by Neil Cross
Fearing for their continued existence, Eloise rested her chin on the driver’s headrest, close to Robert’s ear, and suggested to him that she navigate.
Robert said: ‘I can’t let you do that.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘I’d have to tell you where we were going.’
‘Oh,’ said Eloise. ‘For goodness sake.’
She turned to the rear and rolled her eyes. But she found no succour there. Lenny’s expression implied that Robert’s objection was quite sensible.
‘But we’re going to die,’ she said.
She suggested to Robert that he divide the journey into stages: then she could navigate, leg by leg, without needing to know their eventual destination. Robert said he would think about it. While he was thinking about it, he almost ploughed headlong into an oncoming Honda Civic.
Later, when he felt able to meet her gaze, he glanced in the rear-view and said: ‘OK. Good idea.’
With the vehicle still in motion, Eloise grabbed her bag and scrambled over to the front seats. She spread the map on the dashboard. Driver and navigator shared a family pack of lemon bon-bons. By virtue of her position, she had authority over the stereo. She put on some Mozart. Lenny hated Mozart. He was a Wagner man, if anything.
Late in the afternoon, they arrived at Chinon, a medieval village set beneath the ruins of a long-destroyed chateau, through which tourists now roamed. Robert had reserved big, noisy rooms in the Hotel du Point du Jour, on the quai Jeanne d’Arc. Shepherd opened his window and stared at the street below. He remembered taking school coach trips to France. The unique disquietude of attempting to exert command over forty adolescents on foreign soil.
In the morning, he rose early and took a walk. He was the last of them to arrive at breakfast: Lenny was folding and stuffing whole buttered croissants into his mouth and Eloise was sipping bitter coffee while reading about the town in a tourist pamphlet, copies of which were scattered liberally over the hotel. Robert had arrived shortly before Shepherd. He was untucked and downcast. The previous day had taken its toll on him.
Lenny passed him a basket of warm rolls, complete with little packets of butter and jam.
‘Eat,’ he said.
Robert rubbed his belly and swallowed a belch.
‘I don’t eat breakfast.’
Lenny waggled the bowl. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Eat.’
‘He won’t shut up until you do,’ Eloise told him, so Robert gave up and sat down to join them. They made further room for Shepherd at the small table: they squeezed elbow to elbow, ripping rolls and spreading butter with blunt knives; slurping and spilling orange juice and coffee.
Shepherd was happy.
The autumn made the countryside mournful and strange, but Robert seemed more relaxed at the wheel, and (having survived the previous day) his passengers were more at ease about being driven on the wrong side of foreign country roads by someone who had not been eligible to vote at the last general election. Robert described a slow, circuitous route, descending on their unknown objective in a loose spiral. More than once, Shepherd noticed minor landmarks—certain signposts and crossroads—they had already passed, coming in a different direction.
Nobody else commented on this. He didn’t mention it to Lenny who, despite his supposed internationalism, was not overjoyed to be in France anyway. It was too full of the French, whose proximity made him nervous. The deeper they got into the country, the more sullenly he crouched on the back seat.
About midday, they ate lunch at a Chinese restaurant tucked away on a small-town backstreet. Lenny found a tobacconist and bought the International Guardian. They didn’t stock his brand of rolling tobacco, so he folded himself up on the rearmost corner seat and blew Marlboro Light smoke out of the window, into the vehicle’s slipstream.
Their destination proved to be Bourges, in the centre of the country.
Robert took a while finding a place to park the van: when he had, Shepherd fretted about leaving the luggage so they spent another twenty-five minutes finding and then parking outside the hotel. Robert checked in on their behalf, leaving their baggage piled alongside the concierge’s desk. Then they followed him on foot into the town’s medieval vieille ville, where half-timbered houses and gothic turrets crowded the winding cobbled roads like a mouthful of bad teeth.
Shepherd wanted a sense of history. Such places never felt haunted to him. He couldn’t feel the taint and discoloration of hundreds of years. The Bourges vieille ville might have been constructed from fibreglass ten years previously. Yet still the sight of a Bakelite telephone or a ration book under a glass case in a provincial museum could stupefy him with the awareness of unspooling time.
Robert took them to a café on the rue des Beaux Arts. The afternoon shadows were long and there was a bite in the air, but they took an outside table nevertheless, in view of the cathedral of Saint-Etienne. Out of earshot, Robert wandered up and down the pavement, nodding and talking into a mobile phone. Then he replaced the mobile in his pocket and joined them at the table.
Lenny ordered a Pernod, the others beer. They sat and waited. There seemed little to say.
They were on their second drink and beginning to warm up, when a shadow fell across the table. Shepherd looked up.
The girl might have been a phantom in indigo denim and suede Converse.
Robert jumped to his feet. He and the thin young woman hugged for a long time. Then he introduced Caroline Holloway to Eloise, Lenny and Shepherd in turn. She moved to set her small rucksack on the table: Robert pushed aside empty beer glasses and Lenny’s ashtray, making room to accommodate it. Then he found her a chair. Caroline sat and removed her sunglasses. Her eyes looked bruised.
