A line of plants in wooden tubs divided the café from the restaurant terrace where the men were eating. Alex slipped between two of the tubs and moved quickly into the shadows of the restaurant interior. He felt safer here, less exposed. The kitchens were right behind him. To one side was a bar and in front of it about a dozen tables, all of them empty. Waiters were coming in and out with plates of food, but all the customers had chosen to eat outside.
Alex looked out through the door. And caught his breath. Yassen had got up and was walking purposefully towards him. Had he been spotted? But then he saw that Yassen was holding something: a mobile phone. He must have received a call and was coming into the restaurant to take it privately. Another few steps and he would reach the door. Alex looked around him and saw an alcove screened by a bead curtain. He pushed through it and found himself in a storage area just big enough to conceal him. Mops, buckets, cardboard boxes and empty wine bottles crowded around him. The beads shivered and became still.
Yassen was suddenly there.
“I arrived twenty minutes ago,” he was saying. He was speaking English with only a very slight trace of a Russian accent. “Franco was waiting for me. The address is confirmed and everything has been arranged.”
There was a pause. Alex tried not to breathe. He was centimetres away from Yassen, separated only by the fragile barrier of brightly coloured beads. But for the fact that it was so dark inside after the glare of the sun, Yassen would surely have seen him.
“We’ll do it this afternoon. You have nothing to worry about. It is better for us not to communicate. I will report to you on my return to England.”
Yassen Gregorovich clicked off the phone and suddenly became quite still. Alex actually saw the moment, the sudden alertness as some animal instinct told Yassen that he had been overheard. The phone was still cradled inside the man’s hand, but it could have been a knife that he was about to throw. His head was still but his eyes glanced from side to side, searching for the enemy. Alex stayed where he was behind the beads, not daring to move. What should he do? He was tempted to make a break for it, to run out into the open air. No. He would be dead before he had taken two steps. Yassen would kill him before he even knew who he was or why he had been there. Very slowly, Alex looked around for a weapon, for anything to defend himself with.
And then the kitchen door swung open and a waiter came out, swerving round Yassen and calling to someone at the same time. The stillness of the moment was shattered. Yassen slipped the phone into his trouser pocket and went out to rejoin the other men.
Alex let out a huge sigh of relief.
What had he learnt?
Yassen Gregorovich had come here to kill someone. He was sure of that much. The address is confirmed and everything has been arranged. But at least Alex hadn’t heard his own name mentioned. So he was right. The target was probably some Frenchman, living here in Saint-Pierre. It would happen sometime this afternoon. A gunshot or perhaps a knife flashing in the sun. A fleeting moment of violence and someone somewhere would sit back, knowing they had one enemy less.
What could he do?
Alex pushed through the bead curtain and made his way out of the back of the restaurant. He was relieved to find himself in the street, away from the square. Only now did he try to collect his thoughts. He could go to the police, of course. He could tell them that he was a spy who had worked, three times now, for MI6 – British military intelligence. He could say that he had recognized Yassen, knew him for what he was, and that a killing would almost certainly take place that afternoon unless he was stopped.
But what good would it do? The French police might understand him, but they would never believe him. He was a fourteen-year-old English schoolboy with sand in his hair and a suntan. They would take one look at him and laugh.
He could go to Sabina and her parents. But Alex didn’t want to do that either. He was only here because they had invited him, and why should he bring murder into their holiday? Not that they would believe him any more than the police. Once, when he had been staying with her in Cornwall, Alex had tried to tell Sabina the truth. She had thought he was joking.
Alex looked around at the tourist shops, the ice-cream parlours, the crowds strolling happily along the street. It was a typical picture-postcard view. The real world. So what the hell was he doing getting mixed up again with spies and assassins? He was on holiday. This was none of his business. Let Yassen do whatever he wanted. Alex wouldn’t be able to stop him even if he tried. Better to forget that he had ever seen him.
Alex took a deep breath and walked back down the road towards the beach to find Sabina and her parents. As he went he tried to work out what he would tell them: why he had left so suddenly and why he was no longer smiling now that he was back.
That afternoon, Alex and Sabina hitched a lift with a local farmer to Aigues-Mortes, a fortified town on the edge of the salt marshes. Sabina wanted to escape from her parents and hang out in a French café, where they could watch the locals and tourists rub shoulders in the street. She had devised a system for marking French teenagers for good looks – with points lost for weedy legs, crooked teeth or bad dress sense. Nobody had yet scored more than seven out of twenty and Alex would normally have been happy sitting with her, listening to her as she laughed out loud.
But not this afternoon.
Everything was out of focus. The great walls and towers that surrounded him were miles away, and the sightseers seemed to be moving too slowly, like a film that had run down. Alex wanted to enjoy being here. He wanted to feel part of the holiday again. But seeing Yassen had spoilt it all.
