TWENTY-EIGHT

The picture-postcard charms of Bruges were nowhere apparent at the Palace of Justice. Rachel and I were driven there in separate cars, our last words exchanged before we knew it in our room at the Hesperis. I was left in a windowless holding cell while they questioned Rachel. Shock and confusion were no friends to clear thinking. I knew what they’d said had happened and how bad it looked for us, but how much I should reveal when my turn came I couldn’t decide, not least because I had no way of knowing what Rachel had already revealed.

I assumed they’d brought in Cardale as well, though I hadn’t seen him as we were bustled out of the hotel. As for Eldritch, had Rachel mentioned him? Did he even know where we were? There again, I was clueless. In the end, all I could trust was my own instinct. Rachel would tell them the truth, but not quite the whole truth. She’d leave Eldritch out of it. And since Cardale didn’t know the old man had travelled to Ostend in the first place, he’d be in the clear – to help us as best he could, or was willing to. Thirty-six years in prison had doubtless left him with a well-founded dread of the police. Whatever he did for us he’d do at arm’s length.

Sir Miles Linley had arranged Ardal Quilligan’s murder. I didn’t have a doubt of that, dismissive though I’d been earlier of Eldritch’s claim that he was behind the break-ins. The choice of murder weapon clinched it, designed as it was to frame Rachel. The proof Quilligan had brought with him that his brother had forged the Picassos was gone now. That too I didn’t doubt. And without it, all we could aim for was our own exoneration. Victory of the sort that had briefly been within reach was now unattainable.

But there had to be more driving Linley than fear of being caught up in a costly lawsuit. Murder – of his own brother-in-law – was too extreme a response. That more would explain everything, I felt certain. But what it might be Eldritch had kept to himself and the Belgian police weren’t going to be fobbed off with vague accusations. They’d need evidence. And the only evidence they had so far suggested Rachel Banner had killed Ardal Quilligan – with or without my assistance.

The interview room featured utilitarian furniture, blank grey walls and a barred window through which the medieval spires and belfries of Bruges could be distantly glimpsed. Leysen had handed over to a predatorily tall, stooped, grey-bearded man who introduced himself as Herman Bequaert, onderzoeksrechter – judge of investigation – for our cases, as he explained in fluent English. He was accompanied by a clerk and a uniformed officer was also in attendance, presumably in case I cut up rough. The truth was, though, that I felt as weak as a kitten. My hands were shaking, my heart palpitating. Two hours of solitude – as the clock on the wall revealed it had been – had left me with little grasp of anything except the seriousness of the situation. I wondered how close Rachel actually was to me within the starkly functional architecture of the building. I wished I could see her, or speak to her. I wished we could explain together how this had come about. But they wouldn’t allow that, I knew. We’d be kept rigorously apart, so that our separate accounts could be compared and contrasted.

I stumbled out a request to be allowed a phone call to a lawyer, ignorant though I was of whether I had any such right in Belgian law. Bequaert surprised me by the affability of his response. Would I choose the same one as Rachel – Oudermans of Antwerp? Yes, of course. Who else was there to turn to? Well, Oudermans had been contacted. Someone was on their way. But Bruges was a ninety-kilometre drive from Antwerp. Besides, he explained, our legal representative wasn’t entitled to sit in on the interviews. So …

‘How do you know the firm of Oudermans, Mr Swan?’ Instantly, I was on treacherous ground. How had Rachel answered that question? I said she’d mentioned them in some context I couldn’t recall. ‘Were you and Miss Banner together the whole time you were in Ostend?’ This was my chance to distance myself from her, I realized: to assert that there’d been an opportunity for her to go down to the car park on her own and kill Quilligan. It wasn’t a chance I had any intention of taking.

But Bequaert didn’t drop the subject. ‘Mr Cardale says you visited him in his room last evening and Miss Banner wasn’t with you.’ Well, that was undeniable. But I’d only been there a few minutes. Still, it disproved my claim that Rachel and I hadn’t parted, even briefly. Already, the interview was going badly.

