Conviction

by Denise Mina

  She snorted not once, but twice, and whispered, ‘You don’t know these people.’

  ‘Gretchen Teigler?’

  She looked at us, one to the other, and smirked. ‘She’ll kill you.’

  ‘She has tried.’

  That got her attention. I softened my hold on her foot.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Just now on a train. Two assassins. And before.’ I lifted up my fringe to show my scar and she looked confused.

  ‘Elle est Sophie Bukaran,’ said the woman behind the counter.

  Sabine knew the name. She nodded at me, impressed. ‘You do know her then?’

  ‘I do.’

  Fin blurted suddenly, ‘How could you afford to open a bakery?’

  Sabine blinked.

  ‘I know you didn’t have the money before Amila’s conviction but suddenly you do. How did that happen?’

  ‘Are you accusing me of something?’

  Fin was too tired to couch it. ‘I am, yeah. I wonder how it is that you’ve suddenly got money and Amila decides not to appeal against her conviction.’

  Sabine laughed bitterly, staring into the street beyond us, standing very still. She snapped back and looked at us. ‘Come in,’ she ordered. ‘Come in here.’

  She turned away, looked at my foot and I released her. She walked back through the space in the counter and waited at the side for us to follow her through to the kitchen.

  It was spotless, full of new stainless-steel appliances and worktops. The sound quality would be tinny and awful. Too many hard surfaces. She waited until we were standing with her and then she said, ‘I was paid by Gretchen Teigler, in cash by her secretary. She came here with the money in a bag and told me that Amila should serve her sentence and not appeal and I could have all that money. She opened the bag to show me it. It was a lot. She didn’t know it was already too late. We were dealing with bigger things than her appeal.’

  ‘You took the money?’

  ‘I did. It made no difference. It was already too late for Amila. She’s dying but at least now, when the courts decide she’s nearly dead and release her, I can afford good palliative care. So I took the money, signed a non-disclosure and opened this bakery. She wanted this. We both wanted this. So now I visit Amila once a month and I send her photographs of the bread every day, so that she can see the morning’s work. When I visit her, if it’s one of the days when she can talk, we talk about the bread, about the bakery and the cakes.’

  ‘If she can talk?’

  Sabine hung her head. She braced herself and her voice became a whisper. ‘Amila’s headaches, the reason she left the Dana in Saint-Martin, were caused by a brain tumour. She is dying. They have operated twice but it keeps growing back. An appeal will take years. She wouldn’t live long enough to go to court. If she was free she could have had better treatment, she could have travelled for the operation, it might have gone better. But she isn’t. She’s in prison and this–’ Sabine motioned to kitchen–‘this is what she wants me to do. So you–’ she prodded me in the chest–‘you tell people. Tell them I took blood money from that bitch and let her think I betrayed Amila, that her money was enough for me to do that. I let everyone think that. I don’t care what you think of me because I have one thing to do for my Amila. I get up at three thirty every morning and make beautiful bread, and I make it with love, for Amila. I take a photo of the bread every day and I print it and, before we open the doors to our customers, I put that picture in an envelope and I post it to Amila because she can’t read any more. But she can see pictures. And every morning I stand at the postbox. And every morning I kiss her envelope and I whisper her name. My Amila is worth ten of Gretchen Teigler and my Amila is dying and I am dying too. Now get out of our shop and don’t you fucking come back here.’

  We did.

  Outside Fin took the phone out of his pocket, pulled the mic out and put it into its little bag and drew the string. He put it in his pocket.

  ‘I don’t know if we should use that recording,’ he said.

  I think we both felt very humbled. ‘Yeah. Best scrub that. We can tell it ourselves.’

  We walked for a bit. I thought about Sabine, how she was prepared to have people believe her low, the constancy of her love. She could have been lying, but I didn’t think she was.

  Teigler wielded her power so ruthlessly. She had warped all of our lives. She might have spies here, she might know we’d been to see Sabine. We could have put her in terrible danger just by talking to her, like Julia.

