The Alchemist's Secret (31 page)

‘...No,’ Ben answered after a pause.

‘Men like us are bad news for women,’ Simon said pensively, copying Ben and throwing in another stone. They watched it arc against the sunlight and drop into the water, ripples radiating outward. ‘We’re lone wolves. We want to love them, but we only hurt them. And so they walk away…’

‘Talking from experience?’

Simon looked at him, smiled sadly. ‘She said life with me was like death. All I can think about, talk about, is death. It’s my job, the only thing I know.’

‘You do it pretty well,’ Ben said.

‘Pretty well,’ Simon conceded. ‘But not well enough. As you were quick to point out, you’re the one holding the gun.’

Ben tossed him back the .38. ‘Sign of good faith.’

Simon looked surprised, and slipped the gun back in its holster. Ben offered him a cigarette, and they sat smoking in silence as they both gazed at the flowing water and listened to the birds. Then Simon turned to Ben. ‘All right. Supposing I go along with you on this. There’s something else I want you to do in return.’

‘What?’

‘I want you to help find a missing teenager. That’s what you do, isn’t it?’

‘You really have been doing your homework.’

‘Your priest friend told me. I didn’t believe him at first, so I checked it out with Interpol. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about the Julián Sanchez kidnap case, would you? Spanish police are still wondering about the mystery rescuer who did such a…
rigorous
job.’

Ben shrugged. ‘Off the record, I might know something about it. But I can’t help you with this one. There’s no time. I’ve got to find Roberta.’

‘What if I told you that I think this missing persons case is connected?’

Ben looked at him sharply. ‘What the hell do you mean?’

Simon smiled. ‘A gold medallion was found in the boy’s bedroom. You’d recognize the symbol on it, I’m sure. A sword with a banner and the words
Gladius Domini
engraved on it?’

Montpellier

‘More questions? Why aren’t you people out looking for my son, instead of coming around here all the time?’

Natalie Dubois showed Ben inside the simple, modest house and led him into a living-room. She was a small blonde woman in her thirties, pale and tense-looking with large black circles under her eyes. ‘It won’t take long,’ he promised her. ‘I just need a few details.’

‘I already told the other officers everything,’ she retorted. ‘He’s been gone for days-what more do you need to know?’

‘Madame, I’m a specialist. Please, if you co-operate with me I believe we have a much better chance of finding Marc quickly. May I sit down?’ He took out his pad and pen.

‘I just know that something awful has happened to him. I feel it. I think I’m never going to see him again.’ Madame Dubois’ face was drawn and haggard. She sobbed quietly into a handkerchief.

‘So, the last time you saw him, he was riding off on his moped. He didn’t say where he was going?’

‘Of course not, I would have mentioned it,’ she replied impatiently.

‘Maybe you could write me down the registration number of the bike. Has he ever done anything like this before? Disappeared for a few days, gone off somewhere?’

‘Never. He’s come home late a few times, but nothing like this.’

‘What about friends? Is there anyone he might have gone off with, or gone to see-like a music event, maybe, or a party somewhere?’

She shook her head, sniffing. ‘Marc isn’t that kind of boy. He’s shy, introverted. He likes reading and writing stories. He has friends, but he doesn’t go off with them.’

‘He’s still at school?’

‘No, he left earlier this year. He works with my brother-in-law Richard, as an apprentice electrician.’

‘Does Marc’s father live with you?’ He’d noticed she wasn’t wearing a ring.

‘Marc’s father walked out of here four years ago,’ she said coldly. ‘We haven’t seen him since.’

Ben noted down on his pad:
Father involved in abduction?

She gave a bitter laugh. ‘If you’re thinking his father’s got him, you’re wrong. That man isn’t the least bit interested in anyone but himself.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said. ‘Is Marc religious? Did he ever talk about joining a Christian organization, anything like that?’

‘No. Are you asking because of that thing they found in his room?’

‘The medallion.’

‘I don’t know where that came from, I’d never seen it before. The cops-I mean, the other officers-think he stole it. But my Marc’s no thief.’ Madame Dubois rose defensively in her chair.

‘No, I don’t think he’s a thief either. Listen, do you think it’s possible I could talk to Marc’s uncle, Richard?’

‘He lives not far away, just up the road. But he won’t be able to tell you anything I couldn’t.’

