by Peter May
“What about Irina?”
“What about her?”
“Who’ll be keeping an eye on her funeral?”
“Lieutenant Cabrel.”
Braque said. “I wouldn’t have thought it very likely that Georgy Vetrov would turn up at either.”
“Well, no.” Faubert stood up. “Particularly since you seem to have lost him.”
Braque bristled at the implication that she was somehow responsible for mislaying their prime suspect.
“If he has made it back to Russia, then the likelihood is that we’ll never see him again.” He paused. “But here’s the thing . . .” He picked up a manila folder and held it out to her. “Forensic examination of Vetrov’s computer.” She opened it as he spoke. “Deleted emails recovered from the hard drive.”
She ran her eye down the list, then stopped suddenly. Three from the bottom was an email from “well wisher.” It was titled “Something you should know.” Almost the same email that was sent to Niamh Macfarlane. “Irina is having an affair with a Scottish textile supplier called Ruairidh Macfarlane. Why don’t you ask her about it?”
She looked up to find Faubert watching her intently. “Someone sent this email, Braque, intent on mischief, or malice, or both. Now perhaps it did provoke Vetrov into planting that car bomb and killing them both. But we have absolutely no proof of that. All we know is that he has vanished. He didn’t send this email to himself. Nor, it would be safe to assume, the one to Madame Macfarlane. So there is someone else out there who can most definitely help us with our enquiries.” He opened another folder and lifted out an electronic airline ticket, before dropping it on the desk in front of her. “Which is why I want you to be at the funeral.”
Clarity dawned suddenly on Braque. “That’s why the remains were released so early.”
“The only reason. We had to rush through bone and tissue matching. Damage was so extreme that DNA comparison wasn’t always possible. If we’d waited, the whole thing would have gone cold. Sometimes, a simple blood test was good enough to tell us which parts were male, which parts female. The rest, the slush, whatever, got washed down the pathologist’s drain, disposed of along with the bits that couldn’t be matched.”
“Jesus, boss!” Braque was shocked.
Faubert waved her shock aside with a dismissive hand. “This is a very high-profile case, Lieutenant. People upstairs want a high-profile resolution. And fast.” He drew a deep breath, as if inhaling smoke, and looked at her critically. “And why you?” He shook his head. “I’m asking myself the same question. But you are the only detective in the department with the level of English required for an assignment like this. So you get to go to sunny Stornoway.”
He rounded his desk, feeling in his jacket pocket for his cigarette packet. Evidently dealing with Braque had brought on nicotine cravings.
“We’ve already been in touch with Police Scotland. They’ve been briefed, and a local officer on the island will be allocated to look after you. Find out everything you can about the couple. Friends, relationships. Enemies.”
“She’ll recognize me.”
“Well why shouldn’t she? You’re not going there undercover. You’ll need to talk to her, too.” He brushed a hand across each shoulder and clouds of fine skin filled the air. Then he looked at his watch. “You’d better hurry. You’ve got less than three hours to get yourself out to Charles de Gaulle.”
Braque watched her fingers shaking as they punched out Madeleine’s number on her phone. The chatter of keyboards and voices filled the detectives’ office, along with the aroma of freshly brewed coffee. Braque’s panic shut it all out.
Madeleine’s voice sounded feeble. “Oui, allô?” The reason she had been unable to pick up the twins that morning was what she claimed to be the onset of la grippe, although Braque was sure it was more likely to be a simple cold than the flu. Madeleine had a habit of dramatizing things.
“Maddie, I’ve got a bit of an emergency. They’re sending me to Scotland for a few days and I need someone to take the girls.”
“I’m fine. Thanks for asking.” Madeleine’s tone suggested that she wasn’t being entirely flippant.
“Oh, I’m sorry, my poor darling. How are you?”
“Terrible, now that you ask.”
Even before she pressed the question, Braque knew what the answer would be. “I don’t suppose . . .”
“Sylvie, it’s out of the question. I can’t even take care of Patsy, never mind the twins. Yves is having to pick her up from school. It’s going to be a few days before I’m up and about again.”
