The English Girl: A Novel

Both were in total darkness.
    Keller took up a post midway between the two as Gabriel drew a Maglite from his pocket. He left the light switched off and descended blindly into the gloom, slowly, one step, two steps, three steps, four. Halfway down, he heard a sound from above, footfalls, muffled and quick. Then came two dull thumps, the sound of an HK45 with a suppressor firing two shots in rapid succession.
    Someone had come down the stairs.
    Someone had bumped into the man who scored the highest total ever recorded in the killing house at Hereford.
    Someone had died.
    Gabriel switched on the Maglite and raced down the steps two at a time.
    A t the bottom was a foyer with a tile floor and doors on each of the three walls. The owner’s storeroom was on the left. Caught by the beam of the Maglite, the padlock sparkled with a brightness that suggested it had not been there long. Gabriel swung the rucksack from his shoulders, removed the bolt cutters, and closed the jaws around the shackle. A few pounds of pressure were all it took to send the padlock clattering to the floor. Gabriel moved aside the latch and pushed open the door. The smell hit him instantly. Heavy and nauseatingly sweet. The smell of a human being in captivity. He played the beam of the Maglite around the interior. A cot. Handcuffs. A hood. A bucket for a toilet. Insulation to muffle the screaming.
    But Madeline was gone.
    Upstairs there were two more dull thuds from Keller’s muted HK.
    Then two more.
    T he first body was in the entrance hall, at the base of the stairs leading to the second floor. It was one of the guards who hadn’t shown his face outside the villa. Now, thanks to two hollow-nosed .45-caliber rounds, there was little left of it. The same was true for René Brossard, who was sprawled next to him, a gun still in his lifeless hand. The woman was on the second-floor landing. Keller hadn’t wanted to shoot her, but he’d had no choice; she had pointed a gun at him and given every indication that she intended to fire. He had spared her face, though, shooting her twice in the upper torso. As a result, she was the only one of the three still alive. Gabriel knelt next to her and held her hand. It was already cold to his touch.
    “Am I going to die?” she asked him.
    “No,” he said, squeezing her hand gently. “You’re not going to die.”
    “Help me,” she said. “Please help me.”
    “I will,” answered Gabriel. “But you have to help me, too. You have to tell me where I can find the girl.”
    “She’s not here.”
    “Where is she?”
    The woman’s mouth tried to form words but could not.
    “Where is she?” Gabriel repeated.
    “I swear I don’t know.” The woman shivered. Her eyes were losing focus. “Please,” she whispered, “you have to help me.”
    “When was she here last?”
    “Two days ago. No, three.”
    “Which was it?”
    “I can’t remember. Please, please, you have to—”
    “Was it before or after you and Brossard went to Aix?”
    “How do you know we went to Aix?”
    “Answer me,” said Gabriel, squeezing her hand again. “Was it before or after?”
    “It was that night.”
    “Who took her?”
    “Paul.”
    “Only Paul?”
    “Yes.”
    “Where did he take her?”
    “To the other safe house.”
    “Is that what he called it? A safe house?”
    “Yes.”
    “Where is it?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Tell me,” repeated Gabriel.
    “Paul never told us where it was. He called it operational security.”
    “Those were his exact words? Operational security?”
    She nodded.
    “How many safe houses are there?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Two? Three?”
    “Paul never told us that.”
    “How long was she here?”
    “From the beginning,” the woman said.
    And then she died.
    T hey laid the four bodies on the floor of the storage room and covered them in clean white linen. There was nothing to be done about the blood inside the house, but outside Gabriel quickly hosed down the paving stones of the garden to superficially erase the evidence of what had occurred there. He reckoned they had at least forty-eight hours; then the woman from L’Immobiliere du Lubéron would come calling to collect the keys from the departing clients and supervise the cleanup. After discovering the blood, she would immediately phone the gendarmes, who would in turn discover the four bodies in the owner’s private storage room—a storage room that had been emptied of its contents and converted into a cell