The Last Darkness
Page 35
He had the feeling his mother was about to launch into her usual mumbo about her late father, an important Frog lawyer with a big house in the Loire Valley. Fine wines, crystal, silver candlesticks, the works. Bobby sometimes wondered how much of this story was true.
The plotline was total suds: young French woman of a certain class marries beneath herself, falling for a charming adventurer called Jacques Descartes, who drags her halfway round the world in doomed pursuit of lost gold mines and oil deposits, riches based on wild rumours eavesdropped in the taverns of shabby port cities where travellers traded dodgy map fragments or dog-eared geological reports for a few drams of booze or some cash. The lovers marry in Mozambique and, having survived various disasters – a shipwreck, an earthquake, according to Sandrine – they wash up in Glasgow many years later because Monsieur Le Loverboy has learned of a forgotten silver mine in the hills of Lanarkshire.
Of all places. Lanarkshire. The sticks.
The story culminated in sickness and poverty, Jacques dying from TB, and Sandrine living out a miserable widowhood in this unpleasant corner of a cold Scottish city, her only legacy Bobby, who remembered his dad, his papa, as an embittered man with a frighteningly big head and thick white hair, who sometimes sang ‘La Marseillaise’ if he was pished. Which was often.
It was all rubbish, Bobby sometimes thought. Pure keich. Or maybe there was some nub of truth, enough to keep Sandrine warm on cold nights. Fuck did it matter?
‘I’m going out,’ he said.
‘Where?’
‘Don’t interrogate me, Ma. I’m thirty-seven years old.’
‘In your head, ah, you are an adolescent.’ She made a Gallic gesture, shrugging then throwing her hands up in the fashion of a juggler. ‘No job. No prospects. No girl, Robert. No love. Where is love? Life needs love.’
Her accent turned Robert into Robair. She pronounced their last name Daycart instead of Deskarts. He hated that. Daycart. It was like something with wheels.
‘You do not make anything of yourself.’
‘At least I don’t lie around on a clapped-out old sofa watching crap TV.’
‘Ah, no. You are so busy acquiring a university degree, of course. Forgive me, I forget.’
Her sarcasm. Her love story. Her broken heart. Her maroon sofa and that bloody shawl. What else didn’t he like about his mother? He headed towards the door. ‘One day you’ll be proud of me.’
‘I hold my breath.’
He paused on the way out. Just for a second his nerve wilted, but he pushed his uncertainty aside and shut the door before hitting the stairs. Beezer – one of whose ancestors was a famous French philosopher, a fact Sandrine had fruitlessly tried to impress on her son years ago – was on the go.
With murder in his heart.
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About the Author
Campbell Armstrong (1944–2013) was an international bestselling author best known for his thriller series featuring British counterterrorism agent Frank Pagan, and his quartet of Glasgow Novels, featuring detective Lou Perlman. Two of these, White Rage and Butcher, were nominated for France’s Prix du Polar. Armstrong’s novels Assassins & Victims and The Punctual Rape won Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Awards.
Born in Glasgow and educated at the University of Sussex, Armstrong worked as a book editor in London and taught creative writing at universities in the United States.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2002 by Campbell Armstrong
Cover design by Angela Goddard
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0712-2
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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