‘Let’s go back, Johann.’
‘It is early yet. I think one day I will come to your hotel and you will have moved back to England.’
‘Then let’s not go to my hotel. Ryan will be fine for a while. Let’s go to your place.’
His hesitation made her wonder if she’d been too forward, but she had not felt a man’s touch for a long time, and she sensed a need in him matched by her own. Finally he seemed to reach an agreement with himself and rose, hauling her to her feet. They climbed back to the car, and headed away from the Basse Corniche into the hills. High in the Savaric cliffs the roads were covered with plumes of gravel, stones washed down from the rocks above. Gradually the route narrowed, until it was little more than the width of a car. He stopped before a tall steel gate, tucking the Mercedes beneath the overhanging pine boughs, and helped her out. The long-stemmed birds-of-paradise surrounding the house had lost their tough orange petals, but the plant borders had been meticulously maintained. No lights showed in the single-storey building of peach stucco that lay ahead.
There was something clandestine about his behaviour, and she was compelled to ask, ‘Are we supposed to be here?’
‘It’s fine, really, it’s not a problem. The house belongs to an old friend who only stays between June and September. The rest of the year it’s empty. He let me have the keys. Come on.’
He had trouble remembering where the lights were, and then only turned on one of the lamps in the lounge. The walls were covered with stag antlers. There were a pair of leather wing-backed armchairs and a bearskin rug on the floor that she suspected had been cut from creatures tracked by the owner. She smelled pine and polish and old leather. It was hard to imagine that a young man like Johann would know anyone who lived in this way; this was an old hunter’s house. He left the window shutters closed, and flicked on a gas fire filled with artificial logs.
While she warmed herself, he found cut-crystal glasses arranged on a walnut drinks cabinet and poured out two brandies. ‘Soon I think the snows will come,’ he told her, ‘even here.’
‘And I’ll have to go back home,’ she admitted. ‘The first part of my support money came through today. I was expecting more, but it’s enough for me and Ryan to live on for a little while.’
‘So you will stay?’
‘No, it wouldn’t last long if I did that. I have to go back to my flat in London. I don’t have any wealthy friends like you.’ She looked around the shadowy lounge and drew her legs up, feeling the warmth of the fire on her skin.
When he kissed her, she tasted brandy on his tongue. It remained in her mouth as his lips moved down to her neck, his hands avoiding the swell of her breasts but slipping around her back in a tight grip, as if he was scared of ever letting her go, as if he might never be able to find her again. He removed his shirt without thought, shrugging it from his shoulders as though the material was burning his skin.
He lowered himself onto his knees before her, taking her to the floor, moving smoothly, almost gracefully above her. His arms were tanned darker below the biceps, and she could discern a faint scent of sweat released by the warmth of his chest. He was so tender and careful that she wondered if he had somehow guessed her past suffering at the hands of men.
The intensity of her arousal surprised her, because it was caused by another’s desire. She had not expected or even wanted this, but now that her need had been unmasked, she gave way to it. It was absurdly picturesque, making love on the floor of a stranger’s house, lying on an animal skin before a fire, a scene made even more artificial by the fact that the flame effect was fake, but his anxiety to please her was real enough, and she relaxed, closing her eyes as he placed a hand at the base of her spine, raising her hips to slide down her jeans. Water dripped metronomically somewhere far above them. She heard the wind rising outside, and rain falling softly in the pines. Her senses felt heightened. A shudder of air passed between them, as if the spirits of earlier inhabitants were crossing the room.
He made love to her in silence, his smooth dry hands guiding, moving, pressing down firmly, as though every action had to be performed in a certain manner. The rain fell harder. The house creaked. The heat within her raised the pulse of her heart, shortening her breath. The steady rustle of leaves sounded like static. He held her gaze, never breaking the link he had established between them, holding her in place, the entire act controlled for her benefit.
Some time later, when he pulled away from her, she felt cool air returning to the room as a diagonal bar of light widened across the floor, and a shower tap was turned on. It was an old man’s house, where everything was within easy reach.
