Chapter One, in which Louise receives an unpleasant gift
Four days later
"You accepted a parcel for me?" asked Louise Cartham when she entered Nathalie's office on Tuesday afternoon. She knocked on the open door more as a reflex than anything else, but went in without waiting for a response.
Nathalie Ames, the owner of the Black Feather pub in Earlsraven, ticked the last position she had checked on her spreadsheet before raising her head and looking at her cook. "Yes, some parcel service delivered it. It was an hour ago, around three. You'd only just left for the country market," she said. "It was so close that you must have passed each other in the car park."
Louise shrugged her shoulders. "I didn't notice anyone outside, but I was rushing."
"I've put it on the table over there." Nathalie pointed to the back corner of her office.
The cook was taken aback when she saw the large size of the parcel. "But I didn't order anything," she said.
"Perhaps a surprise from your sweetheart, Martin," Nathalie suggested. "To make up for the fact that he'll probably be spending the rest of the week in hot Spain while the temperatures slowly start to drop again here."
"If he had any free time, I could imagine it," Louise replied. "But after sixteen or eighteen hours of tough contract negotiations a day, he'd be far too exhausted to want to do anything other than walk from the air-conditioned conference room to the air-conditioned lift and retire to his air-conditioned room."
Nathalie smiled at Louise, who was not only her cook but also her best friend here in Earlsraven. "That's what you get when you start a relationship with an internationally sought-after lawyer."
"Well, if these two companies had thought more about how they wanted to work together from the outset, Martin and his team would have been spared a lot of time." Louise shook her head in disbelief. "Yesterday, they spent four hours discussing where the new logo on the small envelopes should go. Martin works it out, presents it to both sides and, if he's lucky, everyone agrees, and they can move on to the next topic."
"The colour of the promotional pens?" said Nathalie, amused.
"Something like that." Louise turned the parcel so that she could read the address label. "Hmm? A law firm? Jonsson, Johansson and Jonasson from Gothenburg? I don't know them."
"They obviously know you, though."
"Yes, apparently." She reached over to Nathalie's desk and took the scissors to cut through the adhesive tape on all sides so that she could unpack the parcel without damaging anything. Soon, a jumble of wrapping paper and bubble wrap lay on the floor.
All that was left was a thin black film, and when Louise pulled it off at one end, she wondered, "Huh?"
"So?" asked Nathalie, who had watched impatiently as her cook removed one protective layer after another.
"Looks like . five picture frames."
"Maybe you've won something," Nathalie said. She took a sip of her iced tea, which had been sitting on her desk for so long that it had become warm.
"I've not taken part in anything where I could win anything," Louise contradicted her. "I don't give out my details so lightly." She removed the last of the black film, then spread out five framed pictures on the table and looked at them. "What are you doing?" Louise murmured.
She sounded so puzzled that Nathalie left her seat, came round the desk and stood next to her.
In front of her were five oil paintings, each of which seemed to depict the same man, although a certain ageing process was recognisable from portrait to portrait. In the first painting, he looked to be twenty-five with a full head of dark hair, whereas, in the last, he appeared to be in his early sixties, although the receding hairline might have made him seem a little older than he actually was. His face became a little more wrinkled and narrower with each picture, but, overall, the man made a very likeable impression.
"Portraits of the same person? But who is he?"
"What are you doing?" Louise wondered again, oblivious to Nathalie's question.
"You know him?"
"What? Er . yes, yes. I know him," was the curt reply.
"Aren't you going to introduce him to me?" Nathalie asked with a grin.
Louise shook her head and ran her fingers through her short white hair. Finally, she turned to her boss. "I'm sorry, I'm a bit . 'confused' doesn't quite cover it . I'm ."
"Could it relate to your old job?" Nathalie suggested helpfully.
"Yes, that's it," Louise said quietly, then pointed to the paintings. "That's Dr Desmond van Gelder there."
"Van Gelder? Any famous Dutchman?"
"No, British by birth," Louise replied. "And more infamous than famous."
"Should I know him? The name doesn't ring any bells."
The cook shook her head. "It was all before your time."
"Well, fill me in then."
"Let's sit down," Louise suggested, pulling up the two chairs in front of the desk. "It was almost thirty years ago. I'd only been with the secret service for a short time then. Because an older colleague was off work for a few weeks due to a slipped disc and no one else was available, I was taken on as a newcomer to the team that was supposed to solve a kidnapping case as quickly as possible. The ten-year-old daughter of a South American diplomat to Britain had been kidnapped; there was no ransom demand and initially no sign of life from the kidnapped girl. Unfortunately, we were unable to rescue the diplomat's daughter because we had no idea who had kidnapped her and where she was being kept."
"So, the kidnapper never made any contact?" Nathalie asked, startled.
"No, he did, but by then it was hopeless, because we had no starting point for a large-scale search for the abducted child. When he rang, he only said: 'Just one more day.' That would have been the tenth day after the abduction." Louise shrugged her shoulders in frustration. "That day, we received a letter with a photo in it showing a landscape that, at first glance, could have been almost anywhere in the world. Only after we had agreed with a newspaper editor to publish the photo as part of a supposed prize competition did we make any progress. Readers were asked where the photograph had been taken and, if they answered correctly, they could win a prize. Hundreds of postcard entries were received by the editorial team, but at first it looked as if we wouldn't get anywhere because everyone thought they recognised a different place. In the end, however, there were five people who submitted a matching answer."
"And then you found the girl?"
"Yes, after we realised that there was an old bunker there," Louise confirmed with a serious face. "The kidnapper had gained access to the facility and hidden the girl there. But it was too late."
"Oh, no," said Nathalie. "Did the whole newspaper competition take too long?"
"Yes, he wasn't bluffing about the countdown."
"He didn't give you a chance, only sending the photograph on the final day. Why did he do that?"
"To play with us. We were able to reconstruct that he had taken the diplomat's daughter to the bunker immediately after the abduction. There, he tied her to a table and gave her a drip that constantly released a sedative into her bloodstream so that she was probably unconscious the entire time. A second drip supplied her with a nutrient solution."
"So, he wanted to keep her alive ."
"Only for ten days. Both drips had been dosed very precisely to only last for that time. So, he took the little girl there, hooked up all the IVs, and then he didn't have to check on her again. That was very clever," she added angrily. "That way he didn't attract attention, unlike if he had checked on the girl every other day, say."
Nathalie took a sip of iced tea. "But if the tranquilliser was used up after ten days, why didn't the girl wake up and try to free herself?"
"Because there was a third drip," Louise explained grimly. "As soon as the sedative was used up, the third drip came into play, which was set to deliver a very high dose into her body."
"A very high dose of what?" Nathalie asked promptly, although she suspected the answer.
"Morphine," replied her cook. "The kidnapper was a doctor, it turned out. The diplomat's daughter never regained consciousness."
"Did he try the same thing again?"
Louise nodded. "Yes, three more times after that," she continued after a short pause, but quieter and more concerned than before. "He got a little bolder each time, giving us more so-called clues. Nothing happened for two or three years; then he struck again. This time with the illegitimate daughter of an arch-conservative Tory candidate."
"Both victims seem connected to politics," observed Nathalie, running her fingers through her long, fair hair.
"Yes, I thought that at the time, too, but, in reality, there was no pattern to his victims, nor the areas of the country they came from. He'd scope out a new hiding place, set it up, then go on the prowl for a victim."
Nathalie made an indignant sound. "That's chilling. So, did everything happen the same way with his second victim?"
Louise stretched and took a deep breath. "Not quite. This time he sent us a photo of the new hiding place three days before the ten days was due to...
