by Peter May
She sat for what felt like hours, but was probably only minutes, before she got up and wandered to the window. People were still eating and drinking and laughing down there. How she wished she were one of them. That things could just be back to how they were before. They had been through so much together, she and Ruairidh, and always come out the other side of it stronger. Or so she had thought.
She stiffened and felt the skin stinging across her scalp. Ruairidh had just emerged from the bar into the courtyard below, a glass of beer in his hand. He sat at an empty table and placed his beer on it, untouched. She watched as he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, before dropping his head briefly into his hands. When he raised it again, he sat back folding his arms and stretched his legs out, gazing at the fizzing amber liquid in his glass. But he made no attempt to drink it.
Niamh watched for a long time, aching inside. So many moments of magic, and madness, between them. So many memories. She was tempted to go down and join him. To say sorry for doubting him. To ask him what it was that had gone wrong and how they could put it right.
And then Irina stepped from the bar. Niamh saw her look around before spotting Ruairidh and walking towards him. She was shorter than Niamh, willow-thin, with long chestnut hair cut in a straight fringe that hung in a curtain over her eyes. Almond eyes, almost slanted. So dark they seemed to soak up all the light. Everything about her was feminine. The way she walked, the way she held her hands, so elegant with their long, slim fingers. The seductive, slightly hoarse quality of her voice. Niamh had only met her once, but she had made Niamh feel big and clumsy, which by any normal standards she was not. Tall, yes. Nearly five-eight, but certainly not overweight. Her long, slender legs had been the envy of all her friends at the Nicolson. And her thick-cut, shoulder-length wavy blonde hair gave her the air of a thirty-year-old, rather than the forty she had just turned this year. Still, she had felt oversized next to the petite Irina, and watched her now with a growing jealousy.
Ruairidh stood up when he saw her coming and kissed her on both cheeks. They exchanged a few earnest words and Niamh wished she could lip-read. Then they turned and walked out together into the bar, leaving his beer undrunk.
Niamh felt a sense of hopelessness wash over her. And then desperation. If she let him go now, let him walk out of the hotel with Irina Vetrov, she feared she would be letting him walk out of her life. For ever.
An impulse led her to snatch her Ranish Tweed jacket from the back of a chair, and her bag, and almost run across the room to the door. She was still pulling on the jacket as she hurried down the hall, turning right past tall arched windows that looked down on to the courtyard. She pressed the call button for the lift several times and was considering running down the stairs when suddenly it arrived. By the time she got to the lobby, Ruairidh and Irina had left the hotel. Through glass doors that gave on to the square, Niamh saw them getting into Irina’s car, a white A-Class Mercedes, its hazard lights flashing.
Niamh sprinted through the lobby, pausing breathlessly to let two sets of sliding doors open, before running out on to the pavement, assailed by a thousand city smells and sounds carried on cooling night breezes. The Mercedes was already accelerating away, past the lines of police vehicles, towards the traffic lights at the far end of the Place.
A classical-looking building on the block beyond the Crowne Plaza was clad in scaffolding, and simmered darkly behind mesh screening. Workmen’s trucks and a couple of skips lined up along the pavement in front of it, abandoned for the night.
Niamh ran out into the middle of the street, past a classic revolving Morris column, with its domed top, advertising a rerun of Le Fusible at the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens. Several armed police officers turned to look at her, suddenly alert. But she didn’t even see them. The brake lights of the Mercedes glowed red as it stopped at the lights beyond the workmen’s trucks, and the left indicator began to flash. Niamh glanced across the square, beyond the thirty-foot statue of Marianne picked out by symbolic red, white and blue spots, and thought that if she ran a diagonal across the slabs, she could reach the far end of the square in time to cut the car off before it was gone for good. If only the lights would stay red long enough.