The break-in in London during which the murder weapon had supposedly been stolen: naturally, we’d reported it to the police, hadn’t we? No, we hadn’t. And would Rachel’s flatmate be able to confirm such a break-in had actually taken place? No, she wouldn’t. Bequaert looked at me wearily. I knew what he was thinking. Was this the best I could do? Did I seriously think this was good enough? No, I didn’t. But at least I didn’t have to say as much.

We came to the forgery story. That, his expression implied, was all it was: a story. The only luggage in Quilligan’s car was an overnight bag. It contained nothing remotely relevant. ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘They stole it after killing him.’

‘And they are?’ enquired Bequaert. I didn’t hold back, any more than I guessed Rachel had. Linley, Linley, Linley. It was all down to him. ‘Sir Miles Linley,’ Bequaert carefully specified. ‘Retired diplomat. A man with … an impeccable reputation. Ardal Quilligan’s brother-in-law. He is the murderer? And the burglar?’

‘Not exactly. He must have … hired people to steal the knife and kill Quilligan.’ It sounded hollow even to me.

Back to the break-in – the alleged break-in: could Rachel have turned the flat over herself to convince me it had taken place? The carrot was being dangled in front of my nose again. Say yes. Say she could have skipped out of the hotel room while I was asleep, met Quilligan in the car park by secret prior arrangement and then … cut his throat.

‘Why would she do such a thing?’

‘You tell me, Mr Swan. You tell me.’

‘I can’t. Because she didn’t.’

He was unconvinced. That was obvious. But a contradiction he never directly referred to clearly bothered him. If Ardal Quilligan had brought the much mooted proof to Ostend, where was it now? And why would Rachel want to kill him? Had I seen blood on her clothes? There’d have been a lot of it. ‘Arterial spray carries a long way,’ Bequaert emphasized in his perfectly enunciated, painstaking English. I assured him I hadn’t. If he didn’t believe me, what had become of those blood-stained clothes? They must have searched our room thoroughly.

We were going in circles by now. Rachel’s fingerprints were on the knife. Mine weren’t. I could sell her down the river if I wanted to save myself. It’s what Bequaert was implicitly urging me to do. Eventually, he realized I wasn’t going to. Then, and only then, he played his trump card. There was a record of two telephone calls from our room to the Hotel du Parc. Who did we know who was staying there? The game was up. They were bound to have checked already and learnt another Swan had booked into the Parc.

‘My uncle, Eldritch Swan.’ Sorry, Eldritch, I silently apologized to him. I have no choice.

‘Your uncle accompanied you to Ostend?’

‘No. He went ahead.’

‘Why?’

‘He, er … didn’t want Simon Cardale to feel … outnumbered.’ What kind of an answer was that? It was pitiful.

‘Mr Cardale was surprised when he learnt from us that your name is Stephen Swan. We knew because that was the name the hotel took from your passport. But he thought you were called Peter Fordham. Why the alias?’

‘My uncle and … Sir Miles Linley … were at school together. They … fell out … years ago. We didn’t want Cardale to … make the connection.’

‘Where is your uncle now?’

‘Isn’t he at the Hotel du Parc?’ Obviously he wasn’t, which gave me some small cheer to offset the prevailing bleakness.

‘He checked out this morning, shortly after you and Miss Banner were detained. A porter at the Hesperis told Inspecteur Leysen later that an elderly Englishman had asked him why there were police in the hotel. The porter told him about the body in the car park. Of course, he did not know who the dead man was.’ No. But Eldritch knew. Right away. ‘So, where is he?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Where do you think he is?’

I shrugged. ‘Travelling back to England?’

‘Not staying here to help you and Miss Banner?’

‘How could he do that?’

‘By speaking to us, perhaps. By telling us the truth.’

‘That hasn’t done me much good.’

Silence fell. The ticking of the clock became audible. Bequaert said something to the clerk in Dutch, then stood up. ‘Take some more time to think, Mr Swan,’ he said, sighing. Then he walked out.

As far as I could judge, in the absence of my confiscated wristwatch, the second stay in the cell was even longer than my first. The thinking Bequaert wanted me to do didn’t lead where he’d have hoped. The truth, incredible though it might seem, was all he was going to get from me. I had nothing else to offer. I tried to fix Rachel’s face in my mind, to draw some comfort from knowing we weren’t far apart, even though we couldn’t see or speak to each other. And I willed her to do the same.

