COME away with me for the weekend,” Finney said next morning, leaning over me as I lay staring at the wall, “we both need a break.”
I rolled over and gazed up at him. I had not slept all night. Hannah and William had crawled into my bed in the early morning. Usually when Finney is there they cling grimly to the outer edge of my side of the bed, but this time they had set up camp in the valley between my pillows and Finney’s. They were still asleep, squashed together, a mountain range of arms and legs.
“Come on,” he said, “I’ll talk to Carol. She’ll understand.”
“I’ve been away a lot, William’s not keen.” Did Finney understand, I wondered, that this kind of competition for my time and attention was one of the things that frightened me?
“Give me two nights.”
Taking my leave of Hannah and William was a long-drawn-out affair. There were so many final hugs and kisses that I nearly missed the last call. At Heathrow I ran through the departure hall and at last caught sight of Finney. I shouted his name, and he looked to see that I was carrying luggage, and it was only then, when I hoisted my bag over my head so that he could see, that he allowed himself to smile.
It was a short, bumpy ride to Paris, an hour of enforced closeness, Finney’s knees jammed up against the seat in front, our shoulders pressed together.
We checked into a small hotel on the rue de Seine on the Left Bank, where Finney surprised me by addressing the receptionist in more than passable French. Our room was tiny, on the fifth floor. The wallpaper was decorated with little pink flowers, and there were plump embroidered cushions on the bed. I opened the window and looked out at the street, the warm noise of city traffic wrapping itself around me. I had spoken that morning to Beatrice on the telephone, and the conversation had been going around and around in my head ever since. Finally Beatrice had some of her answers. She had a body to bury. But the discovery had only made her other questions more urgent. Who could have done this to her daughter? Finney came and stood behind me. I closed my eyes and leaned back into him.
“I have a life-affirming idea,” I said eventually. “Let’s eat.”
We ate in a small restaurant in the maze of streets off the boulevard St. Germain. I could not face crowds, so we chose a restaurant that was quiet and expensive, decorated not in the rich colors of the tourist bistro, but in shades of gray. There were a few tables of affluent local residents at a comfortable distance from us, their conversations providing an agreeable background noise for our meal. We ate and drank in almost total silence.
After our meal, we walked by the Seine, below the golden Gothic spires of Notre Dame, and then went back to the hotel, to our womblike room. Finney opened the windows to let the city in, and we undressed in silence and went to bed.
The next morning, breakfast consisted of coffee and toast at a café on a cobbled street, tourists gathering around us, one group looking noisily for eggs and bacon and English tea.
“So how do you know where to stay in Paris?”
He looked less like a police officer than ever here in the sun, relaxed, happy. I realized how much my view of him was defined by the way I had met him.
“You think I’m a Philistine, don’t you.”
“No. . . . Well, a little bit.”
“I spent six months here with the Paris police force, supposedly coordinating our efforts to curtail drug-smuggling operations.”
“Supposedly?”
“Coordinating is a fine art.”
I sipped at my coffee. “Why did you join the police, Finney?”
“Why not? You don’t share your father’s view of the police as the reactionary forces of oppression, do you?”
“No . . . well . . . a little bit.”
He scowled. “We’re a necessity.”
“So are sewers.”
He raised his eyebrows. There was an irritated glint in his eye. “Thank you. Look, I’m a steady guy. It’s a steady job, a steady income, steady demand,” he told me. “Isn’t that what your media friends think?”
“You like to stick your nose into other people’s business, just like me,” I said. “You lot are no different from journalists.”
“Now that,” he said, “is below the belt.”
Across the street, a table of backpackers were photographing one another, their poses getting a little more raunchy with each click of the shutter, their laughter getting louder, reaching a crescendo of delight when one of the girls hitched up her skirt, sat astride the lap of another girl, and kissed her. Finney had his back to them.
“What are we going to do?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said vaguely, not wanting to apply my mind. “More of the same, I suppose.”
We smiled at each other. We had agreed, in the middle of the night, that we would not be distracted. With Melanie dead, the urgency of my quest was gone anyway. I had wanted to save her, not find out who had killed her. The shock of the discovery of her body had receded, and in its wake I realized that we had, all her friends, been mourning her for months. It was her body, decayed and destroyed, that was the shock, that and the knowledge—
now a certainty, not a suspicion—that she had died at someone else’s hand, with real violence. It had been a long and lingering death for those left behind. But at least we knew it had not been a long or lingering death for Melanie.
