Splendid Isolation

by Helena Maeve

  “So…you still had that in you,” he wheezed, exhausted.

  Cole fidgeted as he stretched his legs. Manuel’s handprints were still etched in pink on the meat of his thighs. “Good drugs, right? Wish I could—”

  The shrill ringing on his replacement mobile cut short the pillow talk. Cole pressed his face to Manuel’s shoulder with a groan.

  “Don’t answer,” Manuel exhorted.

  “Could be important.”

  In their line of work, they were always on call.

  Cole rose slowly, careful not to rest his weight on his injured arm, and hitched up his sleep pants. He cut a handsome, ruffled silhouette in the diffuse glow of the street lamps outside.

  Manuel let himself enjoy the sight even as he braced for the worst.

  He knew it by the slant of Cole’s brow. He knew it in the stiffening of his glistening shoulders, as the evidence of their exertion dried on warm skin.

  Cole flashed him an apologetic smile and gestured to the living room. Manuel waved him off. Probably best to start cleaning himself up now, before the extraction team arrived to take him away.

  At length, the hum of voices faded to the worrisome clutch of silence. Pulse thumping against his temples, Manuel barely fought the urge to get out of bed and investigate. How he played it now could make all the difference between a fond farewell and Cole’s earning antipathy at long last.

  His patience was rewarded when Cole returned to the bedroom, silhouette bleached white in the lamplight. Sleep pants hung delectably low over his hips. The thought of tugging them the rest of the way down to the floor zoomed through Manuel’s addled mind. He banished the notion. It only took one glance at Cole’s sallow cheeks and thinned lips to know this wasn’t the time for seduction.

  The mattress dipped as Cole sat down, silent and contemplative.

  Manuel resisted the urge to lay a palm against the small of his back. “Everything okay?” He had a feeling he’d already guessed the answer.

  “That was Chelsea,” Cole said, hefting the replacement mobile as though to test its weight. “You wouldn’t believe what happened after I was discharged…”

  Manuel propped himself up onto an elbow. “What?”

  “Arthur vanished into thin air. Strange, isn’t it?”

  “Very,” Manuel echoed. “Hope they find him. He seemed rather…troubled.”

  “Mm…” Cole twisted around to restore the phone to the bedside table. “I know I don’t have to ask, but it might come up.”

  Go ahead.

  “You didn’t have anything to do with that…did you?” Cole’s gaze was a sniper’s red bead. Manuel had been its focus in the past, but that wasn’t enough for immunization.

  “How could I? I was with you almost constantly.”

  “Almost?”

  Manuel hummed in acquiescence. “Had to call Robin, didn’t I? He was very worried. Nearly sent out a search party when he didn’t hear from me two nights in a row…”

  And by search party, he meant the kind with pitchforks and torches that could descend on Section with enough force to cripple all ongoing operations. They wouldn’t destroy the SIS, but then they didn’t have to.

  Arthur’s incursion would be a footnote in the guerrilla war Cole and his brethren could not afford.

  “I see.”

  “Be stupid of me to compromise the favor I’ve earned by cooperating with the family for the sake of a man who tried to kill us both.”

  “Who nearly succeeded,” Cole corrected as he tipped back into bed with Manuel. He favored his left arm, turning slowly to rest his head against Manuel’s shoulder. “I know I don’t have to tell you what’s at stake here.”

  “But I so love hearing you talk business…”

  Cole pinched his flank. “Makes no difference, anyway. We’ll find him soon. Bring him to justice.”

  Or what passes for justice in Section’s eyes.

  Manuel pressed his lips to Cole’s temple and buried his guilt deep. “Or…I could give you something else to think about.” The sheets rustled when he hoisted himself over Cole’s body, skin sliding against skin.

  “Or that.” Cole swallowed hard. “That’s a much better idea.”

  Manuel bent down to kiss him.

  “Just—”

  “Yes?” he breathed, poised on the knife edge of dread.

  Cole peered up at him. “If you did have something to do with Arthur’s David Copperfield act…you understand I couldn’t say that I don’t object?”

  Lighter by about a hundred pounds, Manuel slid a knuckle under his chin.

  “Darling? Do shut up and kiss me.”

  Also available from Pride Publishing:

  Shadow Play: Price of Freedom

  Helena Maeve

  Excerpt

  Chapter One

  “What do you mean ‘the body is gone’?” Ulysses pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’re kidding, right? I came in yesterday and you said—”

  “I know what I said,” Malika shot back, lips pursed around the filter of her unlit cigarette. Her hands shook around the plastic lighter. A cold front had settled over Gatinau in the late evening hours, after Ulysses had found his hotel but before he realized he’d misplaced his cell phone. By morning, the chill was entrenched, hostile.

  His on-the-ground contact was no kinder.

  After a good minute of trying to ignite her cigarette, Malika pried it from her mouth and threw up her hands. “Look, some guys came during the night. Must’ve been around midnight, maybe a little later… Next thing I know, I’m told to take a walk. When I come back, he’s gone. That’s all I know.”

  “Told by whom?”

