Authors: Kevin Wignall
Chapter Twenty
Later that afternoon Dan had a cab take him to the address Inger had given him for the café. He’d already received a couple of messages from Patrick and had decided to fly out the next day, to Paris, then on to Limoges by train. The fact that Brabham was now trying to shut down Patrick as well as his former operatives suggested none of them had time to waste.
The café was in a part of the city he wasn’t familiar with, and he wondered if it was near her office or where she lived. Inger was already there when he arrived, sitting at a table in the corner. He joined her, they exchanged a formal kiss and she ordered coffee.
While they waited for it to arrive, she said, “Patrick told me about Jack Redford. It’s incredible.”
“I guess it is,” said Dan, even though he didn’t think the new revelations were any more incredible than what they’d discovered for themselves.
“I have something for you too.” She reached down into her bag and took out an envelope, saying as she placed it on the table, “That’s the man who came from Berlin to look around Redford’s house.”
Dan picked up the envelope and pulled the picture out enough to look at it—a capture from a security camera at the airport by the look of it. It was a guy of around thirty, but nobody he recognized.
“Do you have a name?”
“Alex Robertson.”
“Robertson or Robinson?”
“Sorry, you’re right, Alex Robinson. You’ve heard of him?”
Dan nodded and looked at the picture more closely. He wished he could take something from it, but he was just an average-looking guy in a suit, almost suspiciously clean-cut—he probably got mistaken for a Mormon missionary.
Dan slipped the picture back into the envelope and said, “I understand you’re staying involved with this in some way.”
“Especially now.” She looked around the coffee shop, a few of the other tables occupied, and said, “I hope you don’t mind me accompanying you tomorrow. More as an observer, though we feel it does involve us, particularly after what happened on Skeppsholmen.”
Dan smiled. So Brabham’s attempt to have Patrick killed in Stockholm was being seen by the Swedish Security Service as a legitimate reason for their involvement. He couldn’t blame them for that, and it hardly mattered that it had probably all resulted from Redford sticking a pin in the map—if he’d hit upon some other wilderness Dan would probably be having this conversation with an officer from another country’s intelligence service.
“What makes you think I’m going anywhere tomorrow?”
“It’s too late today and, as beautiful as my city is, I don’t think you want to stay any longer. I’m guessing Paris?”
“Flying to Paris, then the train to Limoges.”
“Oh.” She clearly understood what that meant, that he intended to speak with Sabine’s parents first. She almost seemed to have second thoughts, as if imagining how charged that meeting might be.
“Changed your mind?”
“No, but . . .” She hesitated, then said, “I think you’d call it in at the deep end.”
He nodded, and they stopped talking for a moment because the coffee arrived.
Once they were left alone again, she said, “I heard the full story about what happened earlier today.” She was smiling slightly.
“What of it?”
“You didn’t kill him.”
He smiled too now and said, “I keep surprising you, don’t I?” She didn’t say anything but seemed to acknowledge that he had a point. “I haven’t had time to think it through, but Matty would’ve been under a lot of pressure—we all are—and that’s why he made the wrong decision on this. I’m guessing it’s also why he hesitated before pulling the trigger, which is what gave me the edge. But we’ve got some history, Matty Hellström and me, and he’s a decent guy. He’s separated, I think, but he has a wife and two small kids. It’d take a lot more than what happened today for me to kill him.”
She sat staring at him for a good few seconds, then seemed to snap out of it and reached down for her coffee.
Finally, after putting the cup back down, she said, “Well, I still think you did the right thing, and it would have been easy for anyone, even someone without your history, to do . . . the wrong thing in that situation.”
He stared back at her, directly into her eyes, and he could tell she found it unsettling in some way.
“I’m not a bad person.”
“I know that now and, yes, I’m surprised by that because . . . Well, you’ve done some really bad things, horrible things.”
“I know.”
When she realized he wasn’t going to say anything more, she said, “How do you live with that?”
He shook his head.
“Truth is I just do. I get paid, I do the job I’m paid to do. I’ve killed some people, I’ve handed people over to be killed, or tortured, or imprisoned, but the targets are never exactly innocents themselves.”
Even as he said it, though, he thought of Ramon Martinez, torn away from his family—Dan had been well paid for tracking him down, but he wasn’t certain he’d been paid enough to justify it, and he couldn’t help but think of the boy, wondering who would take him to school each morning now.
With what seemed an uncanny change of subject, as if she’d been reading his thoughts, Inger sounded curious as she said, “Have you never been tempted to settle down, have children?”
