CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Time passes. I can’t keep it or save it or mark it—the ribbon slips through my fingers regardless. And time shows that Tom is right, of course: the Dictaphone tape is cleaned up, but not all of it is audible. Crucially, not the part where Caro confessed to dumping roofies in my wine, if that confession truly happened at all, though it remains fixed in my memory. Despite the lack of confession, the police question Caro, and they even find her drug dealer (the unexpected casualty in all of this, as his is the only actual arrest); they leave no stone unturned. It is my repeated and most fervent wish that this investigation has completely annihilated any chances of Caro making partner this time round; surely, even more than the Severine investigation, it must be diverting her attention from that process? But in the face of the finest legal representation money can buy (Tom was right on that, too), the decision is made not to prosecute.
By that point, I am back at work—hollow cheeked but clear-eyed, with most of my cracks papered over. Paul did an admirable job of holding the Channing Associates fort in my absence by the remarkably sensible solution of promoting Julie to work alongside him and hiring a temporary secretary. Julie, it turns out, loves the role, and I can’t bring myself to demote her, so now I am up a head count with zero prospect of raising any new contracts given the impending tidal wave of gossip that is no doubt beginning to circulate. We are diligently working out the contracts we do have, but every time I talk with Paul I find myself imagining scales behind his eyes, weighing up the best time to jump. Still, I’m actually relieved to have Julie in place; the first few weeks back at work are incredibly exhausting, and I barely pull my weight. Neither of them quite understand what happened, though I suspect Tom may have told Paul more than I realize; anyway, in communications to clients Paul wisely blamed my hospitalization on an accidental blow to the head and left the rest well alone.
The Haft & Weil contract hasn’t been revoked, to my surprise. Paul picked it up in my absence, liaising with someone other than Caro due to the need for her to focus on the partnership selection process (official line only, I hope); I have made no move to regain control of it. Therefore it’s a complete surprise to find Gordon Farrow waiting by my office front door when I step outside one lunchtime to get a sandwich; I grind to a halt halfway down the steps.
“Hello,” he says diffidently when I make no sound. “I don’t suppose you expected to see me.”
“No,” I reply warily. “I didn’t.”
“Can I buy you a coffee?” It’s very much a question; he shows no expectation of a positive response. Perhaps that’s why I nod.
“There’s a café this way where we can get a sandwich, too, if you haven’t eaten.”
I glance at him as we walk along. He looks like he always does, a nondescript man in all respects. He must be appraising me, too, as he says, “I’m glad to see you looking so well. How do you feel?”
“Tired,” I say, yawning messily on cue. “Head injuries can do that, apparently.”
We find a table in the café and settle down, each of us hiding behind the menu. It’s not the same café as the one where Lara and I experienced the bird incident, but I still find myself glancing at the window and almost exclaim aloud when I see Severine sauntering by in her black shift dress. She turns her head and eyes me coolly, then continues down the pavement outside, away from the café. What does it mean, that she is back? Is she staying, or is this her version of good-bye? “I’m so pleased you agreed to meet with me,” Gordon says abruptly, putting down the menu. I drag my attention back to him, resisting the urge to crane my neck to see if she has really gone. “I wasn’t sure you would. I should have known you wouldn’t blame me for any . . . difficulties . . . between you and Caro—”
“Difficulties.” I put down my own menu. “Difficulties, Gordon? Is that the right word? She tried to kill me. She put so much Rohypnol in my drink that she damn near succeeded. So forgive me if I find the word difficulties a little too weak.”
“There is no evidence of that—” He tries to hold my gaze, but even his legendary steel is wavering.
“So I’m told. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. If you’d heard the tape—”
“I heard it.” He looks away.
“Who—” I start, but the waitress comes to take our order; she is a plump brunette continually smiling even as she speaks. I can’t imagine why she’s quite this happy at work. It’s jarring.
When she leaves I find Gordon appraising me again. “You’re angry with me,” he says mildly.
“Yes.”
“Because I stand by her? She’s my daughter; failing evidence to the contrary I have to believe her.” He explains this like it’s an intellectual discussion on the finer points of a legal draft.
“Do you have to?” I consider that. “Perhaps. I don’t know. What would you do if there was evidence but she claimed it was all fabricated?”
He shrugs, with a slight smile I don’t entirely understand.
“Anyway, that’s not why I’m angry with you.”
His control is superb. “Why, then?”
“Because I do blame you, for her behavior: you and your wife. You are partly responsible. How did she come to believe this kind of behavior is allowed? Where were the boundaries when she was growing up? You got divorced and then you felt guilty and you let her get away with murder and then, well, then getting away with murder wasn’t a metaphor anymore.” I stop and pick up my water glass, feeling oddly shaky after my savage words. I had no idea that was going to come out of my mouth. Is that how I really feel about it? Do I really blame him?
