Authors: Kevin Wignall
Chapter Fifteen
They spent the rest of the morning down in the shelter. Dan went through Redford’s recent Internet history in more detail and searched the computer for other files that might have been hidden away on it—though Redford seemed to have been quite old school in that respect, and had apparently printed most of the stuff that had interested him.
That accounted for the filing cabinets. Inger started on them, working methodically through the drawers, and then Dan joined in too, though in truth, neither of them were entirely sure what they were looking for. Perhaps, if they were lucky, they would find something that at least pointed to the keystone, to the thing that lay at the center of all this endeavor.
They walked back to the cabin for lunch, and as they sat eating, Inger said, “How long will you stay?”
It was a complex question. As she’d already pointed out, there was too much material for them to go through in its entirety—Dan simply didn’t have that much time. But he had to go through enough of it to provide him with a next step. And he didn’t want to walk away from Redford’s archive and then find it out of reach.
“Can we keep this between us?” She shrugged casually, but he sensed she’d misunderstood, and he added, “I mean, the shelter, the office, maybe even Redford’s identity—does anyone else need to know about it for the time being?”
“Oh, I see.” She thought about it, and finally said, “I think I would have to tell one other person, my superior, but I’m pretty sure he’d be okay about keeping it quiet. He’s one of the reasons we’re helping—he and Patrick White are old friends. I think we might have to reveal Jack’s true identity, but we don’t have to talk about the shelter.”
“Good. And thanks.”
“Why do you want it so?”
“Because of what you said. We won’t have time to go through it all, but it’s possible I’ll need to come back, if the trail runs cold, or . . . I don’t know.” She nodded, acknowledging the level of doubt that surrounded everything in his life right now. “So to answer your question, another stint this afternoon, again in the morning, and maybe fly out of Luleå late tomorrow afternoon.”
“Oh.” She was surprised, but perhaps also disappointed. If he hadn’t known about her sexuality he’d have taken encouragement from that, which in his present state of mind seemed like just another example of how skewed his life had become. As it was, any disappointment was probably based on the fact that she simply enjoyed his company, and as a result he felt oddly touched by it.
“There’s nothing else you need to see up here?”
Dan shook his head and said, “Every single aspect of Jacques Fillon’s existence is under that garage. Everything else is just window dressing, a distraction. The house, the area, even the accident—they tell us nothing about him. He could have been living on the moon, because his entire life is down in that shelter.”
“Jack Redford.” He looked at her, questioning. “You called him Jacques Fillon.”
“Of course.” He swigged from his beer. “I’ve been thinking about it too. I’ve got a clean cell to call Patrick, but I’ll ask him to meet me in Stockholm the day after tomorrow. I’d prefer to give him most of this in person.”
“You mean so that you can see his face, and how he reacts?” She clearly sensed that he didn’t entirely trust Patrick, that he probably didn’t entirely trust anyone.
Dan smiled, admitting there was some truth in that, and said, “He’ll stay at the Grand so I’ll need to be staying somewhere nearby but not obvious.”
She nodded, thinking it over, then said, “Actually, there’s quite a cool hotel on Skeppsholmen.”
“That’s good—it’s been a while since I’ve been with the cool crowd.”
She laughed but said, “No, it’s the location. You know if you walk past the Grand, across the bridge, that’s Skeppsholmen, so it’s kind of close and out of the city at the same time, quiet.”
“Okay, yeah, I know where you mean. That could be good.”
“So you have been to Stockholm before?”
She was a master of deadpan delivery.
He smiled and said, “We should get back to work.”
The afternoon continued in the same vein, without either of them finding anything that promised to narrow their search or provide leads. It also didn’t help that Redford had obviously been a linguist. There were sheets in French, German, Spanish. Dan spoke a very little German, better French, and Inger spoke some German, but neither of them were really fluent enough to look through documents at speed.
Late in the afternoon, Dan booted up the computer again and used it to search for information on some of the stories pinned to the corkboards. He didn’t bother looking for material on Harry Brabham because he knew he’d be swamped by all the public domain information surrounding a congressman, but he searched on the other two children, and on the allegations of fraud and favors, seeing if he could find a link between them.
Finally, he looked at the Paris murder. Most of the news stories pinned around the map of Paris were in French, but he was able to pull out the victim’s name, Sabine Merel, and a date. He typed it in and hit Search and scanned the results. The third story he clicked on had a picture of the girl who’d been murdered and, as soon as it popped onto the screen, Dan felt his heart kick up a gear. Could this be it, the key to everything Redford had done here?
“Inger, you might want to take a look at this.”
“What is it?” She was looking over, her fingers holding her place in the filing drawer she was working through.
“The murder in Paris that’s on that board over there, I’ve just searched on it and found a picture of the victim.”
She was reluctant to lose her place among the documents, so she pulled one proud of the others to mark her progress, and then came over saying, “What about it . . . oh.”
“Yeah, oh.” They both looked beyond the computer to the corkboard with the single photograph on it. It was the same girl, Sabine Merel.
