The Last Witness Read online

  ‘My God… don’t tell me your father was molesting you?’

  Elena threw he head back and laughed out loud at the suggestion. She subdued it quickly. ‘No, no. My father might have been a monster in every other way… but he wasn’t molesting me.’

  Gordon raised his glass and smiled. ‘Now you’ve got me at it. Seeing demons where they don’t exist.’

  Elena was glad of the light relief to suddenly dead-end their conversation. But her half smile as she raised her glass to clink with Gordon’s also conveniently shielded the bitter irony: what in fact had happened with her father was in many ways far, far worse.

  Elena became increasingly agitated as the days counted down to her going away.

  Clinging to the hope that Nadine would call with fresh news from Lorena’s school or GP, or that Lorena herself would phone again. But as Gordon had pointed out when he’d picked up on her agitation, ‘Surely best if she doesn’t call. At least one sign that Ryall is doing what he’s been told and is keeping away from her room. Or that her first call was a false alarm.’

  But the comment only made her focus more on why she remained uneasy: the abject fear she’d read in Lorena’s face in that brief moment. She was concerned that even if the problem with Ryall re-surfaced, Lorena might be too frightened to raise the alarm again. Also, she was Lorena’s only possible ally, yet now she was heading off. Deserting her.

  The last day was particularly tense. She thought of putting in a last minute call to Nadine, then wavered against the idea before finally going ahead, only to discover that Nadine was out on calls and unavailable. Then work and final arrangements took over – checking rosters and schedules, last second calls to synchronise their travel over – and she was headed for a midnight shuttle in a van loaded to the brim leading the way for the main 2-ton supply truck behind.

  The long drive over gave her some moments to think again about Lorena, probably too many, and at one point her diver, Nick – twenty-eight, square-jawed, who looked like he’d stepped from a jeans advert despite his years of wild debauchery as a roadie – asked her what was wrong.

  ‘One of the kids I placed with an English family a couple of years back. I’m worried about her.’

  ‘Is she ill, or just a bad family?’

  Elena smiled tautly at the ‘just’, as if it was a far lesser worry than illness. She didn’t want to go into detail with Nick. ‘That’s what we don’t know yet. We’re hoping she’s mistaken.’

  Nick half-shrugged, sensing Elena’s reluctance to elaborate. ‘Hope it works out.’

  ‘Thanks. Me too’ She looked to one side, losing herself momentarily in the darkness of the endless line of fir trees bordering the autobahn.

  One of Nick’s favourite Ry Cooder tracks was playing on the CD, and he turned it up a notch. Elena found herself slipping into cat-naps with the repetitive scenery, and their small talk didn’t return for a while, with Nick by then alternating with some of Elena’s favourites: Santana and Peter Green era Fleetwood Mac.

  When they arrived in Bucharest, the hectic turn of events pushed all thoughts of Lorena into the background. A seven year old boy at the Cerneit orphanage with a prolonged headache and eye strain was finally diagnosed as having meningitis. Two more suspected cases were discovered over the next few hours, and Elena was caught up in a maelstrom of activity: treatment for the three cases and organizing vaccines for the remaining children, with frantic calls back to London for wired funds to cover it all.

  The boy’s condition worsened on the third night, and she kept up a bedside vigil for five hours holding his hand and praying that they didn’t lose him. It struck her then: Gordon was right. These children needed her, this is where her main focus had to be. She didn’t have time, nor the mental or emotional space, to be divided on two fronts.

  The boy rallied well the next morning, and Elena headed off with Nick, a day behind schedule, to the orphanage in Brasov. Approaching the Carpathian mountains, dusk was falling. They looked dark and foreboding at the best of times, often shrouded with mist, ideal fodder for the shadowy myths and legends surrounding them.

  But staring into the rising wall of darkness with the last dusk light as a pale trim, Elena was suddenly gripped by recall of the chine – the one and only time she’d taken Lorena there on a day out to introduce her to the area before she settled in with the Ryalls.