  “One of the doctors.” Malika pressed her thin lips together. “I shouldn’t be telling you this. Everything’s been very hush-hush since last night.”

  Ulysses’ fingers itched. He wanted to grab his notepad, jot down every word in case he mistranslated them later. While he spoke it well enough to make his way through the country largely undetected, French wasn’t his mother tongue. He’d missed nuances before.

  “Okay… Do you know who they were? These men who came to take the body, could they have been undertakers? Or family?” he asked, stabbing in the dark.

  “Not unless the guy had five brothers built like Rambo.” Malika knuckled absently at the gleaming stud in her nose. “We need authorization from the police before we can release a body to the family. Sometimes, if there’s any hint of foul play…”

  As there is in this case?

  “And you haven’t received one.”

  Malika shook her head. “Gets weirder, though.” She glanced around the empty parking lot as though to check that no one was listening and curled her lower lip between her teeth. The perfect oval of her face elongated when she sucked her cheeks in. No matter how round and baby-soft her features and how often her scratchy voice cracked, there was a hardness to her, a no-nonsense attitude that Ulysses had appreciated when her cousin had first put them in touch.

  Yet unlike the cousin from Marseille, Malika was slightly more attuned to the dangers of collaborating with the press.

  Ulysses knew he should have found her wariness reassuring—he didn’t trust the cowboy-anarchist types and the ink on her neck was hard to miss—but he was weary of chasing false leads. His patience had just about run dry. “What?” he snapped, pushing his glasses up his nose. “What else is there? Aliens? The Illuminati?”

  “This morning, we have no record of a Monsieur X.”

  “He’s a…” Ulysses waved a hand. He couldn’t think of the French word. “A John Doe? You misidentified the remains?”

  “No. It’s as if we never registered the body, never entered it into the system…”

  His jaw slackened. “But that’s not possible.” Foreign nationals who died on French soil couldn’t simply be misplaced. “Must be a glitch. Mister X didn’t just get up and walk off the slab.”

  It was to no avail, Malika was already looking away. Like all astute m
ercenaries, she knew their collaboration had come to a close. “Is there someone else I can talk to?” Ulysses pressed. “Losing a body strikes me as a pretty big deal.”

  “And if your little magazine wants to print it, be my guest. But you’re not using my name,” Malika said, gesturing with her unlit cigarette. “Are we clear?”

  Ulysses drew himself up a little straighter. He was going to let the mocking comment about his magazine slide. He was going to be an adult about this, no matter how it wounded him to hear a labor of love dismissed as a vanity project. “I won’t mention you if you tell me who else I can speak to about this… Maybe the pathologist who performed the autopsy?”

  Malika narrowed her eyes. For a beat, Ulysses thought she might refuse. He had lost sources to fear before, but this wasn’t the Balkans in ’93. This was France and Paris was just a couple of hours away by car.

  Stories like this weren’t supposed to happen here.

  “I can give you a name,” Malika said after brief deliberation. “But it will cost you.”

  * * * *

  Two hours later and eighty euros lighter—a figure agreed upon after a little negotiation—Ulysses shoved through the glass doors of the Hôpital Saint-Damien of Gatinau with a splinter of annoyance stuck deep in his belly. He’d heard of locals closing ranks before and employees being cautioned against rocking the boat, but getting threatened with legal action if he didn’t cease and desist was new.

  The last time it had happened, he’d been researching the Ernust scandal back home.

  And look how well that turned out.

  A fine, misting rain had settled over the town since he’d ventured into the morgue, bringing with it the salt-and-brine perfume of the Channel.

  Ulysses pulled up the collar of his trench coat and hurried across the deserted parking lot.

  Unsurprisingly, he had forgotten his umbrella back at the hotel. His shoes slapped through one puddle after another, splashing the cuffs of his trousers with runoff. He wanted nothing more than to drive back to the bed and breakfast, and burrow under the covers until he worked up the nerve to call London.

  Claudia would be thrilled to hear that he’d come to his senses, that he was finally throwing in the towel. She would press him to come home.

  The stoplights of a lone, olive-green Ford Focus blinked on and off as Ulysses unlocked the car. It was a vile little thing. Manual transmission, teal leather seats and a radio that only functioned intermittently. The interior harbored the ghost of stale cigarette smoke and, oddly enough, a grandmotherly hint of lavender. Still, it was dry and it was his, for however long he remained in Normandy.

  Ulysses raked a hand through his hair. The rain had done a number on it. Wispy blond strands stood on end, greasy like some hair gel commercial. He made a brief attempt to comb them into order, squinting into the rear view mirror as he did so.

  I’m getting too old for this shit.

  The dark circles under his eyes had yet to fade after a night spent poring through patchy evidence. A persistent twinge had sunk talons into his lower back, making him yearn for the massage parlors back home.

  He could have been there right now, getting worked over by some twink with lush lips and soft hands. Professional integrity—what little he had left of it—was a terrible thing.

  The engine rumbled to life when he slid the key into the ignition. Despite its many flaws, the rental car had been reliable so far. It got him from point A to point B even as the chassis vibrated worryingly and the exhaust sputtered with the occasional cloud of billowing dark smoke. If only it could help him make sense of the story, it would have been the perfect machine.

