The English Girl: A Novel Read online

  The Hotel de la Mer was not actually by the sea. Compact, tidy, and covered with a fresh coat of white paint, it overlooked the tidal river that split the town in two. Gabriel intentionally drove past the entrance three times before finally easing into an angled parking space along the quay. No one from the hotel came to help him; it was not that kind of place. He waited for a lone car to pass before switching off the engine. Then, after burying the key deep in the front pocket of his jeans, he climbed quickly out. The two suitcases were surprisingly heavy. Indeed, had he not known the contents, he would have assumed that Jeremy Fallon had filled them with lead weights. Gulls circled slowly overhead, as if hoping he might collapse beneath the weight of his burden.

  The hotel had no proper lobby, only a cramped vestibule where a bald, thin clerk sat somnambulantly behind a desk. Despite the fact there were only eight rooms, it took a moment for him to locate the reservation. Gabriel paid in cash, violating one of the kidnappers’ demands, and left a generous deposit for incidentals.

  “Is there a second key for the room?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  “May I have it, please?”

  “But what about Mademoiselle Ricard?”

  “I’ll let her in.”

  The clerk frowned disapprovingly as he slid the extra key across the desktop.

  “There are no others?” asked Gabriel. “Just this one?”

  “The maid has a master key, of course. And so do I.”

  “And you’re sure there’s no one in the room?” he asked.

  “Positive,” said the clerk. “I just finished preparing it myself.”

  For this thoughtful gesture, Gabriel placed a ten-euro note upon the desk. It was seized by a grimy hand and disappeared into the pocket of an ill-fitting blazer.

  “Do you require assistance with your luggage?” he asked, as though assisting Gabriel was the last thing on his mind that evening.

  “No, thank you,” said Gabriel cheerfully. “I think I can manage.”

  He wheeled the suitcases across the linoleum floor, then did his best to make them appear weightless as he lifted them off the ground by their grips and started up the narrow staircase. His room was on the third floor, at the end of a dimly lit hall. Gabriel inserted the key into the lock with the care of a doctor wielding a medical probe. Entering, he found the room empty and a single light burning weakly on the bedside table. He rolled the bags just across the threshold. Then, after closing the door and drawing his Beretta, he quickly searched the closet and the bathroom. Finally, certain he was alone, he chained the door, barricaded it with every piece of furniture in the room, and wedged the two suitcases beneath the bed. As he stood upright again, the phone he had collected in Calais rang for the second time. “Very good,” said the same computer-generated voice. “Now listen carefully.”

  This time, Gabriel issued several demands of his own. She had to come alone, with no backup, and no weapon. Gabriel reserved the right to search her—thoroughly and intrusively, he added, just so there were no misunderstandings. After that, she could take all the time she needed to verify that the notes were genuine and, when tallied, amounted to a sum of ten million euros. She could count the money, smell it, taste it, or make love to it—Gabriel didn’t care, so long as she made no attempt to steal it. If she did that, said Gabriel, she would get hurt, badly, and the deal would be off. “And don’t make any stupid threats about killing Madeline,” he said. “Threats insult my intelligence.”

  “One hour,” responded the voice, and the connection went dead.

  Gabriel removed a straight-backed chair from his barricade and placed it in the room’s arrow-slit of a window. And there he sat for the next sixty-seven minutes watching the street below. Forty minutes into his vigil, a man hurried past the hotel beneath an umbrella, pausing only long enough to pull at the latch of the Passat’s front passenger-side door. After that, there were no more cars or pedestrians, only the gulls circling overhead, and a gang of street cats that feasted on the rubbish from the seafood restaurant next door. The waiting, he thought. Always the waiting.

  When sixty minutes elapsed with no sign of her, Gabriel felt a stab of panic—a panic that worsened with each passing minute. Then, finally, a BMW wagon nosed into the empty space next to his. The door opened and a stylish boot emerged, followed in short order by a long, blue-jeaned leg. The leg belonged to a woman with coal-black hair that fell about her shoulders and shielded her face from Gabriel’s view. He watched as she came across the street through the rain, watched the rhythm of her stride, the bend of her knees. It was a curious thing, the gait; it was like a fingerprint or a retina scan. A face could be easily changed, but even professional intelligence officers struggled to change the way they walked. Gabriel realized he had seen the walk before. She was the woman from the ferry.

  He was certain of it.

  25

  GRAND-FORT-PHILIPPE, FRANCE

  It took her less than a minute to make her way from the street to the third floor of the hotel. Gabriel used the interval to remove the barricade of furniture from the entrance hall. Then he placed his ear against the door and listened to the tack-hammer clatter of her heels along the uncarpeted hall. It was a good door, solid and thick, enough to slow a bullet but not to stop one. The woman knocked lightly upon it, as though she suspected children were sleeping within.

  “Are you alone?” asked Gabriel in French.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “Do you have a gun?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know what will happen if I find a gun on you?”

  “The deal is off.”

