Lovers and Liars Trilogy

by Sally Beauman

  When the door closed behind Gini, Pascal knew he could stop acting. He ran his hands through his hair. He began to pace the room. He told himself that he had at least managed to disguise it, but his agitation was intense. It had been a mistake to touch Gini. He should never have allowed himself to take her hand. He should not have lost his temper, that was the worst mistake: That made it all shortcircuit, brought the past roaring back. Three weeks in a war zone twelve years before, but the time gap was immaterial. He had wanted Gini now; he had wanted her then. The need was unchanged, still as sharp as ever. It was as immediate, as fierce. Yesterday, yesterday, he told himself; yesterday he’d felt safe. He’d been watching her carefully, right through the lunch with Nicholas Jenkins, and he’d been able to tell himself that he was, thank God, invulnerable now. This was a new Gini, a stranger: Of course he could work with this woman—when he looked at her he felt nothing at all.

  “The thing is,” Jenkins had said before Gini arrived, “she’s a good reporter. She’s quick, she’s got an instinct for leads. She does her homework. You could make a good team….” Pascal could hear the “but” coming; he waited. Jenkins grinned. “But—and it’s a big but—she can be difficult to work with. Like a lot of the ladies now…you know, the feminist thing.”

  Jenkins made a face. “Plus, she has one helluva chip on her shoulder about her father. Every fucking story she works on—it has to be bloody perfect. Daddy might read it, you see. Not that Daddy ever does, I suspect, because Daddy doesn’t give a damn by all accounts. But she can’t see that. She’s trying to prove something, and when she writes an article, she’s writing it for him.”

  “I’ve met her father.” Pascal gave Jenkins a quick glance, but there was no reaction. Again Jenkins grinned.

  “You have? Well then, you’ll know. Just stay off the subject of Sam Hunter and his fucking Pulitzer Prize. She’ll sing his praises for an entire evening. Believe me, I know.” A note of more personal resentment entered his voice as he made this remark. An overture rejected?

  “Anything else?” Pascal said.

  “Yes. She’s pushy. Sharp. Very good-looking, of course, but a bit short in the female charm department.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Put it this way. She can freeze a man’s balls at five paces. So don’t try making a pass.”

  “That’s okay.” Pascal gave him a cold look. “I’m here to work with her.”

  Jenkins laughed. “Pascal, please—so very PC. Just wait till you see her.” He sketched a female outline with his hands. “You may just change your mind.”

  And then Gini had come into the room; for a moment Pascal did not recognize her. He stared at this tall, thin young woman. She had a cool manner, a slightly combative air. He looked at her with dismay and with regret. He thought: My lovely Gini, and then he thought: All that beauty, and it’s gone.

  All through lunch he felt the same. He could see that she disliked Jenkins, and was containing her hostility for him with some difficulty—that was fine; his own reaction was much the same. But it was more than that. She gave off an almost palpable chill. She sat opposite him, and she never once smiled. It seemed to him, as time passed, that there was something false, something forced, in her behavior, as if she chose to act a part. Such pains to play the professional, to emphasize the information on Hawthorne she possessed. And then she couldn’t resist capping the remarks Pascal himself made, remarks to which she had listened with a tight set face.

  “Your turn, Gini, there’s plenty to add,” Jenkins had said.

  “There certainly is,” she’d replied with a dismissive glance in Pascal’s direction.

  It was a put-down, and it startled him. Watching her, he thought: How changed she is—she’s hard as nails.

  She showed no emotion as the story about Hawthorne emerged: There was no sign of shock, or sympathy, just that cold, alert, dispassionate appraisal. Pascal had watched it, listened to it, and it seemed to him deeply unfeminine. By the end of the lunch he was hideously depressed. He had known that Gini must be altered; it had not occurred to him she would become a woman he disliked.