She asked if anyone minded and lit a Marlboro Light before anyone could say yes.
They waited.
With an edge of impatience, Shepherd said: ‘Would you excuse us?’
As one, the others apologized and stood. They tried to gather their things with too much haste, dropping coins and wallets and phones and cigarettes. Shepherd watched the girl from the corner of his eye. She looked at them as if they were a poorly rehearsed, importunate street theatre company.
When they had gone, he said: ‘I’m sorry about that.’
She shrugged. She seemed younger than her years, which he knew to be twenty-one. It was as if she had retreated to childhood. She was skinny. He hoped she was eating properly although he suspected she was not.
He asked Caroline if she would like a drink. She ordered a coffee. When it arrived she held the warm cup in her hands like a candle. Shepherd felt he had made no contact with her. He set aside his half-drunk lager and explained at length why he was there.
He said: ‘I truly believe him to be innocent.’
She laughed once, bitterly.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Right.’
He disregarded her affected bitterness.
He said: ‘The last few months must have been terrible.’
She crossed her legs and jigged her ankle.
‘Yes.’
He wanted to place his hand over hers, checked himself. Instead he rested his big palm flat on the table.
He said: ‘Now I’m here, I don’t know what to say.’
‘Are you a reporter?’
‘You know I’m not.’
‘Then why are you here?’
‘I told you. To help.’
‘How?’
‘I want to find him.’
‘You can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘No one can find him. He can’t be found.’
‘There’s nobody who can’t be found. But I do need your help to find him.’
‘I don’t know where he is.’
‘I know what it’s like,’ Shepherd said, ‘to be far from home.’
She looked at the table.
‘I don’t understand what you want.’
‘To help your dad.’
‘He’s gone,’ she said.
‘I can bring him back.’
‘No, you can’t. Not if he doesn’t want to come home.’
‘Of course he wants to come home.’
‘You don’t even know him.’
‘True.’
‘Then why should you bother?’
He shrugged and could not answer.
Because I want to go home, too.
‘Are you really the man on the phone? The psychic?’
‘Yes.’
She pressed one nostril closed and sniffed through the other.
‘What’s that all about, then?’
‘I wish I knew. I really do.’
He smiled sadly; his beard split along the middle like a coconut.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘I know this must sound mad. It sounds mad to me, when I say it. But look at Robert. He trusts me—and he only wants the best for you.’
She stirred the coffee and poured in some milk. She watched the revolution of a spiral galaxy.
She said: ‘Robert just wants to believe you can help. He’s desperate to get things back as they were.’
‘Is that such a bad thing to want?’
She said: ‘I can’t believe I’m even having this conversation.’
‘Nor can I.’
‘Look,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you mean well.’
She dropped two rough cubes of sugar into the cup; hesitated; added a third.
‘One for dad,’ she said, just loud enough for him to hear.
Shepherd raised an eyebrow.
‘He’s got this really sweet tooth,’ said Caroline.
Shepherd smiled again, gently, as at a pleasant memory.
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘He used to embarrass me in restaurants,’ she said. ‘On purpose. When I was younger. You know. He’d skip the main course altogether and just order something from the dessert menu. And for dessert he’d order another dessert. Just to wind me up.’
Shepherd put his head on one side.
‘Do you look like him?’
‘I don’t know. I think I take after him. I’m much more like him than mum.’
‘How is your mother?’
It was the wrong question and he knew it.
She narrowed her eyes.
‘How do you expect?’
He wanted to apologize. He didn’t know how, without losing her further.
She took a gulp from the coffee, set down the cup it in its swimming saucer.
He said: ‘Please don’t go.’
‘Really,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t even be talking to you.’
‘I want to help him,’ said Shepherd.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘You can’t.’
She slipped a few francs under her saucer, slung the small rucksack over her shoulder and walked away. It would have been easy for him to follow her, but he chose not to. She walked slowly, as if cradling something broken, and she turned the corner like a wandering ghost and was gone.
Shepherd got the bill, left a few coins in a saucer, then went for a walk. Their cash was running low, so he found an ATM and withdrew 3,000 francs. He found a small bookshop and browsed for a few minutes. His French was not good, and the English Language section was restricted to best-selling titles he was already familiar with: A Year in Provence, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Chocolat, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. He flicked through a couple without interest. Then he broke the spine and bent the covers of some Jeffrey Archer paperbacks.
He ambled back to the café. The others were waiting for him inside. He grabbed a chair and sat by Eloise.
‘No go,’ he said.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Never mind.’
‘I did warn you,’ said Robert.
Lenny made a dismissive hand gesture and lit a cigarette.
‘I don’t know what I was thinking,’ said Shepherd.
