The gates had no locks and Henrik opened them and slipped through the gap then paused as he looked over the house.
Clearly abandoned. The front door still had police tape splashed across it, though the tape was torn where the door had since been reopened. The windows were all boarded up – to prevent squatters, Henrik presumed, though he didn’t imagine there were many of those around here.
As he looked on, he wondered why the house had been left like this. Months had passed since the murders. The house wasn’t for sale, and Henrik really didn’t know how many people would want a house where such a brutal crime had taken place anyway, but why hadn’t Sophie Thibaud come back here after she’d been rescued? Had she wanted to but her aunt had forbidden it?
He didn’t trust Monique Thibaud at all. She was hiding something. Not only did she know more about the attacks than she’d told him and Ryker but she also knew more about Sophie’s disappearance.
Perhaps he’d make her farmhouse his next stop today?
Maybe. There was also one other person he wanted to see.
He carried on toward the house, his eyes busy as he moved. To his right the snow-covered field rolled out and down into a valley, giving a far-reaching view over the Alps. Behind the house and to his left the frozen gardens were surrounded by dense pine forest. Within those forests – about a mile away – lay the spot where Sophie and her family had been taken. Where Sophie’s parents and brother had been executed. Where Sophie had fled. Perhaps he’d trek out that way.
He reached the front door. Tried the handle with his gloved hand. Locked.
He moved around the side of the house. Boards were nailed and screwed in place over every window. Secure. He kept going, past a side door that was similarly boarded, to the back of the house where he found boarded-over patio doors. A couple of windows too.
Wait. The patio doors. They were boarded over, but the bottom of the two boards fixed over the right-hand door sat proud of the wood above it ever so slightly. Misalignment, or…
He pulled at the corner of the wood. The screws remained in place in the board, but they were loose in the door. The board had been prized off then simply pushed back into place.
Henrik took the wood with both hands and pulled it off and set it to the side. He tried the door handle. Locked. And no sign of forced entry. The rectangular panes of the glass were all intact.
Henrik sighed as he thought. Then he strode across the snow to the trees. Grabbed the first thick branch he found on the ground. Strode back. He paused a few steps from the house and looked over the snow-covered lawn. Plenty of little indentations there from birds, foxes perhaps. Plenty of remnants of footprints too. Even though this place was boarded up now, there’d no doubt been plenty of people here over the last few weeks – police, family, reporters – roaming around. He looked behind him at the two neat trails of prints he’d left – by far the freshest he could see.
Whatever.
He walked back up to the patio doors and crouched down. He swung the log back and smacked it against the glass. Nothing. He tried again with more vigor. The glass cracked but remained in place. He hit it again, again, again. Finally, the glass gave way and he used the log to clear the remains away from the edges. Then, hands first, Henrik pulled himself through the small gap. Small, but easily big enough to accommodate his frame.
Ryker’s? Probably not, Henrik thought with a smile.
He rose up inside the house. It was cold, dark, and smelled damp. He flicked on the torch he’d brought with him. Furniture remained in place in the room, uncovered. The room he stood in, a lounge of some sort, still had sofas, side tables, a rug, TV, stereo. Even magazines still lay in a pile on top of a coffee table. The whole place was like a scene-of-crime museum.
Henrik moved on through, not exactly sure what he was looking for, but determined to search the place from top to bottom anyway. He started downstairs. Had finished there within a few minutes. Nothing stuck out to him, except for the mess of white-and-brown footprints – a combination of wet snow, dirt, and perhaps salt – that concentrated around the front door and spread out across the wood floor like tentacles. Further evidence of the presence of police and others in the days after the murders.
Henrik headed upstairs. He found Sophie’s room first. What he expected a typical teenage girl’s bedroom to look like. Pop star and movie posters adorned the walls, along with a collage of photos. Makeup was strewn on a nightstand. A wardrobe and drawers brimmed with clothes. A clutter of schoolbooks sat on a desk… But no computer. Perhaps the police had taken that away.
He moved to the photo wall, scanned over the pictures. A few shots of Sophie with her girlfriends. Some smiling, some pouting, some posing in funny or acrobatic poses. He smiled when his eyes rested on one of Sophie swinging one-handed from a tree in the middle of the forest. An autumn shot, judging by the brown hues. Her smile was infectious.
As he looked more closely he saw the same few male faces too. Her father, brother, but also teenagers. One he recognized from the bar, but another—
Noise.
Outside.
Not a car engine. Too quiet. Not the wind. Something else. The crunch of snow from footsteps? He stood and waited. Heard nothing more.
Just his imagination.
He spent a couple more minutes rifling through drawers, but other than finding out more about Sophie’s taste in fashion, he didn’t come away with any new information – nothing to help solve the puzzle of her near death and subsequent disappearance. No secret diary. No phone or tablet or computer that might hold private messages or anything like that.
He moved out of her room, across the landing, to a bigger and grander room with a king-sized bed and a roll-top bath sitting in a bay window. Probably, the bath had a fabulous view of the valley, though with the window boarded the fixture looked ridiculously out of place in the room, rather than the bathroom.
Henrik turned and spotted a small doorway, next to a chest of drawers that stood at a diagonal to the wall – shifted aside? The doorway was three or four feet high and wide. A cut-out in the wall. He moved over and crouched and looked inside the panic room. The screens on the wall were all turned off now. He thought for a moment as he stared into the cramped space, twisting his torch left and right.
According to what he’d read, the police believed Sophie had been inside the panic room at some point during the ordeal. He’d noticed various cameras in the house – had they recorded her movements? The moments the attackers had arrived and captured her family? The local police would have those records. He wondered if he could get hold of them too. What else did the police know that he didn’t?
But if Sophie had been in the panic room, safe, then why had she come out at all?
Noise. Again. Outside.
Henrik stood and strode to the door. He looked over the landing to the hallway below and held his breath as he listened.
Nothing once more.
Rats, perhaps? Or some other animal that had found its way into the abandoned house for shelter?
A wolf?
Crunch.
The sound was definitely outside.
Henrik crept down the stairs and looked at the front door. Why? He could see nothing there. He moved even more slowly to the patio doors at the back, and the broken window where he’d entered. The log he’d used to smash the glass was right there. He reached forward quickly, grabbed the wood, and pulled back inside and pressed his back to the wall as he listened.
Nothing inside. Nothing outside now, either. His heart drummed in his chest.
Think.
What would Ryker do?
He crouched low, looking out. Then he ducked outside and straightened up against the wall.
The sound of crunching snow to his left, then, from much closer, ‘Fils de pute!’
He didn’t understand the French, but the angry tone made clear the words were an insult.
The man grabbed Henrik by the back of his coat. Henrik spun around and swiped across and the log splatted against the side of the man’s head. The force in the shot wasn’t enough to fell him, but enough to get him to let Henrik go, and he stumbled back, clutching his face. But then the man came at him again, spewing expletives. He grabbed for Henrik, who snapped away from his grip and swooshed the log at him once more. No contact, but the man slid on the icy surface. Not flat on his face, but enough to give Henrik a chance.
Without another thought, Henrik hurled the log at the guy, then turned and sprinted for the woods.