The Blame Game

by C. J. Cooke

  ‘Kareem gave me this address just outside Paris,’ I said, showing the piece of paper to her. ‘Normandy, actually. It’s close to where the CCTV footage showed Michael withdrawing money at the bank.’

  ‘And?’

  I took a deep breath. ‘I’m going.’

  She frowned. ‘Where?’

  ‘To France. Tonight.’

  She looked to the ceiling in despair and gave a groan.

  ‘You cannot go to France …’

  ‘If the police find him first they’ll charge him with murder-suicide …’

  She nailed me to the seat with a fierce look. ‘Helen, take a minute and listen to what you are saying. You’ve just been in a horrific car crash. You are in no fit state to run off to France and rescue anybody.’

  I told her what Kareem had said before I left the café. ‘He doesn’t believe that Chris Holloway has kidnapped Michael.’

  ‘And you believe that? A decade of threatening letters and you think they aren’t behind this?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know, Jeannie. Maybe they are.’ I took out the piece of paper with the address, spread it on the table. ‘But how can I sit here and do nothing when I know where Michael is?’

  Truth be told, I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to leave Saskia and Reuben for a second. But greater than that was the urgency to fix all of this, to clear Michael’s name. Jeannie looked online, found a flight leaving tonight. Only an hour and fifteen minutes from Newcastle-upon-Tyne to Paris, then a train from there to Normandy. Jeannie insisted on coming with me but I told her no, I needed her at home. There was no one else I would feel comfortable with looking after Reuben and holding Saskia’s hand.

  At home, Reuben saw me packing and asked nervously where I was going.

  ‘I’m going to get Dad back,’ I told him.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He’s in France, sweetheart. It’s only an hour by plane. I promise I’ll be no more than a day or two, OK?’

  ‘A day?’

  His eyes were wide and shining, and I had to swallow back a sob as I promised him it would go quickly, that we’d go swimming as soon as I got back.

  ‘Can Dad come swimming too?’

  I nodded, less certainly this time, and he saw. Brave boy. He visibly braced himself as I pulled the suitcase downstairs and waved goodbye from the window, still a little child at heart. I thought my heart would break as I pulled off down the street.

  At Charles de Gaulle Airport I focus on the people around me, on the departure boards, a young boy flailing on the ground while his beleaguered mother begs him to calm down. I can well imagine how he feels. I feel overwhelmed, not sure where to go. At an information desk I ask how to get to the address Kareem gave me. The clerk explains it in English, then prints out a list of instructions: I’m to take a train to Gare du Nord, then a train to Caen and a taxi.

  When I manage to hail a taxi outside the station at Caen I’m filled with relief. I pass the address to the driver and he gives me a thumbs up. Outside the sky is navy and portentous. The first specks of rain flick against the windscreen.

  We drive out of a small town towards countryside, sprawling fields at either side of the car and narrowing roads with no traffic. The taxi pulls up outside a set of tall gates. I lean forward. The headlights bounce off the iron railings but beyond them I can see what looks like a sprawling estate. Château du Seuil.

  ‘There’s a noticeboard,’ the taxi driver says, shining a torch on the pillar beside the gate. ‘Opening hours are 9 a.m. until 5 p.m., weekdays only.’

  ‘Opening hours?’

  ‘Oui. This is not a private address. It is a tourist destination.’

  A tourist destination? My stomach twists and I feel a flash of panic. Jeannie was right. I had no reason to trust Kareem. The address was wrong. He has led me, quite literally, to the middle of nowhere. I feel sick.

  ‘Can you take me back to the airport?’

  ‘Airport?’

  ‘Charles de Gaulle?’

  The driver laughs. ‘That is a long way for a taxi.’

  ‘The train station, then. I’ll take the next train to the airport.’

  He reverses, begins to drive away. Through the trees I see lights on in one of the rooms of the castle.

  ‘There are no more trains to Paris this evening,’ the taxi driver says dismissively. ‘Let me take you to a bed and breakfast, huh? Then in the morning you can go to Château du Seuil.’