He looked back at her. It had been the one thing in his life he’d found hardest to talk about, even with his closest friends, and yet for some reason he wanted to tell her, and it seemed the easiest and most natural thing in the world to do so. He wasn’t sure why he felt so comfortable around her, why he felt able to share thoughts he’d hardly dared acknowledge himself, but he did all the same.
He shrugged and said, “Actually, I did, kind of. I had a son nine years ago.” He could see her astonishment, and knew it was the one thing that wouldn’t have shown up in her research. “We weren’t a couple. It was just a fling really, a bit of fun . . .”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a one-night stand or anything like that. What I mean is we both knew we probably wouldn’t stay together. We didn’t even live together. And then Emilia fell pregnant and we had a son. Luca.”
She looked mesmerized by the revelation, and said, “You don’t see him anymore?”
He hesitated, certain he should have made it clearer, sooner. Her face fell in response, as once again she seemed to preempt what he was going to say.
“He died.” He nodded to himself, conscious of how rarely he’d said those words aloud, how rarely he’d even acknowledged them. His son had died, and a bit of Dan had died with him, leaving him not quite whole. “He died. I was away on a job, off the grid, just a couple of weeks, and he got meningitis.” She gasped a little in shock and sorrow. “Killed him within twenty-four hours. When I left he was thriving, you know, eighteen months old, healthy, strong. He’d just started calling me Papa, and then I came back and he was gone, like he’d never been there. Something I always say, you can’t disappear completely, but Luca did. He vanished, like he’d never been there at all.”
She put her hand on his and said, “Dan, I’m sorry, I . . .”
“Wish you hadn’t asked?”
“No, I’m glad I asked, and I’m glad you told me.”
“So you haven’t changed your mind about coming with me?”
She looked nonplussed and said, “Not at all. Why would I? And in fact I know it might sound strange, but it makes me hope more than ever that we’ll find the person who killed Sabine Merel and, if we can bring him to justice, even better.”
Dan nodded, liking her sentiment, though he wasn’t sure of the connection she’d made. Perhaps it was only that so many of the bad things in life were beyond their control, that it was all the more important to take on the things that could be tackled.
For every random death—Luca’s, Redford’s, the other children on that bus—there were those that should not have happened, that demanded justice, and Sabine Merel’s murder was among them.
Chapter Twenty-one
They arrived in Limoges late the following afternoon. Dan had managed to call the Merels from a payphone in Gare Montparnasse so they were at least expecting them. The man he’d spoken to had been surprised at first, but had accepted Dan’s request without any questions. Maybe, after all these years, they were just happy that anyone was showing an interest, no matter who they were.
They booked into the Candide, a grand-looking hotel near the center which had seen better days but still had a dash of old-world charm. And then they immediately took a cab the short distance to the Merels’ house. Dan noticed Inger looking a little nervous now that they were here and about to do this.
He’d never been to Limoges itself, but it reminded him of plenty of other French cities. It had that mixture of old and new piling on top of each other, vying for precedence, a jumble that should have looked anonymous and yet still managed somehow to look entirely French.
The Merels also lived close to the center, in a house set inside its own little oasis behind high, off-white walls. They rang the bell and were buzzed in, the door opening onto a beautiful lawned garden that stretched around the house. And the house itself looked like it belonged in the countryside rather than the middle of the city, a big place with wooden shutters on the windows.
The front door opened before they reached it and a man came out to meet them. For some reason, Dan had been expecting an old man, and he guessed Merel was sixty or thereabouts, but he looked young and fit. His clothes were casual enough, cords and a pale-blue sweater, but again, there was something more youthful and fashionable about the look of them, as if he were someone who worked for a glossy magazine or in the media.
He smiled uncertainly and said, “Mr. Hendricks?” Dan had dropped the idea of using an alias, and doubted Inger could even remember that he’d briefly been David Porter.
“That’s right, thanks for agreeing to meet us, Monsieur Merel. This is Inger Bengtsson—she works for the Swedish government.”
Merel had been about to say something else, but the mention of Inger’s name and her employment threw him briefly.
After a moment, he recovered, greeted Inger first, shook Dan’s hand and said, “Please, call me Sebastien. And do come in.”
He took them inside, the hallway and the rooms off it reinforcing what the outside had already suggested, that these people had money. He showed them into a large sitting room then, a baby grand filling one corner, the top adorned with family photos.
“Please, do sit down. A little drink; some wine, or cognac?”
“Thank you, whatever you’re having.”
