Blacklight Blue (23 page)

‘And so I was alone. My baby and my lover both dead. My whole world in ruins around me. I felt truly cursed, Mister Macleod. You can have no idea. I would never be with another man. No one could ever replace my Reginald. But I could give nurture to a child. Bring some meaning to a life that had lost all purpose. Although I knew that even if there had been someone to make me pregnant, I would never have survived another birth.’

She took several small sips of tea before replacing the cup in its saucer. ‘You know, everywhere I looked, all around me, women had children. Women who didn’t deserve to have children, or even want them. Women who got pregnant at the drop of a hat. A night of fun, a moment’s carelessness.’ She looked at Enzo, an appeal for understanding. ‘And I could never adopt. Not back then. A single woman. A hemophiliac. It was so unfair.’

‘And you thought it was fair to steal someone else’s child?’

‘Oh, I chose very carefully, Mister Macleod, I can assure you. It wasn’t a spur of the moment thing. I took several months to prepare. Reginald had left me well provided for in his will. I sold the house in England and came to France. I had no living relatives, so I had no ties, no one to know my history.

‘I found this house here in Collioure. I bought and furnished it. When, finally, I moved in, I would be the grieving English widow, escaping tragedy in England, bringing her young son with her to start a new life. I’d had Richard put on my passport, you see. I still had his birth certificate. The people at the passport authority had no way of knowing he was dead.’

A sudden understanding dawned on Enzo. ‘Richard. Your own son was called Richard?’

‘Oh, yes. Actually, that was what clinched it for me in Cadaquès. I had already selected the boy before I discovered that his name was Richard. It was too great a coincidence. I thought that it was fate. That it was meant to be. Although now I realise that, if anything, it was meant to be a punishment, not a blessing.’

Her smile was wistful and distant, full of pain not pleasure at the process of recollection. ‘I was staying at another hotel, just around the bay. I’d been there for a couple of weeks, and I would spend my days sitting around the pools of other hotels, watching families and their children. Sometimes following them. Sometimes striking up conversations. No one ever saw me as a threat, you see. A young woman on her own, a ring still on her wedding finger. If anyone asked, I told them the truth. My husband had been killed in a plane crash, and I was escaping the horror of it all for a few short weeks.

‘That’s when I first saw Richard. At the poolside with his family. And then later, on the beach. I even took a photograph of them and got a studio in town to develop it for me. He was such a beautiful boy. Fair, like my own Richard. But what made it so perfect, do you see, there were two of them. Identical. Whatever the pain of losing one child might be, his mother would always have the compensation of the other. And there was another sibling, too. An older sister.’

‘And that made it alright?’ Enzo couldn’t keep the disapproval from his voice.

She responded as if pricked by a pin, stung to self-justification. ‘She already had three children, and could have had more if she wanted. She was a Catholic, so she probably would.’

‘So you took him.’

‘Yes. I could give him so much more. And my attention would be undivided, not spread thin across a whole family. I spent several days devising a way of doing it. But in the end it was almost too easy. They made it that way for me. Leaving their children alone in the hotel room each night while they ate and drank and laughed with their friends in the restaurant. And that stupid girl who was supposed to check on them, too busy flirting with a boy from the kitchen. A rendezvous each night out by the bins. Adolescent groping. Disgusting. Taking Richard should have been so very simple.’

‘And it wasn’t?’

‘It was a disaster. As I lifted him from the cot, he was still half asleep, and his little hand came up to hang around my neck. As it did, the sharp corner of a fingernail tore the skin of my cheek and I started to bleed. Such a stupid, silly little thing. But I couldn’t stop it, do you see? When I bleed, I bleed. I’d been going to take his little panda as a comforter, but in the end I had to let it go. It was all I could do to carry Richard and try to staunch the blood at the same time. I nearly abandoned the whole thing. I was out in the corridor, in two minds about putting him back, when I heard someone coming up in the lift. So I ran. The die was cast. There was no going back.’

She lifted her teacup again, but the tea was tepid now, and she pulled a face and laid it down again. ‘It took just two hours to get him back here. But we’d crossed a border, and in those days the media was not as all-pervasive as it is now. There was virtually no coverage of the abduction in the French press. I knew the police would search the immediate vicinity, Cadaquès and its environs. And they’d probably search far and wide. Throughout Spain, and no doubt in the UK. But two hours up the coast, in France? I was fairly certain that no one would ever think of looking for us here.’

She smiled a strange little smile, full of bitterness and irony. ‘And so we were free to begin our dream life together. Except that the dream turned into a nightmare, and I only had him for sixteen years. Sixteen long, difficult years.’