  When they left the building, he was arguing with himself; he was telling himself that with dislike came relief. He could work with this woman: There was no entanglement here. The girl he remembered, he told himself, was dead. She was a ghost, a phantom, alive only in his memory; how strange. For twelve years he had been thinking about her, and now that he’d met her again, she did not exist

  And then something happened!—something he could not explain. A little magic, a trick of the light, some accidental angle of the head, some shadow that passed across her eyes. She had been silent in the half-dusk, staring toward the security gate across the yard, and then, suddenly, a transformation took place. Suddenly he could see the girl in the woman she had become: He glimpsed vulnerability beneath that new combative façade. He saw the ghost of the girl in the shape of her eyes, in the curve of her cheek. He rested his eyes on her face, and he saw again that she was lovely. Recognition flooded through him; a sudden and astonishing joy swept through him. Before he could stop himself, he greeted her. He said her name, in the old way, in the old accents. She swung around, startled, color ebbing from her cheeks, and before she could disguise it, it was there, still there, absolutely unaltered, that quality he had once loved, transparent in her face.

  Nothing he could define: Gravity, honesty, the courage to give joy—in the past he had used these poor terms, and others equally inexact to explain the inexplicable, what it was that he found delightful in her face. He had tried many times in Beirut to capture it on film. He had of course failed. Film could not capture her resonance any more than words could: Film froze the instant; it could not convey the touch of her hand, or the tone of her voice. This reductiveness became a challenge. Pascal told himself that the camera could and did convey so much: It could convey anger, happiness, desolation, vanity, grief. His determination to capture her on film became an obsession with him, a quest. “Stand here,” he would say. “Turn your face to the light. Look at me. Yes. Yes. That’s right….”

  But what he saw with his eyes was not what his lenses recorded. When he looked at the printed images, they were effective but dead. He kept them, nevertheless, and one of them in particular, just a small black and white shot, he kept still. Sitting in Gini’s London room now, he drew it out.

  He had taken it late one afternoon, close by the harbor. From a technical point of view it was a failure, he knew that. The light had been difficult, the shutter speed, possibly the aperture, incorrect. It was overexposed: Her face was given a translucent, hazy quality, the fault of reflected light. Even so, it was his favorite picture. Looking at it in the past, even looking at it now, he knew why he had kept it, why he had allowed it to become such a talisman. It was a young girl, just a girl, someone who had lied about her age and who was in fact much younger than he had realized when he took this shot. Her pale hair blew across her forehead; she was wearing only one earring and a loose, ordinary open-neck shirt. She had a wide-set, level-eyed gaze; she was half frowning, half smiling. It was an unremarkable picture in every way, it belied his professional gifts, it was, to most eyes, just a pretty girl, with the movement of waves behind her, a typical holiday snap—but to Pascal it was of crucial importance. To look at this was to look at his own truth, a truth that would never alter or erode. Whatever love meant, however much, later, he came to doubt its deceptions and seductions, there was still this. The day he took this picture, his camera had been lucky—for once it had captured joy. That still had the capacity to astonish him: He was so used, by then, to capturing death.

  It happened, he told himself now. It happened, and this picture had been his proof. Then, not half an hour earlier, he had seen far greater proof than this. He had seen the past as he remembered and hoped it had been: He had seen it written in Gini’s eyes and face. Let go, he thought; he had no further need for photographs.

  Bending, on a sudden impulse, he touch
ed the picture to the flames of the fire, and watched it catch. It burned instantly, in a flare of chemicals, and he brushed the telltale ashes underfoot. Rituals had their uses. To acknowledge once and for all that it had happened, but it was over, helped. Hearing movement from the room beyond, he went out to the kitchen and made coffee. Colleagues, friends, professionals, a working team: He said this to himself.

  “What we will do,” he announced cheerfully when Gini returned, “is go out for dinner, have some good red wine, some food, discuss the case.”

  He broke off. Gini was watching him quietly. She agreed, in a subdued way, that this was a good course.