She sat up slowly, gathering her thoughts, looking around for her clothes. He had folded them neatly on the edge of the sofa while she dozed. She rose and dressed, waiting for him to finish, but the sound of the shower continued. He had folded his own clothes, too, topping them with the satchel she had never seen away from his side.
She had no intention to pry, simply wanted to understand more about him because he had told her so little, and then the satchel’s flap was at her fingertips. Inside she saw nothing unusual at first: a wallet, small change, some loose scraps of paper with scrawled phone numbers, a small monochrome photograph of a stern old woman, a bundle tied with a rubber band and seated in an open envelope.
She took the bundle out and tipped it to the firelight.
Almost too frightened to look, she opened her fingers to see what she was holding. A French passport and a matching identity card bearing his photograph, two French credit cards, a chequebook, all in the same name, Johann Bellocq. She turned back to the passport and read Date of Birth: 1966, passport issued in Marseilles. Johann had been raised here in the Alpes-Maritimes, he had told her so himself.
She had faintly suspected from the outset that he might not operate within the boundaries of the law: his reluctance to reveal so little hard information about himself, the clandestine way in which he seemed to move around, the changing cars, the borrowed houses—nothing added up. Johann kept his passport in his jacket at all times. He had shown it to her. This had to be another one. In that case, whose identity was he carrying about with him?
A dropping sensation filled her stomach. Bellocq was not his real name at all. He was…who? A liar, a thief. The credit cards were issued from two different banks. Suddenly his absence of character started to make sense. The betrayals had been small, a slip about his childhood, the corrected mention of a place, an interrupted recollection, the hasty dismissal of a memory, the constant guarding of his feelings—perhaps the only real part had been his desire for her. He saw something in her, some damage, some sense of kindred spirit…
A familiar rising panic sent her to the stack of photographs lying beneath the passport in the bundle. She flicked through them with widening eyes and horrified realisation, until she became aware that the shower had stopped running. He would dry himself and come to find her.
She rose to her feet and desperately looked about for her purse, surprised to discover how shaky she felt. He would not be able to stop her leaving. Uncertain of what to do, she hesitated, listening as the shower door opened and shut. The upper half of the room was deeply shadowed. He had turned off the light, so that the false flames of the fire provided the only illumination. She would have to get out of the village. It was dangerous to stay a minute more.
For a second she thought she saw an outflung arm clad in brown wool, the palm turned up, fingers splayed, lying behind the sofa. Unable to look, she prayed it was just a log that had rolled from the fire. Whose house was this? Not Johann’s, nor any friend’s. He had stolen the car and found house keys, had entered a stranger’s home and come back for her. For all she knew he had murdered someone in their bed, made love to her while the corpse lay upstairs…
She had not meant to cry out, but she did, and he came running for her. He sat beside her, gripping her hand. He tried to calm her fears, then told her of his childhood, how he had come to kill
his mother, how even the local gendarmes had turned a blind eye because they had known what the old woman was like and how he had been sent away to the nuns for five long years, until he could come to terms with the weight of his crime.
For the first time in his life he was completely honest, telling her everything, because he loved her and wanted her to forgive him. Because he wanted to be with her forever, no matter what she thought of his past, even though it meant telling her how he survived from day to day, moving from town to town, from life to life…
Then he stared into her eyes.
She knew all about his past even before he told her; for a certain kind of man, the problems always began with a bad childhood. She listened to his story very carefully, because she was afraid of him. He was an amalgam of every damaged soul she had ever met. She knew that if she managed to get away, she would have to tell someone about him, and his history would become part of her story.
As she sat before the great stone fireplace in the Villa de l’Ouest, shivering with fear and cold, listening intently, she forced herself to imagine how terrible his childhood had been, and tried to forgive him for what he had become, but found she could not. Matricide, she thought, the ultimate crime against woman. The idea, coupled with the knowledge that she had made love to him, sickened and shamed her. She thought of the photographs, and bile rose in her throat.