  With a heavy heart I walk up the steps to the guesthouse and pay for a room for one night. I can’t shake the feeling that this has been a wasted journey. That I’ve come all this way for nothing.

  I slip the key in the door and find a small, dark room with a single bed. The emptiness feels like a slap in the face.

  Sinking down on the bed I close my eyes, fighting back tears. Somehow I’ll have to come to terms with the fact that I’ll never see Michael again. That perhaps I drove him away.

  A few moments later, a knock at the door makes me jump upright, my heart hammering.

  ‘Who is it?’ I say. Someone tries the door handle, but it’s locked. My throat tightens.

  ‘Who is it?’ I demand.

  ‘It’s me.’

  I recognise the voice. In an instant I open the door and see a man standing in the dim corridor.

  ‘Helen?’

  49

  Helen

  8th September 2017

  I take a step back and look him over as he stands in the doorway. It is Michael but not Michael, a facsimile in flesh-form. His hair is shorter – an uneven buzzcut, silver filings glistening amongst the dark – and the beard he grew out in Belize is gone, revealing the fine jaw I’ve not seen in a long time. I don’t recognise the black coat he’s wearing. But more than anything I don’t recognise the look in his eyes.

  He reaches out to me, presses his face into my shoulder and sobs. There is nothing more wonderful and terrible than this moment. We are together. He is alive. Our life has been ripped apart and I cannot imagine how it will ever be the same.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I whisper, wiping my face and leaning back to look him over, to confirm that he’s really here, this is really happening.

  I reach out and tentatively cup my hand against his cheek. He flinches and in a sliver of sunlight I see the cause: a dark bruise against his cheekbone, another on his hand. His nose looks broken, his lower lip is painfully split open. I don’t remember his nose being broken in the hospital, nor his lips being so damaged. He looks dreadful.

  ‘What happened?’ I say when he takes a few uneven steps across the room and sinks down on to the bed. ‘I saw the CCTV footage at the hospital in Belize. Did they blackmail you into leaving? Where did they take you?’ I start to grow upset, questions spilling out of me. A need for answers burns me. ‘Who did this, Michael?’

  He looks stunned. I wonder if he’s been drugged. There are fresh bruises on his face. Has he been tortured?

  ‘Nobody blackmailed me,’ he says simply.

  I wait for something more. ‘But you left the hospital … and the police showed me footage of you drawing money out of a bank in Paris …’

  He looks away. ‘I had to.’

  I’m not sure I heard him right. ‘You had to?’

  ‘I read the letters,’ he says simply, returning his eyes to mine. There’s a light gone out of them and I try not to think about what that means.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I should have told you …’

  ‘I know you were scared,’ he says. ‘They’ve been searching for us for years. Luke’s family.’

  ‘Because of what happened on Mont Blanc,’ I say, and he nods.

  In a terrible outpour I tell him everything that has happened: the police interviews in Belize, the terrible suspicion. Saskia’s surgery, the Medevac. Returning home and feeling that I was going out of my mind.

  He listens to all of this, keeps his gaze on the wall opposite. His eyes are haunted, his lips slightly open. It’s the
expression of a scream too harrowing to be uttered. I take his hand.

  ‘Michael?’

  His eyes shift slowly to mine, but I’m not sure he’s seeing me.

  ‘How did you know I was here?’

  ‘Reuben,’ he says, matter-of-fact.

  ‘Reuben?’

  ‘I’ve been communicating with him on iPix.’

  ‘iPix?’

  ‘As Malfoy. I set it up a while ago, remember? When he had no friends to play with on there and we wanted to encourage his drawings?’

  In a moment it comes to me, and I remember it.

  ‘He was able to show me a lot that was going on in Belize.’ He raises a shaky hand to his face. ‘I knew about Saskia. It almost tore me apart.’

  His voice breaks and he starts to weep, his shoulders rising, huge, drawn-out sobs. I hold him tight, tell him that we have each other. We can be together. We are a family, always.

  I tell him about Kareem. About the address I have for Chris Holloway.

  ‘A private investigator?’ he says, his voice rising, when I tell him how I knew to come to France. ‘What information did he have on us?’

  ‘They knew we were going to Belize.’