  Gabriel opened the door a few inches with the chain still in place. “Put your hand through,” he said.

  The woman hesitated for a moment and then obeyed. Her hand was long and pale. She wore a single ring, a band of woven silver, and there was a small tattoo of the sun on the webbing between her thumb and forefinger. Gabriel seized hold of the wrist and twisted it painfully. On the underside were the long-healed scars of a youthful suicide attempt.

  “If you ever want to use this hand again,” he said, “you’ll do exactly as I tell you. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” gasped the woman.

  “Drop your handbag to the floor and push it to me with your foot.”

  Again, the woman obeyed. With his left hand still wrapped around her wrist, Gabriel reached down and emptied the contents of the handbag onto the floor. It was the usual detritus one would expect to find in the purse of a French female, with two notable exceptions: a jeweler’s loupe and a handheld infrared lamp. Gabriel removed the chain from the door and, twisting the wrist to the point of breaking, drew the woman inside. With his foot, he closed the door. Then he pushed her face-first against the wall and, as promised, searched her thoroughly, confident in the belief he was going where many men had gone before.

  “Are you enjoying yourself?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Gabriel said dully. “In fact, I haven’t had this much fun since the last time I had a bullet removed.”

  “I hope it hurt.”

  He removed the dark wig and ran his hand through the woman’s boyishly short blond hair.

  “Finished?” she asked.

  “Turn around.”

  She did, facing him for the first time. She was tall and thin, with the long limbs and small breasts of a Degas dancer. Her heart-shaped face was impish and innocent, and on her lips was the faintest trace of an ironic smile. The Office loved faces like hers. Gabriel wondered how many fortunes had been lost to it.

  “How are we going to do this?” she asked.

  “The usual way,” answered Gabriel. “You’re going to examine the money, and I’m going to hold a gun to your head. And if you do anything to make me nervous, I’m going to blow your brains out.”

  “Are you always this charming?”

  “Only with girls I really like.”

  “Where’s the money?”

  “Under the bed.�
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  “Are you going to get it for me?”

  “Not a chance.”

  The woman exhaled heavily, knelt at the foot of the bed, and heaved the first bag into view. Opening it, she counted the number of stacks in each direction, first vertically, then horizontally. Then she pulled a stack from the center, like a climatologist drilling an ice core, and counted those, too.

  “Finished?” asked Gabriel, mocking her.

  “We’re just getting started.”

  She selected six bundles of notes from six different parts of the bag at six different depths and counted the notes, setting one note aside from each bundle. She counted quickly, like someone who had worked in a bank or a casino. Or perhaps, thought Gabriel, she simply spent a lot of time counting stolen money.

  “I need my things,” she said.

  “You don’t really think I’m going to turn my back on you?”

  She left the six hundred-euro notes on the bed and went to the entrance hall to collect her loupe and infrared lamp. Returning, she sat on the edge of the bed and used the loupe to examine each bill carefully, looking for any clue that it might be counterfeit—a poorly printed image, a missing number or character, a hologram or watermark that didn’t look genuine. The examination of each bill took more than a minute. When she was finally finished, she set down the loupe and picked up the infrared lamp.

  “I need to turn off the room lights.”

  “Turn that on first,” said Gabriel, nodding toward the infrared lamp.

  She did. Gabriel walked around the room switching off the lights until only the purplish glow of the infrared remained. She used it to examine each of the six bills. The security strips glowed lime green, proving the bills were genuine.

  “Very good,” she said.

  “I can’t tell you how happy I am you’re pleased.” Gabriel switched on the room lights. “Now I have a demand,” he said. “Tell Paul to call me within the hour, or the deal’s off.”

  “He’s not going to like it.”

  “Tell him about the money,” said Gabriel. “He’ll get over it.”

  The woman returned the wig to her head, collected her things, and departed without another word. Gabriel watched her drive away from his outpost in the window. Then he remained there, staring into the wet street, and waited for the phone to ring. The call came through at 9:15 p.m., one hour to the minute. After enduring a computer-generated tirade, Gabriel calmly issued his demand. There was a silence, a burst of typing, and then the voice. Thin, lifeless, and stressing all the wrong words.

  “I’m in charge,” it said, “not you.”

  “I understand,” Gabriel responded, calmer still. “But this is a business transaction, nothing more. Money for merchandise. And I would be remiss if I didn’t do my due diligence before completing the sale.”

  Another pause, more typing, then the voice.

  “This call has lasted too long. Hang up and wait for us to call back.”

  Gabriel did as he was told. A minute later a call came through from a different device. The voice issued a detailed set of instructions, which Gabriel copied onto a page of Hotel de la Mer stationery.

  “When?” he asked.

  “One hour,” said the voice.

  And then it was gone. Gabriel severed the connection and reread the instructions to make certain he had written them down correctly. There was only one problem.

  The money.

