Authors: Marcus Sedgwick
I wondered if anyone had told her what was approaching her, so very soon, when she reached the point of menarche. And if anyone had, could she understand what she was being told? That she would start to bleed, and while this was a normal thing for every other girl in the world, for her it would mean death.
I doubted that anyone had told her; she was from a small, rural, Catholic community, and I knew that it was unlikely that anything had been done to help her understand. But maybe that was a kindness.
I remembered my childhood, and I remembered Susan, how it had happened for her. I don’t know if she knew anything until the day she bled for the first time, and it took me years to work out what had been going on one mysterious summer day when I had found my big sister crying in the garden, and she had run inside and shut herself in her room.
Our mother, not the most sensitive of creatures, had spent the rest of the day with Susan, while I was left sitting at the top of the stairs, wondering what was wrong.
Eventually my father had come home and did a very rare thing. He played cricket with me until it got too dark to see the ball, and still we had not had supper, and still Susan had not emerged.
When I asked if something was wrong with Susan it was even more mystifying to be told she was fine. We ate very late, and a very quiet Susan joined us briefly. I wondered why everyone was telling me she was fine when I could see she was anything but.
She disappeared up to bed, but next morning she seemed well enough. Am I imagining it now, or had something changed in her already? Maybe I’m just projecting a cliché back on to her:
she became a woman
. But I know that she no longer went camping with me in the woods behind the house, or played with me all day in the valley beyond, as we had for as long as I could remember.
She just stopped doing those things, and I was an adult before I pieced together enough hints and implications to work out that she had been told to stop doing those things, she had not wanted to stop doing them.
If that was the experience of an upper-middle-class girl of educated and wealthy parents in Britain, I couldn’t imagine that Giovanna had had more consideration, albeit a few years had passed in between.
So Verovkin had played a card, and now it was my turn to play one back. He had put the girl down before me as bait and, that being the case, I knew he would want me to get to Lausanne before making his move, or I would have no trail to follow, and there would be no trap to close around me.
I knew of the Swiss Haemophilia Clinic. It was a genuine establishment, and though I had never corresponded with the doctors there, it was a respected institution, founded on the groundbreaking work that Feissly had done in the twenties. Obviously, Verovkin was using them unwittingly, but how and when he intended to take the girl I was left to guess. For now, there were more pressing problems to solve. I was hungry. I needed to travel fast. I had money but it was English.
It took me most of the morning to walk into the nearest town, a fishing village called Wissant. I was dry by then, but must still have looked a little out of place. I hitched a lift from there into Calais, and as in Dover, I found that ports are a good place to engage in activities that border on illegality. I managed to change a good deal of money in a little office near the quay. The lady asked for my passport. It didn’t take much to convince her that I had left it in my hotel and was in a hurry: a couple of pounds extra for her were enough.
I found a down-at-heel café along the street and ate a big meal, and then waited to feel my hunger drain from me. As it did, I prayed that the night’s fog had allowed Dyer and his boat to travel far before being found. Maybe I would be lucky and the thing would have been dragged out to the Atlantic. Even if it was found, there was nothing to connect it to me, and that thought gave me some satisfaction.
Leaving the café, I stretched my arms out in the strong morning sun, and started to feel better. I walked to the outskirts of the town and found the shabbiest garage I could, where the owner was happy to allow me to rent a battered old Peugeot
403
without adhering to the formalities of paperwork. It was important to me to avoid the trains, for there was always the possibility that the ticket inspector would want to see my passport too. Being unable to produce one would lead to an unravelling of events that I could not afford.
I left the garage owner clutching a large sum in francs and set out to drive as far as I could before the light went. He must have known there was a chance I’d not be coming back, but I’d given him more than the car was worth, and I knew he’d be perfectly happy with that arrangement.
I made my way across France. The first night I stopped on the outskirts of Amiens, the next Dijon. Both nights I was forced, despite the sums at my disposal, to choose the cheapest guest houses I could find, places where they would not demand the production of a passport at a polished walnut reception desk.
I didn’t mind; it suited me well enough. There was a greater problem on my mind, and that was crossing the border into Switzerland. I knew I would have to make the trip cross-country, in the dark, to avoid border formalities.
In Amiens I had bought a few road maps, which I now pored over every time I made a stop for food or to rest, or to buy petrol. Finally, by driving the roads near the frontier, I made my choice. I fixed on an insignificant village called Chappelle-en-Bois, in the Jura. The woods after which the village was named gave out at the top of the hill, and from there on, I would be in Switzerland. The only problem was the Peugeot, and I knew I would have to abandon it and get hold of another. But that was a matter of inconvenience to me, no more, and I understood again how money makes all the difference. It was how he, Verovkin, had made his life so free, and how he had been able to get away with the terrible things he’d done, and it was how I was going to track him down. And when I had, I would put a stop to him, for good.
Chapter 10
God bless the Swiss, I thought.
It had taken quite a lot of work in Glasgow to set up the bank accounts in Geneva, as they had been reluctant to do so without my physical presence there. Once again, I’d learned that money opens every door. When they’d heard the sums I was speaking of investing with them, things had changed, and to make matters even better for me, the beauty of a numbered account was that all I needed to access my money was that number, and a password.
The Peugeot had taken a big chunk of the money I had left England with, and I needed a new car and money to live on. I armed myself with Swiss francs on top of the dwindling French ones I had left, and also lire and marks, because I wanted to be prepared.