Despite our resolution not to be distracted by her, we had used the hotel computer to check the news on the Internet. We learned that initial indications were that Melanie had been killed by a gunshot wound to the back of the head. It had been a clean, professional killing. The remnants of a hood remained, covering her head. There were no indications of rape or of mutilation. One newspaper was reporting that the last call to Melanie’s mobile phone was from Fred Sevi, at two minutes to ten in the evening on January 10.
“It was him,” I muttered. “Why did I get so hung up on Mike?”
I buried my head in my hands. Panic overwhelmed me. I had made a man’s life hell. I had repeated history, only this time I was the predator.
“Stop jumping to conclusions,” Finney said. “It’s a mobile phone, not a gun. Sevi could have been calling her from Dundee. They’ll go over all that.”
“I know that,” I said, “but why did she come out of the bar if not to speak on the phone? You heard Andrew Bentley. Why did she walk outside, if it wasn’t to speak on the phone?”
“You heard Bentley, too. She may just have wanted a cigarette.”
I shook my head. “Whoever wanted to kill her needed to get her outside, he couldn’t just hang around and wait.”
We walked by the Seine for an hour, and every time I tried to bring up Melanie’s death, Finney blocked me. Eventually I gave up. And when I had been silent for a long time, he spoke again.
“I thought,” he said carefully, “that we might try to track down the mysterious Sabine.”
“I thought,” I said equally carefully, “that you were fed up with my crazy family.”
“You are all barking mad. With the exception of Patrick.”
“Patrick? Why should he be let off the hook?”
“He’s male, and he has no Ballantyne blood,” Finney said with forensic accuracy. He made a gesture, resting his case, and I scowled.
“Anyway,” Finney went on, “if, as seems possible, I’m stuck with them—you—then it follows that I should know the worst.”
I gazed at him. “If you know about Gilbert, you know the worst.”
Adding Gilbert to our holiday was like igniting a stick of dynamite. But if there was one thing that united Finney and me (and surely there must always be one thing, beyond sex, that keeps unlikely couples together), it was a restless curiosity. So that if a stone presented itself, however innocent it looked, we were both incapable of leaving it unturned.
“You have your sources,” I suggested.
“I have my sources.”
We took the subway to Montmartre, to the rue Ravignan. I expected nothing and expected even less when we found ourselves faced with a locked door and an entrance buzzer. Finney pressed an apartment number and, when a woman answered, said, again in good French, that we had been sent by Gilbert Ballantyne. To my surprise, the woman buzzed us in. We climbed a winding, red-carpeted staircase to the second floor, where a girl dressed in black was already waiting for us at an open door. She looked at us with mousy eyes half-hidden by lank hair, obviously disappointed that Finney was not whom she had expected.
“Sabine?”
“Maman?” she called back into the apartment, and an older woman appeared, her blond hair swept onto her head, pale, sun-spotted skin stretched tight over high cheekbones, long earrings dangling almost to her shoulders, a younger, thinner, taller version of my mother. And living in an alternative universe. She stood, an elegant and sophisticated woman in an elegant and sophisticated hallway. My mother would not have endured this lack of clutter. It was indecently tidy.
Finney filled the gap left by my confusion, introducing us as friends of Gilbert Ballantyne. The woman’s face fell. She flapped her hand, urging us inside and looking up and down the corridor outside to check that no one had seen or heard us.
“Gilbert, il n’est pas ici,” she said defensively. I took in polished wood, gilt-framed glass, pretty pictures, flowers.
“Do you know where he is?”
The woman looked helplessly at Sabine.
“Il a disparu,” she said, and made an explosive sound that she matched with her hands and that I guessed meant “just like that.” “Mais, c’est normal.”
“Normal?” I echoed.
“Lui, c’est comme le soleil. Un jour il est là et puis il disparait.”
I stared at Sabine. She regarded me with something that I could describe only as malice.
The woman was examining Finney. “Vous êtes de la police?” she asked nervously.
Finney shook his head. Not here, not technically. He pulled a face that suggested the very thought was laughable.
“Alors?” She raised her hands. She was not being impolite. She simply did not know what to do with us. Nor did we know what to do with her. Finney kept her chatting—no, she had no idea when Gilbert would be back. No, she had no forwarding address for him. Did Gilbert owe us money? It sometimes happened that people would come to this door claiming that Gilbert had borrowed from them. Were we journalists? I knew Finney was giving me time to think, time to decide how much to tell her of my identity. The daughter—this girl I now realized must be my half-sister—watched me through narrowed eyes. She knows, I thought. And she wants nothing to do with me. Nor I with her.
“We’re late,” I said quietly to Finney. “It’s time for us to go.”
He nodded. We made our excuses.