  His face contorts. ‘But … how would they know that? We only decided to go to Belize on the spur of the moment …’

  I nod. ‘Yes. But someone put a tracking device on Saskia’s teddy.’ I explain how Reuben had found the tag on the teddy’s collar. His eyes widen in horror and he falls silent.

  Why put the tracking device on Jack-Jack, and not inside my wallet, or Michael’s keychain? Whoever had put that device on Jack-Jack to track our movements had to have known that Saskia wouldn’t lose the teddy, that he was important to her, otherwise they risked losing our location.

  I notice Michael is panting slightly, a hand lifting to his ribs.

  ‘Lie down,’ I say softly, but he shakes his head.

  ‘We haven’t got time. I know where they are.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Luke’s family,’ he says, swallowing hard in pain. ‘I found the house.’

  I frown. ‘Château de Seuil. I went there.’

  He looks up. ‘You went there?’

  ‘Yes. But it was a public property.’

  ‘They still live in one of the buildings there,’ he says, shifting his position until he finds a way to sit that eases the pain. He tilts his head back, eyes on the ceiling. ‘I’ve already been. I spoke to a groundsman. He says they’re expected back tomorrow.’ He lowers his head, rests his eyes on me. ‘There’s another thing.’

  ‘What?’

  He hesitates. ‘I found Theo.’

  ‘It’s here, thanks,’ Michael tells the taxi driver. The estate looks different in daylight. The tall gates I saw last night are cast iron and marked with gold lettering: Château de Seuil. Beyond them I can see a sweeping landscape: a large lake surrounded by trees, gardens, and a towering castle at the end of a long driveway.

  I follow Michael silently across a gravel path towards a wooden hut, where a girl stands, a roll of tickets in her hands and a vest emblazoned with the Château de Seuil logo. She thinks we’re here to go on the tour.

  Michael pulls out a wallet, buys two tickets. I don’t ask him whose credit card he’s using, though it’s not his name along the strip.

  We head towards the castle. I notice his limp is pronounced, his face pale and his breath laboured. He doesn’t look well.

  ‘Michael, I think you need to go to hospital,’ I say, but he shakes his head.

  ‘Nearly there.’

  We reach a long garden fringed with bedded plants and small trees.

  ‘Where’s Theo?’ I say, glancing around. Is he really here? Are we just going to walk up to him, shake hands? Talk about the weather? Perhaps my many sightings of him over the years weren’t imagined after all. I’m sick at the thought of meeting him after all these years.

  Michael staggers towards a clearing in the soil. I make out a stone angel, covered in moss. And a marble tombstone with clear gold script.

  Luke Augustus Aucoin

  22.8.1976 – 25.6.1995

  and his brother, Theo Charles Aucoin

  22.8.1976 – 25.6.1999

  Fratres in aeternum numquam seorsum

  I take a few steps forward and fall to my knees on the grass, weeping as I take it in. It’s a grave. Theo died on the fourth anniversary of Luke’s death. Suicide, I think, remembering how he had howled when the mountain rescue unit at Chamonix told us they’d recovered his body. It must have been. He was devoted to Luke. This was all my fault. Both brothers, gone.

  I can hardly bear it.

  At the bed and breakfast Michael removes his shirt, letting me trace the damage caused by an unnamed attacker across his ribcage and stomach. Beneath fresh bruises, older traces of the crash: the mark of the seatbelt, cuts across his forehead from shattered glass. A superimposition of trauma.

  I kiss his scars, his broken lips, cradle his face in my hands as he weeps.

  After, we lie together, our hands interlaced. Neither of us speak. He has not said whether or not he knows about the fire and I have not confessed it.

  A long distance stretches between us, a deep fissure riven by silence and lies.

  50

  Reuben

  8th September 2017

  Josh is at my house and we’re putting the finishing touches to our animations. The deadline for the competition is tonight so we’re working really hard to get everything rendered and uploaded in time. We didn’t even eat dinner, just came home from school with Aunt Jeannie and went upstairs to get our animations finished.

