Seen and Not Heard (Maggie Bennett 4)

Bats, she realized as they flew blindly away. Marc had disturbed a horde of sleeping bats overhead, sending them flying wildly into the night. She only hoped they scared him half as much as they scared her.

She allowed herself one brief glimpse down to the stone floor beneath them. There was no sign of Nicole in the candlelit darkness, no sign of life at all. Maybe Nicole had come to her senses, had gone to hide in the car. Or maybe she was just waiting for death to come and claim her.

Out of the corner of her eye Claire thought she saw a flash of light through one of the narrow slits of windows. She dismissed it as wishful thinking, and climbed higher. “I’m not going to let you get away with this,” she announced, her voice calm and dispassionate. “To get to Nicole you?

??ll have to go through me. And I’m not going to let you.”

The silence above her was as thick as a velvet shroud. One more flight, one more rickety expanse of walkway, and there’d be nowhere else to go. Maybe he’d found a place to hide, maybe she’d been fooling herself and there was another way down. Sudden panic clamped a fierce hand around her heart.

“Marc?” She cursed the fear that came through her voice, but she couldn’t help it. She willed herself to calm. “Cat got your tongue?” she taunted, climbing up the final flight. The walkway swung beneath her weight, pulling from the wall, the flimsy wood rotting beneath her fingertips. “Marc?”

He was there. It was so dark she could scarcely see him, but the white gloves and face stood out with eerie luminescence. He stood absolutely still, not making any move toward her, waiting for her to come to him.

“Two can play at this game,” she said, holding still. “If you think I’m going to come any further you’re crazier than I thought, and that would be downright impossible, my friend. Why are you wearing face paint?”

His body moved, an expressive pantomime with short, graceful gestures that were a perfect communication. His face was himself, he said, sorrow and laughter hiding from the world. He reached up a white-gloved hand and gestured her closer, that gesture promising her love and redemption and oblivion, and for one brief, horrifying moment she was tempted.

“I’m not taking one step further,” she said, her voice deliberately mocking, “so you can stop making like the Ghost of Christmas Future. If you want me, Marc, you’re going to have to come and get me.”

He twisted in the darkness, and she could see the silvery glitter of the knife in his hand. In a weird, inexplicable way it was reassuring. He was so mesmerizing in his grace and talent that she was half ready to do or believe anything. The knife was a blessedly prosaic instrument of death.

She could make gestures, too. She held up a hand in the murky darkness, beckoning him. Her hand didn’t shake. “Come and get me,” she cooed again. “Or we can just stand here all night long.”

She thought she heard noises far beneath her, but she didn’t dare look. Maybe Nicole was fool enough to come out into the open, but it wouldn’t matter. As long as she stood between Marc and Nicole, the child would be safe. And Claire was prepared to stand there forever.

He moved again in the darkness, coming infinitesimally closer, shrugging his shoulders, curving his arms in a defenseless gesture only slightly marred by the knife. His head was cocked to one side; his whole body shivered with sorrow and longing and a twisted sort of love.

And then he lunged. She could never be certain where her energy came from. She was standing motionless, awaiting the knife, when she heard the noise from below, jerking her from her dreamy state. “Damn you, no!” she shrieked as he leapt on her, hitting at him, the knife slicing painlessly into her hand.

He was standing there, motionless, staring at her for a timeless moment, shock and sorrow in his mad dark eyes. And she realized he was standing on air, as he fell, slowly, silently, his soundless scream filling her ears as she watched him tumble, gracefully—oh, so gracefully—to his death on the flagstones far below.

There were people below, people surrounding the curiously flattened shape of Marc Bonnard. The catwalk shifted and swayed as Claire climbed down, her bloody hand clinging to the splintery railing. When she reached the ground floor, men rushed up to help her, but she hit them away. In her confusion she saw two men lying on the floor. One was Tom, and people were working feverishly on him. She wanted to rush to his side, to assure herself that he was still alive, but her feet refused to obey her.

Slowly, dazedly, she crossed the stone floor, pushing the huddle of police aside, until she stood over Marc’s body. There was no doubt about him—the back of his head was crushed, his neck at a hideous angle, his beautiful, graceful body destroyed. The black, mad eyes were still and staring, and he was very, very dead.

She looked across the corpse into Nicole’s eyes. The blankness was gone as she looked down at the man who’d murdered her mother and grandmother, the man who had tried to kill her.

“Bon,” she said succinctly, meeting Claire’s questioning gaze.

“Bon,” said Claire, speaking French for the first and only time in her life. And holding out her arms, she waited for Nicole to run into them.

EPILOGUE

Malgreave lit another cigarette. God, he was getting sick of the taste of these wretched things. He ought to toss them out. After all, he was going to have to accustom himself to a new life. Might as well make a clean sweep.

It was eleven o’clock the next morning. He hadn’t been back to his house in the suburbs, and if it were up to him he wouldn’t return. The house was empty without Marie, and he didn’t know if he could stand it.

Josef was standing in the office he coveted, staring out the window. His thinning hair was standing up on his high, domed forehead, his suit was rumpled, his face set in an expression of gloom and disappointment.

Malgreave grinned sourly. Helga was going to give him hell, and Josef deserved it. “Look at it this way, old friend,” Malgreave said gently, “at least the Americans are alive. Both of them, and the child, too.”

Josef snorted, and Malgreave felt once more that disquieting feeling. When it came to the human angle Josef was missing something. Malgreave could sympathize—fifteen years of Paris police work could take the humanity out of anybody. You had to fight to keep it. Malgreave had, Vidal had. If Josef had lost it, he’d be a worse cop for it.

Finally Josef whirled around. “Did you see what the papers said? Calling us inept, incompetent, a bunch of Keystone Kops bumbling around while people were being murdered?”

“No, I didn’t see it. What good would it do? We did some things well, some things very badly. The problem with this job, Josef, is that when we screw up, people die. And we screwed up.”

Josef swore, an obscenity unusual from his chaste lips. “You said you were going to retire when we caught the killers?”