Braque exhausted all other possibilities before resorting, finally, to calling her ex. It simply wasn’t an option going back to Faubert to tell him she couldn’t go to Scotland because she was unable to find a babysitter.
Gilles answered the phone with a sigh, caller ID betraying her identity in advance. “What is it now, Sylvie?”
“Gilles, I need a huge favour.”
“You always do.”
She ignored his tone. “I’m being sent abroad on a case. Just for a few days. But I can’t get anyone to take the girls.”
There was a long silence.
“Gilles?”
“You know, we should never have had children. You’re not fit to be a mother.”
“We, Gilles. That’s the salient word here. We had children. It’s a shared responsibility.”
“Except that you have custody and I only get to see them when it suits you.”
“I have to work!”
“Bloody hell, so do I! The difference is that I’ve got a partner, speaking of shared responsibility. You don’t. And you can’t cope, can you? It’s not even about money. It’s the job, the hours you work. The same things that made you a bad partner making you a bad mother.”
“I love my girls. And they love me.”
“They do. But they never get to see you. You’re never there. You’re always letting them down.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Not fair on them, no. Listen, girl, you were the one that fought for custody. You were the one that didn’t want them spending time with Lise. Scared that she was going to steal them away from you. Well, if you can’t live up to your obligations as a mother, then we really are going to have to revisit the whole question of custody.”
Braque contained her emotions with difficulty. “Are you going to take them or not?”
“Of course I’ll bloody take them! But when you get back, Sylvie, we’re going to have to talk. This cannot go on. The girls need a mother, not a babysitter. A home, not a crêche.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Balanish sat at the mouth of the river, overlooking the sea loch, and with easy passage from the harbour out to the ocean. Hills rose on three sides and it nestled in the valley where it was protected from the worst of the weather that the Atlantic could muster.
The Macfarlane croft was accessed from the turn-off just before the bridge, and sat halfway up the hill. It fell away on a long, gentle slope to the shore. Ruairidh’s father still kept a handful of sheep, but they had long ago stopped growing anything other than a few potatoes on a patch they cultivated at the side of the house.
The old croft house, now providing offices for Ranish Tweed, had been built next to the ruins of the original blackhouse halfway down the hill at the end of a steep pitted track. The new house sat just below the road at the top of the hill, commanding spectacular views over the loch, as well as the village below.
Niamh pulled her Jeep in alongside the Macfarlanes’ Audi A3. It was not a vehicle that could ever have negotiated the track across the moor to Taigh ’an Fiosaich. But beyond the initial tour of the house that Ruairidh had given them when he drove them out himself in the Jeep, the Macfarlanes had never been to visit.
As she walked around the granite-chipped walls of the house, Niamh felt the full fresh blast of a stiffening wind and noticed that Seonag’s red SUV was not outside the office further down the hill. She knocked on
the back door and opened it into the kitchen.
Donald was sitting at the kitchen table eating toast and watching the news on a small TV set placed on top of the fridge. He seemed startled by her arrival, and then embarrassed.
“Hi,” he said, turning off the television and getting hurriedly to his feet. “Mum, Dad,” he called through the open door into the hall, “that’s Niamh.” Then he shuffled awkwardly. “Everything okay?”
Niamh shrugged. “As okay as anything can be in the circumstances.”
Mr. Macfarlane came in first, wiping shaving foam from his neck with a towel that he then hung over the back of a chair. He looked gaunt, dark semicircles below his eyes. “Aw, Niamh,” he said, and gave her the warmest of hugs. “I’m so sorry, my love. It’s the most awful thing to have happened. Donna’s been inconsolable.”
Donna appeared at the door. Niamh had never been able to bring herself to call her mother-in-law anything other than Mrs. Macfarlane. She might have been inconsolable, but she stood now with a face like gneiss. Whatever grieving was going on inside was not visible on the exterior. She said, “Seonag told us you were coming.” A pause. “It might have been nice if you had told us yourself.”