‘I’d still like to pay him a visit. Will he be at home now?’

As he was getting up to leave, she gripped his wrist and looked into his eyes. ‘Monsieur, will you find my boy?’

He patted her hand. ‘I’ll try.’

‘The kid hasn’t been
kidnapped
, for Christ’s sake. He’s run off somewhere, probably got a girlfriend. Or a boyfriend. Who fucking knows, these days?’ Richard offered Ben a beer. ‘First cop I’ve ever known who takes a drink on duty,’ he laughed as Ben cracked open the can and pulled up a chair at the kitchen table.

‘I’m what you might call an outside consultant,’ Ben said. ‘What makes you so sure he’s just run off?’

‘Look, between you and me, he takes after his father, my brother Thierry. Total waster. Guy never held down a job in his life, in and out of jail for all kinds of petty crimes. The kid’s going down the same road, I reckon, and his mother can’t see it. Thinks the sun shines out of his arse. Me, I rue the day I ever let her talk me into taking the little bastard on. He’s a complete waste of time and money, and if I don’t fire him pretty soon he’ll probably fry himself on a live wire and I’ll get the blame…’

‘I understand, but I still have to treat this as suspicious until we know better. You’re his uncle, and he’s got no father. Did he ever confide in you, maybe mention anything out of the ordinary?’

‘You kidding? Everything’s out of the ordinary with Marc. Talk about head in the clouds.’

‘Like what, for instance?’

Richard made an exasperated gesture. ‘You fucking name it. The kid lives in a dream world-if you believed half of what he told you, you’d think…I dunno…Dracula was your neighbour and aliens run the world.’ He slurped his beer, and drew the can away with a ring of foam on his upper lip. He wiped it away with his sleeve. ‘Like the job we did just before he ran away…’

‘Or disappeared.’

‘Yeah. Whatever.’ Richard told Ben about the cellar. ‘And then he wouldn’t stop going on about it. Convinced it was something weird.’

Ben leaned forward in his chair, setting down the beer can and taking out his pad. ‘This was a private residence?’

‘Nah, it’s some kind of place for Holy Joes.’ Richard grinned. ‘You know, a centre for Christian something or other. Like a school. Nice folks, friendly, decent. Paid cash, too.’

‘Have you got the address there?’

‘Yeah, sure.’ Richard went into the hall and came back leafing through a thick business diary. ‘Here it is. Centre for Christian Education, about fifteen kilometres from here, out in the sticks. But you’re wasting your time if you think that godless little turd went there.’ Richard sighed. ‘Look, maybe I’m sounding rough on the kid. If something’s happened to him, I’m sorry and I’ll eat my words. But I don’t believe it. Three or four days, he’ll have run out of whatever cash he lifted from Natalie’s purse, and he’ll be home again with a hangover and his tail between his legs. And this is what you guys spend our tax money on, instead of catching crooks?’

Roberta didn’t know how long she’d been lying there on the hard, narrow bunk. Her mind cleared slowly as she blinked and tried to remember where she was. Frightening memories came back. A big, strong guy dragging her out of a car. She’d been held down. Injected with something, screaming. Then she must have passed out.

Her head was throbbing and her mouth tasted bad. She was in a dim, cold, windowless cellar. The room was long and wide, but the cell she was locked in was tiny and cramped. On three sides she was surrounded by steel bars. The wall behind her was cold stone. A single naked bulb hung from a strand of wire in the middle of the cellar, its pale yellow light shining weakly off thick stone pillars.

In another cell a few metres away, a teenage boy was lying comatose on the concrete floor. He seemed heavily sedated, or dead. She tried calling out to him. He didn’t stir.

Her guard was a scrawny-looking man of about thirty. He had bulbous, shifting eyes and a straggly yellow beard. A submachine gun hung from a sling around his neck. He paced nervously up and down all the time. She watched him, measuring the cellar by the number of his steps. Every so often he shot a look at her, the bulging eyes scanning her from head to toe.

After a while the scrawny guard was replaced by a stocky man with a shaven head, older, more confident. He brought her a mug of thin coffee and some beans and rice in a tin dish. After that he ignored her.

The teenager in the next cell came to. He lifted himself groggily up on his hands and knees, and turned to look at her with bloodshot eyes.

