The next morning they sat in the dining room and had croissants, coffee and fruit. It was just as she’d imagined. There were strangers at the other tables, sunshine coming in through the windows, and the young girl helping was friendly, with a clean white apron. The tiny dog wandered about between the tables looking for crumbs and at the reception desk a couple with a baby were checking in. The baby, ignored in a car seat at their feet, gazed with myopic wonder at the chair leg and her mother’s jeans.
‘Let’s go and look at the town,’ said Dan.
They locked their room, and walked beneath the medieval arch into the centre. They took leaflets from the display in the hotel, then forgot them in the first cafe they went to. Bea had an ice cream. They shared it on a bench in the courtyard of the Hospice de Beaune. It was a suntrap. The ice cream melted down her hand while they looked at the multicoloured patterns in the tiles of the roof. They both licked ice cream from her fingers and wrists and Dan dabbed at her with a paper napkin, squashed into a tiny ball.
‘Messy girl,’ he said.
Detective Dufour rang to update them. The permission to seize the money would come through from the juge very shortly. Once the paperwork was in order they would collect it as soon as possible.
‘We’ll see you at Paligny at four o’clock,’ he said.
Bea thanked him and hung up. ‘We’re meeting Dufour at four,’ she told Dan.
‘He’s the knob,’ said Dan.
‘The racist knob?’ said Bea. ‘The other one was a knob, too.’
‘The hairy one?’
‘He perved on me.’
‘Cops the world over,’ said Dan. ‘Pervy racist knobs.’
‘Look at us, police interview veterans. We’re so street.’
They walked to the Basilique Notre-Dame de Beaune.
‘I’ve seen better,’ said Dan. ‘But not in real life.’
There was nobody there but them. It was very quiet, and they felt quieter too, now they were inside. They let their eyes rest on the arches and carvings, and looked at the stories in the stained glass without trying to decipher them.
Bea went to an altar by a side table, and Dan walked around the perimeter. She put a two-euro coin in the box, and lit a candle for Alex. Pain shouldn’t define his life and death. It wasn’t fair it would be his memorial. Murder. And a garden full of people thinking about his trust fund. She stared into the small flame until it seemed almost solid, and was the only thing she could see. He wasn’t marked for a violent end. And he had been a baby once.
She closed her eyes and determinedly tried to build a good, real picture of him, but the bad things crowded it out. The smashed car, imagined blood, her mother touching him. Bea opposed them carefully. His wit, her memory answered, cleverness. But the good things were feeble. Addiction, her grief fought back, loneliness. She kept her eyes closed, and kept her focus on bringing him to mind. She forgot the fight. A sense of him came to her. She felt the intangible sweetness, unworldly and untouched, that was his soul. The rest was just covering. She didn’t open her eyes until there was only that, like sunlight, filling her head, nothing else.
Dan finished walking around the church and came back to her side. He had become used to seeing her battling, and pinkness creeping up her neck, as she fought with herself. He had grown accustomed to a sharp look in her, switching languages, managing grief, managing him. Now, as she opened her eyes, she smiled.
‘Better?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Come see this –’
He led her round the church.
‘Dan, I’ve been thinking,’ said Bea. ‘I’ve been doing this all wrong.’
‘All what?’
‘My life. Money.’
‘How?’
‘I’ve been running away.’
‘From what?’
‘That money at Paligny is nothing.’
‘Bea, it isn’t nothing.’
‘To people like my father it’s nothing. The big money is just beamed around the world, like light. It’s only us normal people paying our taxes and wondering why there aren’t any hospital beds.’
‘Yeah, I know –’
‘Except I’m not normal, Dan. I am people like him, I have that money. Real money. You know how you said, when my father dies, I’ll have millions.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No, you’re right.’
‘He won’t be feeling so generous now, will he?’
‘He’ll be angry. He might get investigated. He won’t be ruined. He won’t cut me out of his will.’
It was strange to be talking like that in church, but it didn’t feel wrong. It wasn’t she who was greedy. She hadn’t done anything bad.