He had taken her hand and was saying something about her being the only woman he could ever trust with his burden, and never wanting to let her go. She tried to wriggle her fingers free, panic shortening her breath, terror soaring in her heart. But even as she tried to escape, she suddenly saw that she might never be free of him.
12
LACUNA
‘Where on earth are we?’ asked Arthur Bryant.
‘You’re the map reader, you should know,’ suggested May, switching on the windscreen wipers. ‘It’s starting to snow. That could slow us down a bit.’
Bryant dug into his astrakhan coat and withdrew a crumpled bag. ‘You’re always going on about what a good driver you are. Now’s your chance to prove it. Have a Milk Bottle. Or there are some pink sugar Shrimps.’ He rattled the bag at May.
‘No, thank you, they get stuck in my teeth. What was the last sign you saw?’
‘Windlesham. Or possibly Bagshot. Hang on, there’s one coming up on the left.’ Bryant wrapped his spectacle arms around his ears and squinted. ‘Hawley, Framley, Minley Manor, Hartley Wintney. The names of English towns are more like elocution exercises than real places. Listen to this: Tinkerton, Tapperton, Topley. Sounds like a ping-pong ball falling down a flight of steps. I say, look at that.’ He pointed through the windscreen. ‘Not often you see a green sky. Is that some kind of shepherd’s warning, I wonder?’
‘Not much traffic,’ May noted in puzzlement. ‘Turn on the radio.’
Bryant rolled the dial through a range of staticky channels, each less distinct than the last, but got a refreshing blast of Respighi on Radio Three and, on a local station, several women holding an urgent discussion about butter. ‘This isn’t Alma’s original radio,’ he explained. ‘I had to buy it from an Armenian man in the Caledonian Road who ran away with my change. There was a time when being a police officer used to count for something.’
‘I don’t understand.’ May took his eyes from the road, confused. ‘What happened to the original radio?’
‘Oh, it melted.’ Bryant sucked his sweet pensively. ‘I borrowed it from the van and wired it to a car battery for a party back in 1970. We were celebrating the anniversary of the Messina brothers being sent down, remember them? Five Maltese racketeers who ran an empire of brothels and streetwalkers across the West End after the war. The senior officers at Bow Street were full of stories about them running around armed with razors, hammers and coshes. The Messinas introduced the “short time” rule for London prostitutes, reducing their time with punters to ten minutes, working them from four P.M. to six A.M. until they were half dead. Eugenio Messina used to drive around Piccadilly in a yellow Rolls-Royce, checking that his girls weren’t leaning against walls, not that the gesture made him a gentleman. He just wanted to make sure they were working hard.’
‘I don’t see what this has to do with your melted radio—’
‘Some of the call girls heard we were holding a bash, and threw a Molotov cocktail through the window of the station house kitchen to remind us that we had ruined their livelihoods.’
‘So that’s how the radio—’
‘No, I’d put the radio on the cooker, not realising the grill was on. We almost choked to death on the fumes. Oh, we had a laugh in those days.’ He peered out at the passing fields. ‘Look at the snow falling in the trees; it’s so postcard-pretty out there. I’d forgotten how much I hate the countryside. All those rustic views and seasonal changes give me the willies.’
‘That’s because you’ve never spent time there,’ May replied.
‘Why would I? My family came from London. None of us had any business out here. Rural folk think they’re so superior, just because they have a village pub and a duck pond.’
May knew that his partner’s antipathy to the countryside stemmed from the lean times his parents had endured following the war, when their only work came from long days spent hop-picking in Kent. Locals had hated rowdy East-Enders piling down to disturb the peace in their charabancs. ‘The engine doesn’t sound quite right to me.’
‘I had it checked over only recently.’
‘A fully qualified mechanic, I hope.’
‘More of an astrologer,’ Bryant admitted.
‘He must have thought you were born under the sign of the mug, charging you to tie string around the distributor. Do me a favor and call Janice, would you?’ asked May. ‘Make sure everything’s all right.’
Bryant thumped away at his mobile and listened. ‘Janice?’ he shouted. ‘Are you there?’