Alex had met Sabina only a month before, when the two of them had been helping at the Wimbledon tennis tournament, but they had struck up an immediate friendship. Sabina was an only child. Her mother, Liz, worked as a fashion designer; her father, Edward, was a journalist. Alex hadn’t seen very much of him. He had started the holiday late, coming down on the train from Paris, and had been working on some story ever since.
The family had rented a house just outside Saint-Pierre, right on the edge of a river, the Petit Rhône. It was a simple place, typical of the area: bright white with blue shutters and a roof of sun-baked terracotta tiles. There were three bedrooms and, on the ground floor, an airy, old-fashioned kitchen that opened onto an overgrown garden with a swimming pool and a tennis court with weeds pushing through the asphalt. Alex had loved it from the start. His bedroom overlooked the river, and every evening he and Sabina had spent hours sprawled over an old wicker sofa, talking quietly and watching the water ripple past.
The first week of the holiday had disappeared in a flash. They had swum in the pool and in the sea, which was less than a mile away. They had gone walking, climbing, canoeing and, once (it wasn’t Alex’s favourite sport), horse-riding. Alex really liked Sabina’s parents. They were the sort of adults who hadn’t forgotten that they had once been teenagers themselves, and more or less left him and Sabina to do whatever they wanted on their own. And for the last seven days everything had been fine.
Until Yassen.
The address is confirmed and everything has been arranged. We’ll do it this afternoon…
What was the Russian planning to do in Saint-Pierre? What bad luck was it that had brought him here, casting his shadow once again over Alex’s life? Despite the heat of the afternoon sun, Alex shivered.
“Alex?”
He realized that Sabina had been talking to him, and looked round. She was gazing across the table with a look of concern. “What are you thinking about?” she asked. “You were miles away.”
“Nothing.”
“You haven’t been yourself all afternoon. Did something happen this morning? Where did you disappear to on the beach?”
“I told you. I just needed a drink.” He hated having to lie to her but he couldn’t tell her the truth.
“I was just saying we ought to get going. I promised we’d be home by five. Oh my God! Look at that one!” She pointed at anoth
er teenager walking past. “Four out of twenty. Aren’t there any good-looking boys in France?” She glanced at Alex. “Apart from you, I mean.”
“So how many do I get out of twenty?” Alex asked.
Sabina considered. “Twelve and a half,” she said at last. “But don’t worry, Alex. Another ten years and you’ll be perfect.”
Sometimes horror announces itself in the smallest of ways.
On this day it was a single police car, racing along the wide, empty road that twisted down to Saint-Pierre. Alex and Sabina were sitting in the back of the same truck that had brought them. They were looking at a herd of cows grazing in one of the fields when the police car – blue and white with a light flashing on the roof – overtook them and tore off into the distance. Alex still had Yassen on his mind and the sight of it tightened the knot in the pit of his stomach. But it was only a police car. It didn’t have to mean anything.
But then there was a helicopter, taking off from somewhere not so far away and arcing into the brilliant sky. Sabina saw it and pointed at it.
“Something’s happened,” she said. “That’s just come from the town.”
Had the helicopter come from the town? Alex wasn’t so sure. He watched it sweep over them and disappear in the direction of Aigues-Mortes, and all the time his breaths were getting shorter and he felt the heavy weight of some nameless dread.
And then they turned a corner and Alex knew that his worst fears had come true – but in a way that he could never have foreseen.
Rubble, jagged brickwork and twisted steel. Thick black smoke curling into the sky. Their house had been blown apart. Just one wall remained intact, giving the cruel illusion that not too much damage had been done. But the rest of it was gone. Alex saw a brass bed hanging at a crazy angle, somehow suspended in mid-air. A pair of blue shutters lay in the grass about fifty metres away. The water in the swimming pool was brown and scummy. The blast must have been immense.
A fleet of cars and vans was parked around the building. They belonged to the police, the hospital, the fire department and the anti-terrorist squad. To Alex they didn’t look real: more like brightly coloured toys. In a foreign country, nothing looks more foreign than its emergency services.
“Mum! Dad!”
Alex heard Sabina shout the words and saw her leap out of the truck before they had stopped moving. Then she was running across the gravel drive, forcing her way between the officials in their different uniforms. The truck stopped and Alex climbed down, unsure whether his feet would come into contact with the ground or if he would simply go on, right through it. His head was spinning; he thought he was going to faint.
Nobody spoke to him as he continued forward. It was as if he wasn’t there at all. Ahead of him he saw Sabina’s mother appear from nowhere, her face streaked with ashes and tears, and he thought to himself that if she was all right, if she had been out of the house when the explosion happened, then maybe Edward Pleasure had escaped too. But then he saw Sabina begin to shake and fall into her mother’s arms, and he knew the worst.
He drew nearer, in time to hear Liz’s words as she clutched hold of her daughter.
“We still don’t know what happened. Dad’s been taken by helicopter to Montpellier. He’s alive, Sabina, but he’s badly injured. We’re going to him now. You know your dad’s a fighter. But the doctors aren’t sure if he’s going to make it or not. We just don’t know…”
The smell of burning reached out to Alex and engulfed him. The smoke had blotted out the sun. His eyes began to water and he fought for breath.
