‘Stuck out in the road as you were, could you see the driver?’ demanded Harding.
‘Not very well. He was going bald and he wore spectacles; I think they had heavy black frames. And he had a beaked nose. That’s the best I can do.’
‘A thin man? Or fat?’
‘Quite heavily built.’
‘Did you see enough of him to help a police artist create a picture?’ asked Blake, avoiding their earlier oversight.
The man shook his head. ‘I really don’t think so. I don’t want to mislead.’
‘We’d really like you to try,’ urged Blake. ‘We’ll keep your reservations in mind.’
‘All right.’
‘How old would you say the man was?’ said Harding, also avoiding the earlier omission.
‘Again, I don’t want to mislead. Late forties, early fifties. I can’t get any closer than that.’
‘What about the woman?’ asked Blake.
‘I hardly saw her at alclass="underline" I was looking at the front of their car, trying to judge the distance to get by.’
‘But you didn’t get by,’ reminded Harding. ‘You had to pull in behind.’
‘Blond. Hair very tightly pinned at the back. I didn’t see her face at all. I wasn’t really interested: it was a mother picking up her daughter, as far as I was concerned. All I wanted to do was get by and get to work.’
‘Is that the impression you had?’ asked Claudine quickly, not wanting to miss the moment. ‘That it was a mother picking up her child?’
‘I drive along the road all the time. I know the school’s there and I’m used to seeing the kids picked up. That usually causes jams, too. I try to beat them by coming along earlier but that day I didn’t make it.’
‘Was there anything other than your knowing there was a school that made you think it was mother and daughter? Anything unusual about the way the child was behaving?’
Lunckner shook his head. ‘She was scowling, as if she was annoyed.’
‘Annoyed?’ persisted Claudine. ‘Not frightened?’
‘Annoyed,’ insisted the man. ‘I thought it was because her mother was late and had made her walk. Or that she was being told off.’
‘When you were driving behind them did you see the woman drop her arm, to put it round the child, which would have been a natural thing to do if she’d been late and her daughter was upset?’
‘It wouldn’t have been comfortable,’ the man pointed out. ‘She was too small against the woman in the back seat. If she’d put her arm down it would have been round the child’s neck, not round her shoulders or her back.’
‘And the woman definitely didn’t do that, reach down to hold Mary?’
‘Not that I saw.’
‘While they were in your view, did you get any impression that Mary didn’t want to be there? Any indication of their arguing or Mary fighting: trying to get out?’
‘Not at all.’
‘How long were they in your view?’
‘Only a few minutes. At the rue de Laeken they turned left and I turned right.’
‘This is very important,’ warned Claudine. ‘You could see Mary’s head, above the top of the seat.’
‘Just.’
‘The whole of her head, down to her neck? Or just the top: her hair?’
‘Not much more than her hair.’
‘How far up the woman’s arm was the top of Mary’s head?’
The man put the flat of his hand virtually at his shoulder. ‘About there.’
Poncellet summoned an aide to take Lunckner to a police artist, waiting for the man to leave the room before saying: ‘I think that was very good.’ He spoke as if he were personally responsible for the success.
‘I agree,’ said Claudine. ‘We’ve got a lot to work from.’
‘I think so, too,’ said Harding. ‘Rompuy particularly: I prefer his recall to the other guy’s. Rompuy’s drawing will be important.’
‘But will it really take us that much further forward?’ asked Jean Smet, coming into the discussion for the first time.
‘Very much,’ predicted Claudine. ‘I’m getting to know who it is I’m up against.’
‘Well?’ asked Norris impatiently. He was leaning forward intently over Paul Harding’s desk in the embassy’s FBI office.
‘Nothing much so far,’ apologized Duncan McCulloch uncomfortably. A towering, raw-boned man, he was a Texas descendant of a Scottish immigrant whose given name he disdained in favour of Duke. ‘Quite a lot of newspaper cuttings about her involvement in some serial killings a few months back: Chinese gangs terrorizing illegal immigrants into prostitution and drugs. There was a failed hit on her. It was at a railway station. A knife attack. She caught it in the arm but the Chinese went under a train.’
‘What about personal stuff?’ insisted Norris. That was where he’d find the lead to her association with the kidnappers.
Robert Ritchie said: ‘She’s described as a widow in some of the cuttings. Apparently she was Britain’s lead profiler before she transferred here.’
‘Anything between her and Blake?’
‘It doesn’t look like it,’ said McCulloch.
‘You lying down on this?’ demanded Norris, abruptly accusing.
‘For Christ’s sake, John! We’ve only just started!’ protested Ritchie.
‘I don’t like being sworn at. And I don’t like being told there’s nothing dirty when I know there is.’
‘What is it?’ demanded McCulloch. ‘If you’ve got a lead give it to us to follow.’
‘I’m talking instinct. I’ve given you the job of finding it. You fixed a wire?’
‘Yes,’ said McCulloch. ‘Nothing.’
‘We got her personal Europol file?’
Each man waited for the other to respond. Finally Ritchie said: ‘We haven’t got any assets inside Europol, which would be our only chance. Getting hold of a personal Europol file cold, from outside, would be as impossible as getting any of our stuff out of Pennsylvania Avenue. Which you know as well as I do can’t be done.’
Norris patted the table at which he sat. ‘You think Paul might have a contact inside?’
McCulloch shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. But I thought this was a sealed operation?’
‘It was,’ said Norris. ‘Now maybe you guys need help.’
McCulloch managed to restrain himself until they reached the rue Guimard and the bar to which Harding had introduced the FBI’s Washington contingent. ‘Jesus H Christ!’ exploded the Texan. ‘Where the fuck does the asshole think he’s coming from!’
Ritchie, a laid-back survivor of California’s flower power era, was as angry but better controlled. ‘I don’t think the sonofabitch knows where he’s coming from. You ever hear of James Angleton?’
‘The CIA’s master spycatcher,’ remembered McCulloch. ‘Internal counter-intelligence. Only he never caught a single fucking traitor in the Agency – although they were there – broke every law there ever was and ended up a paranoid basket case.’
‘I think we’ve got ourselves the son of Angleton.’
‘The story is that Angleton destroyed as many people as Stalin if it just crossed his mind that they weren’t on his side.’
‘And Norris has just started to have doubts about us,’ declared Ritchie.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It would probably have occurred to each of them, at some stage, but it was Peter Blake who suggested it first so the credit went to him and in Claudine’s opinion more than made up for any earlier oversight. It was admittedly prompted by the appearance of Kurt Volker in the main operational room just as Johan Rompuy and Rene Lunckner re-entered with the police artist, but it was still Blake’s idea. Most encouragingly of all, Paul Harding at once acknowledged it as such.
They’d had to promise Poncellet and the Justice Ministry lawyer a full profile and copies of the artist’s drawings by the end of the day before either of them accepted that Claudine and the detectives needed to work through the information, and even then the reluctant Jean Smet had tried to argue his right to remain.