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well, whatever it was. But it was turning stupid. Meantime, Elder
had asked another question.
 Sorry? she said.
 Trouble with your ears, Joyce? That s twice I ve had to
repeat myself. I said, how s young Barclay getting on?
 I don t know. Okay, I suppose. She started the car. The
sooner she d delivered him to his hotel room, the better.
Better for all concerned.
 You sent him, didn t you? He framed it as a question, but
really it was a statement.
 Yes, she said, reversing the car out of its parking space.  I
sent him.
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 Good.
 Let s get one thing straight from the start, Dominic. You re
here in a consultative capacity. I don t want you going rogue, and
I don t want you . . .
 Manipulating others to serve my needs? Dumping them
afterwards? He was quoting from memory; she d given him this
speech before.  You re prejudging me, Joyce.
 On past experience. She felt more confident now, more
like herself. She knew that given free rein, Dominic would have
the whole department looking for ghosts. He d tried it before.
 Why the interest in Barclay?
 Am I interested?
 You wanted him sent to France. That smacks of the old
Dominic Elder.
 Maybe he reminds me of someone.
 Who?
 I m not sure. Tell me about our friend Khan.
Elder listened as she spoke, his eyes on the world outside the
car. A tedious evening might lie ahead, and he had grown to
loathe London, yet he felt quite calm, quite satisfied for the
moment. He rubbed against the back of the seat. When Joyce
had finished talking, he was thoughtful for a moment.
 The model interests me, he said.
 How so?
 Witch must have had inside information. She knew where
Khan was going to be, and she seems to have known he d have
company. It can t have been the bodyguard, she damned near
killed him. We should be asking questions about the model.
 Okay. Anything else?
 Just the obvious question really.
 And what s that?
He turned to her.  Where exactly did they find Khan s
tongue?
Calais was grim. Bloody French. They waited, seemingly with
infinite patience, while he tried in his stumbling French to ask
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Ian Rankin
his questions, then it turned out half of them spoke English any-
way. They would stare at him and explain slowly and carefully
that an English policeman had already asked them these ques-
tions before. One of them had even had the gall to ask, at the end
of a particularly fraught session, if Barclay wasn t going to ask
him about the financial affairs of the sunken boat s skipper.
 The other policeman, explained the Frenchman,  he
thought this was a very important question to ask.
 Yes, said Barclay through gritted teeth,  I was just getting
around to it.
 Ah, said the Frenchman, sitting back, hands resting easily
on thighs. There could be no doubt in anyone s mind: this young
man was a tyro, sent here for some mysterious reason but
certainly not to gain any new information. There was no new
information. Monsieur Doyle, the boisterous drinks-buying Eng-
lishman, had covered the ground before. Barclay didn t feel like a
tyro. He felt like a retreaded tire  all the miles had been cov-
ered before he d appeared on the scene. He was driving an old
circuit, a loop. No one could understand why. Not even Barclay.
Well, maybe that wasn t exactly true. At first, despite his puz-
zlement, 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 informa-
tion, 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 . . .
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Witch Hunt
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 carry-
ing 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 side-
lines. 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 Euro-
pean insurance before crossing the Channel, and he half-hoped
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Ian Rankin
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 sep-
arate 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, illu-
minating 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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]