“You don’t want to get to know them better?” he asked me as we walked away. We could feel the eyes of Sabine and her mother on us from the doorway. I remembered the accounts Finney had gathered for me, the suggestion of Sabine’s facility with lying.
“I know enough already,” I told him. “The woman is nothing to me. And the girl . . . her mother’s a charming romantic, and her father’s a petty crook. But she’s something else altogether. Something nasty.”
We walked in silence for a moment, and I thought Finney might be thinking me mad. But eventually he said, “You may be right.”
I wondered what more he knew about Sabine, but this time I resisted the urge to find out. Did I envy Sabine and her mother their shrug of the shoulder, the lack of accusation? I couldn’t imagine any one of my family comparing Gilbert to the sun. Not with a straight face.
Finney had little patience with sightseeing. By early evening we had abandoned the line at the Louvre and instead walked by the river. I lit a candle for Melanie in Notre Dame. Then I surprised myself by lighting one for my father.
We returned to the hotel to shower and found ourselves once more in bed, and later we lay there and watched the sun set slowly over the city. Eventually, as hunger reminded us that it was dinnertime, we pulled our clothes back on. When my mobile rang, I seized it up from the floor where it had fallen, my imagination suddenly, guiltily, with the children. It was Jane. I breathed again. Then immediately I wondered why she was calling me here. I assumed she was wallowing in cosy domesticity with Q, both of them absorbed in baby Rosemary. I could hear the baby crying.
“Hi,” I could hardly hear her. “Rosemary sounds unhappy.”
“She’s got colic. I don’t know what to do about it, she doesn’t sleep, I don’t sleep . . .” I could hear the shudder of real exhaustion in her voice. I realized guiltily that my hugely competent friend Jane had joined the ranks of mothers on the edge of collapse and that I had been leaving her to get on with it. “Anyway,” Jane’s voice dragged on wearily, “I know you’re not interested in colic. Did you hear the news?”
“What news?”
“Q just called me. Ridiculous, he’s halfway around the world, and he knows more than me about what’s going on here. Mike Darling has run off.”
“What do you mean, run off?” The phrase made me think of a little boy racing out of the room and up the stairs.
“I don’t know any more than that.”
I sat down hard on the bed. Finney paused in the act of buttoning his shirt and turned to me.
“Where did he go?”
“They don’t know. He seems to have vanished.”
Behind Jane, the sound of Rosemary’s crying rose again, high-pitched and insistent.
“I have to go.” Jane sounded at the end of her tether.
“Where’s Q?”
“In Washington, with the prime minister.” Jane’s voice was distant, as though she were pulling away from the telephone. “He’ll be back next week.” And then the phone went dead.
I leaned against the balcony, looking back into the room as Finney dialed Veronica’s number and smiled, spoke, then listened. He glanced across at me. When he hung up, he came out onto the balcony and we stood side by side, looking out over the city.
“No phone calls to your buddies in the newsroom. That’s the deal.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Take it or leave it.”
“Okay, okay. Tell me.”
“She’s right. Darling’s on the run. He’s taken the boy. Coburn rang to ask Darling to come in and answer more questions.”
“Was there something about Melanie’s body that made them want to talk to him?”
“It was found on land bordering HazPrep, of course they want to talk to him. Perhaps they wanted to rattle him.”
“They must have succeeded.”
“Anita was out at the doctor’s, but Sheryl was there when he got the phone call. Apparently he put the receiver down and just grabbed Christopher and went outside. She followed him out to the car, she says he was clearly in a state of panic, and she demanded to know where he was going, but she says he wouldn’t tell her. He pushed her away, fastened Christopher in the car seat, and drove off.”
Just then Sal rang me on my mobile, and he said aloud what I was thinking.
“He bloody did it.” Sal was exultant. I wondered what had happened to his grief. “The bloody bastard killed her. He’s on the run.”
Finney was glaring at me, warning me not to say too much. But it was impossible to cool the level of Sal’s speculation. And the connection was inevitable. There were no television pictures, the police had lost him, but Mike Darling’s car was a white SUV. Even in the imagination, history was reborn. The man in this car was fleeing because he had been found out.
“Mike Darling bloody killed her,” Sal insisted. When I refused to be persuaded, he hung up on me, upset, as though I was betraying Melanie.
“It’s time to go back,” I said to Finney. “It’s not just Mike Darling, it’s everything. It’s Jane, she’s sounding exhausted, Rosemary’s screaming. I feel as though there are things I should be doing. We can come back some other time.”
He nodded. “We can come back,” he agreed.
He turned away. We packed in silence.