His name is Neil Baker. He agrees to meet Angelique at a motorway hotel on the M25, a place where he frequently convenes with business clients in one of its smaller conference rooms. It takes some persuading, and a lot of reassurance, but she manages to secure his assent to work with their artists, though again, this will take place in another hotel conference room, to which nobody will arrive in a marked police car. At last, they’ll have an image, but they’ll give no indication as to its source. It will be a charcoal sketch based on five-year-old memories of a partially disguised man only glimpsed for two short moments during which the guy’s brain was in meltdown, but it is that kind of case. The very fact that they will have it at all appears to be the sole tangible return on the only previous clue they’ve been able to offer the public.
‘It was the voice,’ Baker says. ‘As soon as I heard it on TV, I went rigid. I can remember everything he said to me, and I hear it replaying in my head any time I think about what happened. I remember his voice far more vividly than I remember what he looked like, maybe because after our first encounter, I kept repeating his words in my mind, kept going over and over what he had said, like you analyse every fibre of anything that might offer hope.’
Angelique doesn’t find it necessary to ask why he hadn’t come forward.
‘I was terrified,’ he volunteers. ‘Christ, once I realised who Josh’s angel of mercy had been, I was physically sick. I spent years wondering who this scary character was, concocting b-movie notions of rogue vigilante cops and gold-hearted villains policing their own. I took it as reassurance that there existed in the darkest hearts some innate sense of decency. Then I heard that recording, and I’ve barely slept since. I don’t understand why he took it upon himself to help us, but I know for bloody sure I don’t want him taking me to task for ingratitude.’
He doesn’t ask who tipped them off. Doesn’t need to, she guesses.
Angelique, in accordance with the man’s request, walks away and heads for the car park, allowing him to exit alone later, once she is gone. She thinks he’s going a wee bit too belt-and-braces with the anonymity measures, but she can relate to why: if you’ve had a one-on-one with Simon Darcourt, you generally wouldn’t be in a hurry for a reprise. Not unless your parents’ lives depended on it, anyway.
You had to give this to Darcourt, he was always good for a mindfuck, and this one, for Angelique’s money, topped the lot. Going out of his way to help out a complete stranger was, in its own way, the most perverse thing he had ever done. Darcourt never did anything without a very strong personal motivation, even if that motivation was electronically transferred into a bank account in Lichtenstein. This guy had neither given nor offered any reward, so what had driven him to rescue a kidnapped child? Insane as it sounded, Baker had perhaps stumbled on to a truth with his previous speculation about an innate sense of decency in the darkest hearts. There was no heart darker than Darcourt’s, and no sense of a value system that anyone else would recognise as decency. But as Ray had put it, ‘he was one of the most self-righteously vindictive people on the planet’: thus, he did have his own skewed, inconsistent, self-serving and hypocritical but very rigidly enforced morality.
Something about the kidnapping had offended that morality. Darcourt’s conscience had previously been untroubled by the welfare of the many young children who had died in the atrocities he had engineered, so something about this was different. Either that or something about him was different.
Ray.
Climbing into the car to escape the blustery drizzle, she reaches for her mobile and listens to it ring as the rain warps her view of the passing traffic. Ray takes a little while to answer; he’s probably in class.
He confirms as much when finally he picks up, asks if it can wait. It can’t.
‘At Dubh Ardrain, did you tell Darcourt he had a son?’ Angelique asks.
Ray pauses. ‘Yeah,’ he confirms grimly, clearly appreciating the altered significance of this, given that Simon is still alive. ‘He was about to shoot me,’ he explains. ‘He was milking the moment, asked me how it felt to know I’d never see my son grow up. I just said: “You tell me.” I was trying to mess with his head, to distract him, buy myself some more time. Christ, I hadn’t thought about it till now. Somebody’s got to warn Alison and Connor.’
Angelique assures him that they will be protected. In a way, they always have been: there were a few ‘I slept with terrorist monster’ chequebook kiss-and-tell pieces after Dubh Ardrain, which had largely satisfied the press’s appetites regarding the Black Spirit’s personal background, but in case these didn’t, there was an injunction in place to prevent Alison and Connor McRae from ever being named in connection to Darcourt.
She terminates the call quickly but politely, then flicks through her contacts list, deciding who best to phone regarding the immediate surveillance and protection of the McRaes, in case Darcourt comes looking for them.
That’s when it strikes her that he already has.
‘I can’t see Simon tuning in via satellite from some mainland European bolthole just so he can stoke up his rage,’ Ray had argued, back when he was still trying to convince himself that the new killer wasn’t his old flatmate. ‘Can you picture him getting the Sun or the Daily Mail delivered to his underground lair or wherever he’d have been hiding?’