Robert peeled off early, but the rest of them stayed in the café until late. They emerged into the night drunk and morose, their thoughts full of solitude and murder. Lenny had spent a good deal of the evening trying to convince Shepherd to take a detour on the way home. He wanted to visit Rennes Le Chateau in the Languedoc. He told Shepherd about a mysterious priest called Saunière, and a fabulous buried treasure. And the tomb of Jesus Christ.
Shepherd agreed it would be interesting to find the tomb of Jesus Christ, but he was currently too tired. He suggested they come back in the spring, which seemed to keep Lenny happy enough.
The hotel reception was oak-panelled and lit with electric candles. A vested concierge stood behind a long wooden counter. There were numbered pigeon holes where he kept messages and room keys on big plastic fobs.
Lenny and Eloise planned to visit the bar and then perhaps a club. Shepherd couldn’t face the prospect and rode the clanking old lift to the third floor. His luggage was waiting at the foot of his bed.
He went through the usual hotel ritual: checking the bathroom, the wardrobes, the bedsprings. He took the remote control from on top of the TV and found BBC World, alternating it with CNN, MTV and a frenetic Spanish gameshow in which contestants and presenter were permanently, and fascinatingly, on the edge of outright panic.
He called room service and ordered an omelette and a bottle of Burgundy. He dined and drank alone. Then, without unpacking or undressing, he fell asleep on the bed.
He woke with the rising sun. He had a crick in his neck and a foul, gummy mouth. Experience suggested he had been snoring. He knew he snored like a buffalo.
His overnight bag contained a ripped Sainsbury’s carrier bag into which he had forced his dirty laundry. He had one clean shirt left and a single change of underwear. He showered with a hungover sense of shame.
He was dressed and ready for breakfast by 7 a.m. He took the lift to reception and went for a walk. The town was coming to life. He bought a French newspaper and a litre of mineral water, which he had drained and discarded within a minute or two. The air smelled different. It was the smallest indices of cultural difference, the familiar and half familiar, that most accentuated his sense of foreignness.
He returned to the hotel at 7.30. He was the first guest in the small, rather baroque restaurant. He folded the newspaper in half, laid it on the white linen and tried to decipher the text while shovelling food into his mouth with his left hand. He paused only to dab at the corner of his mouth with a crisp napkin. (Morsels of food often became entangled in his facial hair, something about which he was becoming somewhat neurotic: eating, he was forever dabbing and rubbing at his mouth in a manner that may itself have been distasteful to some.) Slowly, the restaurant filled with other guests. He was joined by a German family, a pair of elderly Americans and a couple of solitary diners who kept their eyes lowered to minimize unwanted social contact.
Just before 8, Robert walked into the restaurant and pulled up a chair.
Shepherd looked at him.
He said: ‘What happened to you?’
Robert was unshaved. It was not so much that that he had not showered, although clearly he had not. He smelled like somebody who (like Shepherd) had slept in their clothes, but who (unlike Shepherd) hadn’t changed them when he woke up.
Robert ran his palm over his bristly jaw.
He said: ‘I was with Caroline.’
Shepherd nodded.
‘I thought so.’
He poured Robert a coffee.
‘She gave me something.’
‘Milk?’
‘No. She told me not to show it to you under any circumstances.’
Shepherd brushed crumbs from the table and closed the newspaper.
‘Then why are you telling me?’
‘Beca
use I think she wants you to see it—but she didn’t want to say so.’
Shepherd pressed his palms together.
He chose not to deliberate on the ethics of encouraging Robert directly to contravene an unambiguous request from a young, vulnerable woman who trusted him alone of all people left in the world.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Just—you know. The way she acted and that.’
‘And how did she act?’
‘Like she wanted to believe you could help, but she couldn’t bring herself to. She kept asking all these questions about you—’
‘Like what?’
‘Like, did I think you were just—’
‘What? A loony?’
‘Well, yeah. Pretty much. And what did you really want with her dad?’
‘And what did you say?’
‘That I didn’t know.’
‘Didn’t know what? That I wasn’t a loony, or what I really wanted with her dad?’
‘Well. Both, really.’
Shepherd scratched his jaw and twirled a curl of beard round his index finger.
‘And what do you think?’
Robert picked up a knife. He held it close to his eye, examined each of its planes, exploring his distorted reflection. Then he lay the knife on the table again, adjusting its position until it aligned at ninety degrees to the table’s edge.
‘I just want things back as they were,’ he said. He reached into his back pocket and handed Shepherd a much creased sheet of A4 paper. The lines along which it had been folded into eighths were almost translucent.
Shepherd forced himself to hesitate, then took the paper from Robert’s hand. It was the printout of an email.
dear caroline
i did not do this terribl thing i did not kill that girl or hurt her
i am all right please put this behind you if you can
you can do anything you want dont let this stupid mess stop you. do your college work it will all be ok in the end im sure
please look after your nonny grace she always loved you more than anyone when you were young you played in her fur coat you thought it was an island do you remember
Dad xxxxxx
Shepherd read it three times.
Without looking up, he said: ‘May I keep this?’
