‘I tell lies,’ said McCulloch, hitting him again although not intending to break the man’s jaw, which he did. He fractured two of his own knuckles as well. Wim no need any longer to keep the door open the Texan took the stairs two at a time, leaping over the moaning Felicite, and found a boy and a girl dressed as wood nymphs cowering in the first bedroom. ‘We’re going home,’ he said, scooping them up. Both began to fight him. The girl wet herself.
McCulloch held one child under each arm as he plunged back down the stairs. The groaning Felicite made what could have been a gesture to trip him but McCulloch kicked past.
Only when he got out into the forecourt was it established that the children he had rescued were Robert Flet and Yvette Piquette, the two snatched in Eindhoven. Blake had found a boy, later identified as Jacques Blom, a nine-year-old who had disappeared the previous day in Lille, in the party room. He, like the other two, was dressed as a wood nymph. All three were immediately handed over to a combined Belgian/American medical team.
Hillary McBride was refusing to surrender Mary Beth. She knelt in the very centre of the forecourt, crying and repeating: ‘Oh, my darling! My own darling!’
What else she said was drowned by the arrival of another helicopter, although it landed further away from the chateau than the others had done. McBride ran from it, arms in the air. He threw himself down to the kneeling woman and child, embracing Mary Beth as best he could without including Hillary. ‘I got you back, darling! I got you back.’
From between her parents Mary Beth said: ‘I want to go back inside and take this silly costume off. It’s got her blood on it, I’ve got some new clothes. I like them.’
Claudine was at the entrance to the chateau when the swollen-faced, bloodied woman was led out. She said: ‘You didn’t win after all, Felicite. You were never going to. I was never going to let you.’
Felicite took away the surgical dressing she had pressed to her face and spat, bloodily, but it missed.
‘Christ, you’re ugly,’ said Claudine.
A total of thirty-three men, including the man at the gatehouse, were arrested at the chateau and three more at the outside road block. Felicite Galan was the only woman. Among them were two tax inspectors, unknown to each other, another priest and a police inspector, from Lille. The gunshot had been an attempt by an airline pilot to kill himself. He failed but the bullet lodged in his brain, destroying the left lobe and his mentality.
The finding of the medical team, later confirmed at Namur hospital, was that none of the children had been sexually abused, although all of them, apart from Mary Beth McBride, were severely traumatized.
‘Makes you believe in miracles, doesn’t it?’ said Blake.
‘Only just,’ said Claudine. ‘They’ll still need a lot of counselling.’
‘Bastards!’ said the man. ‘At least we got them.’
‘There’re still too many left,’ said Claudine.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
A disgruntled Henri Sanglier had to share the platform and the limelight with McBride and his wife, Miet Ulieff and the police chiefs of Brussels and Namur for the following day’s press conference. McBride described the operation as a brilliant example of international police co-operation and Ulieff said it proved the worth of an organization like Europol. A very dangerous, cross-border crime conspiracy preying upon children had been irrevocably smashed. Proceedings against those detained would take months, maybe even years. Hillary McBride said that although her daughter had been recovered completely unharmed she intended taking the child back to America to recuperate from what had been a horrifying experience, and thanked the media for the restraint she knew she could expect them to show towards the child.
Claudine didn’t attempt to contact Rosetti until after the weekend. When she failed to get a response from his apartment and found his answering machine turned off she called the medical division and was told that he’d taken leave for personal reasons, with no indication of a return date.
She was mildly unsettled by Blake’s dinner invitation but saw no reason to refuse. By coincidence he chose the restaurant by the lake to which Rosetti had taken her the first time they had gone out together.
‘It all got a bit hectic towards the end,’ he said. ‘How’s Hugo?’
‘He’s away, in Rome. His wife’s ill.’ Why was she offering explanations again?
‘Seriously?’
‘She won’t get better.’
‘Poor guy.’
‘Yes.’
‘You told me in Brussels you were lonely.’
‘Yes,’ she said again.
‘No reason why we shouldn’t be friends, is mere?’
‘No.’
‘Enjoy ourselves, without any serious commitment?’
‘No.’
‘Unless we wanted a serious commitment, that is.’
Why not? Claudine asked herself. The situation with Hugo was never going to resolve itself. And she’d decided she wasn’t going to wait for ever. ‘Why don’t we, just for a change, stop trying to analyse it and do just that. Enjoy ourselves?’
It was the third week of Rosetti’s absence – and Claudine’s affair with Blake – that the rumour began. Claudine heard it first from Kurt Volker, whose predilection for surfing into other people’s secret places made him a natural gossip. She was curious that he hadn’t already tiptoed down some darkened electronic alley to confirm it.
The Europol Commission did that at the beginning of the fourth week, in a formal announcement of Henri Sanglier’s resignation. It was timed to coincide with the Paris press conference at which Sanglier appeared flanked by Roger Castille and Guy Coty. Francoise, looking the epitome of French chic, was with him. There was a hugely enlarged photograph of Sanglier’s father being decorated by de Gaulle as a backdrop to remind television viewers of the family honour and Sanglier made an impressive vow to maintain that honour in a political career that had been declined by his father but he had decided to pursue. It was the cue for Castille to denounce the corruption of the present government that he would sweep aside in the coming election. Henri Sanglier, his intended Justice Minister, would be in the vanguard of every fight against crime, as he had been as the most famous of Europol’s governing commissioners.
It was only at the end of the televised conference that Claudine was reminded, annoyed that she hadn’t remembered it earlier. She actually considered telephoning Volker that night but decided there was no urgency. She did, however, call him as soon as she got into the Europol building the following morning.
‘I’m just tidying up my final report on the Mary Beth kidnap,’ she said.
‘I’ve already filed mine,’ said the German.
‘I was wondering about all that pornography you got in?’ she said, recalling the miniature bird tattoo on the thigh of a masked Francoise parading in Sanglier’s house.
‘What about it?’ asked Volker.
‘I know it’s hardly necessary to remind you, but the regulations are that it’s got to be destroyed. With all the chaos at the end I thought you might have overlooked it.’
‘No,’ said the German, unoffended. ‘I intended to.’
‘Intended?’
‘Sanglier asked for it all. When he said pornography was going to be his next priority I thought he meant here, in Europol. He meant when he becomes the French Justice Minister, obviously.’
‘Obviously,’ agreed Claudine.
Rosetti returned at the end of that week. He’d called from Rome, to warn her, and they met that night. It was virtually the only one she hadn’t spent with Blake.
‘Flavia died,’ he announced bluntly. ‘We actually thought there was going to be a recovery. Her eyes opened and there was some movement but it came down to muscle reflexes: even the squeezing of my hand.’
‘I’m sorry. So very sorry.’
‘The priest said it was for the best. So did the doctors. And they’re right.’
‘Yes.’
‘So now there’s us.’