Now she could see the consequences of that same logic, once it was inverted. He wasn’t in some European bolthole; not all the time, anyway. He had spent time – maybe a lot of time – back on his native soil, in order to get close to his son: disguised, unsuspected, assumed dead, watching secretly from a discreet distance, maybe outside school, the swing-park, the sidelines of a football pitch. Near as he dared, perhaps, but no closer than risk allowed, which was why, though she would still call in the warning, she understood Connor and Alison were in no danger. If he was going to snatch the kid, he’d have done it by now, before anyone discovered he was still alive. He knew he could only watch Connor’s life like it was on the other side of glass. Not only could he not risk making any kind of direct contact with the boy, if there was any residual humanity in him, he would understand that he couldn’t do anything that increased the likelihood of his son finding out who and what his father really was.
In Darcourt’s distorted mind, it was thus possible to imagine him finding a surrogacy in acts of vigilantism such as the Baker child’s rescue.
You only had to peruse the letters pages of any newspaper, or these days, any internet forum, to discover the extent to which the average bampot considered parenthood both a justification of and a sanctification for their own self-righteousness. What would it do to ‘one of the most self-righteously vindictive people on the planet’? What other deeds might he consider proxies for the actions of a concerned father unable to directly shape and protect his offspring’s development? Every sad dad tries to make up for his own broken dreams by living vicariously through his children. So wouldn’t he want a fairer world, in which the truly talented, like him, got rewarded with riches and acclaim, while the mere attention-seeking mediocrities had their wings melted for even daring to fly close to the sun?
This new perspective potentially altered the time-line too. The big question they’d been asking since he made his theatrical reappearance was why now? It had only been lately that he had revealed his survival and reclaimed his name, but what if they were wrong to assume that this was the beginning? Maybe it was merely the next phase. The Baker kidnap had been more than five years ago. What else might he have done in that time by way of moulding a better world for future generations, in between visits back to the mother country to steal a glimpse of his son and heir?
And with this question, another, older, unsolved mystery may suddenly have a new solution. Angelique remembers a case Dougnac was called to investigate, in Lombardy, four years back: one the public got to know nothing about. The official story, as reported briefly in the press, was that half a dozen ‘aviation industry’ executives had died on a corporate junket when a yacht went down in the Med off Genoa. There was no such incident: the ‘maritime tragedy’ explanation was concocted at the behest of high-level influence, the shipwreck scenario chosen because it accommodated the absence of any bodies to fill the coffins at the six respective funerals. In truth, for ‘aviation industry’, read ‘arms trade’, and the reason their coffins were buried empty was that, short of DNA sampling, there was no way of knowing which particular puddles of viscera belonged in each casket.
Dougnac was brought in to explore any possible terrorist angle, but the absence of any claim of responsibility or discernible ideological motive had him quickly rejecting the idea. The execs all worked for arms manufacturers, and it was his opinion that the incident represented the sharp end of industrial relations. These firms were often in bed with some extremely dangerous people, and the political influence brought to bear in order to conceal the true nature of the murders was proof of how far – and how high – they were prepared to go to prevent their dirty laundry being aired in public. Dougnac’s suspicion was that the murders had been ordered and orchestrated by none other than Marius Roth, for business and power-broking reasons that only the highest-placed within the European arms trade would ever know.
Angelique had reckoned her boss’s logic was sound, but maintained private reservations regarding his conclusion, on the grounds that Roth had always been the madman in Dougnac’s attic: his bête noire or, perhaps it would be more revealing to say, his white whale.
Marius Roth was a quite squalidly wealthy arms industry maven, mogul and manipulator. He exerted overt and covert influence in the boardrooms of countless ‘defence’ companies, brokered deals involving arms firms and governments around the globe, sanction-evasion and embargo loopholes a speciality, and couldn’t have had more politicians in his pocket if they were miniature-sized and made by Playmobil. All of which, of course, was merely his public, ‘respectable’ face. It was what remained shady and occluded (and the ways in which the shade was cast) that led to such mystery and rumour, not to mention myth-making, as proved fascinating to the point of obsession for Dougnac. Roth’s greatest value to the arms trade was said to be his equally influential manoeuvrings in ensuring that consumption of its products remained high. He was believed to be just as senior a power-broker, fixer and facilitator in the world of the freedom fighter, guerrilla, rebel, insurgent or, if you were to be so crude, terrorist, as in the world of the executive and the politician.
