The French Girl(68)
It’s true. We move from meeting to meeting, mirroring our candidates and clients: if they want a drink, we drink; if they want to eat, we eat. We are a service industry, and the service we provide is confidence. Through the medium of hot beverages and sustenance, every meeting has to whisper, We’re like you, we understand your problems, your needs, we feel your pain and we can solve it. But how can the clients be confident I can solve their problems when they think I can’t solve my own?
My phone rings before I’ve crossed the road: Lara. “Hi, hon—”
“Can you meet for a coffee? Right now?” There’s a note of blind panic threaded through her blunt question; it dredges up the unease always waiting inside me, curled quietly in the depths of my stomach. Lara is not melodramatic, or given to wild fits of runaway imagination; those things take too much energy, and Lara would freely admit she’s a little too lazy for that.
“What’s up?”
“I just had a late lunch with Alain; I’ll tell you in person. Can you meet?”
I glance at my watch, running through the afternoon’s schedule in my head. “Yes. I’ll jump in a cab toward you. Usual place in ten minutes?”
“Yes.” In the uncharacteristic terseness of her reply I can hear her native accent begging for release. I start looking for a cab immediately.
Once ensconced in a black taxi, the unease becomes corporeal, taking on the body of twisting snakes that are no longer confined to my stomach: now they’re swaying upward, encircling my lungs, slithering through my throat, threatening to choke me of words and breath. The thunk of the automatic door locks when the cab speeds up makes me jump, heart racing, adrenaline prickling through my skin. Severine appears beside me in the cab, scrutinizing me expressionlessly in her take-it-or-leave-it manner, but I deem her presence a gesture of solidarity; whether it’s intended that way, I’ll never know, but I may as well take whatever comfort I can get from this creation of my own mind.
The driver is unwilling to cross the traffic flow, so I leap out of the taxi on the other side of the road to the café and spot Lara immediately, already sitting at a table by the window with two tall mugs in front of her. Even through the logo-emblazoned window I can see her face is pinched, but she manages an approximation of a smile and a sketch of a wave when she sees me crossing the road. She gets up to hug me as I enter, and I feel the tension clinging to her frame.
“What’s up?” I ask, as soon as we’re both seated. She’s wearing a dress I haven’t seen before, a fitted sheath with a pattern like a snowstorm in the dark. I wonder if the lunch was planned, if she wore the dress especially for Modan. She looks stunning as ever, but older, somehow. Not in her face, which is exactly the same, but in less tangible ways: her carriage, her demeanor, her very self.
“I had lunch with Alain. He wanted to apologize. He was hurt, lashing out. He still wants . . . well, you know.” I do, or I can imagine; I can extrapolate from what I know so far. And if I know anything about Alain Modan, it’s that he won’t give up on Lara. “But I keep telling him, not until this—the investigation—is all done. I told him that again today, and he said that I shouldn’t have to wait too long, things were coming to an end. Only he looked very grim about it. I asked if he meant he was dropping the case, and he shook his head and asked if you have a lawyer yet.”
“What?” The café fades away instantly; all I have in my focus is the beautiful, desperately worried face of Lara.
She nods, a fast bob. “Yes. He asked if you have a lawyer. I said I didn’t know—I didn’t want to give anything away—and he said you really ought to get one.”
“Jesus.” I am staring at her in abject disbelief. This can’t be happening. “But—”
“Wait, there’s more. He had a file on the table, one of those yellow cardboard things. It had her name on it, and yours, I could see it. He tapped it and then said he was off to the bathroom, just leaving it there with me.” She spreads her hands wide. “It was like he was inviting me to look at it.”
“Did you?” Please say you did.
She nods again—yes!—even faster, guilt written on her face. “I know I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that he meant me to . . . I just had a quick look.” I’m nodding, wordlessly urging her on. “There was a report on the top. I didn’t have time to read it all, I could only skim, but basically—oh, Kate, basically the whole thing was about how he thinks you killed her.” The words are tumbling out of her; she can’t keep up with them, and her accent is slipping. “Motive, opportunity, the whole nine yards. He reckons Seb passed out in the barn with Severine. You found him there and were enraged; you hit her with something—there was something about an old garden rake still having her blood on it; I didn’t know that, did you? Apparently nobody ever washes garden rakes . . . Anyway, they’re testing it for other DNA and fingerprints. So you hit her with the rake then dumped her body; you knew the well was being filled in—”
She stops abruptly, and we stare at each other. I can barely think. I can barely breathe. A garden rake. Slowly the rest of the café returns: the hum of conversation, the sound of the coffee machine, the disturbance of the air when the door is opened. A garden rake with blood still on it after ten years . . . I feel clammy and ill; the hand that reaches out to pick up my mug of coffee is trembling, but my brain is starting to function again.