‘Anyway, I’m not sure he can break my trust. The money is mine, he’s always said so.’
‘And?’
‘I want to act like it’s mine. I want to do good with it.’
‘What do you mean?’
Two people came into the church behind them. She took a step closer, to whisper.
‘I want to keep doing my job, obviously. I love it. But I’ve realised. I can help.’
‘Charity?’
‘I don’t know yet. But it’s not a curse. It’s a privilege.’
He looked into her eyes. ‘That’s what I keep telling you.’
They walked outside, and back towards the town and car.
‘Have you got the ticket thing?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘D’you want anything else, before we go?’
‘No.’
He took her face in his hands and kissed her, gently, on the mouth. The kiss was short, and very light, but behind it there was hunger. She felt precious beneath his hands, as if she were made of pure gold. She pulled away.
‘We’ll be late,’ she said.
There was no police car outside the hotel when they got to Paligny at ten to four. They sat down on the steps to wait.
‘Remember when Alex wasn’t in, when we got here?’ said Bea.
‘Can’t believe it was two weeks ago.’
‘Two weeks exactly.’
‘Where’s Dufour?’ said Dan, swinging the car keys on his finger and looking at the empty gates.
‘I hope he’s not going to be Dufive.’
It was hot and birds were singing.
‘Even if Russ Bannam was a friend of Alex’s, he was still weird,’ said Dan. ‘Where did he get that car?’
‘Alex had a lot of rich friends.’
‘He didn’t look rich. I didn’t believe a word that came out of his mouth, did you?’
‘No.’
They heard an engine, but the car passed by quickly, in a flash of yellow.
‘Shall we leave tomorrow?’ said Dan. ‘If they’ll let us.’
‘Spain?’
‘Yeah.’
She looked at the empty driveway and the tall trees above them. She wanted structure. She wanted work, and to face the reality of herself, and the two of them.
‘Or we could just go home,’ she said.
‘Home? D’you want to?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what we should do,’ she said. ‘I don’t get any of it. I wish none of it had ever happened. I wish Alex was alive. I wish we could go back to how we were.’
‘Except how we were before wasn’t real,’ said Dan.
‘I know you think that. But it was real to me.’
‘It wasn’t honest.’
‘Do you think I haven’t been honest with you?’
‘You didn’t tell me the whole truth.’
‘There isn’t a whole truth.’
He looked away. ‘OK,’ he said.
‘I’m going up to Alex’s room for a minute,’ she said.
‘Do you want me to come with you?’
‘No. I want to be on my own.’
She let herself into the hotel and closed the door behind her.
The vines over the door at the back had grown over the glass. She looked at the keys hanging silently on the varnished board. Hubris. Greed. Lust. Envy. Gluttony. Wrath. Sloth. She went up the stairs. The door to Alex’s bedroom was ajar. She looked all around, at the bed, and shelves, the wardrobe, and his guitar still leaning against the wall. She thrummed the strings, just to hear them in the quiet. It was easy this time. She went straight to the desk and picked up the Simone Weil anthology.
‘I’ll take this, if that’s OK,’ she said to the room.
She opened it, anywhere, flicking through pages. Circled and underlined, she read:
‘If someone does me injury I must desire that this injury shall not degrade me. I must desire this out of love for him who inflicts it, in order that he may not really have done evil.’
Alex had circled it three times, in different pens. He had added ‘S’ onto ‘he’, and ‘her’, diagonally, over ‘him’. In the margin he had written, vertically –
‘I must desire this injury shall not degrade me. I must desire this out of love for her, in order that she may not really have done evil.’
Green ink, blue and black. Like all his different imaginary hotel visitors, as if each of them were himself, returning, in a different skin. His life had been an extended struggle to absolve his mother. He hadn’t managed anything else, only that good fight. He had conceived of forgiving his abuser. It was cruel it was always left to the victims to be the bigger person, the better person, and no real punishment for the ones who hurt them, who carried on unchanged and unpunished. His pain was nothing to his mother, she made it her pain. She took everything from him, even his death. And he had forgiven her. To love the person who had broken you. That was brave. Then she thought Alex couldn’t help but love Liv. Maybe he had tried, but couldn’t, because she was his mother.
