CHAPTER NINE
By Monday Severine has found an additional medium through which to make her presence felt: print. The case is making enough waves in France to be worthy of several column inches in the European news section of the Telegraph. There’s a political angle I don’t fully comprehend, not being an expert on French politics over the last ten years; another unsatisfactory gap in my knowledge base. They have a picture of Severine—of course they do; she is nothing if not photogenic, especially in a bikini as in the chosen photo. She lounges unsmiling in black and white on a sunbed, looking at the camera with no trace of concern about being framed on all sides by the words that attempt to capture her life and death and the chaos left by both.
Channing Associates is in the press, too. Paul comes into the office, a perfect storm of tailored suit, energy and enthusiasm, waving a copy of Legal Week. He pulls up his calendar as I take the paper off him to read it. It’s a good article. Apparently despite being newly established, “Channing Associates, headed up by Kate Channing, is comprised of experienced hands who are fleet of foot” and are “the team to watch.”
“I reckon I can lobby Cadfields again on the back of this publicity,” Paul is saying. “They kind of left the door open. I’ll try them, and then there’s Wintersons, and I heard about an in-house general counsel role at BP from a mate at . . .” He babbles away. The Haft & Weil win has given him renewed vigor beyond all expectation; I wonder if he’s further up the bipolar curve than most.
I put Legal Week down on my desk, next to Severine. One article where I’m mentioned by name; one where I’m simply one of the “English holidaymakers staying in the neighboring farmhouse” at the time, who are “helping the police with their inquiries.” It’s not an even match. Severine continues to gaze from her sun lounger, and I can think of nothing else.
I need a lawyer. Which ought to be funny given I’m a legal headhunter, except that it’s not funny at all. Because I need a lawyer.
Modan again.
He’s waiting for me when I emerge from Pret, clutching my coffee and my lunch in a bag. I stop short in the doorway when I spot him lounging against a lamppost. “Bonjour,” he greets me, inclining his head.
I sigh and start walking. “Bonjour. I’m afraid I don’t have any time for you today.” And I don’t have a lawyer yet.
He falls in beside me and shrugs. “Surely a few minutes.”
“Not really, I’m afraid.”
“Perhaps I talk and you listen. While you are eating your lunch, non?”
I’m walking back to my office, but it occurs to me that he will very likely follow me all the way there. I definitely do not want Paul and Julie exposed to the charming Alain Modan and the no-doubt innocent-sounding questions that he would produce. I stop walking and look at him. He cocks his head and smiles his most beguiling smile, the deep lines in his long face curving to frame his mouth.
“I’ll listen. That’s it.” I take a detour toward a nearby courtyard with a bench that will be in the sun, if there’s any sun; it’s warm enough today to justify eating outside. The bench is empty; I navigate to it carefully given that cobblestones, a cup of coffee and kitten heels are a difficult mix, but I make it there unscathed and sit at one end, with my coffee placed precariously on the arm of the bench. Modan sits also, at the far end, spreading his arms along the back of the bench. The sun makes an unexpected appearance, and he tips his head back to enjoy it, eyes closed. Today he’s wearing a pale pink shirt under his suit, with a silver gray tie; very Eurotrash, but it works for him. I wonder if he looks at my clothes in abject horror: this dress is probably two years old. At least I’m wearing designer shoes.
“Alors,” he says, pulling himself upright into business mode. I’m unpackaging my chicken wrap and pay him no heed. “So, I talk. As promised. We have the answer on when the well was filled in.” He looks at me expectantly. I remember that I’m not supposed to know this and raise my eyebrows obligingly over my mouthful of wrap. “Saturday the sixteenth.”
Having a mouthful is useful; it gives me time to think. About what to say, how to say it; about whether to say anything at all. “You said Friday before. Now you say Saturday,” I comment mildly when I’m done chewing. “What makes you so sure you’ve got it right this time?”
He inclines his head: a silent touché. “The papers say Friday, but Monsieur Casteau—the younger one—tells me it was Saturday. He remembers that his girlfriend arrived in town unexpectedly, so they went off to . . .” He spreads his hands eloquently. “He came back on Saturday to finish the job.” He looks at me again as if waiting for a comment, but when he sees I have another mouthful he goes on, with a wry twist to his lips. “He wrote down Friday on the paperwork because of the contract: there was a bonus if the work was finished on time. On Friday. You see?”
I do see why Modan believes Monsieur Casteau the younger; even I believe this, and I’m hearing it secondhand. “Does Theo’s dad plan to sue him for return of the bonus?” I ask, tongue in cheek.
Modan’s lips quirk. “I don’t believe he considers it a high priority.” He gives this last word the French pronunciation: priorité.
