“Isn’t there anyone else we can ask about the school? Find out who was there with her, and so on?”
“Well, the trouble is the place is really very small. It has a website of sorts but there’s no real information on it. We’ve done the usual online searches and talked to everyone we can find who went there, but no one remembers anything significant about Jean D’Aubigny beyond the fact that she was there about ten years ago, had longish dark hair and kept herself to herself.”
“No ex-teachers you can talk to?”
“We haven’t been able to track down any that remember anything significant about her. The impression we’re getting is that there were fairly severe money problems and staff came and went pretty fast. A lot of the teachers and domestic staff were from overseas, and almost certainly paid on a cash-in-hand basis.”
“Can’t the police just unlock the place and go through the records? The Prevention of Terrorism Act makes that possible, surely?”
“It does, and that’s in hand right now. As soon as we’ve got anything I’ll let you know.”
“And locally? Around Newcastle under Lyme? Who did she hang out with there, during the school holidays?”
“The parents aren’t saying. The police have asked around and turned up a Pakistani family who knew her from the local Islamic centre, but that’s about it.”
“Anything from the Paris end?”
“Again, nothing significant. One fellow student named Hamidullah Souad knew her quite well. They studied for exams together and so on and apparently went to the cinema once or twice, but they stopped seeing each other when she told him that she disapproved of his lifestyle. Apparently she supported herself by giving English classes to business people through a language school, but the arrangement came to an end after complaints that she had expressed ‘extreme attitudes’ in front of clients.”
“So we’ve still got no connection with East Anglia?”
“None at all. Does she need to have one?”
“No, she could just be Mansoor’s cover, in which case all she has to be is English. But the pair of them are running now, and if she’s ever been here before it might just point us to where she’s gone to ground, or even what the target is. So don’t let up, Jude, please.”
“We won’t.”
Ten minutes later she and Mackay were back in the Swanley Heath hangar, sitting opposite Deputy Chief Constable Jim Dunstan. A large, bluff man with thinning sandy hair, he retained the bullish, blustering air of the prop forward who, three decades earlier, had led the Joint Services team to victory over the Barbarians at Twickenham.
“Bugger all,” he told them morosely. “Not an effing sausage. We’ve had helicopters up all afternoon, both ours and the Army’s, we’ve got dog-handlers and TA search teams beating the woodland from here to the coast, traffic backed up practically the same distance…”
“It was always going to be difficult, surely?” said Mackay diplomatically.
“Course it bloody was. That’s what I’ve told the Home Office. I explained that just for once it’s not a question of resources, and that the point comes when you’ve got to hold back or risk unmanageable levels of confusion and wire-crossing. In my view our best hope is for a sighting by a member of the general public, and to that end we’ve been pushing the local media angle. It would be a damn sight easier if it wasn’t a Sunday, of course, but what can you do?” He looked from one to the other of them. “Have any of your people come up with anything?”
“Nothing that points to a specific target,” said Liz with deep frustration. “And nothing that puts D’Aubigny in East Anglia at any time in the past. The parents have got some heavy-duty human rights lawyer telling them to keep their mouths shut, so…”
“So they’d rather see her head blown off by those headbangers from Hereford. I know. Brilliant.” He looked without enthusiasm at the activity around them and jutted his chin forward belligerently. “What we actually need is a break. A bloody great slice of luck. Right now, that’s the best we can hope for.”
Liz and Mackay nodded. There wasn’t much else to say. The silence was broken by Liz’s mobile. Another text message, this time a letter code announcing an e-mail. Retiring to an empty stretch of trestle table, she switched on her laptop.
50
Out!” said Faraj urgently. “Put the bags under the tree and then help me with the car.”
With care, Jean arranged the rucksacks at the base of the willow. It had begun to rain again, the light was fading, and the place was deserted. In summer there might have been a few people around: an angler, perhaps, after a chub or a perch, or a couple of picnickers. Late on a wet December afternoon, though, there was little to draw the passerby down the rutted lane and through the stand of trees to this bleak intersection of the Lesser Ouse and the Methwold Fen Relief Drain.
Jean D’Aubigny knew the place, knew that the water was deep there and that visitors were few. Remembered in a rush of memory almost painful in its intensity what it was like to be sixteen years old, to smell the green, muddy aroma of the river and feel the dizzying rush of vodka and cigarettes on an empty stomach.
It had taken them a fair amount of time to find the place, and they had been further slowed by the need to take minor roads and farm tracks across country, but they were now a clear twenty-five miles south of the village from where they had stolen the MGB, and since the roadblock they had not encountered any police. They had heard a distant siren as they crossed the King’s Lynn road, and ten minutes later they had seen a helicopter far to the north of them whose camouflage identified it as military, but that was all. Given that they had to assume that the theft of the MGB had been swiftly reported, they were grateful.
Faraj wound down the MGB’s windows, and pulled back the vinyl top. The car stood beside the old bridge across the river. In front of it a flight of cracked concrete steps led down to a narrow towpath. From the far side of the river the narrower drainage channel led off northwards. The river was deep here, but slow, which was why, for all the place’s bleakness, it had always been so good for swimming. Not that you would want to swim in it now. The level was much higher than Jean remembered it, and the water was a dense, swirling coffee-brown. A scum of foliage, cigarette ends and fast-food containers circled at the foot of the steps.
Turning, she looked around her. Nothing. Then Faraj caught her wrist hard and she froze, backing away from the bridge. There was movement in the relief drain. Something was silently displacing the bullrushes and reeds. An animal? she wondered. A police dog? A police diver, even? Nothing was visible, just that slow, terrifying bending of the reeds.
They were well back from the bank now, crouching behind the car. Both were holding their weapons; both released their safety catches as a stray gust of wind caused rain to cascade from the wet branches overhanging the river.
The reeds in the relief drain parted, and the pointed grey-green nose of a kayak moved silently into view. Sitting inside it was an unmoving figure in hooded olive waterproofs. Jean’s first, paralysing assumption was that this was a Special Forces soldier, and when the figure slowly raised a pair of binoculars to its face this seemed to be confirmed.