Inger nodded, still looking a little nervous, and said, “Yes, anything.”
He smiled, and glanced over at the array of photos before saying, “I’ll be back in a moment. And my wife also—she’s just talking on the telephone.”
He left. Dan could hear his wife now, talking in another room, a low hum, conversational rather than conspiratorial. They were probably surprised by the visit, but he doubted they’d see it as suspicious or something to alert the police about, not after all this time.
I
nger was sitting like a girl outside the principal’s office, but Dan stood and walked over to the piano. There were a lot of people there, suggesting that the Merels had maybe three or even four surviving children, and a whole clutch of grandchildren, a mixture of dark and fair but nothing in between, all of them remarkably attractive.
But there, right in the middle of the frames on display was the hole in the middle of their world. It was unmistakably her, Sabine, but a different picture to the slightly formal one they’d seen in Redford’s office. Here she was smiling, caught off guard at an al fresco dinner, maybe in the garden Dan could see beyond the windows. She was beautiful, but it was more that she was full of life in that picture, full of possibilities and futures—it had to break their hearts every time they looked at it.
Dan didn’t have any pictures of Luca in the Paris apartment. There were several in the house in Italy, and he wondered now if that was why he’d all but abandoned that house, because it was linked always in his mind with the unfinished loss of his child.
One picture in particular, of Luca looking over Dan’s shoulder, smiling at Emilia and therefore at the camera, had torn at his heart. Framed, it had hung in the hall, but on his last visit he’d taken it down and put it in the drawer, exhausted by the emotional pull of it every time he’d tried to walk past.
He heard a noise and turned to see Sebastien Merel coming back in, carrying a tray with a decanter and four glasses. Clearly, given what Dan and Inger had come to talk about, he’d decided cognac would be better.
He saw that Dan was looking at the photographs, and gave a slight acknowledging smile that seemed to speak of the sorrow still weighing him down, but said, “As you can see, we’re blessed, in spite of everything.”
He put the tray down on the table and started to pour four hefty measures. He was still doing it when his wife walked in, the same expensive and attentive informality, the same young looks for someone in her sixties, her hair dark. She apologized in French for keeping them, a rapid but welcoming monologue before her husband stopped her and turned to Inger.
“Inger, you don’t speak French?”
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Madame Merel. “Inger? I’m Catherine Merel, Sabine’s mother.”
She turned to Dan and he smiled and said, “I do speak French, so I understood. Delighted to meet you, Madame Merel, and thank you for agreeing to see us.”
They all sat down on two sofas that faced each other across a coffee table. Dan sat next to Inger now, and he noticed Sebastien Merel pat his wife on the leg as he sat down next to her, offering reassurance of some kind. It made Dan hope all the more that they’d be able to offer some closure for this couple, limited as it would be.
Dan and Merel both sipped at their drinks, the fire of the cognac a reminder to Dan of his meeting with Patrick, the meeting that had set him on this road. Inger and Catherine Merel nursed their glasses but he noticed neither of them drank.
Before Dan could start, Merel looked at Inger, puzzled, and said, “Inger, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but what is the involvement of the Swedish government in this?”
“I don’t mind at all. The new evidence concerning your daughter’s murder came to light in Sweden, from someone living there.”
The couple looked even more baffled by that, but Merel said, “So you’re police? You’re working with the French police?”
Dan cut in and said, “It’s bigger than that, Sebastien. Sabine’s murder is part of a complex investigation, the nature of which means it has to be carried out under the radar. It’s best that you don’t ask too many questions, but rest assured that we’ll do everything we can to get to the truth.”
Whether it was something in Dan’s tone or just the words he’d used, Sebastien Merel nodded eagerly and, to Dan’s slight concern, hopefully. He looked at his wife as he said, “Of course, what can we tell you?”
“First, just some basic details. Did Sabine have a boyfriend at the time, or mention that she was seeing anyone? Was she happy with her roommates? Had she seemed nervous at all, or troubled?”
“I think everything was fine, more or less. Only Catherine . . .”
“The last time I spoke to her,” said Catherine Merel. “I think it was two days before, I couldn’t quite . . . I didn’t know what, but I felt something was wrong. I asked her more than once, and finally she laughed and told me I worried too much.”
Inger said, “Her roommates also, they thought everything was fine?”
“One can never tell, at a time like this. I thought everyone was lying to us.”
Dan said, “Do you have contact details for either of the roommates? I appreciate it’s a long time ago, but . . .”
Merel smiled and said, “But of course. Only for one, Sylvie. She always kept in touch. She works for
Vogue
in Paris.”