‘What went wrong?’

‘Oh, nothing went wrong. It was just Richard. How he was. How, I suppose, he would have been, no matter what. A difficult, disobedient, sulky, sullen, solitary boy. Maybe he missed having a father figure, a role model like Reginald. He certainly didn’t want me. He recoiled from my touch, hated it when I kissed him, wouldn’t hold my hand. You can have no idea how distressing that was for a mother. How, in the end, I grew to dislike him so much, I think perhaps I started to hate him. When he went, it was both a heartbreak and a relief.’

Enzo noticed how easily she referred to herself as his mother, as if almost from the start she had believed it to be true. Some enormous capacity for self-deception. He doubted if she had even followed the story in the British press. British newspapers would have been available here, even then. But she wouldn’t have wanted to read about how she had devastated a family, ruined a mother’s life. That would have made the self-deception so much harder to maintain. ‘So what made him leave?’

‘I came home one day to find him in a state of extreme agitation. I had left him studying for his
baccalauréat
. He wasn’t particularly gifted academically, but he could have done better. He lacked concentration, motivation. Which is, I suppose, why he abandoned his studies that day and went exploring in the attic. That’s how he found all my old papers. The photographs I had taken in Cadaquès, birth certificates, marriage certificate. Reginald’s death certificate.’ She paused. ‘My Richard’s death certificate. Which, as far as he was concerned, was his own.’

Enzo could only imagine what kind of shock it must have been to stumble across your own death certificate. ‘What did he say?’

‘He demanded answers I couldn’t give him. I wasn’t prepared, you see. There was no convincing way I could lie to him. So I simply stonewalled. Accused him of prying, of meddling in things he didn’t understand, of jumping to all the wrong conclusions. He said in that case I should explain it to him so he
would
understand. But I refused to discuss it any further and sent him to his room.’ Her face lapsed into a set of weary resignation. ‘I didn’t dare try to speak to him again that night. And when I went to rouse him in the morning he was gone. Taken hardly anything with him. Just a few items of clothing. The window was open, so I assume he’d jumped down to the garden.’

‘And you didn’t report him missing to the police?’

‘How could I? Any kind of investigation would only have uncovered the truth, especially if they’d found him. No, Mister Macleod, he was gone and I just had to accept it. Alone again, like it seems I was always destined to be. I told his school he’d gone back to England, and that was an end to it.’ She looked at Enzo with sad, pale eyes. ‘I suppose you’ll be reporting me to the authorities.’

‘You committed a crime, Mrs. Archangel. A long time ago, perhaps, but you still have a debt to repay, particularly to his mother. She’s still there, you know. In Cadaquès. All these years later, waiting for her son to return.’

He saw the old lady draw in her lips to contain her emotion. These were things she had never wanted to hear, never dared to imagine. ‘And Richard? What’s become of him?’

His voice was empty, emotionless. ‘He murders people for a living, Mrs. Archangel. He’s a professional killer.’

The shock that flitted across her face was, for a moment extraordinarily vivid, a reflection of an inner emotional turmoil. Horror, fear, revulsion. And then it passed, to be replaced by a kind of acceptance, a silent acknowledgement that she had raised a monster, and that maybe she had known it all along.

‘It’s possible that he might be using the name of William Bright.’

Her eyes lifted sharply. ‘His family name.’

‘William is his brother.’

‘So he found them, then?’

‘So it seems.’

‘And do they…do they know?’

‘They do now.’

She closed her eyes. The lie that she had lived nearly all of her adult life was over. God only knew what the future would hold. When she opened then again, they were filled with tears. Of self pity.

‘Did you ever hear from him, after he left?’

She shook her head. ‘Never.’ Then some distant memory forced a revision. ‘Well, once. Just once. I’m certain it was him, though he didn’t say so.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Wait.’ She eased herself stiffly out of the armchair and crossed to the Welsh dresser. She rummaged in a drawer for several minutes, shuffling through a folder of papers, before turning with a postcard in her hand. Enzo could see that it was a vividly coloured sunset scene, red light on blue hills. ‘This came a few months after he’d gone.’ She lifted reading glasses and peered at the card. ‘Dated December 26th, 1986.’ She raised one hand in a small gesture of exasperation. ‘All it says is
Au revoir
. But it’s his handwriting. I’d have known it anywhere.’ She peered at it again. ‘Strangest thing, though.’

‘What is?’

‘He signed it,
Yves
.’ She looked up. ‘Why would he do that?’

‘Maybe, Mrs. Archangel, by December 26th, 1986, that was his name.’ He held out his hand for the card and she gave it to him. And he saw quite clearly from its postmark that it had been sent from a place called Aubagne.

