Find the Lady

By Alex Brightsmith

Bella was just a girl out of nowhere, more rumour than reality, until the rainy night when she turned the world upside down for undercover officer Thierry Dupois. Kathryn was a dream to cling to, but a father who could not claim her had no way to hold her. Amie is a straight enigma. May is a cherished memory, Kitty too good to be true, and Kate? Kate is a problem, a potential asset too talented to ignore but too apt to take her own path to be entirely trusted. David McAllister might have a job for a girl like that, if he can only be sure that she is that kind of girl, and here he compiles the stories he has collected in his search, the stories of a disparate group of men and women, each with some claim to know the lady, whatever name they have known her by.

Hypnotic storyteller Alex Brightsmith presents a portrait of Kathryn Blake – who she is, who she was, and who she might become – through the expertly interwoven tales of ten finely characterized narrators.
Can you find the lady?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alex Brightsmith
• Release date: Jan 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311206190

Alex Brightsmith

Alex Brightsmith was born and raised in Bedfordshire and defies anyone who was not to point it out on a map. Bedfordshire has been claimed (or rejected) by at least five bordering regions, and its lasting legacies have been a resistance to categorisation and a fondness for sprouts.Alex currently lives in Birmingham, commutes reluctantly, gardens and bakes erratically, and writes emotionally engaging, carefully plotted thrillers, fantasy and flash fiction.

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Find the Lady

by Alex Brightsmith

Smashwords edition

Copyright 2014 Alex Brightsmith

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Table of Contents

Bella

Kathryn

Amabella

Amie

May

Kitty

Kate

Ms Warde

Miss Blake

Katrya

A word from the author

Featuring Kathryn Blake

Other worlds

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Subject: Catalina, suitability for permanent appointment and transfer

Interviews and translation: David McAllister

Bella

Thierry Dupois / Paris

It was raining.

Okay, I know, you asked about the girl, not the weather, but my memory of her is all bound up in it. It had been coming down in steady grey sheets all day, the kind of rain that works its way into your soul, and it formed the perfect backdrop to my unease. The job was going too fast, running out of my control. A week earlier, all I had to worry about were the guidelines on how hot a packet I could pass on and still expect my badge to protect me in court. Now I was huddled in the cab of a stolen truck, watching the rain and as much of Dieppe port as I could make out through my fogged windscreen, waiting for my cargo, and for Bella.

So I remember the rain, and in the rain, I remember her.

Perhaps it was just that the weather matched my mood that night, as I waited in the cooling cab of my truck for my load and for my passengers. I wasn’t ready for passengers. I wasn’t ready for this at all. I should have had months to feel my way in; I’d been prepared to be patient, expected to be frustrated long before I’d made progress. I’d had it thoroughly drummed into me that undercover is for the long game, but here I was in Dieppe, waiting.

I’d had my licence for less than a year when I first met Xavier. I’d got myself the beginnings of a reputation, but I’d barely got started on that carefully calculated fall from grace. I hadn’t even managed to get myself fired yet. I must have said the right things. He slipped me a few packages. I opened them carefully, let two get through, arranged for the other to be found in a strictly random search. I hadn’t liked that, either. We couldn’t pull the trick too often, but it had been altogether too much to let pass, and it didn’t seem to have dented Xavier’s good opinion of me.

One November evening he told me he had a truck and needed a driver – told me to get sick, skip work and be available. I’d thought it was just a beginning. I’d been pleased. And then he’d said casually that I was especially honoured.

Bella’s coming along for the ride, he’d said.

I wasn’t meant to get so far so fast. I’d heard of Bella, and I knew I wasn’t ready. It kept running through my head as I waited, the thought just as insistent as the steady rain.

We’d first heard of Bella about six months earlier. It was never much, just fragmentary mentions on wiretaps and surveillance tapes. She was half a phantom, before that night. A whisper, a threat. Don’t write me off as some romantic frog. Bella was more frightening than ten years to life, and these are hard men I’m talking about. They believed in her arrangements, and generally they were right to. We’d had some good lines on Kimine’s affairs, but they’d fallen apart. A dozen raids, two of them fair sized busts, and three probable convictions to show for it. All three of them of men who would have been home free if they hadn’t tried to make a little extra on their own account, and knew it. They were going down quietly, implicating no one, despite our best efforts. They all had more faith in Bella than in the witness protection scheme of which we were so proud. Even reliable narks got superstitious about Bella; if they gave us her name we counted ourselves lucky, it was about as much as we ever got.