  Out of nowhere I said, ‘I can’t fucking stand this any more. I’m going to Paris to confront Gretchen Teigler face-to-face.’

  ‘But Demy’s in Paris,’ said Fin.

  ‘I’m expecting Demy to be there.’

  We walked on. I expected Fin to say he’d stay or go to his friend’s in Clermont-Ferrand. He stopped and nodded and said, ‘OK. I’m coming too.’

  On the Paris train I sent a text to Dauphine Loire.

  ‘I’ll be at the Neuilly villa tomorrow. Tell Gretchen I’ll only talk to her.’

  She didn’t reply.

  46

  WE GOT DRUNK AGAIN, on a train again, but this was more melancholy because Demy wasn’t there to tell stories. We were scared and being drunk helped.

  We were still quite drunk when we got to Paris.

  I don’t honestly know how we ended up in a hotel as expensive as that. I don’t know if we took a taxi or what happened. It seems too far to have walked from the station. But maybe we did. I just don’t know. There are gaps.

  But we got there and we saw it was a hotel because a big sign outside said ‘HOTEL’ and so we went in.

  We were drunk, we were exhausted and dishevelled. We staggered over to the reception desk. No one asked us to leave. I have a vague memory of a smirking beautiful woman explaining the breakfast times to Fin as he rocked softly on his heels next to me.

  She told us all she had was a suite. I thought maybe she had confused us with some important dishevelled drunks but she took our passports, photocopied them and gave them back. She called Fin by his proper name, welcomed him, and we were escorted up in the lift by a man. I think it was a man.

  The suite had a living room with a very big television and sofas with a lot of cushions. The dominant colour was beige. Off the living room was a dining room and then a door led into a bedroom with a gigantic and inviting bed, a headboard of grey silk, crisp white linen sheets and too many pillows.

  Fin tried to tip the man who had brought us here but he refused to take the money.

  ‘I loved it,’ he said, apropos of nothing.

  ‘Wha’?’ Fin tried to tip him again.

  ‘The train podcast. Demy. Brilliant. Thank you.’ And he walked out and shut the door.

  We slept for ten hours. I can’t make that interesting. Of note was the fact that we were in separate beds, I on the couch, Fin on the bed. I had a bath at one point. Later he had a bath. It’s quite boring to hear about but the experience was glorious. It was lovely to be clean.

  During the night a number of things happened without us.

  The podcast went stratospheric. Most of it was Demy telling the story of Yergey and a lot of Fin and Zviad giggling. I’ve heard that episode since and I admit that it is compelling.

  Also: Zviad’s body was found in the toilet. He had been strangled. Zviad was thirty-one and had a wife and a seven-year-old son in Durres. The CCTV from the train was viewed and Demy was found and traced to Pigalle a few hours later. He was arrested and charged with Zviad’s murder. He was not charged with Julia’s murder. His real name was Yergey.

  This was all unknown to us as we woke up the next morning, late, about ten, and ordered breakfast in our room. A trolley arrived with coffee and fresh croissants and jam, muesli and almond milk. We opened the windows in the dining room and ate with our feet on the table, looking out of the window at the Paris rooftops. If we stood on a chair and bent sideways we could see the Eiffel Tower. We both felt hung-over, b
ut calm, until our predicament sank in.

  I was nervous. Fin could see that. ‘What are you going to say?’

  ‘I’m going to tell Gretchen what happened to Leon.’

  ‘Don’t you think she knows already?’

  ‘I have to believe she doesn’t.’

  I looked at him. He was eating cereal with almond milk. The bowl was small but it was his second portion. I could tell that he was enjoying it. I smiled.

  ‘Are you smiling because I’m eating?

  ‘No, I’m smiling because I care. It’s that addict vortex, isn’t it? Everyone around gets sucked in. Two weeks from now I’d be crying and banging on the bathroom door and begging you to eat a cracker.’

  He laughed at that, covering his mouth to keep the cereal from going everywhere.

  He finished his food. He picked up his phone and started to scroll. ‘Fucking hell. This is out of control.’