He looks at me sadly, saying nothing until the silence stretches out. I find myself holding my breath for a response. I shouldn’t care at all what Gordon thinks of me, but it’s clear I do. Finally he sighs. “I’m not sure I entirely agree with your position, but I do fully respect your right to say it. In truth there is very little you could say to make me feel any more wretched than I already do.” In that moment I can see through to the anguish in his eyes.
“Well,” I say, after a moment, “I’m sure it’s not as simple as all that.” He inclines his head, acknowledging my softening. The waitress has returned with our drinks, her smile in no way dimmed. Surely her cheeks must hurt?
“There is one thing I wanted to tell you before it becomes common knowledge,” Gordon says as he stirs milk into his coffee.
“Yes?”
“Caro has been suspended from Haft & Weil.”
My eyes fly to his face. He smiles a little ruefully at my shock. “Why?” I ask warily when he doesn’t add anything further.
He sips his coffee. “As I already mentioned, the police played me the tape. A French detective, it was; very bright chap, I thought.” I mentally cheer Modan as he shrugs. “Our firm can’t afford to ignore allegations of impropriety around the partnership process. I would have done the same with any employee, and Caro cannot be treated any differently.”
“You took it to the operating committee?” I must be round-eyed in shock.
“Yes. I was duty bound to.” This is arguably true, but still . . . his own daughter. I’m trying to wrap my head around the fact that he reported allegations against his own daughter to the operating committee of the firm. The integrity of that action is staggering. “Therefore we have been further investigating Darren Lucas’s case, and he has been entirely exonerated.”
“And Caro?”
“The evidence seems to be stacking up against her. She’s suspended pending the final results of the investigation.” He pauses, then says delicately, “She claims the evidence is fabricated. So I suppose I will find out the answer to your question in time.” I can’t help it; I start to laugh. After a beat he joins in with a half-hearted chuckle or two. So my most fervent wish is to be granted: Caro will not now be a partner at Haft & Weil, or any other legal firm for that matter. I can’t imagine how she will reconcile herself to that: for the first time in her life, there is a boundary she cannot bend or cross. And then it also occurs to me that a disgraced, struck-off lawyer is much less likely to be believed when attempting to spread scurrilous rumors . . . I try to imagine Caro in disgrace, stripped of her stellar career, robbed of her brittle artifice, and disturbingly find myself imagining a defenseless baby bird.
“It’s not actually in the least bit funny,” Gordon says sadly when the black humor has subsided.
“Yes,” I say, soberly, both Severine and the baby bird image still stuck in my mind. “I know.”
We are lying, Tom and I, propped on our sides in the darkness of Tom’s bedroom; he has blackout blinds, a concept he liked in Boston and brought back to London, and the darkness is a complete absence of light. It’s a comfort to me now; I think of it like a physical place—a retreat we like to run to where we are safely cocooned and can just be. Tom’s hand is idly running up and down the length of my arm from shoulder to elbow. The promise that always lurked in his hugs is borne out in the bedroom: he touches with just the right amount of pressure, firm and deliberate but never too much. He makes me giddy and he makes me safe.
I know I have to tell him; I can’t think of a way to do it except to just do it.
“I see Severine,” I blurt out. Tom’s hand halts, a short hitch, then continues on its route, at a slower pace. “I mean, obviously I don’t really see her; this isn’t The Sixth Sense . . . But I see her. Ever since you told me they found her in the well. It used to be her bones sometimes, her skull . . . but now it’s mostly her. She went away, for a bit, after I hit my head, but she’s back again.” Tom doesn’t say anything. “Do you . . . do you think I’m crazy?”
“Kind of,” he says, but I can hear the smile in his voice.
“I take it you don’t see Theo then.”
“No.” He’s quiet for a moment, his hand arrested in its trail; my skin misses it, the bones within miss it. “It’s more like . . . sometimes I see his absence. Once I notice it, it’s hard to get past it: a space where he should be.” I can hear rather than see a wry smile on his face. “Maybe I don’t have your imagination to fill the gap.”
I think about that as we lie there, the darkness folding around us, holding us safe. Am I filling the gap? Though Severine was never a part of my world, or my friendships. It doesn’t seem to quite fit, as an explanation, but perhaps there’s something to it.
“Does she talk?” asks Tom suddenly.
“No.” Except perhaps for one vital occasion. “Silently enigmatic.”
He laughs softly. “I imagine she would have liked that description. Sounds like you’ve re-created her perfectly.” His hand takes up its trail again. “It’s strange, though. I mean, it’s not like you two were friends or anything—”
“Hardly.”
“—so it’s strange your mind should fix on her, of all people.”
“I’m sure a shrink would have a field day with it all.” I say it with a small laugh, but I’m really waiting for his response. This, after all, is the crux of this conversation.