Take Claude Chanel. Chanel had been dead right about one thing, and as far as I know one thing only, in all his miserable life. He’d stood at the threshold of a rundown apartment in Rouen and said I don’t like it, something’s wrong. I know he said that, because there were six of my colleagues on the other side of the door. His companion had asked scathingly if he wanted to go home and tell Kimine that they’d given up the job because he’d had a funny feeling.

I’ll tell Kimine whatever the hell you like, he’d said, "as long as you tell Bella."

We never did get much more than that. She worked for Kimine – for him or with him, we weren’t even sure about that – and she didn’t take kindly to idiots who diverted from her very clear plans without good cause. She was French, or Arabic, or maybe Swiss. She was an ice goddess. She could see in the dark.

I believed about a tenth of it, and it wasn’t entirely Bella who was tying my stomach in knots. There was Jacques Martin, too. I’d arrested him once, in Marseille. Well, that’s not entirely true. I was on the team, there were a score of us, it was dark, and I didn’t interview him. In short, he had no reason to remember me particularly. Even so, it hadn’t done my nerves any good the first time I saw him with Xavier; he wasn’t supposed to be involved in Kimine’s business.

So here I sat at Dieppe port, in the dusk, in the rain, in the cold cab of a hot truck, waiting.

They came out of one of the warehouses, a little knot of men I would have overlooked, except that I recognized Xavier as they passed under a lighted window. Xavier, two men I took to be customs officers, and another I had seen in Xavier’s company before. Nothing surprising in that. It was the sight of Jacques in that little group that made my stomach lurch, distracting me from the sixth figure. They walked quickly through the rain, and I almost missed my first sight of Bella, buried in the heart of the group.

There was little enough to go on. A slight figure, even in her bulky spray jacket, her hood thrown back for the short walk but her hair covered by a cap. I couldn’t even be sure, from what little I saw, that I was watching a woman. There was no trace of femininity in her confident stride, but this had to be Bella, unless the plan had changed. She was doing all the talking, and even Xavier deferred to her.

They reached the end of the building and cut across the yard to the rear of my truck. I stirred myself and reached for my own jacket. Xavier had said that they wouldn’t need my help, but I had every intention of offering it. Xavier had picked me up at my flat, and the truck had been already waiting for us, so that I hadn’t even got the line I’d hoped for on wherever they’d been keeping it, and all I’d got out of the night so far was a glance at our phantom. I wanted to know what I was driving around, and see the customs seals if I could, and naturally I was curious to see Bella up close.

Before I’d struggled into the damp coat there was a tap at my window, and I found Jacques hanging from the mirror. Maybe I was oversensitive, but I didn’t like the way he grinned at my surprise. I was tempted to swing the door into him, but I wound down the window instead, and his grin widened. There was a nasty twist in it, and something mocking in the way he told me, as he handed back my documents, to get my coat off and be ready to go the moment I got the word.

Nothing Xavier had said had suggested that time was a pressing concern, but it was an instruction I had no reason to argue with. Jacques disappeared back along the truck, and I stowed the papers, struggled back out of the coat and started the engine – to be ready. I was rewarded by a startled curse, which gave me a moment’s grim satisfaction, and then I fell back to brooding.

I wasn’t expecting trouble at that stage of the journey, and it didn’t do to look too sharp, but maybe I took that a little bit too far. Certainly I didn’t have to act startled when my nearside door opened. I only had a glimpse of her before a dirty holdall was thrown into the footwell, and then she was beside me, belting herself in. She’d moved like an ermine, a pale ribbon of movement against the darkness, swinging herself up and in, shedding her jacket and settling into the seat in one long, fluid movement. She was buckling her strap and looking at me expectantly, utterly composed, almost before I’d sat up straight and reached for my own belt.