She could not find it in herself to forgive, but Alex had. She, who prided herself on her truth and honesty, had kept her truths and hatred secret. She took the letter from her pocket. She did not intend to send it to Liv, to whom everything was fuel. But she should tell Dan. He had to know. She was frightened he wouldn’t love her, if he knew the sickness she lived with, but she was a coward. He should know. The latch on the sash window stuck, and she bruised her thumb, pushing at it, but at last it gave. She dropped the folded letter, holding it out, so it wouldn’t get caught in the vines. Then she took the snakeskin, gently, from the wall.
Outside, Dan checked his phone; five past four. He got up and stretched, and walked down the driveway towards the gate, slowly, vaguely, waiting, as his mind wandered. The sun was very hot, the day was still. Bea didn’t trust him. He didn’t think just going home would solve it. It would be better to be separate from everything they knew. The two of them, away from family, and grief, just themselves, in emptiness. She wasn’t like herself. There was need in her now, and fear. She hadn’t been like that before. He had done it to her, as much as Alex dying.
The afternoon was at peace. The trees lived. He was beginning to grow accustomed to the many greens and blues and browns. The sounds and silences of it were only as oppressive or as restful as he felt looking at them. It wasn’t a good place or a bad place, it was just a place. He thought of home. He pictured their little flat in Holloway; the sofa, and each of the four mismatched wooden chairs at the pine table. In his mind’s eye, he saw their bedroom, and the laundry basket, spilling clothes; their bed as they left it every morning, with the imprints of the way they had slept, like a map of their night together. He felt a longing for the grey city comfort of the lives they had run away from. They had being doing all right. They didn’t need to travel for months. They could go home if she wanted. The Cushion was plenty for two or three weeks, and some left over, while he found himself a job. She didn’t want to call Arun, and get involved with bank transfers and sums, and nor did he. They weren’t lost. They just needed a holiday. Holiday. The word had felt so conventional and so restrictive. Now it sang with pleasure and fun. He stopped going towards the gate and the empty road. His body felt light and easy. It was a perfect idea. He had to tell Bea. They could work on everything else. It was simpler than they thought. He wondered if she really meant it, about using all her money for good. He couldn’t tell if it would be too big a change for her. He didn’t want her to be changed. He began to turn back towards to the hotel. Then he heard a car, and paused. He checked his phone. Almost quarter past four.
The sound of the car got louder, and then it came through the gates towards him. For a second he stared at it, thinking slowly that maybe he had it wrong, and it wasn’t the same bright blue BMW, but it got closer, and he saw Russ behind the wheel, and he knew that Russ had seen him.
‘BEA!’ he shouted, over his shoulder.
He started for the hotel. He couldn’t see her at the window. He didn’t know if she’d heard. The car was crawling behind him, slowly, and he turned to face it. He didn’t want to shout for her again, or look like he was panicking. He reached for his phone. Russ was looking through the windscreen at him. But then he stopped, and reversed, slowly, out again, and went. Dan couldn’t see the car. He hesitated, undecided, and looked behind, towards the first-floor window, then back again, to the empty gateway.
He walked towards the gate. As he walked, he rang Bea, but it cut off. Two beeps, and off. He dialled again. He reached the road. There were bushes and nettles at eye level, swelling from the hedge, and he couldn’t see around them. He took a tentative step, trying to look. Dufour would come from that direction. He kept expecting to see the police car. He thought he heard it. They were on their way. He looked round the bulge of green, and saw one headlight and a corner of gleaming blue. He straightened up and squared his shoulders. He made his walk purposeful and aggressive, and stepped out. The BMW was tucked in on the other side of the recycling bins.
‘Hey! What are you doing here?’ he said.
