Blacklight Blue

by Peter May

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The Essex plains were thick with early morning mist, and the flight was delayed by more than half-an-hour. Enzo and Kirsty sat in the concourse looking out through tall windows at the grey expanse of dull, wet, southeast England fading off into an uncertain distance.

  They had hardly spoken on the train ride out from London, each lost in thoughts that couldn’t be voiced. There was an awkwardness between them that neither knew quite how to dispel. Enzo bought a newspaper, and buried his face in it while they waited. But he wasn’t reading. And when finally Kirsty’s flight was announced, he folded it up and left it on the seat beside him.

  They walked together to the gate, and stopped short of it, not knowing how to say goodbye. How to be natural with each other. He put down his overnight bag and wrapped his arms around her. At first she was reluctant to respond, and when she did he tightened his hold on her.

  In the end it was Kirsty who drew away, and they stood looking at each other. ‘Are you alright?’ he asked. She was so pale.

  She nodded. ‘Just tired. Didn’t really sleep well.’ She glanced towards the departures board. ‘They still haven’t announced your flight.’

  He shrugged. ‘The fog’s put everything back.’

  ‘How will you get there from Barcelona?’

  ‘I’ll rent a car. It’s probably only about an hour-and-a-half by road.’

  ‘I’d better go.’ She reached up and brushed his cheek with her lips. ‘See you when you get back.’

  ‘Yeh.’ And he watched her go through the gate with a breaking heart.

  The flight passed in a haze of uncertainty. If she had slept at all during the night she hadn’t been aware of it. Her head ached, as did her throat, and her eyes felt raw from the tears that had soaked into her pillow. It occurred to her, thinking about the little boy who had been abducted all those years ago in Spain, that there must have been a moment when he discovered that he was someone else. A stranger who had lived a lie all of his life.

  Just as she wondered, now, who she was, who she had been.

  And yet on the surface, nothing had changed. Not a single moment of her life had passed any differently. A childhood filled with the love and certainty of a father whom she had thought would always be there. And then all the years without him, resenting him, even hating him. The constant presence of Uncle Sy. Someone she’d been fond of, but who could never have replaced her dad. Her real dad. And now it turned out that he was her real dad. So what difference did it make? It was all just genetics, blood, and family. How did that change her relationship with Enzo? But somehow it did.

  The thought brought fresh tears to her eyes, and she turned her head towards the window to avoid the stares of a man across the aisle who’d been eyeing her lasciviously since they boarded the plane. She let her head rest against the cool glass and couldn’t wait until she saw Roger at Clermont Ferrand. Someone to confide in. A shoulder to cry on. Strong arms to hold her. Her only grasp left on a world disintegrating around her.

  She was disappointed when it was Anna who met her in the arrivals hall. The older woman kissed her on both cheeks.

  ‘Where’s Roger?’

  Anna hesitated. ‘He had to go back to Paris.’ She peered at Kirsty. ‘You look terrible.’

  ‘Thank you. You look pretty good yourself.’

  Anna smiled. ‘I’m sorry. You just looked like maybe you’d been crying.’

  ‘I didn’t sleep very well, that’s all.’

  They walked outside to the car park, and bright winter sunlight angled down from the mountains to the sprawling, flat basin of land that cradled the city of Clermont Ferrand high up on the Massif Central. It was colder here than in London, but a welcome change from the grey misery of a damp southern English November.

  They took the A75 autoroute south before leaving it at Massiac and heading west on the N122, up into the mountains of the Cantal. Kirsty sat staring from the window, but barely registered the changing landscape, the dramatic swoop of fir-lined hills crowned by jagged peaks of snow-covered rock. The road turned and twisted through mountain valleys that never saw the winter sunshine, before emerging suddenly into patches of dazzling sunlight squinting down between the peaks.

  Anna contained her curiosity until they were nearly home, climbing steadily through the trees towards the ski resort of Le Lioran. Another few kilometres and they would begin their descent into the tiny valley that cradled the village of Miramont. Finally she glanced across the car at her silent passenger. ‘What’s wrong, Kirsty?’

  Kirsty awoke as if from a dream. ‘What?’

  ‘You haven’t said a word all the way from Clermont.’