She ran past the graffiti-covered red containers that lined the nearside of the pavement, sprinting beyond Marianne and the steps that led down to the Métro République. Off to her left she was only vaguely aware of the diners who sat out at green metal tables at the Café Fluctuat Nec Mergitur. Destroyed by fire early in 2015, it had been reopened, and renamed with the motto of Paris following the terrorist attacks later that same year. Tossed by the waves but never sunk. It was about to be tossed once more.
Niamh saw the lights change to green and the Mercedes start to turn left across the flow of traffic. And then she was blinded. A searing, burning light that obliterated all else, just a fraction of a second before the shockwave from the blast knocked her off her feet. As she hit the ground, sight returned. She saw glass flying from the broken windows of the Fluctuat Nec Mergitur, tables and chairs spinning away across the square. As she rolled over, the Mercedes was still in the air. Later she would remember it as being ten feet or more off the ground. But in fact it was probably no more than eighteen or twenty inches. Flaming debris showered down across the Place de la République as the car slammed back on to the road, a ball of flame.
While her sight had returned, her hearing had not. The tinnitus was deafening. Then somewhere beyond it she heard a voice screaming. It was some moments before she realized it was her own. She pulled herself to her knees but did not have the strength to stand up, supporting herself on her arms and transfixed by the blazing vehicle on the road. Somewhere in her peripheral vision, beyond awareness, she saw dark figures running in the night. Long, flickering shadows cast by the light of the burning car.
Screams still tore themselves from her throat. Repeated, hysterical bursts of them. Before she understood that it was his name she was shrieking at the night. She felt hands grasp her arms on either side, men in uniform and dark body armour lifting her to her feet. One of them was shouting at her. His lips were moving, but she couldn’t hear him. And then a woman moved into her field of vision. A woman with long dark hair cascading over shoulders draped in silk, a shawl wrapped around her above a pencil skirt and high heels. She flashed a wallet from her bag at the men who held Niamh. With the blaze behind her, Niamh couldn’t see the woman’s face. And yet somehow her voice cut through everything else. A commanding voice edged with concern.
Niamh felt tears burning tracks down her cheeks and stopped screaming to draw breath. Although she could now hear the words, she couldn’t understand them. She shook her head hopelessly. Then suddenly there was clarity. The woman was speaking English.
“You are English?”
She almost certainly only wanted to know that Niamh understood her. But Niamh had never been able to think of herself that way. “Scottish,” she said, her voice was hoarse already. Then she thought what an absurd distinction it was in a moment like this.
“You were running towards the car.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Ruairidh . . .” Just saying his name caused her throat to close and fresh tears to scald her face. She took a moment to find her breath again. “My husband.”
“Your husband was in the car?”
Niamh nodded vigorously. “And Irina.”
“Irina?”
“Vetrov. The fashion designer.” She found light now in the woman’s eyes. “They’re dead, aren’t they?”
The woman nodded.
Niamh broke down again. Sobs contracting in her chest, almost completely blocking the flow of air to her lungs. The woman put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Why were you running towards the car?” It was a refrain that would repeat itself often in the hours to come.
“They were . . .” In her shock and confusion she searched hopelessly for the right word. “Lovers.” She sucked in air between sobs.
“All this time and I never knew it.” She searched the light in the eyes that gazed at her, looking for . . . what? Sympathy? Reason? “Now I’ll never be able to ask him why.”
CHAPTER TWO
It seemed she had been sitting here for hours. And yet time itself had become somehow timeless. It might have been only minutes. But her memory of the time which had passed stretched back further than that.
The room was entirely naked. The floor was tiled, a dirty beige. The walls had been painted a pale yellow at some indeterminate point in the past, but had lost almost all colour now, scored and scratched and scrawled on by the endless procession of cops and criminals who had conducted their business here. A wooden-topped table was supported on tubular legs, scarred and stained by the years. Her folding wooden chair was hard and unforgiving. Two empty chairs stood opposite.
