by Scott, Manda
‘Laurence?’ So much light. He is blind. A great hoofing kick to his gut and he cannot breathe. He is dying.
‘Laurence?’ A punch on his shoulder. Punching a bruise. Hurts. Go away. ‘Laurence. Get up, man. She’s hit.’
Jesus.
He can rise. He does rise. He was lying and now he is standing, swaying. ‘Theo?’ Dear God, please not Theo too.
‘Not Theo. Julie.’
There is fire. A great deal of fire. By its light, he sees that Patrick is in front of him, wild haired, and red down the side of his face. ‘Patrick, you’re hit. Sutherland – sorry.’ Not to call him Patrick. Too familiar.
‘A scratch. I’m fine. It’s Julie. And Theo.’
‘Theo?’
She is by the river, a huddled shape in torn green silk, shimmering in the flame-light. Her blonde hair is short, as if the ends have been severed with a blowtorch. Her face has a red welt down it bigger than Patrick’s. Her clothes are filthy.
‘Larry?’ Her voice … she sounds five again, just fallen from the elm in the park at Ridgemount on an August afternoon. He runs to her, as he did then, reaches her, wraps his arms around her shoulders.
‘Theo, don’t look.’ Above all else, it matters now that Theo must never see the mess that is Julie Hetherington. She did not take a direct hit: they would all be dead were it so, but a fluke, a piece of flying masonry, has stripped the skin from her face, crushed her skull, stolen her life. He could pretend it isn’t her, but for the sheen of raven hair and the pearls that lie blood-red in the firelight. And Theo, who will not let go. Too late, then. She has seen it.
He stands up. ‘Theo, we’re taking you home.’
She’s on her knees again, picking up Julie’s hand. It’s warm, still soft, almost alive. ‘Make her better, Larry. Wake her up.’
He glances at Patrick, who is weeping, a thing he never thought to see. Patrick’s the doctor, he’s supposed to be good with blood and death. He mouths, What do we do?
Patrick takes her other arm. ‘Theo, you have to come home.’
‘I won’t leave her. I can’t.’
‘You must. There might be another plane. We have to get to safety. We’ll pass the college. I’ll talk to the Master. We’ll have her taken care of, but we have to go home now. Right now.’
He levers her fingers off Julie’s hand and they clamp on to his arms, claw-sharp and white.
‘She can’t. Larry, she can’t leave me now. We were going to …’
‘I know. I’m so sorry. Come on.’ He picks her up, bodily, cradles her like a child. ‘Let me take you home.’
Uncle Charles’s house on Devonshire Road is unscathed. Just one plane, just one stick, but the fires are big and the fire engines are out, and the police are everywhere, running. Nobody stops Laurence. He carries Theo all the way home, as if she weighs nothing.
Patrick, the trained medic, clears the way, and at the house he puts up the blackout, lights a fire in the grate, finds and pours the brandy, and an unopened bottle of phenobarbitone tablets that he got after France and carries with him, but doesn’t use, all while Laurence holds Theo.
He sets her on her feet but he can’t make her sit. She won’t drink. She is, as far as he can tell, blind, although he thinks she is seeing things, which is different and, tonight, not unusual.
Patrick takes her hand and presses it round the brandy. ‘Theo, drink this.’
Her gaze comes back to Laurence, and she is not blind. She says, ‘Julie?’
‘She’s dead, Theo. Julie’s dead.’
‘Oh, God.’ She stands for a moment, her gaze unfocused, and then topples forward out of his grasp.
Neither of them is quite ready. They catch her between them, awkwardly. Her hands trail on the floor, bounce over the threshold as they carry her out of the living room and up the stairs. ‘Left. Here. This is her room.’
It smells musty now, and damp. There is only one, pitiful bulb. By its light, her skin is the colour of putty. Her eyes are fixed open, staring. The bed is cold.
Laurence feels uniquely helpless. ‘You’re the medic – what do we do?’