  She’d taken Lorena to see her home, then they’d gone down the steep wooded bank into the chine. As they’d reached the bottom of the chine and the darkness of the steep wooded ravine and the dense foliage above enshrouded them, she’d gripped Lorena’s arm tight and asked her to listen, ‘Listen?’

  It was eerily silent and cool, and after a moment of them standing stock still, they could pick out the sound of the brook running gently through the bottom of the chine towards the sea.

  ‘You hear that?’ she prompted. ‘It’s magical down here, isn’t it? Like some secret hideaway from the rest of the world.’

  Lorena hadn’t answered, and at first Elena thought the trembling where she gripped Lorena’s arm was because of the coolness of the chine. But the shaking became rapidly worse, and Lorena muttered tremulously, ‘I don’t like it down here… please let’s go. The darkness, the water, it…’

  Lorena lurched forward, practically dragging Elena, and within a few paces they’d hit a run. They followed the bottom of the chine close to the running brook, bursting through the branches and foliage as they ran frantically, breathlessly, towards the light of the sea horizon ahead. Lorena’s increasingly laboured breath started lapsing into strangled sobs. Their legs pumped hard and their lungs ached with their rasping breath – but the light never seemed to get closer. The dark, dense foliage remained all-enveloping, suffocating, the light at the end still distant, out of reach, except for a single shaft which seemed to burn through, intensify, as if trying to…

  ‘What…?’ Elena sat up, startled.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Nick repeated.

  Elena shielded her eyes from the searing headlamps of an oncoming truck. She’d fallen asleep; it was now pitch dark. Catching up after her vigil with the boy last night.

  It took her a second to adjust back to her surroundings. They’d in fact burst through to the light of the open beach quite quickly, their breathlessness lost on the fresh sea breeze, and Elena had hugged Lorena tight and kissed the tears from her cheek, muttering, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ She hadn’t realized that the chine might remind Lorena of her sewer days.

  Suddenly the image was back of Lorena standing alone at her bedroom window, deserted. Despite Gordon’s wise words and her own rationalising of the past forty-eight hours, she couldn’t help wondering if that was what Lorena wanted from her now: to once again help her out of the darkness towards the light.

  But when eleven days later Gordon called to tell her that Lorena had phoned again, it threw her into turmoil. Whether through once again becoming absorbed in the plight of the orphaned children, or clinging to rationalisation that nothing was happening or, even if it was, it was no longer her problem – Elena wasn’t sure. But part of her wasn’t surprised at the call, and she wondered why she hadn’t stayed with trusting her instincts. Why she’d allowed herself to so easily get pulled with the flow.

  ‘She said that Ryall stayed away from her room for a while, but now he’d started coming back. And that she needed help. No doubt your help.’

  Slightly numbed, Elena said simply, ‘I suppose I’d better call Nadine Moore again.’

  A few seconds’ silence with only the faint static line hiss, then Gordon asked. ‘When are you heading back?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet. I’ll call you later today when I know.’ She’d decide after she’d spoken to Nadine Moore whether to fly back straightaway or wait out the five days left of her trip. ‘And Gordon, I…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s okay.’ She bit lightly at her bottom lip. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll see you soon, anyway.’ It just didn’t fee
l right pouring out her heart over this faint, static charged line; even though the distance, not having to face him, might have made it easier. And perhaps when she got home, having harboured the secret now for so many years, it still wouldn’t feel right.

  Signing off, Elena found that she was trembling. She knew now why she’d so readily clung to rationalisation, and it had little to do with refusing to accept the worst after everything Lorena had already been through in her troubled past. It had to do with her own past – the wall of lies she’d so carefully constructed throughout her life, to Gordon and everyone else, but most importantly to herself. What lay at the core of their adopting Christos and Katine and her decision to work with strife-torn, orphaned children. She’d feared from the outset the gap in her psyche that this incident with Lorena threatened to open up, and part of her, despite her raw instincts, had tried to push it away. Now, having to face it square on, meant admitting that the founding principals of half her life had been wrong. There was nothing left to stop the wall crumbling.