High up on the wall facing the door, a barred slit of a window opened on to the night lights of the city, almost lost in the fluorescent glare of the strip light on the ceiling. On the wall beyond the empty chairs, a wooden-framed window was blacked out, offering her only a mocking reflection of herself in its darkness. Someone, she was sure, was watching her from the other side of it.
Strangely she felt nothing, as if some narcotic drug had numbed her body and robbed her of her senses. She had expected to cry. But the tears wouldn’t come.
She gazed at her hands folded on the table in front of her. Hands that had touched him, stroked him, loved him. Hands he had held in his. And now they seemed lost, useless, dissociated.
She was almost startled when the door opened. A man of around fifty, with dyed black hair and a grey weary face, walked briskly into the room carrying a brown briefcase. He wore jeans that were a little too tight for him. His white shirt, tucked in at the waist, stretched across an oddly protuberant belly on an otherwise skinny body. The woman from the square followed him in. She had dispensed with the shawl, and her open-necked blouse revealed a hint of modest cleavage. Her pearl necklace, pencil skirt and high heels seemed distinctly inappropriate, as if she were on a romantic night out with a lover, instead of entering a police interview room. Niamh saw now that she was probably only a year or two younger than herself, soft shiny hair tumbling around a face that was unlikely to turn heads, but was not unattractive.
They sat in the two seats opposite Niamh, and the man dropped a modest folder on to the table in front of him. But he didn’t open it. He reached down and from his briefcase took out a small digital recorder which he placed beside it. A red light began winking when he pressed a button on one side.
Niamh smelled cigarettes off his clothes, and on the stale air that he drew from his lungs and breathed across the table at her. She jumped focus to the faded Défense de Fumer sticker on the wall behind him, then back to the orange nicotine stains on his fingers. As some kind of deflection from dwelling even for one moment on the events of earlier that night, she wondered if they made him stand and smoke outside in the cold and the rain these days. Long gone, the smoke-filled interview rooms of old.
Then awareness that he was speaking invaded her consciousness. “This is Lieutenant Sylvie Braque,” he said. “Of the Police Judiciaire. Brigade Criminelle.” His English was heavily accented. Niamh’s eyes strayed momentarily towards Braque then back again to the smoker. “I am Commandant Frédéric Martinez, of the SDAT.” He paused. “You know what that is?”
She shook her head.
“Sous-direction anti-terroriste. The Anti-Terrorism Sub-Directorate. Also of the Police Judiciaire.”
For the first time, Niamh was shaken out of her torpor. “Terrorism? You think this was a terrorist attack?”
“France is still on high alert, Madame, after recent events. Any such incident is regarded as a possible attentat.” He paused to draw breath, and Niamh wondered if he wished it were smoke he was sucking into his lungs. “However, there are several reasons why we are looking at other causes. Not least because the bomb blast was directed upwards, deliberately aimed at inflicting maximum damage to the occupants of the car.”
Niamh clenched her teeth to stop her jaw from trembling. Did he not understand that he was talking about her Ruairidh?
He appeared oblivious. “A terrorist bomb would have been designed for maximum carnage, sending shrapnel in every direction. In which case you would not have been sitting here tonight. Miraculously collateral damage has been minimal. No one else was killed.” He opened his folder now, and scanned the few pages it contained. “We have established that the vehicle did indeed belong to Irina Vetrov, and we have several witnesses who saw both her and your husband getting into it and driving off. What we don’t know is why someone put a bomb under it.” He raised his eyes towards Niamh, and the question was there in their opaque milky brown.
Niamh found her voice with difficulty. “I have no idea.”
He nodded and took out a pen. “Let’s get one or two details for the record, shall we? Your husband’s name was . . .” He hesitated. “Roo . . . Roooai . . .”
“It would be easier for you just to say Rory,” Niamh said. “It’s a Scots Gaelic name. That’s the English pronunciation.” How often had they been forced to trot out the same explanation over the years. For them both. “And in case you’re wondering, my name is pronounced Neave.” She spelled out both names.