This was his fault.
He didn’t know why it had happened but he was utterly certain who was responsible.
Yassen Gregorovich.
None of my business. That was what Alex had thought. This was the result.
THE FINGER ON THE TRIGGER
The policeman facing Alex was young, inexperienced, and struggling to find the right words. It wasn’t just that he was having difficulty with the English language, Alex realized. Down here in this odd, quiet corner of France, the worst he would usually have to deal with would be the occasional drunk driver or maybe a tourist losing his wallet on the beach. This was a new situation and he was completely out of his depth.
“It is the most terrible affair,” he was saying. “You have known Monsieur Pleasure very long time?”
“No. Not very long time,” Alex said.
“He will receive the best treatment.” The policeman smiled encouragingly. “Madame Pleasure and her daughter are going now to hospital but they have requested us to occupy us with you.”
Alex was sitting on a folding chair in the shadow of a tree. It was just after five o’clock but the sun was still hot. The river flowed past a few metres away and he would have given anything to dive into the water and swim, and keep swimming, until he had put this whole business behind him.
Sabina and her mother had left about ten minutes ago and now he was on his own with this young policeman. He had been given a chair in the shade and a bottle of water, but it was obvious that nobody knew what to do with him. This wasn’t his family. He had no right to be here. More officials had turned up: senior policemen, senior firemen. They were moving slowly through the wreckage, occasionally turning over a plank of wood or moving a piece of broken furniture as if they might uncover the one simple clue that would tell them why this had taken place.
“We have telephoned to your consul,” the policeman was saying. “They will come to take you home. But they must send a representative from Lyon. It is a long way. So tonight you must wait here in Saint-Pierre.”
“I know who did this,” Alex said.
“Comment?”
“I know who was responsible.” Alex glanced in the direction of the house. “You have to go into the town. There is a yacht tied to the jetty. I didn’t see the name but you can’t miss it. It’s huge … white. There’s a man on the yacht; his name is Yassen Gregorovich. You have to arrest him before he can get away.”
The policeman stared at Alex, astonished. Alex wondered how much he had understood.
“I am sorry? What is it that you say? This man, Yassen…”
“Yassen Gregorovich.”
“You know him?”
“Yes.”
“Who is he?”
“He’s a killer. He is paid to kill people. I saw him this morning.”
“Please!” The policeman held up a hand. He didn’t want to listen to any more. “Wait here.”
Alex watched him walk away towards the parked cars, presumably to find a senior officer. He took a sip of water, then stood up himself. He didn’t want to sit here watching the events from a folding chair like a picnicker. He walked towards the house. There was an evening breeze but the smell of burnt wood still hung heavily all around. A scrap of paper, scorched and blackened, blew across the gravel. On an impulse, Alex reached down and picked it up.
He read:
That was all there was. The paper turned black and the words disappeared.
Alex realized what he was looking at. It must be a page from the article that Edward Pleasure had been working on ever since he had arrived at the house. Something to do with the mega-celebrity Damian Cray…
“Excusez-moi, jeune homme…”
He looked up and saw that the policeman had returned with a second man, this one a few years older, with a downturned mouth and a small moustache. Alex’s heart sank. He recognized the type before the man had even spoken. Oily and self-important, and wearing a uniform that was too neat, there was disbelief etched all over his face.
“You have something to tell us?” he asked. He spoke better English than his colleague.
Alex repeated what he had said.
“How do you know about this man? The man on the boat.”
“He killed my uncle.”
“Who was your uncle?”
“He was a spy. He worked for MI6.” Alex took a deep breath. “I think I may have been the target of the bomb. I think he was
trying to kill me…”
The two policemen spoke briefly together, then turned back to Alex. Alex knew what was coming. The senior policeman had rearranged his features so that he now looked down at Alex with a mixture of kindness and concern. But there was arrogance there too: I am right. You are wrong. And nothing will persuade me otherwise. He was like a bad teacher in a bad school, putting a cross beside a right answer.
“You have had a terrible shock,” the policeman said. “The explosion … we already know that it was caused by a leak in the gas pipe.”
“No…” Alex shook his head.
The policeman held up a hand. “There is no reason why an assassin would wish to harm a family on holiday. But I understand. You are upset; it is quite possible that you are in shock. You do not know what it is you are saying.”
“Please—”
“We have sent for someone from your consulate and he will arrive soon. Until then it would be better if you did not interfere.”
Alex hung his head. “Do you mind if I go for a walk?” he said. The words came out low and muffled.
“A walk?”
“Just five minutes. I want to be on my own.”
“Of course. Do not go too far. Would you like someone to accompany you?”
“No. I’ll be all right.”
He turned and walked away. He had avoided meeting the policemen’s eyes and they doubtless thought he was ashamed of himself. That was all right. Alex didn’t want them to see his fury, the black anger that coursed through him like an arctic river. They hadn’t believed him! They had treated him like a stupid child!