Rip Tide

The Metro was crowded and hot. The warm weather had begun early; outside the sky was blue and cloudless and the Parisian women were bare-legged, in summer skirts and sandals. Liz felt overdressed in the black trouser suit she had thought suitable for prison visiting. She was standing up, strap hanging and trying to read the back page of Libération over her neighbour’s shoulder when, much to her surprise, a schoolboy got up and offered her his seat. She smiled her thanks and sat down, thinking this would never happen in London. Now with nothing to read, she found her view of the carriage blocked by a young man standing facing away from her. Shoved into the back pocket of his jeans was a paperback book with the title just visible: L’Étranger by Albert Camus. She smiled to herself, remembering how, years ago, she’d waded through the book’s relentlessly gloomy pages for GCSE. It seemed incongruous for this young man to be reading it on such a beautiful day.

Her thoughts turned to the forthcoming interview. She wished she knew a bit more about this Khan. When she was interviewing someone for the first time, she liked to be one step ahead of them, to have something up her sleeve. Maybe she should have waited until Peggy had been able to do more background research, but the French had been keen for her to come straight away. They hadn’t got anything at all out of the other members of the pirate gang, so they were hoping that her interview with Khan would give them something to use to get the others to talk. From the little the French authorities had said about Khan, however, Liz wasn’t very optimistic.

Emerging from the Metro at Saint-Jacques, Liz saw a missed call message on the screen of her mobile phone. It was from Peggy in London, and she hit the button to call her back.

‘Hi, Liz, or should I say bonjour?’

‘What’s up? I’m just on my way to the prison.’

‘Border Agency have come back – their system’s up and running again. They say our Mr Khan left the UK eight months ago for Pakistan. He hasn’t returned to Britain, at least not through official channels.’

‘Mmm.’ It was strange, but not unheard of. Each year thousands of British citizens made trips to Pakistan for all kinds of reasons – to see relatives, to visit friends, to get married, to show their children where their roots lay. But for the most part they came back. In recent years a few young men had travelled to Pakistan for less innocent reasons and, if they had come back, had seemed different from before they’d left. A few hadn’t returned at all, going off to fight in Afghanistan or to train in the tribal areas of Pakistan or to hang out in Peshawar. But Somalia? That was new to Liz. The interview with Khan promised to be interesting – if she could persuade him to talk.

‘Anything else?’ she asked Peggy.

‘Yes, but not from Borders. I spoke to Special Branch in Birmingham… Detective Inspector Fontana. He said the Khan family are well known – and well off: they own a small chain of grocery stores that serve the Asian community. Highly respectable people – he was surprised when I told him where their son’s driving licence had been found. He’s offered to go and talk to the parents. Shall I tell him to go ahead?’

Liz pondered this briefly. ‘Not yet. Wait till I’ve seen the prisoner and then we can decide what to do next. If it really is their son, I’d like to talk to them myself. But I don’t want to alert them until we know a bit more.’

‘Okay. Anything else I should be doing on this?’

‘Don’t think so. I’ll be back tonight. I’ll ring if he says anything useful, but I’m not very hopeful that he’ll talk at all. He’s said nothing to the French.’

All Liz knew about the Santé prison came from the novels of Georges Simenon. The Bar on the Seine began with his famous detective, Inspector Maigret, going to visit a young condemned prisoner in La Santé one sunny Paris day – a day a bit like this one, in fact. Maigret’s footsteps had echoed on the pavement just as hers did while she followed the high stone wall which screened the old prison buildings from the street. Strange that such a place was right in the middle of the city, just a few minutes from the Luxembourg Gardens. It was as if Wormwood Scrubs had been erected on the edge of Green Park, next-door to Buckingham Palace.

Following the instructions she’d been given Liz walked on until she arrived at a small side street, Rue Messier, where, as promised, she found a low booth set into the massive wall. Peering through a long window of bullet-proof glass, she gave her name to the dimly visible guard on the other side. He nodded curtly, then buzzed her through an unmarked steel door into a small windowless reception room.

This was all very different from Maigret’s sleepy guard gazing at a little white cat playing in the sunshine. But nowadays the Santé was a high-security prison which housed some of France’s most lethal prisoners, including Carlos the Jackal. And Mr Amir Khan, was he lethal? Liz wondered.