I take another mouthful and chew thoughtfully. Saturday. The day we left. Modan tips his head back to enjoy another brief appearance of the sun.
I try to nudge the conversation forward when I have finally swallowed. “What time on Saturday?”
He’s been waiting for this; for him this is all a game that he’s very, very good at. He tips his head forward again and blinks a few times while his eyes adjust. “He doesn’t remember exactly, but he thinks perhaps lunchtime.”
Lunchtime. Severine would have had plenty of time to return from the bus depot and then . . . what? Get herself killed by person or persons unknown and stuffed in a well? My breath catches: it’s not a game; I don’t want to play. I put down my suddenly very unappetizing chicken wrap. “I presume you’ve considered Monsieur Casteau,” I say in a rush. “Younger or elder.”
“Bien sûr. Of course.” He purses his lips and moves his head this way and that as if trying to look at something from different angles. “They do not seem to . . . fit.”
“And neither do the rest of us.” I can’t hide my frustration. He gives an equivocal one-shoulder shrug. I stand up to dump my leftovers in a nearby bin, annoyed with myself as well as Modan. I have no lawyer. I shouldn’t be here. I pick up my handbag and my as-yet untouched coffee.
Modan watches me gather myself together without getting up, his long arms still laid across the back of the bench, the very picture of relaxed elegance. “Stranger danger,” he muses. “That is what you say, n’est-ce pas? That is what you teach les enfants at school? For murder, it is most of the time . . . bof, most of the time it is rubbish. Most of the time the murderer is in the home, or the street, or the place of work. Someone nearby. Someone known.”
“Thanks for that,” I say sweetly. “On that cheery note, I must get back to work to spend the rest of the day in fear of my colleagues and neighbors.”
“Ha!” He seems genuinely amused by this; his long face is split by his smile. “Have a good afternoon.”
But I don’t have a good afternoon. I have a busy afternoon, even a productive afternoon; I have an afternoon that in the ordinary course of events would be a perfectly fine afternoon, but not in this world, not after these events. Not with the shadow of Modan looming over me and the ghost of Severine flitting through my office at will.
Caro calls; I get Julie to take a message. She’ll be calling about either Seb’s welcome dinner or to pump me for information—likely both; and I have no energy for either.
I meet Lara for a drink after work: investigation or no investigation, I can’t avoid my closest friend. I can’t remember ever deliberately keeping something from Lara. Seb cheated on me with Severine. The words beat around inside me, looking for an exit, but I force them down. Denied escape, they become a solid ever-present weight that sits in my stomach.
But Lara doesn’t notice anything amiss—she’s too busy keeping her own secrets. She doesn’t ask me if I’ve seen Modan; she doesn’t ask me anything about the case. She’s trying far too hard to avoid the subject. I wonder whether she’s seen him, or talked to him on the phone. I wonder whether they have put into action those desires whispered in an airport bar. The weight in my stomach grows heavier as we talk of all the things we usually talk of, which no longer matter at all.
“Oh, Caro called me,” she says suddenly, wrinkling her pretty nose in distaste. “She’s got that dinner she’s been planning for Seb arranged for Thursday.” She cocks her head and looks at me pleadingly. “Will you come? Please?”
Will I? I hadn’t intended to go, but now I think about it. “I suppose so.” I’m bound to run into Seb sooner or later; I may as well get it over with.
“Yay! It will be no fun without you, and Caro kind of forced me to say yes. She’ll probably put the full-court press on you, too, at some point. You know,” she muses, “much as I hate to admit it, it is nice of her to have arranged it all. I bet Seb will be really touched.” She takes a sip from her wine, then asks hesitantly, in an almost word-perfect repeat of Tom’s question on Saturday: “Do you still care? After all this time?”
I look at our half-drunk wineglasses, Lara’s with a distinct lipstick smudge on one side, mine with only the merest suggestion of a lip print. In my darkly introspective mood even that seems highly symbolic, a deliberate motif designed to illustrate that I move through life leaving barely a trace to show I was ever there. “I don’t know,” I reply at last. I think of Tom’s follow-up—why did you think you broke up?—and I see Seb’s eyes when he told me it was over; I see the way they slid away from mine. I thought that underneath it all he felt guilty, for a myriad of reasons but one particular being he was ashamed that for all his assertions that background didn’t matter, in the end he had to acknowledge that he wanted someone from his world, someone who fit. Now I have a different thesis about the source of that guilt, though not one I can share with Lara. “It’s hard to say. I haven’t actually seen him since—well, since he dumped me, actually.”
Lara’s eyes widen. “Really? Not once? How can that be?”