He hesitates, unusually awkward for Tom, feeling his way. “Do you want to speak to someone about it?”
I hadn’t imagined that question. I consider it. “Not really. It’s not normal, exactly, but it’s not a problem, either. I’ve become . . . accustomed to it.” I’ve become accustomed to her, I should say. I like to think she has become accustomed to me also.
Tom falls silent, thinking. The trail is moving up and down along my hip now, from just under my breast sweeping over the swell of my hip bone and along the line of my thigh. “Then I don’t see a problem.” I smile to myself. Bless him for his pragmatism. “Is she here now?”
“No,” I say, though in truth it’s too dark to tell.
“Good.” He starts to follow his trailing hand with his lips. “I’d rather not have an audience . . .”
And so the lovely ribbon of time keeps slipping through my fingers.
We see Lara and Alain, we see Seb and Alina; as a group we don’t talk of the week in France and we don’t talk of Caro. For a while it’s an awkward subject we’re all avoiding, a stain across our memories that we slide our eyes away from—we were all guilty of suspecting one another; we are all tarred—but life moves on, and in time we have so much else to talk about; and after all, no one sees Caro. I see Severine, but I know I’m the only one. From time to time I notice that Tom doesn’t see Theo.
Tom and I talk about France; we talk about Severine. We both dread the day someone across the Channel takes it in their mind to trawl through cold cases and decides to reopen this one. I know there will never be enough evidence to convict Caro, so all that can happen is months of distress and no satisfactory outcome. Not that this current outcome is satisfactory, though it is an outcome—ultimately Darren Lucas went to the police and Caro was prosecuted for fraud, though her sentence was suspended. It’s hardly a murder conviction or even an attempted murder conviction, but she can never practice law again, she can never be a partner at her father’s firm and Seb has cut her off completely. A messy, oblique sort of justice, if it’s justice at all, though I think for her it’s somehow fitting. I don’t know what she is doing now, or where she is doing it. I don’t think of the baby bird.
And then one day I do see Caro, in an airport lounge. I’m hunched over my phone in an armchair, trying to connect to the airport Wi-Fi, and she sits next to me. “Hello, Kate,” she says; my head lifts, and there she is.
“Caro.” I’m completely floored; her name slips out before I can stop myself from saying anything at all. She’s dressed in casual clothes, jeans and a blazer, typically stylish. She looks older, of course, and just as thin. Her hair is a brighter color than I remember.
“I’m sure you don’t want to talk to me—” she begins. High color is climbing her cheeks.
“I don’t. Leave.”
“I just—” But I’ve grabbed my bag and I’m out of the armchair before the rest of her sentence can reach me. I cannot allow myself to expend one iota more of mental energy on Caro. I don’t even tell Tom I saw her; I refuse to waste the seconds it would take. I never see Caro again.
Severine, though, I do see. If I’d ever entertained the notion that once the case was “solved” she would depart—turn and walk happily (not happily, exactly, not Severine, but at least not reluctantly) into a bright light, perhaps, or evaporate slowly like an early-morning mist that fades with the rising of the sun—well, if I’d ever expected that, it’s not to be. Severine still hovers.
Perhaps, one might say, not as much as before. It’s instructive to note what piques her interest. On the whole, family life seems to bore her; she was nowhere to be seen for the birth of our children. She’s much more likely to make an appearance in my workplace, or any kind of event I’m dreading: the parents’ socials at the twins’ school, for example. Tom reckons it’s a reaction to stress, to which I reply with a certain vehemence that the twins’ birth was about as stressful as anything I can imagine, and where the hell was she then? He just shakes his head, amused, and says, “Not that sort of stress.”
Tom is often amused now. Gently and also to the point of genuine laughter. We both laugh more; I can’t remember a point in my life up until now when I have laughed this often. It’s the twins, especially at the age they are now. They are literal, no room for grays; they don’t understand irony or cynicism. They strip that away from us and instead extract an exaggerated politeness and a readiness to laugh; they make us into the people we want them to see—they make us kinder. More tired, certainly, but kinder.
Channing Associates makes me tired, too. We are seven now, with larger offices, and champagne glasses hidden in the back of one cupboard in case we have new contracts to toast. Paul is smugly satisfied that he stayed, but no less bipolar. Gordon Farrow has become the firm’s informal mentor, and I meet him at least monthly for lunch or dinner, and often more. We don’t talk of Caro. Sometimes I wonder if he is a father figure to me now, in which case am I a daughter figure? Though I should know by now not to assume symmetry in relationships.
And so the lovely ribbon of time keeps slipping through my fingers, and through it all, a walnut brown girl with impossibly slender limbs saunters by, her dark, unreflective eyes taking everything in but revealing nothing. I never do see her smile.