Chapter Forty-Six

Yves watched from the Rue St. Sébastien as Macleod left the house. The tall, ponytailed Scotsman crossed the small car park and disappeared down the steps to the Rue du Mirador. But Yves lingered. He knew there was no danger of losing him, and so he was prepared to allow himself the luxury of a little bittersweet nostalgia.

He stepped out from the shadow of the trees and walked slowly across the tarmac to the house where he had grown up. Nothing much had changed. Everything had grown. The shutters had been repainted. At the top of the steps, he looked down at the little arched gateway through which he had made his escape all those years ago. He could see his bedroom window, and felt a pang of something unfamiliar. It might have been regret. The sea beyond was as it always had been. Like him. Moody, changeable. He listened to it breathing, the sound of his childhood. He smelled its salty fragrance. Breathed it in.

There was a new sign at the entrance to the cottages.
Rue Sans Issue
. Dead end. It had always been a dead end street, where he had lived a dead end life. On the wall next to it was a framed print of a painting someone had done of the cottages. Bright Mediterranean colours, sunlight lying in patches across the hills on the headland beyond.

For several minutes he simply stood listening. He was surprised to discover that he was afraid. Afraid he might see her, meet her, hear her voice. The woman who had stolen his life. But the house was silent. No voices, no footfall in the hall. He moved on to the
terrasse
and saw the wrought iron sewing table where she used to make him sit and read his schoolbooks. The fold-up chair he had sat in so often. The metalwork was painted blue to match the shutters. In his day it had all been green.

She was there, somewhere just on the other side of the door. He knew she was at home. He had seen Macleod going in, and he had been there for more than an hour. No doubt he knew even more now about the young Richard Archangel, his history in both Cadaquès and Collioure. Yves had failed completely to stop him. He should have been dead by now. Only a fluke in Paris had saved his life. And here he was, still digging up the past, pawing through the shit.

Yves tried to control his breathing, to calm himself. Anger was not the answer. Success in killing the Scotsman would depend on cool calculation. And kill him he would. Of that he was certain.

From somewhere inside the house came the sound of breaking glass. He tensed and listened intently. But heard nothing more. He was breathing rapidly again, his heart punching against his ribs like a boxer in training. Stab, jab-jab, stab, jab. Gloved fists pounding the punchbag.

He had no idea what moved him to do it. Some morbid fascination, a strange sense of returning to the safety of the womb, no matter how unhappy his time there had been. He reached for the handle and opened the door, pushing it gently into the darkness of the hall. All his senses were assailed by a smell that summersaulted him back through time, momentarily robbing him of his composure. He reached out to touch the wall and steady himself. He felt like a ghost haunting his own past, and expected any moment to see himself emerge from his bedroom, to climb down the stairs to the sea-facing terrace where he had spent so much of his time reading, thinking, dreaming, crying.

There was not a sound. The living room seemed empty. Then, as he stepped into the room, he was shocked to see his image on every surface, on every wall. Like a place of worship, an altar where she prayed for the boy he had once been. Or, perhaps, the boy she had wanted him to be. He moved to the window and peered down on to the terrace. No one there. Then to his bedroom door. He hesitated for a moment, a sense of dread building inside him. Did he really want to open this door to his past? He pushed the handle down and let the door swing open, and found himself transported back through twenty-two years. All his posters were still on the wall, faded now, and curling around the edges. His guitar was leaned up in the corner. One of its strings had broken. The bed was made. The same bedspread that had covered it the night he left.

It was almost more than he could bear, and he pulled the door quickly closed again.

Where was she? She couldn’t have gone out. Unless she had somehow managed to slip through the arched gate into the lane below without him seeing her.

The tiniest sound caught his attention. At first he was unable to identify it. Then there it was again. A drip. The sound of water on water. It was coming from the bathroom. He moved with the silent steps of the ghost that he was, down the hall to the bathroom door. It was not quite shut. With a hand that he could not hold steady, he pushed it open.

She was lying naked in the bath. A strange, shrunken, white-haired old lady. Almost floating. Her arms at her sides, palms face up, blood issuing in bright red pulses from the dark gashes in her wrists. He glanced down and saw the bloody pieces of broken mirror on the floor.

She was still alive. Her eyes wide open, watching him with that same pale blue intent. For just a second he saw some fleeting emotion flare like the flame of a match before dying again as the phosphor burned out. He stood in the doorway and watched as slowly the eyes glazed over and the light went out. He knew she was dead when her heart stopped pumping blood into the water.