I shrug. “I guess I didn’t want to see him at first, and then Dad got ill so I was up in Yorkshire for a bit.” It was cancer. Pancreatic cancer. I pause, remembering the phone call from Mum, the hopelessness in her voice as she forced herself to utter the dreaded C-word, followed by the mad dash to get the very next train home. I cried silently for almost the entire three-hour journey, sitting alone in a quiet seat facing a luggage rack. By the time I got to the hospital I was ash white and out of tears. “Anyway, by the time I came back his bank had sent him off to Singapore or somewhere like that.”
“Hong Kong, I think. Tom and Caro went to visit.” She takes another sip of her wine, laying down another mark of her presence with an overlapping lipstick print. “Makes it kind of hard to find closure if you’ve never actually seen him since.” She uses her hands to hang an ironic set of quotation marks around “closure” and gives the word an American twang.
“Closure,” I repeat, mimicking her twang. “Closure.” I take a long swallow from my glass, then try the word again in my own accent, rolling it around my mouth. “Closure.” I shake my head. “Nope. Word has absolutely no meaning.”
She giggles. “I think you’re too British for the concept of closure.”
“Or too northern. We don’t grin and bear it; we just bear it and don’t bother with the grin.”
“We Scandies don’t bear it at all; we just off ourselves.”
We smile at each other, enjoying the connection and the levity, and the weight in my stomach lifts a little. It will be all right, I think. When all this is over, everything will be all right again.
The feeling lasts until I climb into a cab home to find Severine already in occupation. The sight of her is like a slap in the face, or a brutal thump back down to earth: it shocks the sense back into me. All right: what an appallingly trite sentiment. It won’t be all right, at least not for everyone; how could I have temporarily forgotten I’ve long stopped believing in guaranteed happy endings? There was a time with Seb where what I felt for him, what I thought he felt for me, was like a rising tide, buoying me up over all obstacles. The inevitable crash when the tide abruptly receded was shattering, all the more so because I should have known better, because I did know better. Oxford was an education in more ways than one: I learned that like sticks with like. Bright, outspoken girls from underprivileged backgrounds might be fun to hang out with, but they don’t ultimately make the inner sanctum of the Sebs of this world. Somehow, even knowing that, even in the face of all evidence to the contrary, I allowed myself to be fooled into believing our relationship would be different, that things would be all right.
I won’t be a fool again; I won’t allow it. I need a damn lawyer.
“Eight o’clock tonight,” says Caro emphatically down the phone on Thursday afternoon. Julie rang her earlier in the week to confirm my attendance, but it’s clear Caro isn’t taking any chances. “I know this is, well . . . difficult for you, but I won’t accept any last-minute excuses; after all, Borderello’s is hell to get a table at.” Her tone is carefully constructed to sound like a lighthearted tease mixed with sympathy, but Caro is not that kind of girl: she doesn’t gossip and sympathize and commiserate. She pokes and prods under the cover of witty repartee.
“Of course I’ll be there,” I say calmly. “I’m looking forward to it.” For a moment I entertain the fantasy of turning up with an adoring Adonis on my arm—who? where would he come from at such late notice?—but I’ll have to settle for Lara and Tom. Perhaps the Adonis trick would be too obvious anyway.
“It’ll be great to have the old gang back together,” she says brightly. “Like old times.” Old times. The thought makes me shudder. Caro’s old times must be very different from mine. I try to strip the irony from any potential response, but she’s already forging on: “That’s all I seem to be talking about these days, what with the investigation and everything. Modan can’t seem to stop with the questions, can he? Have you seen him, too?”
“Not really. He dropped by on Monday, but I was too busy to have more than five minutes for him.”
“I made the mistake of freeing up half an hour for him. I don’t know what for, really—all he wanted to talk about was who was sleeping with who, and whether anyone was sleeping with Severine.”
“Well, I certainly wasn’t,” I say flippantly. “Girls have never been my thing. What about you?”
She gives what may be a genuine laugh. “No, me neither. I’m boringly bourgeois that way. But seriously, I suppose it changes things a bit if someone was sleeping with her.”
“How so?” I ask, making my voice as uninterested as possible. Does she really know about Seb and Severine? Is she trying to find out if I know? Does she know that I know that she knows that . . .
“Motive, I suppose—crime of passion or some such thing. God, I sound like CSI.” She laughs it off. “It’s all a bit grubby, really, having a stranger like Modan poring eagerly through all our tangled love lives.” She switches gear audibly. “Anyway, tonight. Eight o’clock. Borderello’s.”
“See you there.”