When they next came for me, I thought I’d be taken back to the interview room. Instead, I was shown into a smaller room, where a man who was surely too showily dressed to be a detective was waiting for me, smoking a cigarette and sipping a cup of coffee. His suit was gigantically lapelled and gaudily herringboned, paired with a zigzag-patterned tie. He had shoulder-length dark hair and a round, boyish face. He jumped up from his chair as I entered and shook me vigorously by the hand, smiling broadly.

‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Swan. I’m Bart van Briel. From Oudermans. We’re getting you out of here.’

‘You are?’

‘One or two pesky conditions. They’re keeping your passport, for instance. They have no legal right to, but if you don’t agree they won’t release you, so I said you’d be willing. It’s … better than the alternative, I reckon.’

‘What about Rachel?’

‘Ah, no. Miss Banner they’re holding. At least overnight. Nothing I can do there.’

‘I’m not leaving without her.’

‘You must.’ He lowered his voice, though the policeman on the door wasn’t far enough away to miss even a whisper. ‘You’ll be more use to Miss Banner on the outside. I’ll explain when we’re on the road.’

‘The road to where?’

‘Antwerp, of course.’

Van Briel whisked me through the formalities of my release, most of them conducted in Dutch. All my possessions except my passport were returned to me. One thing made very clear to me in English was that I wasn’t to leave Belgium. I kept asking to see Rachel before I left but that was firmly ruled out. It was van Briel who finally shut me up on the point. ‘Miss Banner’s already been transferred to the local prison on the other side of—’

‘Prison?’

‘It’s not as bad as it sounds. She’ll actually be more comfortable than she would be staying here. But if you fuck about like this any more, the onderzoeksrechter might change his mind and send you there as well. He’s not like a judge in England. He’s in charge of the whole investigation. So, please, can we just get the hell out?’

He loaded me into his Porsche and we headed for the autoroute. The loud, fast-moving world was a shock after so many hours of confinement that had felt like days in the living of them. Dusk was falling and I wondered what sort of an evening, and a night to follow, Rachel would have, in a prison cell.

Van Briel seemed to read my thoughts. ‘She’ll be OK, Mr Swan. Detainees who haven’t been charged yet get treated well, I assure you.’

‘And where are you taking me?’ I asked.

‘My place in Antwerp.’ Van Briel grinned. ‘They had to have an address for you before they’d let you go. Without a passport, you couldn’t stay in a hotel anyway. I’ve got a form for you to carry in case you’re stopped and asked for identification. We don’t want you charged with vagrancy while you’re still a murder suspect.’ Another grin. ‘That would look kind of bad.’

‘You think they might release Rachel tomorrow?’

‘No chance. They’ve got the evidence to charge her with murder any time they like. But they can hold her for five days before she has to go before the raadkamer for a decision on whether to charge her or not.’

‘But you said—’

‘You weren’t thinking straight, Mr Swan, so I said what I reckoned you wanted to hear.’

‘I want to hear the truth.’

‘So do I.’

‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means my boss sent me to do the best I could for you and Miss Banner. He chose me because I cut corners and get results.’ A horn blare and a torrent of Dutch obscenities, aimed at a driver who’d just had the temerity to pull out in front of us, provided an instant demonstration of van Briel’s attitude to life in general and quite possibly the law in particular. ‘This is where we are, right? Ardal Quilligan dead.’ He made a slashing gesture across his throat with his forefinger. ‘Murder weapon belongs to Miss Banner and has her fingerprints on it. But not yours. Which is why you’re in this car and she’s back there. Plus your uncle’s missing. And Mr Cardale—’

‘Yes. What about Cardale?’

‘Not my client. Not my business. My understanding is they let him go earlier, with his passport. So, probably headed back to London. Your uncle too, maybe?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Tell me what you do know. Everything. The whole lot.’ He chuckled. ‘Well, as much as you can, anyway. My boss told me about our anonymous client, Mr Swan. Not who he is, but what he wants from your uncle. So, I’m in the picture on all that. But last night? Different story. You need to explain to me what happened. Beginning to end. OK?’

I sighed. ‘OK.’