  He showed me the numbers. They were ludicrous, in the hundreds of thousands. This had to be the peak of it and there would never be a better time to expose Teigler.

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ said Fin.

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  ‘Yes, I am. I’m coming.’

  I didn’t think Fin should come with me. It could go very wrong. The plan was thin and had three different factors that could easy fail. We argued for a bit but he wasn’t even open to a discussion about it. ‘I’m coming,’ was all he would say. He didn’t need to. I thought of Julia lying on the floor, eyes fixed on the ceiling.

  ‘It might not work, Fin. I’m walking into a very dangerous situation. There’s no real reason for you to come. If I’m there alone and they kill me it’ll be over, you’ll be clear.’

  ‘I’m coming,’ he said, ‘I won’t let them hurt you.’

  ‘What are you going to do? Faint at her?’

  ‘I saved you in Skibo. I’m coming with you,’ and he got up and locked himself in the bathroom.

  That was fair. He had saved me. All I had left to do was talk to my girls. I called Hamish and we had a curt, in-front-of-the-kids conversation.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Very well, Anna, how are you today?’

  ‘Did the move go OK?’

  ‘Actually better than could be expected. We got an upgrade so it was worth doing.’

  ‘Oh, I’m in mortal danger but you save a buck. Well done.’

  ‘Yes, tens of euros so, in the end, it’s all been worthwhile.’ As I said, he can be quite dry.

  We both instinctively knew not to say where they were, just in case. But Hamish mentioned the journey and a flight and I assumed they were far away from Porto.

  I could hear the kids watching TV in the background. He put them on to talk to me.

  It was all the usual stuff. You don’t need to hear that. We were pretending things were OK so it was all pretty banal, even while it meant the world to me. I kept telling them I loved them and how happy I was that they were having a good time. Jess was talkative. I think she was trying to reassure me that I was still number one. She didn’t want to mention Estelle or say anything positive about her to me. I didn’t want their future to be all about me vs Estelle. I didn’t want that for them.

  I asked Jess to put Estelle on. She asked if I was sure. I said, yes, of course, we’re friends. I was friends with Estelle before Daddy even met her, you remember?

  She gave the phone to Estelle.

  ‘Estelle?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You know the situation?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If anything happens I want the girls to remember us being friends. Can you cheer it up a bit?’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course! Of course, Anna, don’t worry about a thing.’

  Estelle has the same weaknesses as me. Maybe that’s why we liked each other. She said, ‘The girls have made holiday diaries to show you, so you know what happened each day. They’ll talk you through them when they get back.’ There is no word for the realisation that a step-parent cares for your children almost as much as you do, it’s a very strong feeling, a great, hot soup of gratitude and relief and love.

  ‘I didn’t hit him, Estelle. I want you to know that. And it was over between us. He’s not lying about that. We were struggling.’

  ‘OK then!’ She said it for the audience, not for me. ‘So, where is Fin?’

  Fin was still in the bathroom. He’d been running the water in the sink for a suspiciously long time.

  ‘Fin is pretending to wash his hands in the sink but I think he’s actually throwing up his cereal.’

  She snorted at that and I laughed along with her. The bathroom door opened and out came Fin.

  ‘Can I speak to him?’

  I caught Fin’s eye. ‘I don’t know if he wants to speak to you, to be honest, Estelle…’

  But he did. He reached forward and took the phone and went into another room. He whispered to her. I don’t know what they said. When he came back he had hung up and his eyes were red.

  ‘What did you say to her?’

  ‘Goodbye.’ He looked at me. ‘It’s hard to be alive sometimes. Don’t you find it hard?’

  I was worried he meant he didn’t care if we were murdered today. ‘I do, until my life is threatened and then I’d fight the world.’

  He smiled. ‘Fuck it, let’s go to Gretchen’s house.’

  ‘Fin, you are planning to come back out of there, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ But he didn’t sound unconvinced. I felt he was planning to do something heroic.

  ‘Stick to the plan.’

  ‘I will.’