Chapter Sixteen
Inger was quick to make one connection that Dan hadn’t yet seen. She walked over to the board and said, “It wasn’t new, and I don’t think he planned to fill it. You’re sitting there at the computer, you look up, and what do you see? This picture.” She tapped the board. “He had it here as a reminder, I think, you know, always reminding himself what this was really about.”
Dan knew she was right, knew it instinctively.
“So we have two questions. What did Sabine Merel mean to Jack Redford? And in what way did he believe Brabham might be responsible for her murder?”
“Could she have been Jack’s girlfriend? Or daughter maybe.”
Dan grabbed Redford’s passport off the desk, checked the dates in the article.
“She was nineteen when she was murdered, he would’ve been thirty-seven. I guess it’s possible she could have been his girlfriend, but it’s a big gap, particularly when she’s so young.”
“But probably too small a gap for him to be her father. She could be the daughter of a friend.”
“Maybe. But that brings us on to the other question. I don’t know much about Brabham, so I don’t know if he’s the kind of guy who picks up young girls and murders them for kicks . . .”
He noticed Inger looking over his shoulder, and he knew she was looking at the picture of Brabham on his own corkboard.
He continued, saying, “It’s more likely she was collateral damage in some way, that Redford took exception to it . . .”
“No, it’s bigger.” He looked at her questioningly. “Dan, think of the fact that he disappeared, that he spent all those years putting all of this together, that he built the stockpile in there. In some way, it has to be bigger. You don’t do all of that because you take exception, you do it because you care deeply, or because you have no choice.”
“You’re right. But we have something to go on. We find out everything we can about Sabine Merel and her connections, how she died, where, whether anyone was ever caught or suspected. We find out who Jack Redford was, by which I mean, what he did, what his job was and how that brought him into contact with Sabine and conflict with Brabham.”
She nodded this time and said, “He and Brabham must have known each other for sure, and Brabham must have had a strong reason for sending someone up here to look around Redford’s house.”
“We might find out more about Sabine here, and I want to see if any of the rest of this leads back to her. Patrick should be able to tell us more about Redford.”
“You hope.”
“It depends if he was a company man, or known to them. Looking at his stockpile, I just have the feeling we’re dealing with someone who worked the dark side, and if he did that any time in the last twenty years, Patrick White will know who he is.”
She turned and looked at the picture of Sabine again. Inger was standing in profile to him as a result, a beautiful sight that somehow caused him another little pang of longing, even in the midst of the low-level adrenalin rush he felt now that they’d made a breakthrough. He found himself transfixed, the strand of blonde hair loose behind her ear, the unpierced lobe, the smooth skin of her neck.
Inger stared at the photograph for a few seconds, and finally said, “Whatever he did, he was quite a selfless man, wasn’t he?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, we don’t know his connection to this girl, but whatever it was, he still dedicated a big part of his life to seeking some kind of justice for her.”
“You don’t know that’s what he was looking for.”
“No, but it seems likely, in one form or another. And then his last act, saving the person nearest to him. I’ve seen people in situations like that, perhaps you have too, and they don’t think they’ll be the hero, but they can’t stop themselves when the moment comes.”
“I’ll give you that, his last act was selfless. And maybe this was too.” He smiled. “I’m sorry to say I’m not quite as noble. I’m only looking at saving me.”
She smiled and said, “Maybe your moment just hasn’t come yet.”
Maybe. He liked to think it might be true but, as things stood, his record didn’t look good—he’d delivered plenty of pain in his life, but had never yet saved anyone, not even those who’d mattered most.
Chapter Seventeen
Sabine Merel had been an art student in Paris, studying sculpture, sharing a small apartment with a couple of other girls. She’d been working late in the studio at the art college one night in May, but had arranged to meet her friends later at a party. They’d thought little of it when she’d failed to show up.
The next morning, her body had been found in the alley at the back of a restaurant. She’d been punched hard in the face, then strangled with her own scarf some short time later. She’d been robbed, and her clothes, casual clothes for the studio, had been left in disarray, top pulled up, jeans and underwear pulled down, but there had been no evidence of a sexual assault beyond that.
The police had subsequently suggested that both the robbery and the interference with Sabine’s clothing might have been post-mortem attempts to suggest a false motive, and they’d speculated that Sabine had more likely been killed by someone known to her.
A student who’d also been in the studio that night had been questioned but then released without charge. A brief media storm had followed because the male student was of Algerian origin and, given the strength of his alibi, the police had faced accusations of racism.
There had been no other suspects in the murder of Sabine Merel and no one had ever been charged with the crime. It seemed that in the fourteen years since, no further leads had ever arisen, and the death of this young art student had been quietly forgotten, probably by everyone except her own family and friends and, of course, Jack Redford.
It had taken Dan the last hour of the afternoon to piece together that much, working through the French in the articles Redford had saved. In one sense it was nothing new or surprising to him. He’d known, seen, and sometimes even brought about, too many unjustified deaths to be much moved by the story of another.
