Point Blanc Read online

  The receptionist took down two keys. He didn’t ask either of them to sign in. He didn’t ask for a credit card. The school owned the hotel, so there would be no bill when they left. He gave Alex one of the keys.

  “I hope you are not superstitious,” he said, speaking in English now.

  “No,” Alex replied.

  “It is room thirteen. On the first floor. I am sure you will find it most agreeable.” The receptionist smiled.

  Mrs Stellenbosch took her key. “The hotel has its own restaurant,” she said. “We might as well eat here tonight. We don’t want to go out in the rain. Anyway, the food here is excellent. Do you like French food, Alex?”

  “Not much,” Alex said.

  “Well, I’m sure we’ll find something that you like. Why don’t you freshen up after the journey?” She looked at her watch. “We’ll eat at seven. An hour and a half from now. It will give us an opportunity to talk together. Might I suggest, perhaps, some smarter clothes for dinner? The French are informal, but – if you’ll forgive me saying so, my dear – you take informality a little far. I’ll call you at five to seven. I hope the room is all right.”

  Room thirteen was at the end of a long, narrow corridor. The door opened into a surprisingly large space, with views over the square. There was a double bed with a black and white cover, a television and mini-bar, a desk and, on the wall, a couple of framed pictures of Paris. A porter had carried up Alex’s cases and, as soon as he was gone, Alex kicked off his shoes and sat down on the bed. He wondered why they had come here. He knew the helicopter had needed refuelling, but that shouldn’t have necessitated an overnight stop. Why not fly straight on to the school?

  He had more than an hour to kill. First he went into the bathroom – more glass and white marble – and took a long shower. Then, wrapped in a towel, he went back into the room and put the television on. Alex Friend would watch a lot of television. There were about thirty channels to choose from. Alex skipped past the French ones and stopped on MTV. He wondered if he was being monitored. There was a large mirror next to the desk and it would have been easy enough to conceal a camera behind it. Well, why not give them something to think about? He opened the mini-bar and poured himself a glass of gin. Then he went into the bathroom, refilled the bottle with water and put it back in the fridge. Drinking alcohol and stealing! If she was watching, Mrs Stellenbosch would know that she had her hands full with him.

  He spent the next forty minutes watching television and pretending to drink the gin. Then he took the glass into the bathroom and dumped it in the sink, allowing the liquid to run out. It was time to get dressed. Should he do what he was told and put on smart clothes? In the end, he compromised. He put on a shirt, but kept the same jeans. A moment later, the telephone rang. His call to dinner.

  Mrs Stellenbosch was waiting for him in the restaurant, an airless room in the basement. Soft lighting and mirrors had been used to make it feel more spacious, but it was still the last place Alex would have chosen. The restaurant could have been anywhere, in any part of the world. There were two other diners – businessmen by the look of them – but otherwise they were alone. Mrs Stellenbosch had changed into a black evening dress with feathers at the collar and she wore an antique-looking necklace of black and silver beads. The smarter her clothes, Alex thought, the uglier she looked. She was smoking another cigar.

  “Ah, Alex!” She blew smoke. “Did you have a rest? Or did you watch TV?”

  Alex didn’t say anything. He sat down and opened the menu, then closed it again when he saw that it was all in French.

  “You must let me order for you. Some soup to start, perhaps? And then a steak. I’ve never yet met a boy who doesn’t like steak.”

  “My cousin Oliver is a vegetarian,” Alex said. It was something he had read in one of the files.

  The assistant director nodded as if she already knew this. “Then he doesn’t know what he is missing,” she said. A pale-faced waiter came over and she placed the order in French. “What will you drink?” she asked.

  “I’ll have a Coke.”

  “A repulsive drink, I always think. I have never understood the taste. But, of course, you shall have what you want.”

  The waiter brought Alex a Coke and a glass of champagne for Mrs Stellenbosch. Alex watched the bubbles rising in the two glasses, his black, hers a pale gold.

  “Santé,” she said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “It’s French for ‘good health’.”