However, he was also a world-class master of deniability, so nothing could even remotely be proved. Intel on his more occult connections was frustratingly thin, with sometimes only the conspicuous absence of evidence constituting the only clue. A marked tendency for suspects believed to have had dealings with Roth to die before the authorities could talk to them was one such conspicuous absence. Many died in custody, some disappeared from custody, never to be seen again, and some, most alarmingly, killed themselves, usually after going to extremely desperate lengths to avoid being taken alive. Dougnac believed that they did not merely fear the consequences of giving up information, but that if they were captured at all, they were immediately tainted and thus condemned in the eyes of the people they were afraid of. No amount of swearing you told the cops nothing was going to save you. What it wouldn’t save you from was evidently the stuff of nightmares even to hardened men of violence.
Throwing another layer of gauze over Roth’s blurred picture was the fact that, even were the authorities to keep a suspect alive long enough to talk, if they were high enough up the food chain to have had direct dealings with the man himself, they wouldn’t necessarily know that they had. It was said that while Roth necessarily maintained a recognisable (albeit low-profile) public identity, in his darker dealings, he was a shape-shifting wraith who never gave the same name to two people, and who altered his physical appearance to further distinguish these multiple personae. Dougnac said they had some extreme-distance zoom shots showing him bald, hunched and pot-bellied; others slim, upright and with a full head of hair. Dougnac reckoned he used not just wigs, but various prostheses too, meaning that no two contacts, even if they were to be so suicidally indiscreet, could compare notes and conclude they had been dealing with the same man. These photos had been taken while the subject was aboard a vast luxury yacht, the ownership and registration of which were needles in a legal haystack of fronts, pseudonyms and shell-companies. Furthermore, it had never been satisfactorily established that the man in them was even the same individual – disguised or not – as turned up at board meetings and parliaments. To put the tin lid on it, Dougnac entertained the truly brain-twisting possibility that his ‘respectable’ public identity could be just another fabricated cypher. ‘There may not even be a Marius Roth,’ as he perplexingly put it.
A damaging symptom of this frustrating elusiveness was that Dougnac could fall into the trap of imagining Roth’s hand behind anything and everything, especially in the absence of an alternative explanation. Thus he had been inclined to believe his personal bogeyman was responsible for the Lombardy incident, particularly as there was no apparent motive or beneficiary: two factors that Dougnac expected would remain concealed but, in certain elite circles, known and very clearly understood.
But what if the ‘aviation industry’ killings had been Darcourt: like the murderer attacking the paedophile, his cracked moral compass still functioning enough to point him towards a target that might paint the perpetrator in a better light than the victims?
The implicit self-righteousness of it was certainly in keeping with Darcourt’s new MO, so there was as much reason to pin it on him as there was Roth. Roth’s tentacles spread far and wide, but that didn’t make him responsible for half as much as Dougnac tended to imagine. Nor was he quite as untouchable as Dougnac’s reverent obsession would suggest. Roth had, after all, been visited by a genuine yacht mystery of his own. A couple of years back, his vessel Corsair – this boat quite definitely registered to the named businessman – was discovered to be drifting off the French Riviera, unmanned in as much as the goons who crewed it had all been shot dead.
Embarrassing and compromising as this incident clearly was, it was testament to Roth’s mythical stature – and perhaps his people’s spin-control – that the rumour which grew legs quickest explained the killings as an internal punishment: a pour encourager les autres exercise in retribution for some undisclosed failure. Angelique, who was less inclined towards chasing ghosts, preferred the more plausible theory that his team had been humped: that someone had boarded the yacht and ripped them all a new one, with extremely disappointing consequences for one or several items on Herr Roth’s agenda.
Could that also have been Darcourt? she wonders, for the fraction of a second it takes to remember a conclusive argument to the contrary. To wit, Darcourt is a shite-bag. He always specialises in easy targets: the unsuspecting, undefended and unarmed, so taking on a crew of weapon-toting hired muscle was as outside his MO as it was possible to get. Whoever hit the Corsair had undertaken an assault – from the water, no less
– against a team of trained mercs armed with automatic weapons and in organised communication via short-wave radio. So while it did prove that Roth was touchable, it nonetheless put him in an extremely low percentile of vulnerability. He had nothing to fear from Simon Darcourt, anyway, Angelique muses, before halting that thought on the proverbial dime.
She’s staring at the windscreen, the drizzle rendering the glass as opaque as the black surface of a storm-churned sea, but what she’s seeing has absolute clarity.
Marius Roth dealt in all manner of ‘defence-related’ commodities, including talent. Given the Black Spirit’s ‘have Semtex, will travel’ status as a terrorist-for-hire, it was impossible to imagine that Roth didn’t have a hand – not to mention a finder’s fee – in securing Darcourt’s services on behalf of various bloodthirsty and cash-rich psychopaths. General Aristide Mopoza, for example, who had contracted Darcourt for Dubh Ardrain, and who had, now she comes to think of it, found himself assassinated shortly after its failure. Assassination was an occupational hazard in the post of military dictator to a country such as Sonzola, but Dougnac had commented on there being a spooky familiarity about Mopoza suddenly not being alive to talk about something that might potentially lead back to Marius Roth. Darcourt, having apparently died at the power station, posed no such danger. But now that he has revealed himself to have survived, and revealed this to as wide an audience as possible, then it would be fair to say that Marius Roth does have something to fear from Simon Darcourt. Enough, in fact, for Roth to unleash his dogs in order to get hold of the bastard before his attention-craving atrocities lead the authorities straight to him.