  ‘Sorry. I was just thinking about what happened in London.’

  ‘What did happen?’

  ‘It wasn’t the killer’s DNA in the database. It was his twin brother’s, a brother who was abducted in Spain when he was just a child. Everyone thought he was dead.’

  ‘Is that why Enzo didn’t come back with you?’

  Kirsty nodded. ‘He’s gone to Spain.’

  She turned to look at Anna. ‘We saw him, you know. The killer. He was stalking us in London. But we managed to lose him.’ She was lost in thought for a moment. ‘It was really scary.’

  ‘That’s not why you’ve been crying, though.’

  Kirsty’s head snapped round. ‘Who says I’ve been crying?’

  ‘Kirsty, I’ve seen enough red-rimmed eyes looking back at me from the mirror to know when someone’s been shedding tears.’

  Kirsty held her gaze for a moment, before turning away, and Anna flicked her indicator and braked suddenly, pulling them round into an unexpected left-hand turn. Kirsty saw the welcome sign to Le Lioran, and the road dipped down into a sprawling car park. Pine covered slopes rose all around the nearly deserted ski resort. Alpine cabins, an ugly apartment block, a hotel, a tiny shopping mall, stores filled with ski equipment and souvenirs. Chair lifts were threaded up between the trees, but the chairs hung silent and empty, swinging in the cold wind that sheered off the mountains. There were hardly any cars in the parking.

  ‘The season hasn’t started yet,’ Anna said. ‘And the summer tourists are long gone. Looks like we’ve got the place pretty much to ourselves.’ She pulled up her car and switched off the engine. She turned towards Kirsty. ‘So are you going to tell me, or are you going to bottle it up forever?’

  Kirsty shook her head. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’ But she wasn’t sure she could keep it to herself for very much longer.

  ‘Trust me, Kirsty. I have an instinct for these things.’

  Kirsty was fighting now to contain her tears, staring straight ahead of her at nothing. ‘How would you feel if you suddenly found out that your dad wasn’t really your dad?’

  Whatever Anna might have been expecting, it wasn’t this. She sat silently for a few moments absorbing the revelation. ‘Does he know that?’

  ‘He found out at the same time as I did. We were staying with his oldest friend. My sort of surrogate dad. The one who was always around when Enzo wasn’t. He was drunk. Jealous, I think. And there was some kind of tension between them. Then it all came out. I’d gone to bed. I wasn’t supposed to hear, but I did.’

  ‘So he doesn’t know that you know.’ Kirsty shook her head. ‘Are you going to tell him?’

  Kirsty stared at her hands. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘And how do you feel about it?’

  ‘How do you think I feel about it?’

  ‘No, I mean, how do you feel about Enzo? Does it change anything?’

  Kirsty flashed her a tear-stained look. ‘It changes everything.’

  ‘How?’

  Kirsty became shrill. ‘I don’t know. I can’t explain it. It just does.’

  Anna put a hand over hers. ‘I’m sorry. I guess you’re pretty confused right now. I didn’t read the warning signs very well: Private. Keep Out. Right?’ Kirsty took her hand and squ
eezed it tightly. Anna waited until the grip on her hand relaxed, before reclaiming it to open the car door. ‘Come on, there’s something here you should see.’

  As she slammed the door shut and rounded the car, her breath billowed around her head, caught in the sunlight that streamed across the frozen car park. Kirsty sat for a moment, before getting out of the passenger side. ‘What is there to see in a place like this?’

  Anna took her hand. ‘I’ll show you.’

  There was no snow here in the resort, or on any of the lower slopes. But the peaks above them glistened white against a diamond blue sky. The bar-brasserie was empty. In the covered shopping strip, only a handful of desultory figures wandered amongst the stands of cards and mugs and ski jackets. Shop signs swayed in the wind. École de Ski Les Yétis, Spar Alimentation, Salon de Thé. A bored-looking receptionist doodled behind the counter in the empty lobby of the drum-shaped hotel above the mall.