  “Oh. Cheers.”

  There was a moment’s silence. The woman’s eyes were fixed on him – as if she could see right through him. “So, you were at Eton,” she said casually.

  “That’s right.” Alex was suddenly on his guard.

  “What house were you in?”

  “The Hopgarden.” It was the name of a real house at the school. Alex had read the file carefully.

  “I visited Eton once. I remember a statue. I think it was a king. It was just through the main gate…”

  She was testing him. Alex was sure of it. Did she suspect him – or was it simply a precaution, something she always did? “You’re talking about Henry VI,” he said. “His statue’s in College Yard. He founded Eton.”

  “But you didn’t like it there.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t like the uniform and I didn’t like the beaks.” Alex was careful not to use the word “teachers”. At Eton, they’re known as beaks. He half smiled to himself. If she wanted a bit of Eton-speak, he’d give it to her. “And I didn’t like the rules. Getting fined by the pop. Or being put in the tardy book. I was always getting rips and infoes or being put on the bill. The divs were boring—”

  “I’m afraid I don’t really understand a word you’re saying.”

  “Divs are lessons,” Alex explained. “Rips are when your work is no good—”

  “All right!” She drew a line with her cigar. “Is that why you set fire to the library?”

  “No,” Alex said. “That was just because I don’t like books.”

  The first course arrived. Alex’s soup was yellow and had something floating in it. He picked up his spoon and poked at it suspiciously. “What’s this?” he demanded.

  “Soupe de moules.”

  He looked at her blankly.

  “Mussel soup. I hope you enjoy it.”

  “I’d have preferred Heinz tomato,” Alex said.

  The steaks, when they came, were typically French; barely cooked at all. Alex took a couple of mouthfuls of the bloody meat, then threw down his knife and fork and used his fingers to eat the chips. Mrs Stellenbosch talked to him about the French Alps, about skiing and about her visits to various European cities. It was easy to look bored. He was bored. And he was beginning to feel tired. He took a sip of Coke, hoping the cold drink would wake him up. The meal seemed to be dragging on all night.

  But at last the puddings – ice cream with white chocolate sauce – had come and gone. Alex declined coffee.

  “You look tired,” Stellenbosch said. She had lit another cigar. The smoke curled around her head and made him feel dizzy. “Would you like to go to bed?”

  “Yes.”

  “We don’t need to leave until midday tomorrow. You’ll have time for a visit to the Louvre, if you’d like that.”

  Alex shook his head. “Actually, paintings bore me.”

  “Really? What a shame!”

  Alex stood up. Somehow his hand knocked into his glass, spilling the rest of the Coke over the pristine white tablecloth. What was the matter with him? Suddenly he was exhausted.

  “Would you like me to come up with you, Alex?” the woman asked. She was looking carefully at him, a tiny glimmer of interest in her otherwise dead eyes.

  “No. I’ll be all right.” Alex stepped away. “Goodnight.”

  Getting upstairs was an ordeal. He was tempted to take the lift but he didn’t want to lock himself into that small, windowless cubicle. He would have
felt suffocated. He climbed the stairs, his shoulder resting heavily against the wall, stumbled down the corridor and somehow got the key into the lock. When he finally got inside, the room was spinning. What was going on? Had he drunk more of the gin than he had intended or was he…?

  Alex swallowed. He had been drugged. There had been something in the Coke. It was still on his tongue, a sort of bitterness. There were only three steps between him and his bed, but it could have been a mile away. His legs wouldn’t obey him any more. Just lifting one foot took all his strength. He fell forward, reaching out with his arms. Somehow he managed to propel himself far enough. His chest and shoulders hit the bed, sinking into the mattress. The room was spinning round him, faster and faster. He tried to stand up, tried to speak – but nothing came. His eyes closed. Gratefully, he allowed the darkness to take him.

  Thirty minutes later, there was a soft click and the room began to change.