Xavier had said his boys would be travelling in the back. I hadn’t argued. He hadn’t said he’d be travelling with them. He certainly hadn’t said that Bella would be travelling with me. She asked abruptly

Xavier give you the route?

Dwha? Yeah.

You know the town, or you need directions?

I can manage. A little more sharply than I’d meant. Thanks.

We pulled out, and I was all of a sudden glad of the filthy night. However well I knew the town, at that hour and in that weather I had every excuse to be absorbed in my driving, and she left me to it.

Bella. Well. I didn’t know what I’d expected, but I was still surprised. I hadn’t expected a girl who could keep Xavier on a leash with a look. I should have, perhaps. Despite all I’d heard, I hadn’t expected a girl. You’ve met her, yes? I know a little more, now, but that night, in the half-light of the cab, dressed anonymously in jeans and a sweater, bare headed, clean faced? She could have been fifteen.

Then there was her voice, the certainty of her tone, the coarseness of her accent. Yeah, call me a snob if you want. I never met anyone before who talked that way and left school with a certificate worth showing around, but you could see she was smart. It set her aside from Xavier, as well. His men are all north coast lads, as he is himself, not Parisians.

As we got out of town and on to clearer roads I started to wonder if she expected conversation, knowing that a passenger can make themselves a nuisance in a thousand ways. I needn’t have worried. She was undemanding company, serene and lost in thought. She passed a comment, now and then, on the traffic, on a building site we passed; after I absently flipped on the radio she even chatted a little, slightly to my surprise, about the football scores. I stole a few sideways glances as we went on. She might have been sitting in the back seat of a limousine, even making occasional notes in a notepad on her knee.

I relaxed, but it was too good to last.

We were well south of Paris before she sprang it on me, and the roads were quieter. I had pulled up at a roundabout when she turned to me and smiled. It made her more the little girl than ever, childishly amused.

Thierry Dupois, I’m gladder ‘n I can rightly say to of got this chance to talk to you.

There was a gap in the traffic; I’d already chosen it, and my movements as I let in the clutch and took my place in the flow were purely mechanical. Inside I was reeling. Thierry Dupois is the name on my badge, for sure, and I hadn’t made my life unnecessarily complicated by going as anything but Thierry, but the surname on all the papers they had seen was Roche.

I took my exit, eased up to cruising speed and settled my shoulders. Then I turned to her and smiled.

Roche, I said. It’s Roche, miss. You must have me confused with someone else.

She laughed. It was the most natural, unforced sound in the world. Pure delight, no cruelty.

Great recovery, Dupois. Beaudiful. But just a shade too late.

We were a hundred kilometres from my first scheduled break. That’s a lot of ground to cover, a long time, even on clear roads, in that steady rain. She spent the first eighty telling me what a lucky man I was, in detail. Not mocking me, just explaining. Maybe she went on at such length because she didn’t want any futile arguments about misidentification, but she could have sold me on her certainty in a fraction of the time.

She told me how she’d picked me up, what mistakes I’d made, how she’d been lucky in her turn. She told me, with clinical detachment, what would have happened if she hadn’t found me first, if she hadn’t been in a position to cover my tracks, if she herself had slipped.

I ain’t saying I didn’t make mistakes of me own, she said, only it don’t look that way, so far.

And again the shock of that accent, so far at odds with her appearance and with her sharp intelligence.

She told me how she’d traced me back, and the packages she had sent my way to test me. She recited a few choice sections of a report she should never have seen, and not knowing about her other talent I was a little stung that she had memorized them.

I was sold, I told you that, sold long before she wound up her demonstration. With her there beside me, calm and composed, it never occurred to me, but I wonder, now, if she talked so long to put off the next stage, even though she knew she had already committed herself.

She dried up at last. I kept my attention on the road, but in the end I had to ask it.

Who are you?

I’m Bella. You might of heard of me? I’m Kimine’s right hand – you’ve heard of him, for sure.

In the rush of my personal disaster the final confirmation that we had been on the right track passed me by inconsequentially. She must have known what my next question had to be. She answered before I could phrase it.