The car was empty. There was a slowing of every moving thing around him, and every detail came into focus. It felt like a very long time; the moment between seeing the car had nobody inside, and hearing the sound behind him. In the slowness, he saw the brightness of the day, amplified and sharp. The sunlight throbbed. He felt the warm air on his skin, and wished with every part of himself that he could go back. He wanted not to have walked out of the gate, and not to have looked for the car. He should have gone back. He needed to warn Bea. He was afraid. The moment ended. He glimpsed movement in the corner of his eye and sensed the rush of air behind him, and in a hair’s breadth of that broken second, felt dreadful sadness.
Her phone rang. It was Dufour. She turned and paced the room as they talked. He said he was on his way, and apologised. She thought she heard Dan call her name, and picked up the book and snakeskin. Dufour was telling her he’d have at least one other man with him. He was talking about the paperwork for the money, and saying they had passed Russ Bannam’s description to the Police Nationale. The line beeped over his voice.
‘What did you say?’ she asked Dufour.
She finished the call, put the phone on the ledge, and looked down from the window. She couldn’t see Dan, just the empty driveway, and the Golf, parked below. She leaned out. She saw the folded letter, on the ground. Her phone rang again, jumping on the painted sill. It fell, and lay crooked on the floor. Griff. She picked it up – rejected the call and saw she’d missed Dan.
She went down to the hall, holding Alex’s book, and letting the snakeskin flutter, looking at it. The front door was open a few inches. Dan wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the car. The letter lay on the gravel. She looked out, down the drive.
‘Dan?’
She stood on the steps in the sun, wondering where he could be, then went back inside. She heard a car start up, out on the road, but when she turned, saw nothing.
‘Dan!’
She left the door open and the book and snakeskin on the desk, and went through to look out into the garden. She rang him. She couldn’t hear ringing. She should have been able to hear it, if he was nearby. She tried again, holding her phone against her leg, to muffle it, but there was only silence. The sun was beating into the dining room through the closed window. There were dead flies on the floor.
‘Dan?’ she said to his voicemail. ‘Where are you?’
She reached up to struggle with the stiff bolts on the garden door, bending, with her back to the room, not knowing why she felt such urgency. The door opened, and she went out into the garden and called again, her voice strange in the quiet.
The garden lay in the heavy heat, the birds were resting or had gone. The chestnut garden furniture looked sticky in the sun. Bea felt the silence thicken around her, and, in the silence, danger. It pressed and quivered. She looked behind her.
‘Dan!’ she called, but quietly.
She sensed somebody who wasn’t Dan had heard. She went back into the house. Russ was standing in the hall. The front door was wide open. He had a grey T-shirt with a big shape on the front, like a dark sun. He was carrying a tyre iron. It was long, and had a blue curved handle. He looked taller.
‘Hey,’ he said, smiling, as if they were friends. ‘Car broke down.’
They stood looking at one another. He waited for her to speak. The only difference from the night before was a certain hurry in him, a slight sweat. He was just a little out of breath.
‘Really?’ she said, her own voice distant in her ear. ‘Where’s Dan?’
‘Could I use your phone?’
Her eyes flickered, trying to take in the periphery. They were alone. He was nearer the desk than she was.
‘Sure. It’s there. On the desk.’
‘No,’ said Russ. ‘I mean your phone.’
Her heart began to race, unevenly, as if it were starting up; it hurt her chest.
‘Why do you need mine?’
He could see her phone in her hand. It was too late to put it behind her back.
‘Use that one,’ she said, the breath in her voice making it small. ‘The one on the desk? It’s better.’
Her mouth around the words was clumsy, like a foreign language, like being anaesthetised.
He smiled again. ‘Nah, I’d like to use yours.’
He started towards her. If she ran, it would be the end. She held her phone out to him, trying not to flinch when his fingers touched her palm. He took it.
‘See?’ he said.
He was closer. The tyre iron loose in his right hand.
‘Where’s Dan?’
She looked from his face to his chest. The shape on his T-shirt was shining. She had thought it was a design, but it wasn’t. It was wet. She knew what it was.
‘Will you come with me?’ said Russ, relaxed, as though they were both in on something.
