The English Girl: A Novel

for a kidnap victim. Forty-eight hours, thought Gabriel. Perhaps a bit longer, but not much.
    It was beginning to get light when they hiked out of the valley and returned to the spot where they had left the motorbike and Keller’s old Renault. Gabriel paused for one last look; a single figure, a laborer, was moving through the vineyards but otherwise there was no activity in the valley below. They loaded the rucksacks into the trunk of Keller’s car and drove separately to the town of Buoux, where they stopped for brioche and café crème in a café filled with ruddy-faced locals. The smell of freshly baked bread made Gabriel feel slightly ill. He rang Graham Seymour in London and in cryptic language reported that the mission had failed, that Madeline had been in the villa once but had been moved approximately seventy-two hours earlier. The trail had reached a dead end, he said before ringing off. All they could do now was wait for Paul to make his demands.
    “But what if he decides it’s too risky to make demands?” asked Keller. “What if he just kills her instead?”
    “Why are you always so negative?”
    “I suppose you’re beginning to rub off on me.”
    They left the Lubéron by the same route they had taken the night they had followed René Brossard and the woman from Aix: down the slopes of the massif, across the river Durance, past the shore of the reservoir at Saint-Christophe, and, eventually, back to Marseilles. There was a ferry leaving for Corsica at noon. They each bought a ticket and then sat next to one another at separate tables at a café adjacent to the terminal. Gabriel drank tea, Keller beer. His mood was noticeably gloomy. It was not often he returned to Corsica having failed to fulfill his mission.
    “It wasn’t your fault,” said Gabriel.
    “I told you she was there,” he answered. “She wasn’t.”
    “But it looked like she was.”
    “Why?” Keller asked. “Why were the guards pulling night shifts when Madeline was already gone?”
    Just then, Gabriel’s mobile phone vibrated. He raised it to his ear slowly, listened in silence, then returned it to the tabletop.
    “Graham?” asked Keller.
    Gabriel nodded. “Someone left a phone taped to the underside of a bench in Hyde Park last night.”
    “Where’s the phone now?”
    “Downing Street.”
    “When is he supposed to call?”
    “Five minutes.”
    Keller finished his beer and immediately ordered another. Five minutes passed, then five more. From outside came an announcement that the ferry for Corsica was beginning to board. It nearly drowned out the sound of Gabriel’s phone buzzing against the tabletop. Again he raised it to his ear and listened in silence.
    “Well?” asked Keller as Gabriel slipped the phone into his pocket.
    “Paul made his demand.”
    “How much does he want?”
    “Ten million euros.”
    “Is that all?”
    “No,” said Gabriel. “The prime minister would like a word.”
    Outside a line of cars was snaking into the belly of the ferry. Keller rose. Gabriel watched him go.

20
    MARSEILLES–LONDON
    T he next flight to Heathrow was at five that evening. Gabriel purchased a change of clothing from a department store near the Old Port and then checked into a sad transit hotel adjacent to the train station to bathe and dress. He stuffed his old clothing into an overflowing rubbish bin behind a restaurant, left the motorbike in a spot where he was confident it would be stolen by nightfall, and took a taxi to the airport. The main terminal looked as though it had been abandoned to an advancing army. Gabriel checked the French Internet news sites to make certain the police hadn’t found four bodies in a tranquil valley in the Lubéron; then he purchased a first-class ticket for London using the name Johannes Klemp. During the flight he refused all service and all attempts by his seatmate, a bald Swiss banker, to engage him in conversation, choosing instead to stare morosely out his window. There was not much to see that night; a thick layer of cloud blanketed the whole of northern Europe. Only when the plane was a few thousand feet from the ground again did the yellow sodium lamps of West London manage to prick the gloom. To Gabriel they looked like a sea of votive candles. He closed his eyes; and in his thoughts he saw a raincoated woman standing before the altar of a dark, ancient church, making the sign of the cross as though the very movement was unfamiliar to her.
    Exiting the aircraft,