The woman moaned.
‘Please. Stay still. You’ve broken your foot.’ Calque tried to unwind the window but the mechanism was damaged. The woman’s face had already turned purple.
It was clear that she was having difficulty breathing. ‘Macron. Bring the hammer. Fast. We’re going to have to break the glass.’
‘What hammer?’
‘The fire extinguisher, then.’ Calque took off his jacket and wrapped it around the woman’s head. ‘It’s all right, Madame. Don’t struggle. We need to break the glass.’
All tension suddenly went out of the woman’s body and she slumped heavily against the car.
‘Quick. She’s stopped breathing.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Smash the window with the extinguisher.’
Macron drew back the fire extinguisher and lashed at the window. The extinguisher bounced off the security glass.
‘Give it to me.’ Calque grabbed the extinguisher. He smashed the butt against the window glass. ‘Now give me your jacket.’ He wrapped the jacket around his hand and punched through the shattered glass. He eased the woman to the ground and laid her head on the jacket. Hunching forwards, he struck her sharply over the heart. He felt with two fingers below her left breast and then began depressing her sternum. ‘Macron. When I tell you, give her two spaced breaths.’
Macron crouched down by the woman’s head.
‘You called the ambulance?’
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘Good lad. We’ll keep this up until they get here. Has she still got her pulse?’
‘Yes, Sir. It’s fl uttering a little, but it’s there.’
Between double-handed strokes, Calque looked into Macron’s eyes. ‘Now do you believe me? About the second man?’
‘I always believed you, Sir. But do you really think he did this?’
‘Two breaths.’
Macron bent forward and gave the woman the kiss of life.
Calque restarted his two-handed strokes. ‘I don’t simply believe it, boy. I know it.’
36
Yola spat the last of her pumpkin seed husks on to the floor of the car. ‘Look. Wild asparagus.’
‘What?’
‘Wild asparagus. We have to stop.’
‘You can’t be serious.’
Yola gave Sabir a sharp tap on the shoulder. ‘Is somebody timing us? Are we being chased? Is there a deadline for this thing?’
‘Well, of course not…’
‘So stop.’
Sabir looked to Alexi for support. ‘You don’t think we should stop, do you?’
‘Of course we should stop. How often do you see wild asparagus growing beside the road? Yola must have her cueillette.’
‘Her what?’ Aware that he was being outvoted, Sabir swung the car around and headed back towards the asparagus clump.
‘Wherever they go, gypsy women conduct what they call a cueillette. That means they never pass by free food – herbs, salad, eggs, grapes, walnuts, Reines Claudes – without stopping to collect it.’
‘What the Hell are Reines Claudes?’
‘Green plums.’
‘Oh. You mean greengages?’
‘Reines Claudes. Yes.’
Sabir glanced back-up the road behind them. A Citroen breasted the corner and thundered guilelessly past. ‘I’m taking us to where we can’t be seen. Just in case a police car comes by.’
‘No one will recognise us, Adam. They’re looking for one man, not two men and a woman. And in a car with different plates.’
‘Still.’
Yola hammered the seat-back in front of her. ‘Look. I can see some more. Over there by the river.’ She rustled about in her rucksack and came up with two knotted plastic bags. ‘You two go and collect the asparagus by the road. I’ll collect the other stuff. I can see dandelions, nettles and marguerites too. You boys are lucky. We’re going to have a feast tonight.’
37
Achor Bale had bought himself forty minutes’ grace. Forty minutes in which to extract all the information he needed. Forty minutes for the police to deal with the scene he had left behind him, liaise with the ambulance service and placate the local back-up.
He slammed his foot on to the accelerator and watched the tracking markers converge. Then he sucked in his breath and slowed down.
Something had changed. Sabir wasn’t moving forward any more. As Bale watched, the marker began slowly retracing its steps towards him. He hesitated, one hand poised over the steering wheel. Now the marker was stationary. It was flashing less than five hundred metres ahead of him.
Bale pulled off the road twenty metres before the apex of the corner. He hesitated before abandoning his car, but then decided that he had neither the time, nor a suitable location, in which to hide it. He’d just have to risk the police driving by and making the somewhat unlikely connection between him and a stationary vehicle.
He hurried over the breast of the hill and down through a small wood. Why had they stopped so soon after the last halt? A picnic? An accident? It could be anything.
The best thing would be if he could get them all together. Then he could concentrate on one whilst the others were forced to watch. That way nearly always worked. Guilt, thought Bale, was the major weakness of the Western world. When people didn’t feel guilt, they built empires. When they began to feel guilt, they lost them. Look at the British.
He saw the girl first, squatting alone near the riverbank. Was she taking a leak? Was that what this was all about? He searched for the men but they were out of sight. Then he saw that she was dissecting clumps of vegetation and stuffing the residue into a series of plastic bags. Jesus Christ. These people weren’t to be believed.
He checked around for the men one final time and then cut down towards the girl. This was simply too good to be true. They must have known he was coming.
Laid it all on in some way.
He hesitated for a moment, when he was about fifteen feet from the girl. She made a pretty picture, squatting there in her long gypsy dress by the river. A perfect picture of innocence. Bale was reminded of something from the long-distant past but he couldn’t quite identify the scene. The sudden lapse disturbed him, like an unexpected current of cold air travelling through a tear in a pair of trousers.
He ran the last few yards, confident that the girl hadn’t heard his approach. At the last possible moment she began to turn around but he was already on top of her, pinning her arms to the ground with his knees. He had expected her to scream and had taken the precaution of pinching shut her nose – it was a method which nearly always worked with women and was far better than risking one’s hand over a panic-stricken person’s mouth – but the girl was strangely silent. It was almost as if she had been expecting him.
‘If you cry out, I shall sever your spinal cord. Just like I did to your brother. Do you understand me?’
She nodded.
He couldn’t see her face properly, as he had her pinioned down from the back, with her body underneath him and her arms stretched out in a cruciform position. He rectified this by angling her head to one side.
‘I’m going to say this once and once only. In ten seconds time I am going to knock you out with my fist. While you are unconscious I am going to raise your skirt, take off your underpants and conduct an exploration inside you with my knife. When I encounter your fallopian tubes I am going to cut them. You will bleed badly but it won’t kill you. The men will probably find you before that happens. But you will never be a mother. Do you understand me? That will be gone. Forever.’
He heard rather than saw her evacuating her bladder. Her eyes turned up in themselves and started fl uttering.
‘Stop that. Wake up.’ He pinched her cheek as hard as he could. Her eyes began to refocus. ‘Now listen. What did you find? Where are you going? Tell me these things and I will leave you alone. Your ten seconds have started.’