She looked back to his face. There was only his face, nothing else around it, just him.
‘No. I’m waiting here, for the police.’
‘They coming here?’
‘They’ll be here in a minute. They’re coming now. Where’s Dan?’
She looked at the open door. She saw her car. Dan had the keys in his pocket. There was another one in the glove compartment. But the glove compartment was locked, with the small key on Dan’s key ring, in his pocket.
‘Where is he?’
‘Where’s the money Alex told me about?’ said Russ.
‘In the attic.’
‘Yeah?’ He said it as if she’d lie about it.
‘It’s up in the attic. You can have it.’
Russ sighed. ‘Shit. We’d better be quick.’
He turned off her phone and put it in his pocket, taking his eyes off her for a second, but not long enough.
‘What about your car?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘You said it broke down.’
He sort of laughed. ‘Yeah,’ he said, like she was stupid.
‘You first.’ He gestured, gentlemanly, towards the stairs.
She couldn’t move.
‘No.’ Her voice was weak. ‘Where’s Dan?’
‘C’mon. Let’s go.’
She shook her head. ‘You go up,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you where it is.’
He suddenly jumped at her, arms out, the tyre iron flying up towards her head. She ducked and yelped. He stepped back again, smiling. Her eyes were hot with tears, she felt urine, leaking from her. There wasn’t very much of it. He wouldn’t know.
He hadn’t touched her. She closed her mouth and breathed through her nose.
‘All right. I’ll take you up and show you,’ she said. ‘Then tell me where Dan is.’
‘OK, sure,’ he said.
He kicked the front door closed. She waited for the sound of the police car turning into the driveway. They’d see his car, she thought. Russ ran the tyre iron along the banisters as they went up. They passed the bedroom doors.
‘I’ve got to say,’ he said, like a tourist, ‘it’s not much of a hotel. I mean, what the fuck? It’s not like he described at all. When I came the first time, I thought I had the wrong place.’
She pointed to the trapdoor, and the ladder.
‘Up there,’ she said.
‘There? I didn’t even see that. I’ve been looking in the basement. And all over. You didn’t know I’ve been in and out of this place, did you? Couldn’t find a fucking thing.’ He tested the ladder against the wall, keeping an eye on her. ‘You sure it’s up there?’
She nodded.
‘The money Alex told me about?’ he said. ‘You know about the money?’
She nodded again. ‘Yes, it’s there.’
‘You get it.’
She didn’t move because her body wouldn’t obey, but he thought she was waiting, and he stepped back to give her space. She climbed the ladder as he watched. Her skirt swung out, she was scared he was looking.
‘What’s up there?’ he said.
She unbolted the trapdoor. The trap was right there, resting on the joists. He didn’t know that. She climbed up into the roof on hands and knees. It felt like escaping, just to be up there, that it would be possible to get free now. Her fear went, and she felt quick, and sharp. She looked down at him, staring up from the corridor, naked skin and eyes, the tender skull beneath his hair. She moved sideways, out of his eye line, into the dark.
‘What are you doing?’
She looked around, in the airless heat. No windows, no gaps or holes, no roof light or access panel, no chimney, no way of getting out.
‘You got it?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘What are you doing?’
She looked for a weapon, but there was nothing. Forensically, she remembered the empty, weightless snake traps, the rubbish bags, carpet, nothing. No fire extinguisher. No tools. Nothing.
‘Come on!’
‘One second.’
He was just below but he couldn’t see her. She was still on her own. She felt a sort of bliss.
‘I’m coming up,’ he said.
‘No. It’s here.’
She picked up the money in its box. It was heavy. She held it above the open hatch to show him. His vulnerable face looked up at her. She could throw it at his head. She could throw it hard down onto his face. But she couldn’t find it in herself to do it. He hadn’t hurt her. She didn’t dare to start a fight with him. She imagined him holding up his hands to protect himself, as it glanced off, and then the impossibility of being quick enough, or wounding him badly enough, to save herself. She handed it to him. She was giving him what he wanted.