‘You don’t need to keep checking on us,’ said Sergeant Longbright. ‘Everything’s fine. How’s your trip?’
‘Long motorways play havoc with a weak bladder, but we soldier on. I’ll call you at regular intervals.’
‘There’s really no need, I assure you.’
Longbright replaced the receiver and looked back at Giles Kershaw. ‘I didn’t say anything. I know how upset you must be, but what good would it do to mention it now? Mr Bryant can’t do anything from where he is. At least he didn’t ask if I was still at the unit.’
‘He could talk to Raymond about the matter; he could use his authority,’ Kershaw replied, dropping his head into his hands and allowing his thin blond hair to run through his fingers. ‘I can’t believe Oswald would do a thing like this. He told me I was the best assistant he’d had in years. Why would he refuse to recommend me for the position?’
‘He obviously doesn’t think you’re ready for it,’ said Longbright. ‘You know how demanding he is, you’ve been shadowing him for nearly a year now.’
‘So Finch steps down on Friday, and Land appoints an outsider to come in and take over. Someone who’s never worked with the unit before, and might decide to stay on forever. Oswald led me to believe the job was mine. He can’t do this to me. This is a specialist unit. All my training has been geared towards this work—where else can I go? You know it’s not fair, Janice. My career’s on the line here.’
‘Leave it for forty-eight hours, until the boys are back,’ Longbright suggested. ‘Nothing will happen before then. I’ll go in with them and see Raymond, but I warn you, Mr Bryant thinks you rely too much on technology and not enough on your natural instincts. He’s told you that before. You’ll need to convince him as well.’ She checked her watch. ‘You’d better go down to the Bayham Street Morgue. They brought someone in a few minutes ago. Caucasian female, early twenties, some kind of overdose, but she was found in suspicious circumstances. It’s probably nothing, but Raymond wants us to take care of it.’
Kershaw puffed his cheeks in annoyance. ‘The system’s down now. I thought
we weren’t accepting any cases until the upgrade was finished.’
‘It’s not a referral; we’re just lending a hand. Oswald will be down there, Giles. You’re going to have to work alongside him without letting him know about what you’ve heard.’
‘So I have to help the man who just stepped on my promotion. That’s just great.’ Kershaw picked up his folders and stormed out of the office.
Longbright went to the window and looked out at the grey-green evening. Her bosses were right to remain aloof from the everyday problems of the office; it allowed them space to think. Instead, everyone came to her with their problems, and then expected her to take sides. Since he had announced his retirement, Oswald Finch had managed to upset everyone in the unit. Could it be he simply regretted making the decision to leave? If he could no longer make himself useful, what was left for him?
It looked like it was snowing outside. She pressed her hand against the radiator and discovered it was cold. No heat, no computers, no investigations, and now Raymond has decided not to let us go home after all, she thought. What else can go wrong?
‘It’s snowing,’ said Meera, clearing a patch of condensation from the curved window in her office. ‘With any luck it’ll cover the tramps and they’ll freeze to death.’
‘There’s a touch of Margaret Thatcher in you,’ Colin Bimsley pointed out. ‘I love seeing snow; it freshens everything up. It even makes Camden Town look almost attractive. It’s beautiful.’
‘Not when you’re standing out in it.’ Mangeshkar remembered an incident from her childhood, when she spent the evening locked out on the balcony of the flats while her stepfather beat the hell out of her mother. She had been wearing a T-shirt and track suit bottoms, and the snow had fallen steadily enough to whiten her hair. Eventually a neighbour had taken the frozen girl in and warmed her beside the fire. She had not cried or complained, but never spoke to her mother’s husband again, even after he begged her to forgive him. She had no love of snow. Watching Bimsley’s goggle-eyed reaction to the weather merely convinced her that he was part Labrador. The fact that they expected her to work with someone so hopelessly optimistic and soft showed how badly they had misjudged her abilities. With a groan of fury, she stalked out of the office in search of Giles Kershaw, slamming the door hard behind her.
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