His wife smiled a little, perhaps with the bittersweet reminder of what her daughter’s contemporaries were doing now, but then she said to her husband, “And Yousef.”
“Of course, Youse
f!
He was a colleague of Sabine, and is now quite a successful artist, also in Paris. He was in the studio with her that night.”
The final words were delivered with delicacy, as if there was something fragile about the statement.
Dan said, “The boy they questioned. The accusations of racism.”
“Anyone who knew Yousef at all would know it was ridiculous for him to be questioned.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s the most gentle person.” He turned again to his wife and offered her a smile, something almost apologetic about it, then faced forward and said, “Sabine was punched in the face, I’m sure you have read. One single punch, they think, but it was powerful enough to break her nose, fracture her cheekbone and knock out two teeth.” Dan was conscious of Inger taking a drink of her cognac for the first time. “They think he waited until she was fully conscious again. She was face down. He was kneeling on her back, with so much force that he also broke two ribs. Then he strangled her with her own scarf, and even then his violence was beyond belief, crushing her windpipe, rupturing blood vessels in her neck. I repeat, if you knew Yousef, you would know that’s impossible for him.”
Catherine Merel’s face had sunk as she’d listened, the story so familiar and yet still visibly sapping her will and her energy as she sat there.
“Thank you for telling us about it,” said Dan. “And we’d really appreciate those details for Sylvie and Yousef, and perhaps if you could call them, tell them we’ll visit in the next day or two.”
“Of course, if it helps.”
“There was one other thing I wanted to ask. Had Sabine ever mentioned any American friends, any American connections at all?”
Catherine Merel looked up again, an urgency about her, and she said, “You think she was killed by an American? Somebody important?”
Inger said, “Why do you say important?”
Her tone was accusatory in response, saying, “It is what you said. It’s bigger than the police. And now you ask about Americans. You know something you’re not telling us.”
Dan quickly cut in and said, “We know lots of things, Madame Merel, but nothing certain. I wouldn’t play games with you. I know it means too much.”
She nodded, accepting what he was saying, acknowledging the final point, that it meant too much, and she turned to Inger with a brittle smile and said, “I have some photographs, if you would like to see?”
“I’d like that very much,” said Inger.
She got up and crossed the room, coming back with a photograph album.
Merel smiled and said, “Dan, please, let’s leave the ladies to look at photographs. If you come to the study with me, I’ll get you those details, and see if there’s anyone else who might be of assistance.”
Dan could imagine Inger’s response to being cast in that way, the ladies left in the drawing room while the men got on with business, but he was relieved not to have to look at photos himself. He followed Merel into the study and stood there in silence as he made a note of the two names with addresses and phone numbers.
He looked up then and said, “We have a contact for the police too, but I imagine you have that side of things covered?”
“Yes, we do.” On the one hand, he was thinking a police contact might have been useful, but it seemed unlikely the kind of person they’d been given as a liaison would be much use to Dan. Merel handed him the piece of paper and he said, “Thanks. I hope we’ll be back in time to visit them tomorrow.”
“I’ll call this evening and let them know.” He glanced at the door, then, and said, “It’s impossible for you to know how important this is for us, for our whole family. But for my wife, especially, it’s become . . . an obsession. The finding of the murderer.”
“I understand.”
Merel nodded, but as if he hadn’t heard.
“I worry sometimes, what will happen to her if the murderer is found, because then there is no barrier left between us and our loss—we have to face it raw.”
“I understand that too.”
“Yes, I believe you do, Dan. I see in the newspaper, reports of murder, and it’s such a simple thing; a man is murdered here, a woman there, covered in a few lines, so easily forgotten. But it’s complex too, no? For those of us left, it’s a puzzle we’ll never solve, no matter what we learn.”
“You still want to know.”
“Naturally,” said Merel. He looked ready to say something else, but only fell back sadly on the same word. “Naturally.”
Dan could barely imagine the level of their grief, but he could understand how this unsolved crime, the need to find the person who’d taken her from them, had become something to hang their lives on. And if it went, if the murderer was caught, they would have to face all over again the stark early morning truth that it solved nothing, that Sabine was still lost for ever.
Even knowing that, though, as he stood there in Merel’s study, vaguely aware of Catherine Merel and Inger talking in the other room, Dan wanted nothing more than to provide this decent and dignified couple with those answers. If it secured his own future into the bargain, all well and good, but if it didn’t, at least he’d have done one irrefutably good thing in his life, and finished the work that a better man than him had started.