  They climbed steps into the large terminal building of the Téléphérique, and in the deserted ticket hall Anna bought them a couple of return tickets on the cablecar that would take them to the peak of the Plomb du Cantal, the highest mountain in the range. Summer and winter there would have been long queues standing patiently on the concrete concourse upstairs. But in this dead time between seasons there wasn’t another soul, and a frozen-looking employee punched their tickets and waved them through to the landing stage.

  From here they had a view of the twin cables stretched between stanchions, rising steeply through the grassy gap between the trees towards the snowline. Their cablecar stood in its dock. The other had just left the landing stage at the peak, a distant speck descending through a blaze of white.

  They crossed the docking area, with its red-painted barriers, and walked through open doors into the empty cablecar. It had sliding doors at each corner, and panoramic windows at either end. A notice warned that the car was limited to eighty passengers maximum. But it seemed that today there would only be two. Anna leaned back against the blue rail and folded her arms. She said, ‘I grew up here in the Cantal. This is where I learned to ski.’

  Kirsty said, ‘I’ve never skied.’

  Anna looked at her in disbelief. ‘And you come from Scotland?’

  ‘I grew up in Glasgow. There weren’t many ski slopes in Byres Road.’

  ‘You have to try it. It’s wonderful.’ Her face glowed from some kind of inner passion. ‘Exhilarating. Once you lose your fear, there’s nothing quite like it.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’d ever lose the fear. I’m not good at balance. I can’t even put on roller skates without falling down.’

  The man who had taken their tickets emerged from the terminal, stamping his feet and clapping his hands. He entered the cablecar through the far door, opened a wall panel to access the controls and pressed a button to shut the doors. He nodded towards Anna and Kirsty. ‘Mesdames.’

  He pressed another button and the cablecar jerked, the whine of an electric motor engaging the wheels on the cable above, and they bumped their way out of the dock to begin rising away from the terminal. Rows of empty wooden picnic tables set on the apron around the hotel rapidly became tiny, like furniture in a doll’s house, and green pasture opened up all around the resort, reaching up to the treeline and the snowy peaks beyond.

  There was a sense of floating, almost flying, dipping suddenly at the first support pylon, then rising ever more steeply. The world began to spread itself out below them, the horizon dropping away on all sides to a ragged, snowy fringe on the skyline, patchwork sunlight on green and white. The other cablecar, making its descent, passed them on their right, hanging from the upward curve of the arm that hooked around the cable, only a few hardy souls aboard it.

  And then they passed the snowline, black rock breaking in ragged patches through the still scant covering. Anna and Kirsty moved from the back of the car to the front as they approached the terminal building on the peak, a square structure of wood and steel and concrete built out on struts to allow the cablecars to dock. They stepped out on to a grilled platform, the mountain falling away disconcertingly beneath their feet. Then up steps onto solid concrete, huge yellow wheels set in the roof overhead to haul the cables.

  The cablecar operator lit a cigarette and watched as they passed through open doors into a concrete hall, water lying in icy patches on an uneven floor. A sign advertised Stella Artois, but the cafeteria was shut. They passed through a short corridor, then out through swing doors into the icy blast. The snow lay thick, beneath a towering radio mast, and a well trodden trail led up the final three hundred metres to the summit. There were just a few other hardy souls up here on the roof of the world, in fleeces and boots, examining a representational mountain map with its trails and ski slopes, before heading on up to the peak itself.

  Kirsty drew her coat more tightly around herself and felt the icy edge of the wind burn her cheeks. ‘Why did you bring me up here?’

  ‘You’ll see. Come on.’ Anna held her hand and led her past a line of fenceposts sunk in the snow, over a rise that took them above the cablecar terminal. The world sheered away beneath them. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Just look at it, Kirsty.’ And Kirsty looked, turning slowly through nearly three hundred and sixty degrees. France shimmered away in every direction to a horizon lost in unfocused distance. ‘You can see for, literally, hundreds of kilometres. It’s glorious. Can’t you feel it? That sense of …’ she searched for the right word, ‘ … insignificance. You, or I, just one tiny little speck on the edge of infinity. I used to come up here any time life was getting on top of me. Every time I started to obsess about myself and my problems. And I always found a kind of equilibrium. That sense of balance that comes with perspective. With remembering that whatever troubles you have, they are nothing in the grand scheme of things. Nothing compared to this.’