‘Jesus, it’s heavy,’ he said, halfway up the ladder.
His bony hands reached in. He took it. The second he was clear she closed the trapdoor and knelt on it. She heard him below her.
‘Hey –’
‘You can go now. The police are coming.’
Kneeling, she pushed it down as if she could make herself heavier. There wasn’t a bolt on the inside. She reached over her head and braced her arms against the slanting beam above her. The only light was from the small gash in the plasterboard, where Alex said he’d put his foot.
She waited. She heard the clicks of the catches on the snake trap. She listened, in the heat, straining her ears over the viscous silence. She heard an engine on the road. But it faded. Then his fist thumped the trapdoor, two loud bangs, shaking the wood, like a child’s game. She braced herself against the rafter.
‘I won’t tell anyone,’ she said.
The ladder squeaked, the trapdoor heaved. She heard him grunt. Light came in around the hatch. She was lifted, tilting, and she flung herself off, squashing herself between the joists, splinters and dry rough wood. He grabbed her ankle and she pulled away, but then he was up there with her. He grabbed her arm. She pulled. More strength than she knew she had. She felt his nails break her skin. She thought he’d rip her bicep from the bone. He had another hand on her. He grabbed her hair. He gripped her neck. She clawed, swiping at the empty air. Suddenly he stopped, and let her go. She fell and pressed herself down between the joists.
‘Get up,’ he said.
He bent over her. He had to dig and wriggle and force his hands underneath her body. He couldn’t get a grip. Her skirt tore at the waist, buttons ripped. She gripped the joists with raw fingers, eyes screwed shut, but he got her by the leg and lifted. Her hip was wrenched and the terror of her legs opening wide in front of him made her struggle. Once she was fighting, he could bend her. He flipped her over and grabbed her shoulders. She tried to kick. She could knock him down with a hard kick to his groin, she could fell him, he’d be breathless. She could cause him pain and wound him. She kicked, hard, wildly, but he got down with her and knelt on her and she couldn’t get her hands to his face.
He was calm. He had a good hold of her now. He hoisted her up. Unbalanced by her writhing, he staggered in the dark. At the open trapdoor, without bending, he dropped her from a height, head first to the floor below. She fell haphazardly, like a corpse, on her shoulder and her head. Blind and bright, the pain struck. She couldn’t breathe. The floor was nothing, nor the air. She seemed to float. Then he was standing over her.
‘What are you doing?’ he said.
He bent down, took her by the top of her arm, backed off a little, and punched her. She felt his knuckles split her mouth. He held her up by the wrist. The agony of hanging from her shoulder spread. He punched her again, and that punch was black and distant, brief and soft. She couldn’t see. He dropped her. Her vision cleared. She saw a flash of red as he picked up the plastic box, in and out of focus. She didn’t see it hit her, she heard breaking, tasted metal. Her mouth wasn’t like her mouth, but pulpy, floating. He picked her up by the arm she had fallen on. With one eye she saw his boots, and blood falling on them, glossy and dark, like dripping marbles, one after the other, perfect circles, flattening as they fell.
‘Jesus,’ he said. He didn’t sound angry. ‘We need to move.’
He dragged her along the corridor, down the stairs, and she saw the banisters go by like watching a film.
‘Walk,’ he said.
Her feet couldn’t find the stairs. Her shoulder was out of the socket, like a chicken leg from the joint. He reached the hall, and hoisted her up alongside him, round the waist, as though he were saving her, and dragged her backwards to the kitchen door, clumsily, the tyre iron in his fist across her face. Through her hair, she saw the front door at an angle, and a sliver, bloodied, of daylight and the driveway through the window. Sky. A car. The bonnet of a white car. A white car. She saw it, but before there was time, before any time at all, he pulled her backwards through the fire door, and she saw it close. His breath rasped. Past the empty counters, no knives, no boards, no metal pans, just wiped down surfaces she and Dan had tidied, all going away from her, and her own legs dragging on the ground. The annexe. The fridges.
He whispered, ‘Wait.’