  Josh’s animation is of a fire-breathing dragon who transforms into a man and vice versa. He has called it Return of the Phoenix which I think is a wicked name. It shows this guy walking towards a cliff edge and then he jumps off and you think he’s plunging to his death but instead he transforms into a dragon, and the camera zooms right into him as his arms grow red scales and turn into wings and you see his nose becoming a snout and his hands turning into claws. Right as he’s about to hit the bottom of the cliff his wings span out and he soars upwards and then Josh shows the clouds and a sunset and the view of the valley. It is epic.

  ‘Yours is good, too, though,’ Josh says, but I know he’s just being nice and that’s OK because people sometimes don’t say what they mean out of kindness.

  It’s seven o’clock and I’m famished. I go downstairs to toast a couple of the bagels Aunt Jeannie bought for me. I set my iPad on the coffee table. Aunt Jeannie is at the kitchen table with a large glass of red wine and her laptop open. She’s wearing glasses which reflect the screen. I can even make out the Google logo.

  ‘You searching for something?’ I ask, and she looks up and smiles, though her eyes are sad.

  ‘Always,’ she says.

  The bagels pop up. ‘You want me to get those for you?’ Aunt Jeannie says, but I say ‘no thanks’ and cover them in butter and then a big dollop of strawberry jam. Then I go into the living room. There are two iPads there, one on the coffee table and one on the sofa. Josh must have come downstairs.

  ‘Josh?’ I say, but there’s no answer. He must have come down and then gone back upstairs. I put both iPads under my arm and carry them back to my bedroom, and as I’m walking up the stairs an idea hits my head like a stone. I tell this to Josh and he tilts his head to check if there’s a lump where the stone hit me.

  ‘I’ve just decided I’m going to be a marine biologist,’ I tell him.

  ‘You just decided that right now?’

  I nod and give a big laugh, and there’s a warm feeling in my arms and legs, a good feeling. Ideas start to pour into my brain as if someone’s turned on taps.

  ‘Blue whales are endangered, right?’

  ‘Yes, they are,’ he says.

  ‘The reason they’re so endangered is because ships crash into them all the time because they’re so big. Well, if I become a marine biologist, I could use a tracking dev
ice like the one on Jack-Jack’s collar and then give the app with the digital map to the people driving the ships so they can avoid crashing into them.’

  Josh thinks about this. ‘But … how would you get the tracking device on to the blue whales?’

  I click my fingers and think. ‘A drone,’ I say. ‘I’d use drone to zoom down and drop them on to the blue whale. I’d have to figure out how to get them to stick on.’

  ‘I think it’s a good idea,’ Josh says, biting into his bagel.

  There’s a knock at the door. I hear it and I think Aunt Jeannie is going to get it but then someone knocks again so she must be busy. I go downstairs and look into the kitchen. She’s got the oven fan on. I open the front door and there’s a woman and a man standing there in suits.

  ‘Hello,’ I say.

  ‘Hello,’ says the lady. She’s got short white hair and glasses. The man is much younger and very tall and makes me think of Snape. The lady says, ‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Lavery. I don’t believe we’ve met. You’re Reuben, aren’t you?’

  It always makes me feel funny when people say stuff like this because I don’t know how they know me or why they do. I stare and she smiles.

  ‘Is your mum in, Reuben?’

  I shake my head. ‘My mum’s in France.’

  The lady’s eyebrows shoot up towards her white hair. ‘France?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She looks behind me. ‘I see. Are you on your own, Reuben?’

  ‘My auntie’s here. Do you want some tea and a Kit Kat?’

  Mum always gives people tea and Kit Kats when they come to our house.

  They say ‘no, thank you’ and I go to tell Aunt Jeannie that Detective Chief Inspector Lavery and her boyfriend are here, but then I remember something. I told the lady that Mum is in France but I haven’t checked her location in over an hour so she could be somewhere else by now. I race upstairs and get my iPad and bring it back downstairs to show them.

  ‘I put the TRKLite tag on Mum’s bag,’ I say, but they look puzzled. I bring up the location map with the red dot, showing exactly where Mum is. She’s not even in Paris! She’s in a place called Luc-sur-Mer. I can even see the street she’s on. I show it to them.