Patrick is taking her pulse, all his attention inward. Laying her hand back on the bed, he says, ‘Keep her warm, give her company, don’t expect her to be the same ever again. I’ll make us some tea and fill some hot water bottles.’
He leaves, and presently returns with four hot water bottles wrapped in blankets. When he returns a second time, he brings a tray of tea and biscuits. Laurence slides down the wall to sit with his legs straight out in front of him. After another check on Theodora’s pulse, a feel of her brow, a lift of her eyelid, Patrick comes to sit against the adjacent wall. Their feet meet, making a perfect perpendicular.
Laurence hugs his mug to his breastbone. In his mind is an indelible sequence of blonde head and brunette; the smiles and the grief; the dancing, the laughter; the love.
As if he had spoken aloud, Patrick says, ‘Theo’s strong, she’ll manage. And I imagine there’ll be enough of those present who will understand if she’s more than usually upset.’
‘How long have you known?’
‘About Theo and Julie? Until tonight I wasn’t sure. I just knew your cousin wasn’t interested in me, however much I might want her to be – and I did, rather more than I was prepared to admit earlier today. One is used, of course, to pangs of unrequited … what have you, although I can’t remember an occasion when it was quite so inconvenient. I imagine you know the feeling?’
A half-glance in the dark, a half-smile to go with it that slips straight into Laurence’s heart and out again. He feels dizzy, but not necessarily badly so. ‘One grows used to it.’
‘I’ll take your word on that.’ Sutherland hooks his fingers together, turns his palms out so that all the knuckles crack in a teeth-aching ripple of sound. ‘So now there will be two Vaughan-Thomases who have had their hearts ripped out by this bloody war. Do you suppose your uncle, the Brigadier, will want to use this to his advantage, too?’
‘He’d better not.’
‘I’m not sure you or I have the power to stop him. But we can do whatever’s possible to help her when she wakes.’
‘If she’ll let us.’
‘Some things, a man can do without asking permission.’
There’s an edge in his voice that causes Laurence to turn, slowly. ‘Did you persuade my uncle not to send me into the field? Was that your idea?’
‘Emphatically not. But when it was obvious where things were going, I took the liberty of suggesting that you could be usefully employed in the cipher department. Selfishly, I wanted a known face in the boiler room. You’ve no idea how much safer it feels when you’re in the field and you know that there’s someone at home who cares that what you send is going to get through even if you make the occasional mistake.’
Laurence shuts his eyes, presses his fingers to the closed lids, watches the bursts of pale violet that result. All things considered, he feels remarkably mellow.
‘Do you hate me?’ Patrick asks.
‘Hardly. I’d rather be in the field, but if I can’t do that, I’ll stay where I am. And I do, I swear, care that what you send gets through.’
‘Thank you.’
They sit a while, drink their tea, say nothing. A threshold is passed, some indefinable boundary and, Julie and the bomb notwithstanding, he feels peace such as he has not known since the flames engulfed him and he fell from the sky.
‘Laurence?’ Another threshold passed tonight. They’ve never been on first name terms before.
‘Mmmm?’
‘There’s something I need to tell you.’
It hits him low and hard. ‘You’re going to France?’
A shrug in the dark: that is all the answer he needs. ‘I got word this morning. I’ll leave at the full moon a week from now. I didn’t know how to tell you sooner. I’m sorry, truly.’
So the spark this morning was knowledge hidden, not hope destroyed. One day, he’ll read this man b
etter. He says, ‘It’s what you’ve wanted.’
‘I know. I also know that it would be so much safer to stay here, telling other people what to do.’
‘You’d go mad.’
‘I think I should.’
He dares to look then, at the coppery hair, at the face turned towards him in the yellowing light. There is no pain yet, just a kind of numbness that wraps his soul. It was like this in the Hurricane. One’s mind puts together the pieces, but one’s body takes time to catch up. He has a sense of grasping at smoke, of holding on to what was never there.
Sutherland says, ‘I’ll still need an ally in the boiler room.’
‘You shall always have one. You must know that.’
‘And I thought I might use Julie and Theo’s poem, if that’s not going to upset everyone too much.’