He wrapped his arm round her head and face. She hung in the sweat-muscle vice of his arm. She heard him turn the key, the door. She writhed. She heard the doorbell ring, loud and long. He closed his hand around her neck. Her eyeballs swelled. Her veins, constricted, burned. Then she fell, gently as a leaf, down, drifting, in enormous space. And quietness. She had no sense of herself, no thoughts at all. Then light burst onto her, and pain came back. They were outside. He was dragging her across the ground. The world was like a broken mirror, smell and taste and splintered vision, seeing pain, breathing bubbling blood between her nose and throat.
Her feet were on grass and stones, tangling in weeds. Her arm, flailing, grasped live twigs, tore a leaf. Very clearly, in a second that was a normal second, she realised they were just a few feet from the drive. She saw the nettles and brambles. She saw the white police car, the clean sight of it through the gaps, like zebra stripes.
Unbalanced, Russ tripped, and his hand slipped from her mouth. She screamed on the in-breath, and sank her teeth into his wrist. He threw her down, backwards, and himself on top, tyre iron and snake trap falling with them, and as her head hit the ground, clamped his hand across her mouth and nose. His chest pressed stickily to her cheek. His breastbone and ribs were hard. It felt like an axe cutting into her shoulder. She couldn’t breathe. She tried to move her head. She couldn’t move. No air. And then she heard men’s voices. Russ’s body grew very soft, heavier, burying her. She writhed beneath the weight. She fought. Barely shifting, still blocking her mouth and nose, he hit her. No smacking sound to draw attention, just the heel of his hand on her soft temple, heavy as a punch, dazzling. Darkness, like an inky wave, swelled, fell back, then swelled again. She was underwater, deep, deep, in a soundless night-time sea. No air. No air at all. The sea fell back. His chest was a deadweight. Reliably, her ribs heaved, but there was nothing to draw in. Her lungs burned. She heard footsteps – boots on gravel. Her eyes opened. She hadn’t known they were closed. All she could see was Russ. An inch away, blue tooth marks filled with dark red blood. She saw each bristle in each pore; the flakes on his lips, the tiny lines. A drop of sweat fell from his face into the corner of her eye. She couldn’t breathe. Her vision fluttered and feathered and blurred. Then footsteps, and the slam of a car door.
‘Monsieur? Madame?’
She recognised Dufour. They weren’t coming nearer, they were walking away. Still, no air. No air. The sound of walking, unhurried conversation.
‘Monsieur Durrant? Madame?’ Not Dufour. Another man, distant.
His hand moved from her face. Pure air. Just air. Breathing. Breathing. Light. Alive. She was lying on the steady ground. She was breathing. She rolled, but felt his hands on her again. He pulled her up. He dragged her along the path. She tried to use her feet against the pulling, but had no strength. She heard a shout, but she couldn’t hear the words. It sounded small. Too far away. His hand pulled back her head.
‘See?’ he whispered. ‘Cool car.’
The BMW was in front of her, the back of it, wedged into the narrow path. He dragged her through grass and bushes, along the side of it. She heard a car horn behind them, beeping twice. But no more voices. She was too far to hear their voices. He had to drop the snake trap to get the key from his pocket. He only had one hand on her. He pulled the door open, squashing branches. Still holding her, he put the trap and the tyre iron into the back, and toppling, they fell into the driver’s seat together. Getting up on his knees, he threw her across the front of the car, not onto the passenger seat, just mindlessly, on her back, her head hitting the dashboard, limbs chaotic, not fitting. He was in the driver’s seat. He slammed the door and he started the car.
They bumped from the lay-by to the tarmac. They were on the road. They were pulling away. She couldn’t right herself. She couldn’t move, lying half on the seat and half in the footwell. Like troops falling-back, the no man’s land of her body was abandoned, and she withdrew from it. From far inside the flesh cage of herself, she looked out, a small, live thing, peering through bars. He drove. And even when she was able to move, she didn’t. She waited for her spark to grow brighter. The only way into truth is through one’s own annihilation. She did not want to die, she would not be annihilated.