  If Alex had been able to open his eyes, he would have seen the desk, the mini-bar and the framed pictures of Paris begin to rise up the wall. Or so it might have seemed to him. But in fact the walls weren’t moving. The floor was sinking on hidden hydraulics, taking the bed – with Alex on it – into the depths of the hotel. The entire room was nothing more than a huge lift which was carrying him, one centimetre at a time, into the basement and beyond. Now the walls were metal sheets. He had left the wallpaper, the lights and the pictures high above him. He was dropping through what might have been a ventilation shaft with four steel rods guiding him to the bottom. Brilliant light suddenly flooded over him. There was another soft click. He had arrived.

  The bed had come to rest in the centre of a gleaming underground clinic. Scientific equipment crowded in on him from all sides. There were a number of cameras – digital, video, infrared and X-ray. There were instruments of all shapes and sizes, many of them unrecognizable.

  A tangle of wires spiralled out from each machine to a bank of computers that hummed and blinked on a long worktable against one of the walls. A window had been cut into the wall on the other side. The room was air-conditioned. Had Alex been awake, he might have shivered in the cold. His breath appeared as a faint white cloud hovering around his mouth.

  A plump man wearing a white coat was waiting to receive him. The man was about forty, with yellow hair slicked back and a face that was rapidly sinking into middle-age, with puffy cheeks and a thick, fatty neck. The man had glasses and a small moustache. He had two assistants with him. They were also wearing white coats. Their faces were blank.

  The three of them set to work at once. Handling Alex as if he were a sack of vegetables – or a corpse – they picked him up and stripped off all his clothes. Then they began to photograph him, using a conventional camera to begin with. Starting at his toes, they moved upwards, clicking off at least a hundred pictures, the flash igniting and the film automatically spooling forward. Not one inch of his body escaped their examination. A lock of his hair was snipped off and slid into a plastic envelope. An opthalmoscope was used to produce a perfect image of the back of his eye. They made a moulding of his teeth, slipping a piece of putty into his mouth and manipulating his chin to make him bite down. They made a careful note of the birthmark on his left shoulder, the scar on his arm and even his fingerprints. Alex bit his nails. That was recorded too.

  Finally, they weighed him on a large, flat scale and then measured him – his height, chest, waist, inside leg, hand size and so on – making a note of every measurement on clipboards.

  And all the time, Mrs Stellenbosch watched from the other side of the window. She never moved. The only sign of life anywhere in her face was the cigar, clamped between her lips. It glowed red and the smoke trickled up.

  The three men had finished. The one with the yellow hair spoke into a microphone. “We’re all done,” he said.

  “Give me your opinion, Mr Baxter.” The woman’s voice echoed out of a concealed speaker.

  “It’s a cinch.” The man called Baxter was English. He spoke with an upper-class accent. And he was obviously pleased with himself. “He’s got a good bone structure. Very fit. Interesting face. You notice the pierced ear? He’s had that done recently. Nothing else to say, really.”

  “When will you operate?”

  “Whenever you say, old girl. Just let me know.”

  Mrs Stellenbosch turned to the other two men. “Rhabillez-le!” She snapped the two words.

  The two assistants put Alex’s clothes back on him again. This took longer than taking them off. As they worked, they made a careful note of all the brand names. The Quiksilver shirt. The Gap socks. By the time they had dressed him, they knew as much about him as a doctor knows about a newborn baby. It had all been noted down. And the information would be passed on.

  Mr Baxter walked over to the worktable and pressed a button. At once, the carpet, bed and hotel furniture began to rise up. They disappeared through the ceiling and kept going. Alex slept on as he was carried back up the shaft, finally arriving in the space that he knew as room thirteen.

  There was nothing to show what had happened. The whole experience had evaporated, as quickly as a dream.

  “MY NAME IS GRIEF”

  The academy at Point Blanc had been built by a lunatic. For a time it had been used as an asylum. Alex remembered what Alan Blunt had told him as the helicopter began its final descent, the red and white helipad looming up to receive it. The photograph in the brochure had been artfully taken. Now that he could see the building for himself, he could only describe it as … mad.