  FIVE

  One single incident now threatening so much. Practically everything he’d planned and worked towards these past five years. It hardly seemed believable. Jean-Paul Lacaille shook his head as her looked through the long French windows towards the courtyard. The windows were almost twice his height, in keeping with the spacious, high-ceilinged room: one of four sets along its thirty-eight foot length.

  At the room’s centre was a long refractory table with fourteen Louis XIV chairs surrounding. The ‘power room’ where practically every key decision of the Lacaille family had been made over the past three decades.

  When his father had bought the house in ‘65, the courtyard had been enclosed only on three sides, with views over a formal Italianate garden on the fourth. But with their growing family – three generations of Lacailles under one roof at the same time – increasing workload at home, and finally the addition of a stableblock and gym, his and Roman’s respective play areas – ten years ago they’d built on the fourth wing in the same style to enclose the courtyard. As Roman keenly pointed out, the addition had also done much to improve security: there was no longer open access to the ‘power room’, and at the time of their battles with the Cacchione’s six years ago, Jean-Paul had moved his bedroom to the back of the house. But none of their precautions were to help save Pascal; he’d been the last they’d thought Cacchione would target.

  The house had originally been built in the 1920s by a timber and minerals baron, a small scale Versailles Palace to properly reflect his new-found wealth and status. His father’s route to its grand portals had started with cigarette and contraband smuggling during the 2nd World War off the Tyrrhenian Coast of Corsica. A rival Union Corse member gained territorial advantage by paying heavier bribes to his local Bastia mayor, and his father felt it was time to move on. He arrived in Montreal in March, 1953. The city was wide open then, ripe for docks and construction union racketeering. Numbers, clubs, loan-sharking and prostitution followed. With hedged construction bids, his father had earned millions out of the ’64 Olympics alone. Then soon after came narcotics.

  Like so many old-school Mafioso and Union Corse, his father initially tried to steer clear of narcotics, considering it a dirty, dishonourable enterprise; but in the end the profits were too large to ignore. By the early 70s, the Lacaille family were one of Canada’s largest drug suppliers, second only to the Toronto-based Cacchione family.

  Relationships with old-man Arnaldo Cacchione were reasonable, at least not too strained: violence was minimal, usually metered out to those who broke the rules from within their respective camps, or the rising number of small outside gangs trying to muscle in on their territory. But when young Gianni Cacchione took over the reins, things changed: he was ambitious, territorially aggressive, and a showdown with the Cacchione’s became inevitable. A couple of minor soldiers were lost on each side, then a Cacchione family cousin, before finally the retaliatory hit on Pascal.

  Quiet, unassuming Pascal. Always playing backgammon or playing jazz guitar, or with his nose in a book – if not the company’s accounts then anything from a Victor Hugo classic to the latest American hot seller – his tastes were wide and eclectic. If it weren’t for the family business, maybe he’d have had more time to establish his music career, his first and main passion. And of all of them, he’d had the least to do with the business, never got involved in the muscle or enforcement side, only its balance sheet. That was why probably Cacchione had targeted him: himself, Roman and his father – the most obvious targets – were guarded to the hilt. So they’d picked off Pascal on the side ‘as a message’.

  The message worked. Nothing was ever the same from that day. His father lacked the stomach to fight on. Pascal had been his favourite, the baby of the family, and worse still he blamed Roman for the hit on the Cacchione cousin that had led to the retaliation with Pascal. Internal family wrangling was intense.

  Watching his father’s clawing sorrow and increasing frailty over the following months was what finally steered Jean-Paul towards his momentous decision to try and move the family away from crime. In the lull, they’d lost the main advantage and the best territories to Cacchione in any case. They could make as much by being enterprising in other ways: the stock market, construction, more casinos and clubs. Roman was against the idea, but with still the shadow of a finger pointing at him over Pascal’s death, his protests weren’t forceful.