  Pascal was careful; he kept up this note of camaraderie until, a while later, they were about to leave her apartment. Then, although he knew it was wise to leave the past interred, because that way it retained its perfection and its power, and it remained untainted by the mess he had made of the rest of his life, he asked a foolish question, one he had resolved not to ask.

  “That earring,” he said as they were moving toward the door. “You remember? The one we chose together? Did you keep it? Do you ever wear it?”

  A bad question. Gini crimsoned. “The earring? No—I don’t wear it. In fact, I don’t know if I still have it. The last time I moved apartments I lost it, I think.” She unlatched the chain on her door and held it open for her cat, who marched ahead of them, tail waving, intent on exploring the streets.

  “Come on, Pascal,” she said. “The reservation’s for eight. We’ll be late.”

  The restaurant Gini had chosen was a few blocks from her apartment; it was a small, unpretentious neighborhood place run by a local Italian family. Midweek, it was quiet and it served simple good food.

  They were given an alcove table to the rear of the restaurant. On either side of them there were photographs of Italian film actors and Italian soccer stars; the walls were painted white; the ceiling was strung with Chianti bottles and plastic vines. Pascal looked at these decorations and smiled.

  “A little Italy in North London. It’s nice, Gini.”

  “It’s quiet. The pasta’s good. We can talk.”

  When the waiter had brought them their spaghetti and salads, and poured the wine, Pascal drew out a notebook.

  “Now,” he said, “let’s make a start.”

  “List the possible leads? Sure.”

  “First there’s the courier company, obviously. We find out where the other two parcels went, and who sent them. That may indicate why they were sent, whether or not it’s a deliberate trail….”

  “Then there’s McMullen himself….” Gini leaned forward. “We ought to trace his family and his friends. Check out his past—Oxford, that army career. It could help us to find him.”

  “Jenkins gave me some contacts—names and phone numbers. He sent them with the tape….” Pascal tapped the notebook thoughtfully. “There’s that sister of his, for instance, the one mentioned on the tape. An ex-actress, apparently. It would be worth talking to her.”

  “She lives in London?”

  “Yes. Near Sloane Square. The parents are still alive too—apparently the father’s an art historian. Distinguished, according to Jenkins.”

  “London?”

  “No. Shropshire, unfortunately. Miles away—and I’d rather not approach them by phone. Not initially anyway. The sister first, then, and some of the friends.”

  “Are there many?”

  “Not according to Jenkins. McMullen seems to be something of a loner.”

  “And then there’s Hawthorne himself,” Gini said. “We could try checking out parts of McMullen’s story. After all, if Hawthorne requires these blondes every month, there must be some source of supply. How do you hire a blonde, Pascal?”

  Pascal shrugged. “Escort agencies, call-girl networks. Talk to the head porter in any top London hotel.”

  “Hawthorne’s not exactly likely to do that, is he?”

  “No, but the point is, it’s not difficult. If a man has the money, the women are available.”

  “I can’t believe he’d go through some agency.” Gini shook her head. “It’s too public, too risky.”

  “I would say so too. On the other hand, he would use a false name, obviously.”

  “But he’s so well known, Pascal. He’d be recognized.”

  “So? He wouldn’t be the first—or the last—famous man to hire call girls. You can buy discretion—and cooperation—if you know where to go.”

  “You sound very knowledgeable.”

  “I am very knowledgeable. I’ve been down this particular route before.”

  “Call girls? Prostitutes?”

  “Models. Massage parlors. Madames. Sure. Come on, Gini”—he tapped the notebook impatiently—“whom do you imagine I get leads from? Bank presidents? You know the kind of work I do.”

  “Yes. Yes. I know.” Gini looked away. There was a silence while Pascal continued to make notes, and she toyed with her food. She found she had lost her appetite. The question of Pascal’s present mode of working, of the kind of stories he now chose to cover lay between them, a territory she would have liked to explore. She would have liked to ask him why he had embarked on this work, and whether he saw it as a betrayal of himself and his gifts. But the question was one she instinctively shied away from. Let it wait until she had been working with him longer, until he perhaps had more reason to trust her than he did now. For he did not trust her now, not entirely; she could sense that. Perhaps he trusted no one. Any mention of his wife, his child, or his work, and the shutters came down.