Niamh stiffened. “I didn’t want to disturb you on the sabbath. But I did tell Donald that I would be here today.” She glanced at Donald and he blushed to the roots of his ginger hair. Niamh had little doubt that he had told them just that. But Mrs. Macfarlane revelled in being contrary. Niamh said, “I didn’t see Seonag’s car down by the office.”
“She’s been and gone,” Mr. Macfarlane said. “Off to collect some finished cloth from the mill at Shawbost.”
Niamh nodded. “We need to talk about funeral arrangements.” It sounded so blunt and businesslike, but she had no idea how else to say it.
“You can leave that to us,” Mrs. Macfarlane said. “I think it’s down to the family to organize the funeral.”
Niamh felt anger colour her grief. But she retained control. “As his wife, and next of kin, I am his family.” She saw Mrs. Macfarlane bristle. “But I do think we ought to agree on the details together.” The last thing she wanted was to fall out with Ruairidh’s parents.
“Aye.” Mr. Macfarlane nodded his approval, but his wife was not to be so easily mollified.
“Was he really having an affair with some Russian fashion designer?” she demanded, as if it might all somehow be Niamh’s fault.
“I have no idea. It’s what they’re saying.”
A puff of contempt blew from between puckered lips. “I think if my husband was having an affair with a Russian fashion designer I would have known about it.”
Niamh glanced at an awkward Mr. Macfarlane, who didn’t know where to look. Niamh wanted to say, If your husband was having an affair with anyone, Mrs. Macfarlane, who could blame him? But she bit back the retort. Instead she said, “Whether or not Ruairidh was having an affair is not something I’m going to discuss with you, or anyone else.”
“What about Ranish, then?” she said coldly.
“What about it?”
“We need to discuss the future of the company.”
And finally Niamh lost patience. “For God’s sake! I’m here to talk about burying your son. Not some business venture. Frankly, right now I don’t give a damn about the future of Ranish. I don’t know how it even finds a place in your thoughts.”
For the first time, Mrs. Macfarlane appeared chastened and at a loss for words.
Mr. Macfarlane said, “Donald tells us you’ve brought the body back with you.”
“Yes.”
“Where’s it being kept?”
“It’s in the boot of the car, Mr. Macfarlane.” And she saw the shock on both their faces, glancing then at Donald, who blushed again. She realized there were things he had clearly felt unable to tell them. She said quickly, “I phoned the funeral director in Stornoway first thing this morning to make an appointment. We should probably all go together.”
The cardboard box with its plastic shipping straps sat on the table in front of them. No one knew quite what to say. The awful realization that this was all that was left of her son had reduced Donna Macfarlane to tearful silence.
The funeral director, Alasdair Macrae, stood with his back to the window, looking at it thoughtfully. Here was a man who had seen and dealt with all manner of death, all degrees of grief. A dapper, soft-spoken man with sympathetic blue eyes and the smudge of a sandy moustache on his upper lip. Coffins in racks rose from floor to ceiling against one wall. And through the window behind him Niamh saw a line of refuse bins pushed against the wall. One blue, two black with coloured lids. For recycling the refuse. Just as here, on the inside, they recycled death.
Mr. Macrae had already removed and examined the shipping papers, and now he took a knife to cut the strapping and lift the coffin for still-borns from inside its box. He picked it up, almost as if weighing it, and said, “Come through to the back.”
Niamh and Donald and his parents trooped along a corridor with a shiny linoleum floor into a workshop at the rear of the building. A large clear plastic fanlight let daylight through into the workshop where they had once made the coffins on site. Old workbenches were pushed against painted breeze-block walls, and two coffins stood, lengthwise, on trestles in the middle of the floor. The funeral director removed the lid from one to reveal that beneath its veneer the coffin was constructed of biodegradable MDF.