‘I’m Roberta,’ she whispered across the gap. ‘What’s your name?’

The boy was too out of it to respond. He just stared at her. But the stocky guard obviously didn’t want them talking. He took a syringe out of a zipper bag, grabbed the boy’s arm through the bars of his cage and gave him a shot. After a minute the kid was slumped flat again.

‘What the fuck are you giving him?’ Roberta hissed at him.

‘Shut up, bitch, or you’ll get it too.’ Then he went back to ignoring her.

It seemed like hours and hours later when the stocky guard eventually swapped places with the scrawny, bearded man again. Soon after he’d resumed his watch over her, he gave her a tentative smile and she returned it. ‘Hey, you couldn’t get me a glass of water, could you?’ she called over to him. He hesitated, then went to a table where the guards had a jug and a few dusty glasses.

After she drank the water, he seemed to want to hang around closer to her cage. She smiled again. ‘What’s your name?’

‘A-André,’ he replied nervously.

‘André, c’mere a minute. I need your help.’

The scrawny guard glanced over his shoulder, even though there was nobody else around. ‘What d’you want?’ he muttered suspiciously.

‘I lost an earring,’ she said. That much was true. It must have fallen out somewhere between here and the hotel. She pointed down at the shadows of the floor. ‘It fell down there, your side. I can’t reach through the bars.’

‘Fuck you, find it yourself.’ He turned away with a sour look.

‘Please? It’s antique, twenty-four carat gold. Worth a lot of money.’

That got his interest. He hesitated, then slung the submachine gun behind his back and approached her. He dropped to his knees, searching in the dust. ‘Where abouts?’

Roberta crouched down facing him through the bars. ‘Just around there, I think…maybe this way a bit…yeah, round there…’

‘I can’t see it.’ He was scraping around with his fingers, a look of avid concentration on his face. He moved closer to her and she caught the scent of rancid sweat mixed with cheap deodorant, a kind of cold baked-beans smell. She waited until his head was almost touching the bars of the cage. She passed her hands through the bars either side, her heart beginning to race as she thought about what she was going to do. His attention was fixed on the floor. She took a deep breath and then went for it.

In a sudden movement she grabbed hold of his beard with both hands. He wrenched his head back with a stifled shout, but she held him fast. She used her knees against the bars to brace herself. Yanked with all her strength and his bony forehead crashed against the steel cage. He cried out in pain and grabbed at her wrists. Tightening her grip on his beard, she threw herself violently backwards and smashed his head against the bars a second time. He sagged to the floor, stunned but still struggling. She dug her fingers into his greasy hair, bunching up a tight fistful of it, and with the unthinking brutality that comes with desperation she dashed his head repeatedly against the concrete floor until he stopped yelling and struggling. He lay limply with blood oozing from his broken nose.

She let go of him and fell back into the cage, breathing hard and wiping the sweat out of her eyes. She saw the ring of keys on his belt and crawled forward in the dust. She stretched her arm out for it. It was just within reach of her straining fingers and she unclipped it, fumbling clumsily with the fear that someone would come in and catch her. As she tried the different keys on the ring she glanced nervously up at the steel door at the top of the steps.

The fourth key she tried turned the lock. She pushed hard at the steel door to shove the slumped body out of the way, picked up the fallen sub-machinegun and slung it around her neck.

‘Hey, wake up.’ She banged on the bars of the teenager’s cage, but he wasn’t responding. She thought about opening up his cell and carrying him out-but he’d be too heavy for her. If she could get out of here alone, she’d come back later with the police.

She ran across the cellar to the stone steps. Just as she reached the third step, the steel door at the top swung open, and she froze.

The tall man in black appeared in the doorway above her. Their eyes met.

She knew this guy. Her kidnapper. Without hesitating she pointed the
SMG
at his head and squeezed the trigger.

But he just kept walking down the steps, grinning broadly at her. She squeezed harder on the trigger, but it was stuck or something-the gun wouldn’t work. Three more guards filed through the doorway, all pointing similar weapons at her.

And they’d all remembered to cock theirs.

Bozza snatched the gun away from her. He caught the fist she swung at him, and twisted her arm up tight behind her back. A stab of pain. Another quarter inch and he’d break it. He marched her back to her cell and flung her into it. The barred door clanged shut behind her.