I put down the phone, her words turning over in my head: our tangled love lives. I was with Seb. Lara was with Tom. Other than Seb’s infidelity, where lies the tangle? Come to that, Caro wasn’t with anyone: why would she say “our” love lives? I start to run the payroll software that I use to manage Julie’s and Paul’s salaries, but I’m too distracted to make sense of the process. Abruptly I shut down the program and grab my phone.
“Kate, hello.” Tom sounds harried.
“Bad time?” I glance at the clock: it’s ten to three. “Oh shit, sorry, it’s almost expiry time.” Foreign exchange options usually expire at three.
“Yup. Can I call you back after?”
“Sure.”
He pauses. “You okay?”
“Yes, fine. It’s nothing. Call me back later.” My voice sounds too bright, too forced.
“Okay.”
I put down my mobile and stare at it for a moment, then I shake myself and open the payroll software again with grim determination. It’s sufficiently alien that to make any progress I have to concentrate to the exclusion of anything else; it’s curiously calming. When my mobile finally rings I’m startled.
“Kate?” It’s Tom. The real world floods back in and temporarily robs me of breath. “Kate? Can you hear me?” he asks.
“Yes, sorry. I’m here.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yes . . . actually, no. Was Seb sleeping with anyone else?”
“What?” He’s genuinely taken aback. “Where’s this coming from?”
“It’s just something Caro said. I wondered . . .” I feel a cold sweat on my torso. It’s excruciatingly embarrassing to have to ask this. It’s embarrassing to even have to wonder it. In time I will feel anger at Seb for putting me in this position, but all I feel at the moment is shame.
“Hold on a moment, this sounds like something I shouldn’t be broadcasting over the trading floor. Let me get to my office.” There’s a pause and some muffled noises, then he comes back on the line. “Fire away.”
“It’s just . . . I’m probably getting the wrong end of the stick, but I wondered if Caro was sleeping with Seb.” I add as an afterthought, “Or you, actually.” Theo I don’t consider a real possibility.
“Me sleeping with Seb?” He sounds genuinely bewildered.
I can’t help but laugh. “No, with Caro, you idiot.”
“Hand on my heart, I can promise you I have never slept with either Seb or Caro. Nor do I have any wish to.” Humor warms his deep voice.
“And Seb? Seb with Caro, to be precise.”
His pause is significant. “I don’t think so,” he says finally. There’s no trace of the humor now. “I think . . . well, Caro has always had a thing for him. You must know that.”
I suppose he’s right; I’ve always known that. “And?”
“And nothing. I think that’s all it’s ever been, an unrequited thing. He kind of knew it, but I don’t think he ever went there. He never felt the same, and it would have been a disaster given how close all our families are if he were to screw her over.” Of course, it was fine to screw me over, with my unconnected, unimportant family . . . “At least, that’s my take,” he says at last, but I get the sense he’s still mulling something over.
“Would he have told you, do you think? I know you’re close, but he didn’t tell you about Severine . . .”
“True.” I hear him take a breath in then blow it out. “I don’t know,” he admits reluctantly. “Before you came along, then I’d have said yes, for sure, he would have told me anything. But after . . . I don’t know.” I want to ask what changed, but there’s no way to do it without sounding like I’m looking for some validation, some sign I was important in Seb’s life, and I refuse to be so pitiful in front of Tom. “Where are you going with this?”
“I don’t know. I just suddenly feel like . . . God, I don’t know. I don’t know what the hell was going on that week. Modan is asking questions, and I’m not even sure I can answer anything, because nothing is how I thought it was, and . . . and . . .” I’m suddenly aware I’m close to tears.
“Hey, whoa there,” Tom says softly down the line. “It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not.”
He’s silent for a moment. “No, it’s not, is it? Look, why don’t we meet before dinner tonight? Have a drink and talk all this through. I can get to Knightsbridge for around six. Okay?”
I take a deep, shuddering breath. “Yes. Okay. Thanks. Sorry about all this.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for. Oh—did you get a lawyer?”
“I’m meeting one tomorrow.”
“Good.” He sounds genuinely relieved. “See you at six.”
I put down the phone and rest my eye sockets in the heels of my hands for a moment. When I lift my head again I find Severine watching me. For once there’s no trace of hostility beneath her smooth exterior; she’s simply watching me.
“Haven’t you anywhere better to be?” I ask her. It’s the first time I’ve actually spoken to her; unsurprisingly she doesn’t answer, so I do it for her. “No, I don’t suppose you do, under the circumstances.”
Julie comes to the doorway, pushing her glasses back up her nose. “Did you need something?”
I shake my head, smiling brightly. “No, sorry, just talking to myself.”
She’s already moving back to her seat. “First sign of madness, you know,” she says over her shoulder. The thought had crossed my mind.