The French Girl(70)

“No.” She says it hesitantly, like she’s testing her answer. “It feels a bit strange, but . . .” She shrugs with a hint of a rueful smile. “I’d have no right to mind, even if I did.”

An interesting response. An honest one, I think. I sigh. “Well, it’s a moot point anyway. Since I’m apparently going to jail.” A French jail, to boot. I wonder, in an abstract way, if that is any better or worse than a British jail. And then it strikes me that it’s no longer an abstract consideration.

“It’s not funny, Kate,” Lara says tersely.

“I’m not laughing.” I feel clammy and ill again; I am definitely not laughing. We’re many, many steps away from jail, I remind myself. Don’t think about being arrested. I lean toward the glass and peer out of the window again, down toward the pavement. The gray-feathered heap has gone.

“You have to speak to Alain. You have to give him something, cooperate. You have to tell him—”

“What? What can I tell him? I don’t know anything to tell him.”

“Yes, you do. You can tell him about Caro. You can tell him about the drugs.”

My eyes leap to Lara’s, and she gazes back at me, clear-eyed and unflinching. I look across the divide between us, the corridor of air, and it’s like staring down a tunnel through the years, back to where it all began, back to France and Severine. How far we’ve come, to get to this point, the point where you throw friends under buses. Except Caro is not really a friend, exactly—but I’m splitting hairs. I start to form, then discard, any number of responses.

“What are you going to do?” presses Lara.

A garden rake. “I’m going to call my lawyer.”





CHAPTER SEVENTEEN


I leave the café, already dialing my lawyer, but she’s busy and unable to take my call. Of course she’s busy; she’s a professional at the top of her game, high in demand, which is exactly the sort of lawyer one would want to have—only I want her sitting in her office, staring at her telephone and twiddling her thumbs, doing nothing of note except eagerly awaiting my call. I have half a mind to jump in a taxi to her premises, but I resist the urge and instead choose to walk back to my office.

The fresh air fails to do me good. My mind is racing, unable to break free from a spiral track that leads inexorably to a dark pit of all the things I’m not yet ready to face. Surely there must be a way out, a bargain to be made with a God I don’t believe in . . . How can this be happening to me?

“Jesus,” says Paul. He doesn’t look up as I enter the office. “Did they have to get the coffee beans from South America?”

It takes me a minute to process the words and divine his meaning, then I glance at my watch. I’ve been gone over an hour and a half. But surely not . . . the taxi there, plus the time spent with Lara, plus the walk back: it doesn’t quite seem to add up. But my internal clock and the reckoning of my watch cannot arrive at a mutually agreeable answer. I have the sensation that time is rushing past me, rushing through me, like I’m no more substantial than a ghost and there’s nothing I can do to stem the tide. “I forgot I had a call with Gordon.” It’s hard enough to invent an excuse, let alone give it some expression. “I took it at the coffee shop.”

Paul looks up from his computer screen at that. “Not a problem there, is there?” he asks anxiously. “I thought Caroline Horridge was the liaison now.”

“No problem. Gordon just likes to keep his finger in the pie.” The words make sense, but they mean nothing to me. Perhaps in a while Paul and the business and all those small concerns that add up to mean life will catch at me with little hooks and lines, pulling me back into phase with the world, but for now I feel like nothing exists except the looming dread of a French jail. Shock, I realize. I must be in shock.

“Well, I’ve loaded the Jeffers file now if you want to take a look.”

“Thanks.”

“Oh, I nearly forgot. Someone called for you when Julie was out at lunch, wanting to know when you’d be back, but wouldn’t leave a message. A woman, posh sounding.”

“Well, that certainly narrows it down.” I’ve refound irony: I must be anchored back in the real world now. Except—I glance quickly around—Severine is not here . . . but no, I’ve got that wrong; Severine is not real, Severine is not normal . . . My head is pounding. I sit down quickly.

“Are you all right?” I hear Paul ask distantly.

“Fine,” I say quickly. “Though I don’t think my lunch entirely agreed with me.” I’m getting to be quite the liar. Tom would be proud, except why would he? After this is over, Tom is washing his hands of me. But this may never be over, not for me . . . Where the hell is my damn lawyer? I grab the mouse, determined to focus on something else, and the blank monitor springs to life.

After some time—how long? Five minutes? Twenty-five?—my vision clears and the pounding in my head recedes. Sometime after that I realize it must look odd for me to be staring at a screen, and for lack of anything better to do, I look up the Jeffers file, which is exactly where it should be and perfectly up to date: Paul is nothing if not thorough. I skim through, noting his current role, and the familiar process begins to soothe me: strengths, weaknesses, where would he fit? Stockleys? Haft & Weil? But no, not there because . . . I stop suddenly, as a flush of adrenaline prickles over my skin. Definitely not Haft & Weil, because Mark Jeffers has already worked there, started his career there in fact. In none other than Caro’s group.