The French Girl(32)

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.”