‘I think it’s a perfect, fitting and honourable epitaph.’
‘Your cousin might want it if she goes into the field.’
‘If you ever suggest that in her hearing—’
‘I won’t. I won’t. Nothing aloud. Just … she’d be good. And after this …’
‘The Brigadier won’t let it happen. The women in my family would kill him by slow inches if he did.’
‘I can imagine.’ They lapse to silence and, presently, amiably, they retire to the spare rooms. The next morning, they make a series of telephone calls to various aunts so that, by lunchtime, Theo is being cared for with a degree of sympathy that is entirely novel within Laurence’s experience of the family.
Soon after, they drive back to London.
No more bombs fall on Cambridge.
The week passes thick and slow as poured treacle, and yet, too soon, Laurence is standing on a dark airfield, a bright moon sneering at him, and Patrick Sutherland, swathed in grey, hunched over with a pack on his back and the parachute harness hobbling his knees, is shaking his hand.
‘I want to thank—’
‘Don’t. It’s fine. Just come back in one piece.’
‘I intend to. The poem code—’
‘Use it. I asked Theo. She says you are the best man to use it.’
‘Thank you. And her. I thought we could use it backwards as a bluff check. Just between you and me, if I’m in trouble, I’ll tell Jerry we use it backwards every second time. They’ll believe that kind of thing.’
‘Don’t. Patrick, just—’
‘And if you get that, I want you to find out where I am and drop a bloody big bomb on it. No heroics, are we clear? Promise me, Laurence.’
‘I promise.’ He hadn’t meant to move, but can’t stay still. They grip, arm to arm. ‘Merde alors, Sutherland.’
‘I’ll be back. You still owe me a bottle of Talisker.’ He turns at the tail. ‘Whatever Theo and Julie were doing down south, make sure it was worth it. For all our sakes.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ORLÉANS
Sunday, 18 March 2018
16.00
THE RAIN HAS resumed, with greater determination.
Picaut runs from the car to the studio and shelters from the downpour under the overhang outside the glass doors. Inside the big open-plan office, the conversation is all in minor keys. The dull-striped fish drift and sink. Nobody looks at her; she is the bringer of pain, but also, she belongs here now.
She wants to go upstairs, but she is not ready to face McKinney and his endless questions. If she smoked, this would be the time and place to do it. She leans back on the glass and stares at the old-fleece sky and makes a list of priorities.
Rollo thinks she should call Patrice. He is probably right. She hasn’t thought about him for days and now, just when she should be moving forward, this gate has opened, too, so that memories leak out when she is not expecting them.
They were lovers, once, twice, maybe three times; the exact details are lost in the fire. They parted kindly, she remembers that: there was no rancour. If he were someone else, they could have kept things going on Facebook, but he knows too much of how attention is mined and data harvested ever to go near social media, except to hack someone else’s account.
And now she needs him. And he might not be free.
Her face itches fiercely. She has Ingrid Sorensen’s ointment in her car, but cannot imagine using it.
Behind her, the door hisses open. She spins. Martin Gillard stands in the open space. He’s found a pale blue fleece to pull over his polo shirt that makes his hair look even blonder and takes ten years off his age. Sharply, she says, ‘Can I help you?’
‘I don’t know.’ He has a way of measuring her, head to foot and back again, that feels less dangerous than it probably is. ‘I was wondering the converse. Can I help you? You looked as if perhaps help would be welcome.’
Attack has always been Picaut’s preferred form of defence. She slides her hands in her pockets. ‘Why would Sophie Destivelle leave you a note?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Did you know her?’
‘We met on the day of the filming in Saint-Cybard. I went down to help out.’
‘To provide protection?’
Unsmiling, he says, ‘Maybe we could say I was there to make sure protection wasn’t needed.’ He looks around, glances back into the studio. ‘Which would have been laughable until we heard about Pierre Fayette. And JJ Crotteau. McKinney is …’ He makes a wobbling motion with his hands. ‘Maybe we could go upstairs?’