  Whether it was the lack of oxygen six thousand feet up, or the pure, bracing quality of the wind in her face, Kirsty found herself almost intoxicated by the sense of insignificance that Anna spoke of, like staring drunkenly at a star-crusted sky on a summer’s night and realising that it had no beginning and no end. She breathed deeply, and felt some of the burden of uncertainty slip away. But she could find no words to describe her feelings, and her only response was to turn to Anna, a reluctant smile breaking across her face, and silently nod her understanding.

  Anna said, ‘If it were me, I wouldn’t want any secrets from the people I loved. Secrets are poison, Kirsty. You need to let them out.’

  ‘I’m scared.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘That it’ll change things.’

  ‘It already has. You said it had changed everything.’

  But Kirsty was still confused by a surfeit of conflicting emotions. ‘I don’t know what to think, or what to say.’

  ‘If you loved him before, then you love him still. He hasn’t changed, and neither have you. You can’t alter the past, but you can make the future.’ She turned away, then, staring out across the vast central plateau of her native land, and Kirsty saw the hint of a tear in the corner of her eye.

  ‘What is it?’ She took her arm.

  But Anna blinked away the tear, and smiled to cover it. ‘I never knew my own father that well. I was always too busy. Always thought there would be a tomorrow. Some time when we would sit down and talk and get to know each other, finally. Then he upped and died on me, and there were no tomorrows, no going back.’

  Kirsty looked at her. ‘When was that?’

  ‘Ten years ago.’

  And a strange stab of apprehension spiked through Kirsty’s pain.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Although the sun was low in its winter sky, there was a good deal of warmth left in it. The display in Enzo’s hire car had shown twenty degrees celsius. Parking in the Plaça Frederic Rahola was no problem at this time of year. La Plaja Grana, beyond the statue of Salvador Dali, was deserted. Only a couple of tables on the seafront café were occupied. He walked around past the Ca
sino and the Entina tapas bar and into a tiny cobbled square where leaves clung stubbornly to the trees that would shade it in summer. He checked the map he had acquired in the tourist office then looked up to see a narrow slated street climbing steeply up through an archway into the old town.

  He shrugged aside the ghost of last night’s revelation about Kirsty and Simon. It had haunted him all through the flight and the drive north from Barcelona. But now he sensed that he was only a touch away from Rickie Bright. Bright would know that, and like an animal cornered, become even more dangerous. Enzo needed all his concentration.

  Many of the street names and shop fronts here owed their origins to a strange Catalonian language that hovered somewhere between Spanish and French. The streets were paved with slabs of slate, laid end on, an uneven surface cambered for drainage, and so narrow that they never saw the sun, except in high summer.

  A gaggle of schoolkids passed him on the steep climb, satchels slung across shoulders, spirits high at the end of the school day. A man on a ladder was painting a wrought-iron balcony. Ahead of him, an old lady wearing a headscarf, fresh from her siesta, sat on the doorstep of her house, hands folded on a pink apron. She watched him pass with a dull curiosity.

  Through a maze of tiny, intersecting passageways, Enzo found himself, finally, on the street that ran straight up to the church. The house he was looking for, he knew, was immediately below it at No. 9. On his right, below a gnarled bougainvillea vine, he passed a small restaurant called El Gato Azul. There was a painting of a blue cat on the panel beside the door. On the wall opposite was a menu spattered with paw prints. A little further up, on the other side of the street, was a double door the colour of dried blood. Next to it, the number 9.

  Enzo looked up at the whitewashed three-storey house. All its shutters were tightly closed, and his heart sank with the thought that he might have come all this way only to find that she wasn’t at home. There was a bell-push above the letter box at the side of the door. He pressed it, and heard a bell ringing distantly, somewhere in the depths of the house. After a moment, he heard slow footsteps beyond the door, the rattle of a lock, and one half of the doors swung open to reveal a small, dark-haired woman of indeterminate age. She was dressed all in black, except for a white pinafore. Her skin was olive dark, and her face deeply lined. This was not, he knew, the woman he sought. She looked at Enzo half-obscured by the dark interior of the hall, and he felt the house breathe its cold, damp air in his face.