“I’ll line the interior as I normally would,” he said, “and place pillows at the head of it. We have to do things properly.” He laid the box of Ruairidh’s remains in the middle of the coffin and looked around for a couple of cardboard boxes to brace it at either end. “I’ll construct something like this to hold it in place, so it doesn’t slide about when it’s being carried by the bearers. I’ll make it look nice, of course. Even if nobody sees it.”
Niamh put her hand to her mouth and bit down hard along the length of her forefinger. This was almost too much to bear. The dreadful banality that came in the aftermath of death. Everything practical for the dispatch of the body following the departure of life. And yet it all had to be gone through, step by painful step. The road to closure. The consignment of a lover to eternity.
Outside the rain had begun to fall, swept in across the Barvas Moor from the west coast. Stornoway was a dull town in the rain. Figures huddled in coats and hats, bent over against the wind. Umbrellas were rare, and never lasted more than a few minutes. They could hear the plaintive cries of seagulls circling the inner harbour below.
It was possible to pass the funeral parlour in this residential back street without noticing. The only indication being discreet gold lettering painted on a small square of window. A*MACRAE FUNERAL DIRECTORS. Barely two doors along stood the Body & Sole beauty parlour. Opposite, the Associated Presbyterian Church. This was a street, it seemed, that catered for all aspects of life and death.
The funeral was set for Wednesday at the cemetery at Dalmore Beach, the irony of which was not lost on any of them. Two more days, and all that was left of Ruairidh would be dispatched to the earth for good.
Inside, Mrs. Macfarlane had said, “The coffin should be available at the house for mourners to pay their last respects.” And Mr. Macrae had promised to deliver it to the croft at Balanish by that evening.
Now, as they stood outside in the rain, she said, “I’ll arrange things with the minister.” And although Niamh had wanted to keep control of the process, she was almost relieved to pass on the baton. It had been a long and painful journey, and she was not at all sure she had the strength to see it through to the end.
By late afternoon the wind had blown the rain away, and gathered in strength. From the clifftops at Cellar Head, Niamh felt buffeted by it. Far out across the Minch she saw the rain still falling, like a mist obliterating the swell of the sea and the mainland beyond. The ocean thrashed white against black rocks two hundred feet below, and she wondered how it might feel simply to step off into the void, spreading
her arms like a bird and falling to oblivion. No more pain, no more grief, no more missing Ruairidh, or contemplating the life that lay ahead without him. But she did not have the courage for that.
Half a mile further along the coast, she could see the house they had made together standing proud and defiant on the promontory, and beyond it the ruined house and church built by Iain Fiosaich. A hundred years from now, she wondered, what would remain of their home? Would it vanish without trace like Ruairidh and Niamh themselves? Would anyone remember them, as folk today still remembered Iain Fiosaich and his wealthy wife from New York?
In the gully below, on a rocky shelf cut by nature into the face of the cliff, Fiosaich had built his first home, balanced somewhere between life and death, a precarious if spectacular place to live. But he had abandoned it soon enough, and when Ruairidh and Niamh arrived to build their own home, all that remained of it were the scattered stones of the walls and foundations. Over time, and on countless sabbaths beyond the disapproving glare of the Church, they had built a tiny stone bothy in its place, a refuge for the walkers and hikers who made the pilgrimage out to see the house that Fiosaich had built.
From where she stood Niamh could just see it, with its roof of stone slabs in overlapping layers set upon the wooden structure below, walls of stone hewn from the cliffs, like camouflage, making it difficult to spot if you didn’t know it was there.
It was here that she and Ruairidh had opened the urn containing Róisín’s ashes, to let the wind take them where it would. Nearly eight years ago now.
When she had fallen pregnant, Ranish was in its first flush of success, and her initial thoughts had turned to abortion. How, she had wondered, could a baby possibly fit into the lives they were making for themselves? Working ten or twelve hours a day. Frequent trips abroad or to the mainland. Ruairidh would have carried on as before. Seonag, and no doubt Ruairidh’s mother, would have taken greater control of the company. Leaving Niamh with a primary role as mother and babysitter, and a back seat in the forward progress of Ranish Tweed.