On the upper floor, Martha is making more coffee. Picaut takes the office she used earlier. Clinton McKinney follows her in, the very picture of agitation. ‘We heard about Pierre. And now JJ Crotteau is missing. This is growing out of hand.’
From Gillard, that would have been a condemnation. From McKinney, it sounds peevish. Picaut says, ‘We are working on it. And we have a lead. Sophie Destivelle left a note for Martin hidden inside an alarm clock in Pierre’s spare bedroom. So we know he was lying at least this far: she had been to his house and he must have known it.’
She lays the evidence bag on the desk so that the writing is uppermost. She is watching Martin, not the note, and so she sees the moment when his pupils flare, when the lines about his mouth grow tight.
‘That’s …’ He chews his lip. ‘It’s not from Sophie.’ His voice is tight. He raises his head, looks at Picaut. ‘May I open it?’
She carries spare blue gloves in her car. She passes him a pair. ‘Go ahead.’
He has a pocket knife that looks long enough to cut throats with. The scent of lavender rises thinly as he opens the bag and then slits open the tape to lay the note flat. They gather round to read the neat, bold hand:
McKinney says, ‘That’s Elodie!’
‘It can’t be,’ says Martin. ‘She was still in the air at four this morning.’
They speak in unison, even as Picaut is pulling out her phone and thumbing a speed dial. ‘Sylvie? Did you get Elodie off the flight from the US?’
‘She wasn’t on it.’
‘How could she not be? She texted Clinton McKinney to say she was leaving.’
‘I know. That’s why we didn’t bother to check the passenger manifest. I’m sorry. She wasn’t on board.’
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. ‘McKinney, I’ll need her address. Sylvie, drop whatever you’re doing and get to 531C Rue de Bourgogne. It’s not likely she’s gone home, but we have to check. Go now. Do nothing else.’
‘On my way.’
She hangs up. Gillard catches her hand. ‘I can help.’
She pulls free. ‘BlueSkies and the Foreign Legion? I think not. We’ll do this legally.’
‘But—’
‘Mr Gillard, you will not get in the way of this investigation. In fact, if you so much as leave this building without my written permission, I will issue a pan-European arrest warrant on your name and I don’t care who you’re really working for. Do I make myself clear?’
He takes a step back. Under his five o’clock shadow, he is pale. Hoarsely, he says, ‘I didn’t kill her.’
‘Who, Elodie?’
/>
‘Sophie. Elodie isn’t dead. She can’t be.’
And now he sounds like McKinney. ‘We don’t even know if she’s in the country. She might have missed her plane.’ She takes his shoulders, turns him round, presses him into a chair. ‘Sit.’ She calls Petit-Evard, who is back manning the incident room. ‘Get details of her hotel from Martha. Get onto the US, find out if she’s still there.’
‘On it.’
Gillard says, ‘You don’t believe she’s still there.’
‘I don’t believe anything until I have proof. We are looking for the proof. In the meantime, why don’t you do what her note says and check your email?’
‘Because she hasn’t sent anything.’ He throws his iPhone on the table, thumbs it open at Mail. ‘You can check the servers if you like. The last thing she sent was the text to McKinney last night. I got a copy.’
‘The one that said she was on the plane?’
‘It said she was about to board, yes.’
‘But this is Elodie’s handwriting?’
‘Definitely. And it’s timed at four twenty-seven this morning. At a point when she should have been halfway across the Atlantic.’
‘It’s not proof of anything. She could have written that days ago.’ Picaut looks down at her feet. ‘So, think it through. We don’t know when, we don’t know why, but we know that Elodie wrote this and someone planted it so we could find it and the bad guys couldn’t, which means—’
She looks up. ‘Check her drafts folder.’
McKinney heads across the corridor to Elodie’s office. He stalks back as the printer in his own office coughs to life and spits out a page. ‘Well done.’ He picks it up on the way past. ‘Only one. It’s for Gillard.’ He lays it on the table in front of Martin Gillard: personal, and yet private.