  It was a jumble of towers and battlements, green sloping roofs and windows of every shape and size. Nothing fitted together properly. The overall design should have been simple enough; a circular central area with two wings. But one wing was longer than the other. The two sides didn’t match. The academy was four floors high but the windows were spaced in such a way that it was hard to tell where one floor ended and the next began. There was an internal courtyard that wasn’t quite square, with a fountain that had frozen solid. Even the helipad, jutting out of the roof, was ugly and awkward, as if a spaceship had smashed into the brickwork and lodged in place.

  Mrs Stellenbosch flicked off the controls. “I will take you down to meet the director,” she shouted over the noise of the blades. “Your luggage will be brought down later.”

  It was cold on the roof, the snow covering the mountain still hadn’t melted and everything was white for as far as the eye could see.

  The academy was built into the side of a steep slope. A little further down, Alex saw a great iron tongue that started at ground level but then curved outwards as the mountainside dropped away. It was a ski-jump – the sort of thing he had seen at the Winter Olympics. The end of the curve was at least fifty metres above the ground and, far below, Alex could make out a flat area shaped like a horseshoe where the jumpers were meant to land.

  He was staring at it, imagining what it would be like to propel yourself into space with only two skis to break your fall, when the woman grabbed his arm. “We don’t use it,” she said. “It is forbidden. Come now. Let’s get out of the cold.”

  They went through a door in the side of one of the towers and down a narrow spiral staircase – each step a different distance apart – that took them all the way to the ground floor. Now they were in a long, narrow corridor with plenty of doors but no windows.

  “Classrooms,” Mrs Stellenbosch explained. “You will see them later.”

  Alex followed her through the strangely silent building. The central heating had been turned up high inside the academy and the atmosphere was warm and heavy. They stopped at a pair of modern glass doors which opened into the courtyard that Alex had seen from above. From the heat back into the cold again, Mrs Stellenbosch led him through the doors and past the frozen fountain. A movement caught his eye and Alex glanced up. This was something he hadn’t noticed earlier. A sentry stood on one of the towers. He had a pair of binoculars round his neck and a submachine-gun slung across o
ne arm.

  Armed guards? In a school? Alex had only been here a few minutes and already he was unnerved.

  “Through here.” Mrs Stellenbosch opened another door for him and he found himself in the main reception hall of the academy. A log fire was burning in a massive fireplace with two stone dragons guarding the flames. A grand staircase led upwards. The hall was lit by a chandelier with at least a hundred bulbs. The walls were wood panelled. The carpet was thick, dark red. A dozen pairs of eyes pursued Alex as he followed Mrs Stellenbosch towards the next corridor. The hall was decorated with animal heads. A rhino, an antelope, a water buffalo and, saddest of all, a lion. Alex wondered who had shot them.

  They came to a single door, which suggested they had come to the end of their journey. So far Alex hadn’t encountered any boys but, glancing out of the window, he saw two more guards marching slowly past, both of them cradling machine-guns.

  Mrs Stellenbosch knocked on the door.

  “Come in!” Even with just two words, Alex caught the South African accent.

  The door opened and they went into a huge room that made no sense. Like the rest of the building, its shape was irregular, none of the walls running parallel. The ceiling was about seven metres high, with windows running the whole way and giving an impressive view of the slopes. The room was modern, with soft lighting coming from units concealed in the walls. The furniture was ugly, but not as ugly as the further animal heads on the walls and the zebra skin on the wooden floor. There were three chairs next to a small fireplace. One of them was gold and antique. A man was sitting in it. His head turned as Alex came in.

  “Good afternoon, Alex,” he said. “Please come and sit down.”

  Alex sauntered into the room and took one of the chairs. Mrs Stellenbosch sat in the other.

  “My name is Grief,” the man continued. “Dr Grief. I am very pleased to meet you and to have you here.”

  Alex stared at the man who was the director of Point Blanc, at the white paper skin and the eyes burning behind the red spectacles. It was like meeting a skeleton and for a moment he was lost for words. Then he recovered. “Nice place,” he said.