Marius Roth: the kind of man who has ‘sources who do not even know they are sources’. Marius Roth: the kind of man whose people could at short notice arrange and carry out the kidnap of her parents and render her their puppet inside the police hunt for Darcourt. Marius Roth: the kind of man whose retribution haunts the nightmares of even the worst of killers.
She feels the fear flood her again, like it did that night inside the taxi. The phrase ‘tortured to death’ insinuates itself, threatening her control as it mingles with thoughts of what methods might drive hardened criminals suicidal with fear.
She opens the car door, concerned she’s about to be sick, and steps out into the rain, bending over. Nothing comes of it, but the blood rushes to her head, relieving the onset of faintness. She holds still a few seconds, then stands up straight, lets the breezy smir blow about her face. It’s cooling, immediate. She’s focused again.
This changes nothing, not yet anyway. If Roth wants Darcourt that much, then his people will have to keep her parents alive for now. If it gets that far (and she knows she’ll be doing very well if it does get that far), it will still be all about the exchange, and the key to that was handed her yesterday by Albert Samuel Fleet.
She lets the cool of the rain play upon her face a little longer, dousing the heat from her cheeks and easing the tightness gripping her chest. Feeling sufficiently composed to commence lying to a mutually trusted colleague, she climbs back into her car and calls Dale, to play her one and only card.
She briefs him on Baker, adding Ray’s confirmation that Darcourt père knows there is a Darcourt fils. It’s while Dale is reeling from the concept of this newly concerned father reinventing himself as a psychotic combination of Charles Bronson and Mary Whitehouse that she finally reveals the lead she’s been sitting on for days.
‘I think I might have a new angle,’ she tells him. ‘You remember we struck out with the idea of looking into crooked plastic surgeons?’
‘Yeah,’ he mumbles, suddenly lowering his expectations of what she might have to offer. What upon suggestion seemed a promising avenue of investigation had very quickly turned into a cul-de-sac, terminating against the concrete wall of medical ethics and confidentiality. There were surgeons out there known to have provided a no-questions service to individuals in urgent need of a new appearance, but not only were they unwilling to tell the cops anything, the slimy bastards also knew there was no way you could access their files.
‘Well, I just got a heads-up from a contact back in Paris, regarding a maxillofacial surgeon: one Doctor Guillaume Bouviere.’
In fact, the ‘heads-up’ had consisted of a text accompanying another image of her captive parents. Responding to one of her updates reporting the investigation’s lack of progress, it stated simply:
Suggest you seek Dr G Bouviere, who recently ceased to be of use to the criminal fraternity.
‘Is he a reformed character or something?’ Dale asks none-too-hopefully.
‘After a fashion. He ran a private surgery near Toulon until three months ago.’
‘What happened then?’
‘He was murdered in the car park of his clinic. Rather than bent surgeons, I decided to put out a filter on dead ones,’ she fibs. ‘He was beaten and stabbed, believed to have been killed by junkies looking for drugs. Reports say they took his keys and started tearing the clinic apart before somebody raised the alarm and called the gendarmes.’
‘They get anybody for it?’
‘No. The junkies line seems to have stuck as far as the local cops are concerned. However, my contact says Bouviere was known to have done work for the underworld. Bent facial surgeon dies and his place trashed, just before Simon Darcourt makes his grand reappearance. Gotta be worth a sniff.’
‘Not if the killer got away with the files, which would be presumably what he was after.’
‘Ah, but he didn’t. Like I said, the alarm was raised. Bouviere’s files are now securely in police storage.’
‘But presumably still subject to the usual confidentiality laws,’ Dale reminds her.
‘Which is why I’ll need seventy-two hours, maybe longer, to go over there in person.’
‘What difference will that make?’
‘Let’s just say it gives you deniability if you don’t ask me that kind of question.’
Dale sighs, makes out he’s weighing up his options, but even in her state of enhanced anxiety, Angelique knows he’s buying.
‘If you bring back something that helps us find Darcourt,’ he says, ‘I’ll ask no questions at all. That’s a promise.’
Angelique stares at the rain and is grateful she’s not having this conversation face-to-face. She’ll help find Darcourt, sure, but the real purpose of her trip is to bring back something that ensures they don’t get to keep him.