Martinez gave up trying to follow her and scribbled down their phonetic representations. Then, “Macfarlane,” he said carefully. She nodded. “And what were you and . . . Rory . . . doing here in Paris?”
“We were attending Première Vision at the Parc des Expositions.”
He frowned. “Which is what?”
“It’s the world’s biggest international fabric fair, Commandant,” she said wearily. This all seemed so prosaic. Irrelevant. Ruairidh was dead. “Top fashion designers and clothing manufacturers from around the world come to Paris twice a year to buy the fabrics that will appear on the catwalks and in the stores the following season.”
“And why were you there?”
Niamh closed her eyes and tried to summon the will to find answers to the smoker’s questions. It was hard to think beyond the grief. “Ruairidh and I were not just life partners. We were business partners. A small weaving enterprise in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland called Ranish Tweed.”
“Like Harris Tweed?”
Niamh never ceased to be amazed by how many people had heard of Harris Tweed around the world. A fabric created by a handful of weavers in their own homes on a tiny archipelago off the extreme north-west of Europe. From somewhere she found the palest of smiles. “Like Harris Tweed. But different.”
CHAPTER THREE
The first time that Ruairidh spoke to me about Ranish it came completely out of the blue.
By then I had already succumbed to what seemed like the inevitable, although I had been resisting it for long enough. And I still don’t really know why I gave up my career in favour of home-making and motherhood. Except that somehow it was what had been expected of me all my life.
After university, I worked in Glasgow and London, then at Johnstons of Elgin. The Johnstons mill was based in Moray in the north-east of Scotland. It produced the most wonderful fabric, rich in cashmere, and it was there I found the job in sales and marketing that my entire education had been preparing me for. A job that allowed me to spread my wings for the first time—a lassie born and raised in the tiny village of Balanish on the west side of the Isle of Lewis chasing orders in places like Paris and Frankfurt and Milan.
I loved it.
But, then, I loved Ruairidh, too. And when he asked me to marry him I had no hesitation in giving up my precious job at Johnstons to return to the island of our birth and build the nest in which we would raise our children. It just seemed like the natural thing to do.
It would have been a different story had I known then that he would be unable to find work back on the island, and that I would spend weeks and months on my own restoring the old whitehouse on his parents’ croft. Like most Le
wis boys, he never wanted to move far from his mamaidh. His parents still lived in the new house at the top of the croft, a spit away from the whitehouse his paternal grandparents had built when finally they had abandoned their old blackhouse just before the war. It didn’t help that the Macfarlanes and I saw eye to eye over almost nothing. On the islands, history stays long in the memory. So I was spending much of my time at my parents’ house at the other end of the village.
They were pleased to have me back on the island, but Ruairidh was a taboo subject at home, as it had been for years. And so we never talked about him. When I first told them that we were getting married, there had been fights and tears and accusations of betrayal, before finally they announced that they would not be going to the wedding. I had feared as much, and rather than cause embarrassment, Ruairidh and I married in a registry office in Aberdeen with a couple of witnesses off the street.
I don’t think his parents ever forgave me.
Ruairidh was due home that week. Just for a few days, he had said. But I had been counting off the hours, and then the minutes. I missed him. I was hungry for him. We had spent so little time together since the wedding, and not unsurprisingly there was still no sign of a baby. But the news he brought with him caught me completely off guard.
I suppose that the tweed had always been in my blood. There was an old Hattersley loom lying gathering dust in the blackhouse behind our croft. My father had put a new tin roof on the building, rust-red now, and used it as a storehouse. His father had been a weaver most of his days, working for a pittance for the mills in Stornoway, spending hours in that dark, draughty old building weaving his cloth. When I played there as a child, sometimes I imagined I could hear the distant echo of his shuttles flying back and forth across the warp. In those days you could hardly walk through any village on the island without hearing the clack, clack of the shuttles coming from sheds and garages.
