‘Dr Marlene is in the building,’ said Briffaut, stirring three sugars into his morning coffee.
De Payns tensed. ‘How nice for her.’
He’d only dropped into the boss’s office to see if Jim Valley was getting anywhere with Keratine.
Briffaut gestured for de Payns to sit. ‘We had an agreement about Dr Marlene.’
‘I’ll do it,’ snapped de Payns, almost reflexively, ‘but not right now—I can’t risk being put on medical in the middle of Operation Ellipse.’
Briffaut sipped at his coffee. ‘This is about duty of care. I didn’t want to say it, mon cher, but you’re making me.’
‘No,’ said de Payns, shaking his head and unable to look at Briffaut. ‘Just give me—’
‘She’s waiting for you in interview room six,’ said Briffaut. ‘Go talk to her.’
De Payns stood slowly, feeling like a condemned man. He lingered, hoping Briffaut might change his mind, but the boss turned his focus to a pile of reports on his desk. ‘Go,’ he said again, without looking up.
De Payns left the office and stalked to the second-floor kitchenette. Taking a deep breath, he thought about how he would deal with Dr Marlene. He’d be amenable and open, enough to please Briffaut, while not allowing the session to go too deep.
The only pods left in the canister beside the coffee machine were mint-flavoured. He cursed but then, spying what he thought was a normal espresso at the bottom of the container, he shoved his hand in and dug around for it.
‘Caught with your hand in the jar again,’ said a voice behind him. ‘Might have to report this.’
De Payns turned and saw Shrek. ‘You’re always creeping up on people. We need to get you some squeaky shoes.’
They shook hands, gave each other a slap on the arm. ‘What brings you in?’ asked de Payns, setting up the coffee pod.
‘Then I’d have to kill you,’ said Shrek. ‘And you may not like that.’
‘If you did, I’d have to unfriend you—in a non-violent way, of course.’
‘Évidemment,’ said Shrek, smirking. ‘At least now I know who’s stealing the real coffee.’
De Payns shook his head as the machine chugged out coffee into his mug. ‘Who buys this flavoured shit?’
‘Thought that was you,’ said Shrek. ‘The orange ones, last week?’
‘I blame you for the Turkish delight—it’s like a cup of incense.’
Shrek looked around to see who was close. ‘Lotus arrive okay?’
‘Yes,’ said de Payns, putting sugar in his coffee. ‘The FSB kept an eye on everything.’
■
‘More than seven hours and less than eight,’ said de Payns, as evenly as he could. Dr Marlene was on to the same thing his doctor usually harassed him about: his sleep patterns.
‘Is that uninterrupted sleep?’ she asked.
De Payns paused and observed the woman. Fine-featured, her dark hair was cut in a bob and she wore expensive but understated clothes: cashmere cardigan, pleated skirt, mid-heel shoes with no hint of toenail. She was very smart and refined, and de Payns fought the urge to manipulate her.
‘I wake up a bit, I guess,’ he said.
‘What happens when you wake up?’ she asked.
Marlene had dragged the chairs away from the interview table and arranged them in the open, facing each other, with little space between them. Certainly not enough to get away with lying.
‘Well, that depends if my wife is awake,’ he started with a raised eyebrow, but held up his hand. ‘I’m sorry, let me …’
Marlene smirked and crossed her legs on the other side, a sure female sign of a conversation having grabbed her interest. ‘You were going to misdirect me,’ she said, smiling.
De Payns laughed. ‘Yes, but I stopped myself. How strange is that?’
‘It’s excellent,’ she said. ‘Let’s talk.’
They went through the stress of the job, the fears he lived with, and even delved into his Anglo-French background.
‘I remember seeing in your file,’ she said, contemplative, ‘that you were at Cambridge for a while?’
De Payns paused, wondering if they were going to have the ‘Moran’ chat. He’d been living with the Morans after leaving school and had been accepted as a foreign intake at their college, Magdalene at Cambridge. It wasn’t until he was halfway through his first year that he felt the pull of his family heritage and its Templar lineage, and he’d left Cambridge to join the French air force.
‘Perhaps an English institution made me realise my inherent Frenchness,’ said de Payns. ‘Or maybe I just hated university.’
‘Tell me about the young Alec,’ Marlene said. ‘Alec the fighter pilot. Were you happy, serious, ambitious?’
De Payns breathed out. ‘I was a young man who’d found something he was really good at, and it gave me a sense of purpose. Yes, there were parties and motorbikes and lots of bad behaviour when we were off base, but there was focus, too. I was twenty-one, twenty-two and flying missions over the Balkans. It was stressful, dangerous, high-adrenaline stuff, and I loved it.’
‘You met your wife during these years?’
De Payns paused. He wanted to tell her to mind her own business but stopped himself. ‘Yes, that’s the Alec she fell in love with. The dashing pilot who liked a laugh and a drink.’
‘Past tense?’
‘She asked me to sell my motorbike before our first son was born …’
‘And you complied?’
‘Well,’ he said, with a smile, ‘she asked nicely.’
Marlene got him talking about their courtship, the wedding and his English mother. But as hard as he tried to steer her away, Marlene kept bringing him back to his job with the DGSE and what it was doing to his relationship. He admitted that it was hard to be married to a strong, educated woman and expect her to ask no questions about where he was or what he was doing.
‘She can’t call me or text me for days sometimes,’ he said. ‘She has to pretend that this is all normal, to the kids and her friends. Her closest friend has noticed something’s off, and she’s getting nosy.’