  During the next five minutes, Gabriel made three phone calls in rapid succession. The first two he placed from his room phone—one to the room next door, which went unanswered, and a second to the drowsy night clerk downstairs, who confirmed that the room was unoccupied. Gabriel reserved it for the night, promising payment in full within the hour. Then, from his personal mobile phone, he rang Christopher Keller.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Boulogne,” replied Keller.

  “I need you to walk through the entrance of the Hotel de la Mer in Grand-Fort-Philippe in fifty-five minutes.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because I have an errand to run, and I need to make sure no one steals my luggage while I’m gone.”

  “Where’s the luggage?”

  “Under the bed in the room next door.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Another hour, another wait. Gabriel used the time to put his room in order and to prepare perhaps the strongest cup of Nescafé ever brewed. He was going on his third night without sleep—the Lubéron, Downing Street, and now this. He was close; he could feel it. A few more hours, he thought, as he poured the bitter liquid down his throat. And then he would sleep for a month.

  At ten minutes past ten, he headed downstairs to the lobby, where he told the night clerk that a Monsieur Duval would be arriving shortly. He paid the room charges in full and left behind an envelope, which was to be given to Monsieur Duval at check-in. Then he headed outside and climbed behind the wheel of the Passat. As he was driving away, he peered into the rearview mirror and saw Keller walking into the hotel, right on schedule.

  This time they had given him not only a destination but a specific route as well. It took him across fields of windmills and eventually to the gasworks, refineries, and rail depots of west Dunkirk. Before him rose a mountain range of gravel, like a miniaturized version of the Alps. He sped past it in a cloud of dust and turned onto a narrow road running atop a long breakwater. On his right were the cargo cranes of Dunkirk harbor; on his left, the sea. He marked the starting point of the road with the TRIP setting on the odometer; then, exactly one and a half kilometers later, he pulled to the side and switched off the engine. The car shuddered in the heavy, wet wind. Gabriel climbed out and, turning up his coat collar, set out across the beach. The tide was out; the sand was as hard and flat as a parking lot. He stopped at the water’s edge and hurled his Beretta into the sea. It was a fine place for a soldier’s gun to end up, he thought as he started back toward the car. On the bottom of the sea, off the beaches of Dunkirk.

  When he arrived back at the road, he looked in both directions, east, west, then east again. There were no other people about and no headlights approaching, only the lights of the cargo cranes and the distant glow of the gas fires burning atop the refineries. Gabriel opened the trunk and placed the key on the ground, just inside the left rear wheel. Then he climbed into the trunk, arranged his moderately sized frame in something like a fetal position, and pulled the hatch closed. A few seconds later the phone rang.

  “Are you in?” asked the voice.

  “I’m in.”

  “Five minutes,” said the voice.

  As it turned out, it was closer to ten minutes before Gabriel heard a car pull up behind him. He heard a door opening and closing, followed by the tack-hammer clatter of boots over asphalt. It was the woman, he thought as the car lurched forward. He was certain of it.

  Once free of Dunkirk, she drove at speed for more than an hour, only twice coming to a complete stop. Then she turned onto a pitted track and continued to drive at speed, as if to punish Gabriel for the impertinence of asking for proof of life before surrendering ten million euros in ransom. At one point the Passat bottomed out with a heavy, scraping thud. To Gabriel it sounded as though they had just struck an iceberg.

  The pitted track soon gave way to soft, deep gravel, and the gravel to the concrete floor of a garage. Gabriel knew this because, when the car came to a stop, the sound of the engine was vibrating back at him from the walls. After a moment it fell silent, and the woman climbed out, her heels clattering loudly over the floor. The trunk opened a few inches, and the long pale hand inserted a swath of cloth, which Gabriel immediately pulled over his head.

  “Are you ready?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what’s going to happen if that hood comes off?”

  “The girl dies.”

  Gabriel heard the hatch of the trunk rise. Then two pairs of hands, obviousl
y male, took hold of him, one by the shoulders, the other by the legs, and lifted him out. They placed him on his feet with surprising gentleness and made certain he was stable before binding his hands behind his back with a pair of flex-cuffs. Then they seized him by the elbows and frog-marched him across the gravel, slowing slightly to help him up two brick steps and through a doorway.

  The flooring inside was wooden and uneven, like the floorboards of an old farmhouse. As they made a series of quick turns, Gabriel had the sensation of being guided by a figure of authority. They clambered down a flight of steep stairs, into a cool cellar that smelled of limestone and damp. The hands pushed him forward for several more feet, jerked him to a stop, and then eased him downward, onto the edge of a cot. Gabriel listened carefully to the footfalls of the captors as they withdrew, trying to determine their number. Then a heavy door slammed shut with the finality of a coffin lid. After that, there was no sound at all. Only the smell. Heavy and nauseatingly sweet. The smell of a human being in captivity.

  Gabriel sat motionless and silent, convinced he had been left in the room alone. But after a few seconds, a hand removed the hood from his head. It belonged to a young woman, gaunt, pale as porcelain, yet still exquisitely beautiful.

  “I’m Madeline Hart,” she said. “Who are you?”

  26

  NORTHERN FRANCE