I did a job for him – just the one, ‘nuff cash to set me up, y’know? Only I got meself noticed ‘n he made me an offer. I ought of been a nine day wonder, to shake his own crew up, like, but I saw me chance, ‘n I’m good, ‘n I stayed. Her tone wasn’t boastful, she was merely reporting facts. Now I know enough to blow it all to Hell.

And you need help?

I need a runner.

I don’t think she meant it as a snub. I didn’t have time to dwell on it. She went on in a rush. She had it all mapped out. She had a package I was to take to my superiors. She would be in Marseille on some given dates in December; there were instructions in her package on how to contact her whilst she was there. It would allow her to finalize the plans she had in hand, plans she hadn’t been able to complete until she knew she had a reliable contact. She didn’t want to come safely, tamely home with me and sing; she wanted to stay in her place and help to organize a raid that would put an unequivocal end to Kimine’s operations, and those of as many of his business contacts as she could draw into the net.

I was starting to recover for the shock and to think enough like the detective I’m supposed to be to line up the questions I ought to be asking, but she put a stop to that. She must have misjudged her timings a bit, I think, and she had to gallop through her explanations as we came up to my first break. For her own self-preservation, she had said, as much as because there was no mileage in flouting the law unnecessarily, I would take my proper rest. Xavier and his crew would be staying in the truck. They didn’t like it, but they were used to it, and they had their own facilities. She wouldn’t be talking to me outside the truck, because she had a reputation for distance to maintain and was unprepared to take any chances on being seen to have warmed to me. Besides, she added, she had a feeling I would be needing time to put my thoughts in order.

There was something else that she wanted to demonstrate before we stopped. She rifled through her holdall, took out ink and cards, and took her own fingerprints there and then, waiting until I had to pause at the entrance of the parking area so that I could see what she had done.

There ain’t much I can give you, she said, ‘n I know you need summin more ‘n just a girl outta nowhere. These’re on file; ‘sa best I could do.

She slipped the cards into a thick envelope, and sealed it, then sat with the envelope and a reel of tape on her lap as I pulled into a parking bay and killed the engine. Tape it to your stomach, she said, dark side in. Then she was gone, swallowed up by the wild night that suited her so well, and I tucked the tape and envelope into my own bag, and followed her.

The envelope was stiff and sealed and apparently waterproof, and it had, as advertised, one dark side and one light. I examined it briefly in a toilet stall, and taped it to my stomach as she had said, feeling more than ever that I had slipped somehow into a bad dream. It had enough flex not to bother me as I moved, and sat easily enough above my waist. I glanced in the mirror. Thierry Roche looked back reassuringly, and I went out to get a meal, and do some of the thinking she’d suggested.

She was in the cab before me, apparently dozing, already belted in, and I pulled off without disturbing her. We were well on our way before she opened her eyes and began to talk again, easily, naturally.

It’s a long way to Marseille. You don’t need to know everything we said. Most of it you do know, already, where it relates to her past, or to Kimine. She told me about the one case that would pull up a reference to her prints, a nasty little affair, without wasting her breath on protestations of innocence. She gave her version of events with resignation, and it made as much sense as the version in our files. I’d like to have believed it, but I knew she’d had plenty of time to get her story straight. I asked my questions, and you don’t need to know about those, either. I don’t suppose I asked everything I ought to have done, and I’m sure I didn’t ask anything that hasn’t been asked a dozen times since.

The night wore on. The rain had eased as we moved south, and after my second break the sky cleared. As we got closer to Marseille she started to give directions, and I found that it wasn’t the main port or even Marseille itself, that we were aiming for but a private marina, quite small and very exclusive, not far up the coast. I felt a little out of place as we drew up at the gates, but the swankiest establishment needs a trade entrance, and we were waved through, either expected or unexceptional.

It was almost sunrise, still dark enough to be able to see the blaze of lights up the coast, but late enough to feel the benefit of the freshening before dawn. I parked up as she directed in the service area, and before the engine died, in the last cover it gave her before the sudden silence of the peaceful marina, she told me to give her five minutes, and then to come back as if I intended to offer assistance.

Then she was gone, and it never occurred to me to wonder if a slip of a girl could manage the heavy