Yet it
had
moved him in some way, his mood sinking as the hour had ground on, perhaps because of the gradual drip-feed of information, bringing the girl back to life, even though he knew it was an illusion and that nothing would undo what had been done to her all those years before. He doubted anything would stir within him the indignation Redford had clearly felt, but he felt sad all the same, and mystified by that sadness, for a woman he’d never known, who’d been dead a long time.
As they walked back through the twilight, a darkness that seemed to rise up from the woodland floor rather than descend from above, he summarized what he’d learned for Inger’s benefit. She walked ahead of him in complete silence, though he could tell she was listening intently.
It was a simple story, yet harrowing for all that, and he felt his energy sapping away just in the telling of it, the all-too-familiar tale of a young woman with a promising future snuffed out for no reason at all.
He finished just before they got to the cabin and at the door Inger turned and shook her head and he noticed that a tear had worked its way free and glistened on her cheek. In some way he was both pleased and sorry that it had upset her.
He reached up without thinking and wiped the tear away, then immediately took a step backwards. “Sorry, I . . .”
She ignored the apology and said, “She would have been a year older than me, but I don’t know why I find it so sad. Maybe just the thought of her being in the studio, you know, working towards something, creating, and then that. It’s so cruel, unbearably so.”
He wasn’t sure what to say, but didn’t need to say anything, because they both turned in response to an indistinct sound and saw Mr. Eklund walking along the track, carrying the dinner tray with his effortless and loose-limbed gait.
Inger said something under her breath in Swedish, something affectionate, brought on by the sight of the old man. And Dan understood the sentiment even if he hadn’t understood or even heard the words properly, because it was reassuring after a day like they’d had, to be reminded that there were good things in the world, and good people, simple food cooked well, strangers sharing their kindness indiscriminately. Dan had been outside that virtuous circle himself for most of his adult life, but he was grateful to be inside it now
.
It was only when they were sitting down over their meal that Inger went back to the story of Sabine Merel, though she’d put the poignancy of her death to one side and was business-like again, focusing on the case.
“Did you read anything at all that might have suggested a link with Brabham?”
“Nothing. She was from . . .” He struggled to remember the name of her home town. “Limoges, I think. I don’t know what her parents did, but I couldn’t see any suggestion that they moved in the kind of circles where they might have encountered the CIA’s Paris station chief.”
“So what will you do?”
“There has to be a connection. I’ll find out if Patrick can tell me anything about Redford, and if Sabine Merel’s murder means anything to him. Then I guess I need to do what both the Paris police and Jack Redford failed to do; find out who killed her and why.”
He laughed at the enormity of it, the suggestion that he could find truths in a couple of weeks that had eluded even Jack Redford in all his years of searching.
She laughed too, and said, “How much time did you say you had?”
He nodded, accepting the point, but said, “Look, first off, Redford undoubtedly knew more than he had up on those boards—he knew there was a link and was just looking for a way of proving it. Second, he was in hiding, and that limited what he could do.”
“You’re kind of in hiding too.”
“True, but I haven’t quite become Jacques Fillon yet. So I visit her parents, I visit the friends she lived with, the Algerian, anyone else I can find. Remember, I don’t have to prove anything, I don’t have to make it stand up in court, I just need to find the trail that leads back to Brabham, and I need to keep moving while I do it.”
“And if you fail? You must have some other option for escaping this . . . all these killings.”
All these killings. Just as with the murder of Sabine Merel, the mention of the killings did nothing to evoke the reality of what had happened to those people. But unlike Sabine, Dan and his colleagues had at least lived in that world and had done their own share of killing. It gave them choices, albeit limited.
“There are always options, but none as good as this, and the odds are no better either.” She took in what he said, and swigged at her beer, then Dan said, “So what about you? I guess this is essentially case closed for you? You found out about Habibi, you found out who Jacques Fillon was.”
“Habibi wasn’t important—we just wanted to know what happened to him.”
“And the rest?”
“I’m not sure. Our interest was more than the identity of Jacques Fillon, and given what we found . . . I don’t know. I’ll have to speak to my superior. Maybe I’m done after tomorrow.”
Dan nodded and said, “Well, it’s only been a couple of days, but I’ve enjoyed working with you.”
“Me too. It wasn’t . . .” She stopped herself. He raised his eyebrows, a little mock curiosity, and she said, “As you know already, I read a little about you before coming up here, and yes, it’s only been a couple of days, but you weren’t how I expected.”
Teasing, he said, “In a good way?”
She smiled, saying, “In a good way.”
She didn’t need to spell it out. Dan knew how he read on paper, and she probably hadn’t seen the half of it. He’d spent years working the edge, no rules of engagement, a ruthless focus on getting the job done, no matter what the cost. The only distinction between him and the monsters he’d taken down was the legitimacy of being paid by the winning side.
Or at least, he’d been part of the winning side back then—he had no idea which side he was on now. And he wouldn’t discover the answer to that question until he got back out into the world, to see how far Jack Redford would take him, and how much protection his secret afforded.