I assumed they were used to eccentric foreigners in the bank in Geneva, because they didn’t even blink at the long-haired, bearded and battered man wearing a suit that might once have been expensive but was now clearly showing the miles it had travelled. Nevertheless I felt very conspicuous, and decided I needed to clean myself up a little. I found a barber and had my hair cut a little shorter, and my beard trimmed, enough to smarten myself up, but still enough, I hoped, to make me appear very different from my old persona.
If money was easy to arrange in Switzerland, it took me a while longer to find a car. Geneva was not Calais. It was a mild, sedate kind of place, a place that stuck to the rules, and the one car dealer I spoke to on the outskirts of town was so horrified at my suggestion of a ‘simple’ purchase, in cash, that I could see him practically calling the police on the spot.
I wanted a car, but time was running out. According to the last news I’d seen, Giovanna was due to arrive in Lausanne at the end of the month. I could find nothing more specific than that but it didn’t matter; May was almost over and so I took a risk and caught the train the short distance to Lausanne.
When I arrived, I found I was too late.
I knew something was wrong as soon as I stepped from the train, because I saw packs of men, obviously journalists and photographers, standing around the station – on the platforms, in the ticket hall, on the pavement outside. There was even a TV camera crew.
There were raised voices and passers-by were stopping and staring. Something had happened and it didn’t take me long to find out what it was.
Giovanna had gone missing.
Chapter 11
She’d been collected from Rome by two clinicians from Lausanne, a man and a woman. They were to bring her to Switzerland for her treatment to begin.
The train travelled overnight, the girl sharing a sleeping car with the lady from the clinic.
In the early morning, as the train climbed through the Alps and stopped for Swiss border checks at Brig, the woman had woken to find the girl not in the bunk beneath her.
She’d woken her male colleague, and they’d alerted the conductors, who were fully aware of the precious passenger they had on board. A search ensued. She was not found. Finally, massively delayed, the train had rolled on to Lausanne, minus three passengers: the staff of the clinic, who were being held for questioning by the Swiss police, and little, fragile Giovanna herself, who had vanished into the night, as if some supernatural force had simply spirited her away into the mysterious mountains that towered on each side. But I dismissed these ideas as soon as they came to me. He was clever, very clever. I knew that. He’d found a way to take the girl, that was all.
That was all there was to know, for the time being. The journalists at the station were sending the news of the abduction worldwide, and by now there was probably no one in the West who had not heard about it. The whole town seemed to be in uproar over the news. Lausanne, I soon started to feel, was a very different place from Avignon, or Paris, or even London. This was Switzerland. Nothing bad happens here, that was the message. Nothing bad happens. In fact, nothing happens at all, and certainly not the abduction of a young, sick girl. Lausanne was an elegant place of large, austere buildings set on steep hills and the occasional long flat street parallel to the lakeshore.
Aside from the station, it was obvious that there was one other place where some news might be had, and that was at the clinic itself. It turned out to be only a short walk down from the station, in the Boulevard de Grancy, one of those long quiet level streets with shops at ground level and flats above, and altogether an unlikely place for a world-leading research clinic. But there, at the end of a row of old apartments, was a modern block of straight lines and wide windows. The steps were thronging with another gaggle of journalists. The doors were firmly shut, and it was clear that they had been camped out on the street for some time.
It was twenty-four hours since Giovanna’s disappearance. The clinic had had nothing to say. I began chatting to one of the reporters, a stooping young man standing by himself having a cigarette. I played the innocent but nosy tourist, and found out what I could. The police were due to make a statement to members of the press that afternoon. Knowing I would not be able to get into that announcement, I was at a loss as to what to do.
I thought about staking out the clinic, but I could see it would be hard. It was a well-to-do residential street; I couldn’t get into the flats either opposite or above. There were one or two shops at street level that faced the steps to the clinic, a dry-cleaner’s and an insurance office. Neither offered me the chance to hang around for long. The only hope was to loiter with the reporters, but first I needed to find somewhere to stay, somewhere to dump my case.
And that was what I was about to do when the door to the clinic opened and a stern-looking man in a dark suit emerged. He held a sheet of paper in his hand.
He was immediately surrounded by the journalists, who began shouting questions at him and taking his photo, while he held up his hand for quiet.
He stood waiting for a long time, saying nothing, and finally the reporters fell quiet as he made his announcement. He introduced himself as Dr Sforza and said he was the director of the clinic. He read a short statement regretting the situation and the extreme distress that he personally felt at the disappearance of Giovanna, and explained that they, the clinic, were as short on information as everyone else. They were in constant contact with both the Swiss and Italian police, and would do everything that was in their power to help find Giovanna. They were at a loss to explain what had happened, and then, in a rather sour end to the statement, he defended the role of the two staff from the clinic, asserting that the door to the train compartment had been locked from the inside by the female clinician, and that there had been no signs of damage to, or tampering with, the lock from the outside.
There were shouts and further demands from the journalists then, but Sforza merely turned his paper over and waited for the silence to descend again.
He would also like, he said, to read a statement from the ‘deeply saddened’ and ‘kind benefactor’ who had paid for Giovanna to be brought to Lausanne, a man who still wished to remain anonymous, but who was likewise helping the police with their investigation.
Dr Sforza read, and I listened hard. My French not being perfect, I didn’t understand everything, but I understood enough.
‘
My heart is heavy,
’
he said.
‘
I only wished to bring comfort to poor little Giovanna, and now this terrible event has descended on us all. I shall not rest again until she is found, and I shall blame myself for ever if she is not.
’