  Ulysses reached for the folded map on the passenger seat as he slowly eased out of the parking lot. In London, multitasking behind the wheel could make all the difference between getting home safely and a lifetime of physical therapy, but out here, on the back roads of northern France, in the rain, he might as well have been the only motorist in the world.

  The road back to the hotel was simple to retrace. Take a right at the church, avoid the market square, struggle through narrow cobblestoned roads, and Villa Brigitte should be easy to spot between the tight press of turn-of-the-century townhouses. Ulysses swerved left, deviating toward the seaside.

  Rain pelted the windshield as he let the car settle onto the potholed tarmac. It was a good idea. It was his only idea, short of embracing defeat. You can’t investigate a murder if you don’t even have a body, he imagined Claudia sighing. Come home.

  How could he, when that man’s unmoving, ashen face was printed onto his retinas?

  Ulysses flexed his hands around the steering wheel and lowered his foot to the accelerator. The Ford zoomed down the barren road, spraying rainwater as it sped along the washed out landscape. Somewhere between Gatinau and the coast, the radio crackled to life with the dull whisper of French rock. It wasn’t a band Ulysses recognized, but he turned up the volume anyway.

  Anything would do, even white noise. Five victims and he still had no leads. He couldn’t get a single quote. Claudia was quite rightly adamant that they wouldn’t go to print until Ulysses had solid evidence. Ulysses was adamant that he wouldn’t abandon the story.

  The era of Cold War assassinations was over.

  The Economist told him so. Apparently Europe needed Russia and vice-versa. So why were British and American spies winding up dead all over the continent?

  If that’s even the link between them. MI6 had been justifiably reluctant to answer any requests for comment. He’d expected nothing less, though he was somewhat surprised they hadn’t paired their refusals with the threat of prosecution.

  Perhaps they thought he didn’t have anything, so they didn’t trouble themselves.

  They weren’t wrong.

  Ulysses passed the Criel-sur-Mer sign so fast he barely noticed the rust-bitten metal, let alone the graffiti etched onto it. Probably best to ease off the gas, he reasoned. Criel-sur-Mer had been his first stop last night, but the only decent hotel around was completely booked on account of a wedding party. He’d been wary of trying the hostel. He had only just bought his current laptop.

  Like most resort towns in the off-season period, Criel-sur-Mer was a place built with the expectation of visitors. Shadowed shop windows advertised beach towels and swimming gear, a plethora of sunscreen and post-exposure creams to guarantee a consequence-free tan. Beachside eateries brandished Closed signs through lowered blinds.

  All but the local pub seemed intent on repelling potential customers.

  Ulysses jerked the Ford onto the curb and cut the engine. Having pored over maps on the flight from Rome, he felt like more or less knew the basic layout of the town. The sandstone cliffs echoed with the crash of waves. Decrepit, tightly packed houses rubbed shoulders with newer builds, square edges misaligned. The gray band of the Channel put a damper on his enthusiasm.

  So much for unearthing the secret of what happened here, and why.

  He shivered under his trench coat. The Ford’s heater worked, if blowing out eddies of tepid, cigarette-tinged air counted. Ulysses couldn’t bring himself to turn up the dial. He thought about the boardwalk and the circuitous path to the theater, where John Doe—or Monsieur X, as Malika had called him—may or may not have been murdered.

  The initial autopsy report left little doubt on that score, but that report was now gone, vanished along with Mister X himself. Just like the others.

  A harsh wind rattled the car, making Ulysses’ mind up for him.

  He slammed the car door shut in his wake and locked the Ford without a second glance. It was the kind of night that called for a stiff drink or two.

  Minding his steps, he negotiated the puddles that pocked the sidewalk up to the pub door with a mincing gait. It did nothing to stop him from becoming thoroughly drenched, nor wrinkling his nose when he pushed past the pub door into a cloud of stale liquor and cheap cigarettes.

  That kind of day, that kind of trip.

  Ulysses shrugged
out of his trench coat and made a beeline for the bar. There was nothing he could do about tracking rainwater into the pub.

  “Beer,” he told the bartender. “Whatever you have on tap.”

  Much to his consternation, something of the request was lost in translation. Moments later, beer bottle in hand, he found the table farthest from the door and dropped into a chair, too weary to fuss.

  “Rough day?” a voice asked from the bar.

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  About the Author

  Helena Maeve has always been globe trotter with a fondness for adventure, but only recently has she started putting to paper the many stories she’s collected in her excursions. When she isn’t writing erotic romance novels, she can usually be found in an airport or on a plane, furiously penning in her trusty little notebook.

  Email: helenamaeve@outlook.com

  Helena loves to hear from readers. You can find her contact information, website and author biography at http://www.pride-publishing.com.

  Also by Helena Maeve

  Courting Treason

  Misfit Hearts

  Flight Made Easy

  In the Presence of Mine Enemy

  Fault Lines

  Seat Sixty-Five

  Shadow Play: Best Kept Lies

  Shadow Play: Price of Freedom