  I knew he was depressed and reckless, I knew he was losing weight and I should have left him in the hotel. I let him come with me because I was afraid to go in alone. I’m a coward and a bad friend.

  We went downstairs.

  We did not belong in that hotel. The other guests wore dress-down cashmere sweaters and couture frocks. As we crossed the lobby to the front door I saw, on a tiny plaque on the wall behind reception, the room tariff. Our suite was six grand a night. It almost made me hope we didn’t come back. We’d be washing dishes for a century.

  47

  THE TEIGLER VILLA WAS set back from the street, obscured by a row of trees and an eight-foot-high wall with broken glass twinkling on top. Cameras were perched on high poles at either end. The gate was grey metal, tall and barred, with matching sheet metal behind it blocking the view of the house.

  Fin took his phone out, put the mic in and turned on the recorder. ‘We are at the gate of the villa,’ he said solemnly. ‘We’re going in to meet Gretchen Teigler. It’s a pretty serious gate, three big bolt locks, cameras everywhere.’

  He nodded me to the button. I took a deep breath, raised my hand and pressed the bell. We heard nothing.

  The intercom was a grey metal box with a speaker on it and a small glass eye. We had to assume we were being watched. Fin nodded me to it and I raised a hand to press again just as the heavy lock on the gate snapped open. Fin pushed it with his shoulder and we slipped into the grounds.

  From a drab Parisian street we found ourselves in another world. Combed white gravel chips framed twin square lawns on either side of a path leading up to curved steps to the door. The building was a nineteenth-century villa, two storeys and modest in scale, pale yellow with stucco plaster leaves painted green running diagonally across the facade. They were lush and bushy at the bottom, trailing to sparse and detailed at the top. It was quite lovely.

  The lock on the gate snapped shut behind us. We were trapped.

  We looked at each other. I hoped I didn’t look as scared as he did. Fin took a step forward on the gravel and we discovered that it was not just ornamental. Every movement of our feet echoed around the yard, the sound amplified by the sheet metal gate.

  We waited.

  I don’t know what we were expecting, dogs or snipers, but nothing happened.

  Fin’s voice was very low as he muttered into his phone mic, ‘We are tr
apped in here. The gate is locked behind us and we’re approaching the front of the house now.’

  We crunched up to the stairs, our steps ridiculously loud in the vacuum of sound. We stopped at the bottom. Nothing happened. We walked up the steps to the front door.

  ‘We are at the door,’ whispered Fin.

  I knocked. We could hear steps approaching inside and the front door opened. A Filipino maid in her sixties, wearing a black uniform under a white starched pinny, invited us in without looking at our faces.

  We stepped into the hallway.

  From the outside it looked like a grand nineteenth-century villa but inside it was pure San Diego, as if the inside had been scooped out and remodelled as an ugly Californian hotel from 1987.

  The hallway was shallow and wide, three small rooms knocked into one, black-and-white-tiled floor and very little furniture. A white marble statue of a headless naked woman stood between two sets of double doors. There were no seats.

  The Filipino lady shut the front door behind us, bolting it top and bottom. She turned back and pointed at the phone in Fin’s hand.

  ‘Non.’

  She watched him take the mic out and put it in the drawstring bag. She watched him turn off the voice recorder and ceremoniously put the phone away in the top pocket of his suit jacket.

  ‘Is it recording?’ she asked in unexpected English.

  ‘No,’ said Fin, patting his pocket.

  She looked at the centimetre peeking out of his pocket, unsure whether to believe him.

  Fin told her the microphone fitting was at the bottom, in the mouth piece. ‘It can’t pick up sound as long as it’s in my pocket. That’s why I have this.’ He showed her the detachable mic and dropped his phone back into his breast pocket.

  She looked, reassured herself that it was pointing the wrong way, and then turned and walked away through a side door.

  We waited. The renovations must have included soundproofing because we heard nothing, no muffled steps or radio burbles, no sounds of car engines from the street or jets overhead. It was quite disconcerting.

  Fin leaned his back against the wall for a moment. He was very pale.

  Suddenly one set of the double doors in front of us opened.