‘What makes you think I have it?’
‘We know what you got from the Manzini woman,’ the voice went on. ‘You will deliver it to us personally. You will meet us tonight at the Place du Peyrou in Montpellier. By the statue of Louis the Fourteenth. Eleven o’clock. You will come alone. We will be watching you. If we see any police, you will get Ryder back one piece at a time’.
‘I want proof of life,’ Ben demanded. As he listened, he heard a rustling sound of the phone being passed to someone. Roberta’s voice was suddenly in his ear. She sounded afraid. ‘…you, Ben? I…’ Then her voice was cut off abruptly as the phone was snatched away from her.
Ben was thinking fast. She was alive, and they wouldn’t kill her until they had what they wanted. That meant he could buy time.
‘I need forty-eight hours,’ he said.
There was a long pause. ‘Why? the voice demanded.
‘Because I don’t have the manuscript any more,’ Ben lied. ‘It’s hidden in the hotel.’
‘You will go there and retrieve it,’ the voice said. ‘You have twenty-four hours, or the woman dies’
Twenty-four hours. Ben thought about it for a moment. Whatever plan he might be able to come up with to get her out of there, he was going to need longer than that to put it into place. He’d negotiated many times with kidnappers and he knew how their minds worked. Sometimes they were inflexible in their demands and would execute a victim at the drop of a hat. But that was mostly when they knew they didn’t have much to gain, when the bargaining was breaking down or when it looked as though nobody was going to pay. If these guys wanted the manuscript badly enough and thought he was going to deliver it to them, it was a card he could play for all it was worth. He’d already got the guy backing down. He could push him a little more.
‘Hold on,’ he said calmly. ‘Let’s be reasonable. We have a problem. Thanks to you people, the hotel is crawling with armed police right now. I’m confident I can get the manuscript back, but I’ll need that extra time.’
Another long pause, muffled conversation in the background. Then the man’s voice was back. ‘You have thirty-six hours. Until eleven o’clock tomorrow night.’
‘I’ll be there.’
‘You had better be there, Mr. Hope.’
Police HQ, Montpellier
The vending-machine swallowed Luc Simon’s coins and spurted a jet of thin brown liquid into a plastic cup. The cup was so flimsy he could hardly pick the damn thing up without squeezing all the coffee out of it. He took a sip as he walked back down the corridor towards Cellier’s office, and screwed up his face.
On the wall of the corridor was another one of those Missing Person posters he’d been seeing everywhere, about the teenager who had disappeared a few days before. There’d even been one pinned up in the dingy bar in the village where that old priest lived.
He looked at his watch. Cellier was more than ten minutes late now. He needed to share notes with him about the Ben Hope case, and show him the new information he’d just got through from Interpol. Why was everyone always so fucking slow?. As he paced up and down, he kept looking at the poster.
He took another slurp from his plastic cup and decided he just couldn’t drink this stuff. He stuck his head around the dimpled glass door of Cellier’s office. The secretary looked up from her typing.
‘Where can I get a decent cup of coffee around here?’ he said. ‘Someone filled your vending-machine with diarrhoea.’
The secretary grinned. ‘There’s a good place up the road, sir. I always go there.’
‘Thanks. When your boss comes in, if he ever does, tell him I’ll be back in a few minutes, OK? Oh, where can I pour this shit out?’
‘Give it to me, sir,’ she said, laughing, and he leaned across the desk to pass it to her. There was a file open on her desk, with a photo of Marc Dubois, the missing kid. Sitting on top of the file was a small transparent plastic bag with some items in it.
‘OK, see you in a bit. Coffee place this way or that way?’ he said, pointing up and down the street through the window.
‘That way.’
Simon was heading out of the door when he suddenly stopped. He turned back towards her desk, and bent down to look at that file again. ‘Where did this come from?’ he asked.
‘What, sir?’
‘This in the bag.’ He jabbed his finger through the plastic bag at the object that had caught his eye. ‘Where did they find this?’
‘That’s all stuff from the Dubois missing persons case,’ she said. ‘Just a jotter and a couple of other things belonging to the boy.’
‘What about this thing here?’ He pointed.
She frowned at it. ‘Think they found it in the boy’s bedroom. They don’t think it’s important, though. I’m just typing up the case notes. Why d’you ask?’
In too much of a hurry to walk the three blocks to the café and back, he jumped into the unmarked car he’d been allocated and drove up. He came out three minutes later with a brioche and a cup of something that smelled and looked a hell of a lot more like the real thing. He climbed back into the car and sat sipping the coffee. Ah, yes, much better. The coffee helped him get his thoughts in order.
He was so lost in thought, he didn’t notice the figure approach the car until Ben Hope was opening the door, getting in beside him and holding a pistol at his head.
‘I’ll have that .38,’ Ben said. ‘Carefully, now.’
Simon hesitated for a second, then sighed and drew the revolver slowly from his holster, keeping his fingers well clear of the trigger and handing it to Ben butt-first. ‘You’ve got a nerve, Hope.’
‘Let’s go for a drive.’
They drove out of the town in silence, northwestwards towards the Bois de Valène and down wooded lanes by the banks of the river Mosson. After a few kilometres Ben pointed to an opening in the trees and said, ‘Pull in here.’ The police car bumped down a dirt road and arrived at a shady forest glade. Ben walked Simon from the car at gunpoint to where the trees opened up onto the riverbank and the sparkling blue water sloshed and burbled against the rocks.
‘Are you going to shoot me,’ asked Simon, ‘Major Hope?’
‘Been checking up on me.’ Ben smiled. ‘I wouldn’t do a thing like that. You and I are going to have a little talk in this pretty spot.’
Simon was wondering if Ben would get close enough to give him a chance to grab the pistol off him. Didn’t seem likely.
They walked down to the river. Ben motioned the gun at him to sit on a flat rock. He sat a couple of metres away from the detective.
‘What’s there to talk about?’ Simon asked.
‘For a start, we could talk about how you’re going to call your dogs off me.’
Simon laughed. ‘And why should I do that?’
‘Because I’m not your killer.’
‘No? It seems that everywhere you go, there are dead bodies in your wake,’ Simon said. ‘And hijacking a police officer at gunpoint isn’t the behaviour of an innocent man.’
‘I won’t come in.’
‘You