  Jean-Paul gained the main support from family Consiglieri, Jon Larsen, who pointed out that to achieve their aim, they’d need a keen financial eye on board. Two months of head-hunting by Larsen, and the name Georges Donatiens was proposed: one of the youngest and hottest rising investment portfolio managers with Banque du Quebec. Donatiens had just turned in the best past year performance on pension fund portfolios: an impressive 34%. But it took ten months of cat-and-mouse courting to finally get Donatiens aboard, by which time it was too late for his father.

  Jean-Paul’s quest had by then become a burning ambition, with the final seal, by default, of it being practically a death-bed promise to his father: ‘I’ll clean this business from top to bottom, you’ll see. What happened with Pascal will never be allowed to happen again.’

  But it had come from the heart. All he could picture in that moment was himself, twenty years on, mourning the death of his own son, Raphaël, then only eleven. They had all the money in the world. Yet so much of their lives was spent looking over their shoulders and worrying about the safety and welfare of family. It was no way to live.

  His father had smiled indulgently. ‘A noble quest, and one that hasn’t been achieved before, as far as I know. But you seem determined – I’m sure you will succeed.’ Marked contrast to his father’s previously aired doubts and concerns that as much as you might wish to escape the past, ‘The past will never allow you that escape.’

  His father had become increasingly morose and maudlin in his fading months, contemplating that a ‘Sins of the Father’ retribution had been visited on Pascal due to his own dark past. Jean-Paul couldn’t help reflecting on the messy chain of events with Leduc, now bouncing back solidly in their laps with Tony Savard’s murder.

  Jean-Paul took a deep breath and looked up to where two pigeons tried to nestle into the roof gables. An early morning winter mist hung low, obscuring half of the green copper Versailles roof, vapoured body heat and breath rising up from the stables towards it. How much of this grand edifice had been built on spilled blood and shattered lives over the years? The room where Raphaël had been born, or where they’d celebrated Simone’s Holy Communion and clinked glasses over numerous birthdays, weddings and anniversaries? Or the rooms where his father or Stephanie had been laid to rest, or Raphaël’s bedroom, covered with pop and roller-blading posters like any other normal fifteen-year old’s? Or this room now where counsel had been held on lives to be spared or lost?

  Perhaps his father had been right: however hard they tried, they never would be able to escape
the past. And maybe they simply didn’t deserve to ever be able to.

  ‘So how would you read it, Georges?’ Jean-Paul asked.

  They were sat at one end of the long dining table, Georges with Jon Larsen either side of Jean-Paul at the head, and the mood was tense.

  ‘I would go more or less with Jon’s view,’ Georges said.

  ‘More or less?’ Jean-Paul raised one hand as if whisking air. ‘Have we missed something? How might you differ?’

  They’d spent the first twenty minutes of the meeting discussing business – his round trip to Mexico and Cuba, building schedules there, shares and investment portfolio performance, last quarter’s figures for the clubs and casinos – before turning to the subject of Tony Savard’s murder.

  Georges chose his words carefully. The Lacaille family’s past battles with the Cacchione’s had made this a brittle subject. ‘I agree with Jon that most likely the Cacchione’s are behind it. But we shouldn’t overlook the possibility of a rising group of independents or bikers trying to play us and the Cacchione’s off against each other. Not only do they divert attention, meanwhile they take advantage of the resulting vacuum.’

  Jean Paul nodded sagely for a second, then shrugged. ‘But we’re no longer involved in crime. We don’t pose a threat.’

  ‘No. But since the incident with Leduc, the police for one believe that we’re still heavily involved. And if that’s a clear advantage for the Cacchione’s, then it’s an advantage for others too.’

  ‘Except for one thing,’ Jon Larsen offered. ‘Gianni Cacchione would have to lay off blame in any case because of his situation with Medeiros. And this whole drama with the RCMP probably came about as a by-product of that. A happy accident.’