‘Women do that,’ said Marlene.
‘Clearly,’ said de Payns. ‘It’s doing Romy’s head in, and she’s told me that she’s over it.’
‘How do you communicate when you’re home?’
De Payns felt embarrassed. ‘We fight, or it’s tense and we avoid talking.’
‘Physical fights?’
‘No,’ said de Payns. ‘Never that.’
‘Do you scare her?’
‘Yes,’ said de Payns, feeling uncomfortable. ‘Some of my actions frighten her.’
‘Like?’
‘Like a couple of drunks were hassling her, so I stopped them.’
‘Where?’ asked Marlene.
‘The Metro,’ he admitted. ‘The boys were there. I’m not proud of it.’
‘Do you have other women?’ she asked.
‘No!’ he said, sitting up abruptly, not so cool anymore. ‘God, no—that’s not even … I mean, shit, no.’
‘And her?’
De Payns shifted in his seat. ‘No. I don’t think so. I mean, I trust this woman with my life. I see the way men look at her, but she doesn’t play around.’
‘No new friends, new colleagues that she talks about?’
De Payns shook his head, then paused. ‘Actually, she’s really impressed by her new boss—David—but I think that’s more of an ideological thing, you know?’
‘Tell me.’
He shrugged. ‘Climate change and so on.’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, they agree on everything, I guess.’
‘I see,’ she said, eyes twinkling. ‘Is there a problem between you and Romy on this issue?’
‘Not really,’ said de Payns. ‘I think clean energy is a great idea, but when a group of smart people just agree on everything all the time, then you don’t have theories tested by reality.’
‘She pushes back on your opinion?’
‘We can laugh at our different views of the world, but lately she’s acting like her think tank is the saviour of the planet while my work uses violence to solve problems.’
‘But violence is a big part of your work, yes?’ Marlene stated matter-of-factly. ‘Do you think that affects your behaviour outside work? You mentioned the drunks, for example. Is there anything else?’
De Payns closed his eyes. Should he risk going deeper? Well, he was in it now. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘I have these dreams.’ He described being woken by nightmares that he couldn’t remember. The only trace that remained, after he was fully conscious, was pure terror.
‘I see,’ said Marlene, nodding thoughtfully. ‘I’ve heard around the Company that we lost a colleague recently,’ she said. ‘Were you close?’
‘No, not close, but I knew him.’
‘Is he in your nightmares?’
De Payns sighed and looked out the window. ‘My nightmare is not what happens when I’m asleep—it’s a reality. The colleague you’re talking about? The bad guys came to his house, and they killed him in front of his family. That’s the nightmare.’
‘I get it,’ said Marlene, grimacing.
‘What a normal person would call paranoia is my reality,’ said de Payns. ‘It’s a reality for our colleague’s wife and daughter; it happened in their home. They still live with that.’
‘That makes you feel unsafe?’
‘It makes us all feel unsafe,’ he said, waving his hand to encompass the building they were sitting in. ‘We do a very tough job but our weak spot is our families.’
‘You feel responsible for something you can’t really control?’
De Payns nodded. He could sense something welling up in him. ‘If anything terrible happened to my family, it would be my fault. I can’t let that happen.’
Dr Marlene’s face changed slightly. ‘What do you do when you wake in fright?’
De Payns could feel himself heading for the cliff. ‘I’m not ready to retire, you know that, right?’
Marlene smiled. ‘Your boss doesn’t want to see you retired.’
‘And yet here we are.’
Dr Marlene maintained eye contact and dropped her notepad onto the carpet. ‘I wasn’t here. We didn’t talk. You’re not in my diary. I’m here to see Dominic,’ she said.
De Payns took a deep breath and tried to exhale slowly, but the air came out in a whoosh. ‘Okay, so a few nights ago I had the nightmare.’
‘What did you do?’
De Payns shrugged. ‘Walked around in the dark, listened for sounds, checked the boys, tested the locks, looked for bad guys on the street …’
‘What time of night are we talking about?’
‘Around two.’
‘Fully awake?’
De Payns laughed. ‘Oh, yeah. Heart pumping, ready to fight.’
‘You wake up in that state?’
‘Yes,’ said de Payns. ‘I wake up panting.’
‘So, you checked on the house and the kids, and then …’
‘I sat on the sofa in front of the TV. Waiting.’
‘Waiting for what?’
De Payns shook his head. ‘Whatever is coming.’
‘What would you do to the threat?’
‘Shoot it, most probably,’ said de Payns.
‘With what?’
‘The handgun.’
Dr Marlene looked at him. ‘You have a gun at home?’
‘Yes, I do my rounds of the house with my pistol.’
‘How long did you wait?’
‘I was on the sofa for—I don’t know—five or six minutes.’
‘And then?’
‘My wife came and got me,’ he said, immediately realising how childish that sounded.
‘How did she react to the gun?’
‘She took it away from me.’
‘Was she scared?’
‘She was crying.’
‘Why?’
De Payns looked at the floor, a dampness at the corner of his eyes. ‘You know why.’
‘Tell me, Alec.’
De Payns shook his head. ‘She thought I might kill myself.’
They sat in silence for a few seconds.
‘She just misread the situation,’ said de Payns, having recovered from the slip.
‘The situation was right in front of her,’ said Dr Marlene. ‘Maybe she saw what she saw?’
De Payns smiled. ‘No, I was having a bad night, that’s all,’ he spoke firmly, for his own benefit as much as the doctor’s. ‘There was nothing to see.’