Well, maybe that wasn’t exactly true. At first, despite his puzzlement, he’d felt pleased. He was being trusted on a foreign mission, trusted with expenses and with backup. He was going “into the field.” He couldn’t help feeling that Dominic Elder was somewhere at the back of it. Then he saw what it was, saw what was behind the whole thing.
He was being punished.
Joyce Parry was punishing him for having gone behind her back to Special Branch in the first place. He had marred his record. And his punishment? He would follow in the footsteps of a Special Branch officer, unable to find fresh or missed information, expendable.
Yes, there was no doubt about it. This was the penance expected of him. So he kept his teeth gritted as he went about his business.
“But the other policeman, Monsieur Doyle, he already ask this!”
“Yes, but if you could just tell me again what it was that made you...”
All day. A long and exhausting day. And not a single grain of evidence or even supposition to show for it. There wasn’t much to the center of Calais. It had taken him an hour to explore what there was. There wasn’t much to the center, but the place stretched along the coast, a maze of docks and landing bays, quaysides, jetties, and chaotic buildings, either smelling of fish or of engine oil.
That’s why it had taken him so long to track down the people he wanted to question: the boatmen, the port authorities, people who’d been around and about that evening when the boat carrying Witch had chugged out to sea. It was no wonder the men he spoke to weren’t enthusiastic when he himself showed about as much enthusiasm as a netted cod. In short, he’d completed a poor day’s work, and still with a number of people on his list not yet found. He’d try to wrap it up tomorrow morning. Before lunchtime. The sooner the better.
It was six now. He’d been warned that the French did not eat dinner before eight o’clock. Time for a shower and a change of clothes back at his hotel. Really, he should head back out to the docks after dinner: there were a couple of names on his list who worked only after dark and whose home addresses no one seemed willing to divulge.
“Sur le bleu,” one man had told him, tapping finger against nose. On the blue: the French equivalent of the black market. These men would work for cash, no questions asked or taxes paid. Maybe they had daytime jobs. But they were on the sidelines. Doyle had spoken with them and learned nothing. How could men working “sur le bleu” afford to see anything or hear anything? They didn’t exist officially. They were non-persons at the docks. All of this Doyle had put in his report, a report Barclay had read. It was a thorough report, certainly as good as the one Barclay himself would write. But it was also a bit pleased with itself, a bit smug: I’ve covered everything, it seemed to suggest, what did you expect me to find?
Barclay’s hotel lay in a dark, narrow street near the bus terminal. There was a small empty lot nearby which served as a car park (at each car owner’s risk). Barclay had taken out European insurance before crossing the Channel, and he half-hoped someone would steal his creaky Fiesta with its malfunctioning gearbox. To this end, he gathered together his opera tapes and carried them in a plastic bag. He didn’t mind losing the car, but he didn’t want his tapes stolen, too...
His hotel was in fact the two floors over a bar, but with a separate smoked-glass door taking residents up the steep staircase to the rooms. He’d been given a key to this door and told that meals were served in the bar. Between the smoked-glass door and the stairs, there was another door of solid wood, leading into the bar. He paused, having pressed the time-controlled light switch, illuminating the staircase with its gray vinyl wallpaper. He could nip into the bar for a drink: a cognac or a pastis. He could, but he wouldn’t. He could hear locals in there, shouting the odds about something, their voices echoing. Two or three of them, the bar empty apart from them. He started to climb the stairs, and was halfway up when the lights went off.
He wasn’t in complete darkness. A little light came from the downstairs door. But not much. There was another light switch on the landing, just beside the huge potted plant and the framed painting of some anthropomorphic dogs playing pool. He climbed slowly, hand brushing against the horrible wallpaper with bristly vertical stripes, more like carpeting than anything else. The sort of carpeting that gave you an electric shock if you wore the wrong kind of shoes. Just along the wall a little... light switch somewhere around here... ah, yes, just...
His fingers pressed against something. But it wasn’t the switch. It was warm, soft, yielding. It was a hand. He started and almost fell back down the stairs, but another hand grabbed his arm and pulled him upright. At the same time, the lights came back on. The hand his own hand had touched had already been resting on the light switch. He found himself facing a young woman, small, with short black hair and very red lips. Her face was round and mischievous. She smiled wryly.
“Pardon,” she said: the French word, not the English. He attempted a light laugh, which came out as a strangled snuffle. Then she brushed past him and descended the staircase. He watched her go. She was wearing baggy trousers and a sort of cotton blouson, the trousers dark blue and the blouson sky blue. And lace-up shoes, quite rugged things. Her fingers touched the stair rail as she went. At the bottom, unexpectedly, she turned back and caught him looking at her, then opened not the door to the street but the one leading into the bar. The voices from inside were amplified for a moment, then the door closed again, muffling them.
“Christ,” he said to himself. He walked unsteadily along the corridor and was just trying to fit his room key into the lock when the lights went out yet again.
Inside the room, he threw his bag of cassettes on the carpet and sat down on the springy bed. Then he lay back across it, left hand gripping right wrist and both resting on his forehead. He should make a start on his report, at least get his notes in order. But he kept seeing the girl in his mind. Why had she given him such a start? He managed to smile about it after a bit, rearranging his memory of the incident so that he came out of it in a better light. Well, at least he hadn’t tried to say anything in his inimitable French.
He had a shower, humming to himself all the time, then dried himself briskly and lay back down on the bed again. After a moment’s thought, he reached down beneath the bed and pulled out a bulging cardboard document file marked in thick felt pen with the single word WITCH. It had arrived by motorbike courier at his flat in London, less than half an hour before he’d been due to leave to catch the ferry. A large padded envelope, and the helmeted rider saying: “Sign here.” He’d torn the envelope open, not knowing what to expect — certainly not expecting Dominic Elder’s crammed but meticulously organized obsession. There was a note pinned to the dog-eared flap: “I have the feeling your need will be greater than mine. Besides, I know it by heart. I’ll be in touch. Good luck. Elder.”
Biked all the way from deepest south Wales to London. The bike charges must have been phenomenal, but then Barclay surmised that the department would be paying.
He’d read through the file on the trip across the Channel. It contained plenty of detail; the only thing missing was factual evidence that any of the operations and incidents outlined in two dozen separate reports had anything to do with an individual code-named “Witch.” It seemed to Barclay that Dominic Elder had latched onto any unsolved assassination, any unclaimed terrorist outrage, and had placed the name Witch beside it. A woman seen fleeing the scene... a telephone call made by a female... a prostitute visited... a girl student who disappeared afterwards... these shadowy, ephemeral figures all turned into the same person in Elder’s mind. It smacked of psychosis.