  A shadow had passed across his face when he made his last remark about his sources. As he concentrated on his notes, however, that momentary darkening passed. She watched him as he jotted words and phrases, his concentration absolute. His dark hair, now graying a little at the temples, fell forward across his forehead. His eyes were lowered to the notebook in front of him. She could watch him with impunity, and with a secret pleasure too.

  Pascal, who was altered and unaltered. There was, on his left cheekbone, a tiny scar, the mark of some childhood accident, some fall. Once upon a time, lying in darkness while the music from the dance hall below moved the air in his room, she had traced that scar with her fingers as he slept beside her. She had read all the details of his face with her fingers, the dear geography of eyes, nose, chin, throat, hair. She could remember with absolute precision the particular scent of his skin, the shape and grip of his hands, the ways, words, and hows of physical intimacy. She could remember little shafts of detail: ways he moved, inflections he used. It pained her that these recollections were so sharp, for there was now, of course, one component missing, the component that gave vitality to all the rest. Once, when they looked at each other, there had been such interaction of the eyes. But then, lovers did not need words, because a glance spoke a better language.

  “Is something wrong?” Pascal looked up suddenly.

  “No. Nothing.” She snapped back to the lesser present. “Why?”

  “You looked sad, that’s all.”

  “Not sad, concentrated. I was just thinking about this story….” She gestured toward the waiter. “Shall we get some coffee?”

  He nodded, lit a cigarette.

  “We have one other lead,” she went on, speaking rapidly. “That piece of paper I found in McMullen’s apartment, we mustn’t forget that. It might mean something—and it might mean nothing at all.”

  She took out the scrap of paper as she said this and passed it across. Pascal frowned, holding it up to the candlelight. “Three sets of numbers. They’re not dates. They could be anything. A set of measurements, some combination…they could be old, or recent….”

  “They’re carefully written, Pascal.”

  “Even so. It could just be something someone jotted down. Then they needed a piece of paper to pad out that photograph frame, so they used this. It might not even be McMullen’s writing.”

  “That’s true.” Gini took the piece of paper back from him and sca
nned it. “It’s just…the way McMullen disappeared. Why contact Jenkins, then disappear?”

  “Something happened, obviously between the meeting when he delivered that tape and December twenty-first last year. Maybe he thought he was in danger.”

  “But then surely he’d want to make contact? The story was reaching a crucial stage. He was about to provide that assignation address. If he had to disappear for any reason, surely he’d try to make contact of some kind.”

  “Leave a trail, you mean? Possibly.” Pascal looked across at the paper. “But if that’s some kind of coded message, I can’t crack it, can you?”

  “No. I can’t. But then, codes aren’t my strong point. Never were. We could try the obvious things, I guess, substituting letters for numbers. Try that, Pascal.”

  “With the letter A as number one? Okay.” He scribbled in the notebook, then grinned. “Not too helpful. Look.” He passed the page to Gini. It now read like this:

  3 C

  6/2/6 F/B/F

  2/1/6 B/A/F

  “Gibberish. Damn.” Gini frowned. “Let’s try it with B as number one, or C. C is the third letter of the alphabet, maybe that’s what the number three at the top means…. Try that.”

  They tried this and other combinations for some time. None of the combinations produced anything resembling a message, not even a clear word.

  “Hopeless.” Pascal was the first to grow impatient. He pushed the paper to one side. “I think we’re wasting our time.”

  “One last try. Think, Pascal. It was the only scrap of writing in that whole flat. It was inside Lise Hawthorne’s photograph. That suggests something, surely?”

  “Maybe, maybe…” Pascal smiled. “I can see it’s tempting. Okay. Perhaps you missed something. Maybe you can’t make this work on its own. Maybe it has to be matched to something else. Tell me again how you found it.”