Lovers and Liars Trilogy (109 page)

“It can’t do any harm to propose the idea, Rowland,” he said in a pacifying tone. “Lindsay’s right—Markov is temperamental. He’s also extremely well informed. And he and Lindsay have a special relationship. Markov adores her. She has him eating out of her hand.”

“A special relationship? With Markov?” Rowland’s face registered disbelief. “Well, now I’ve heard everything—”

“Maybe,” Max cut in in the tones of Solomon, “maybe it would be an idea if you
both
saw him. Together.”

This U.N. approach was a mistake. Rowland raised suffering eyes to the ceiling, and Lindsay, seeing this, began speaking very fast.

“If you
imagine,
Max,” she began, “that for one
second
I’d sit down in the Grand Vefour with that stupid, knuckleheaded, obstinate, arrogant Irishman over there… If you think I’d let him loose on Markov, you must be insane. He’s about as subtle as a bear in boxing gloves. He’s a
throwback,
Max, to some very very primitive time. Climb back in your tree, Rowland, why don’t you? And never, ever, under any circumstances ask me for my help again!”

“Done,” Rowland replied. “No problem there. I prefer to work with professionals anyway. Temper tantrums aren’t my scene.”

He took a small, well-timed sip of Fonseca as he said this. Lindsay did not reply. She seemed, Max thought, to be practicing some odd form of rhythmic breathing. They both watched her breathe in and out, precisely ten times.

“Rowland,” she said at last, her voice now sweetly calm. “You do not understand the fashion world. I know it’s very very hard for you to admit that, but I think that when the effects of the port have worn off, even you will realize that it’s true. You need me to check that file out, and you need me to talk to Markov, and you need my expertise, I’m afraid, because without it, Rowland, you’re flying without radar, in fog, over mountains. You’re flying
blind.
When you realize that, come the morning maybe, I shall expect you to apologize. I shall expect you to
grovel,
Rowland, for several hours. ’Night, Max.” She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “Lovely dinner. Sleep well.”

She left the room, closing the door quietly. There was a silence. Rowland put down the port.

“If you laugh, Max,” he said. “If you so much as smile, I warn you…”

“Did I laugh? Smile? Did I say one single word?”

“Wipe that goddamn smug expression off your face, Max.” Rowland sank his head in his hands. “What happened?” he said in irritable tones. “What the fuck happened?
When
did it happen? I blame the port, Max. I should never have touched it. Up until then it was going so
well
.”

Upstairs, Lindsay fairly skipped into her room. She sauntered along to the bathroom in bra and underpants. She washed joyfully and sang a few songs. She nipped back to bed, shivering with cold, pulled the eiderdown up around her shoulders, angled the bedside light, and opened Rowland’s green file. For a while she found it hard to concentrate. Rowland’s maddening face kept swimming between her and the pages. She considered his astonishing hair and eyes; she dwelt on the sublime moment when she had wiped the conceit and arrogance off that extraordinary face with those few well-chosen words.

Once or twice she thought she heard sounds from Gini’s room next door. She thought she heard movement, and then, becoming more alert, thought she heard sounds of weeping. But she couldn’t be sure, and these sixteenth-century walls were thick. She listened intently, then decided she must have been mistaken; she could hear only silence now.

She returned, with better concentration, to the file, and read for an hour. When she was still only halfway through, a memory came back to her, and she felt a small pulse of excitement. There was one very obvious and central gap in the story of Maria Cazarès and Jean Lazare—it might, just might, be a gap that she could fill.

Downstairs, Max was tiring—it was past one in the morning—and Rowland was sunk in gloom.

“If you’re working out ways to grovel,” Max said, rising, “you can do it alone. I’ll give the dogs a quick run, then I’m off to bed.”

“I’ll come with you.” Rowland hauled himself from the chair.

They donned overcoats and boots and set off with the dogs on a circuit of the orchard. Rowland’s hearing was keen. After only a few yards he stopped and listened.

“What’s that noise?”

“What noise? I can’t hear a damn thing. Just the wind. Come on, Rowland, it’s bloody cold.”

“Listen.” Rowland did not move. “Music. I can hear music. It’s coming from up there in the hills.”

Max listened, and after a while he heard it too, distant but just discernible, a weird pulsing whooping sound.

“Probably a party,” he said. “A late-night party. What the hell? Come
on,
Rowland, for God’s sake. I’m freezing.”

“A party?” Rowland still did not move. “Max, there’s no village up there. There’s not even a house. There’s nothing, just fields, trees, the odd barn.”

“Well, maybe it’s an outdoor party. Who cares?”

“In January? In sub-zero temperatures? Max, come on.”

“Look,” said Max with force. “I don’t give a damn if it’s a satanic ritual. They can get on with it as far as I’m concerned. I’m walking around this orchard, then I’m going to bed. I advise you to do the same.”

They walked on a little farther, the dogs racing back and forth among the trees. They had picked up the fox scent, Rowland thought, and remembered the lights he had glimpsed earlier. He paused.

“I might just investigate. Walk up that way. Clear my head. I don’t feel like sleeping just now.”

“You never do,” Max replied grumpily. “It’s one of the many things wrong with you. Your unnerving energy, at dawn. I’m off to bed. I’ll leave the door unlocked. Bolt it when you come in.”

Max returned to the house, the dogs snuffling at his heels.

Rowland crossed the orchard and opened the gate into the fields.

He liked walking, especially at night, and especially alone. Silence, he thought, and the night air, would clear his mind. He might never have admitted it to Lindsay, but some of her remarks had struck home. A bear in boxing gloves? Some Neanderthal throwback? Was that how he seemed? Was that, worse, how he
was?
He shook himself impatiently and lengthened his stride. There was a good path here, he remembered, once he had crossed the first two fields.

As he walked, all the events of that long evening reassembled in his mind. One minute he was thinking of Lindsay’s remarks, the next of the odd, silent, and disconcerting Genevieve Hunter. Then he was swooping back to his own childhood, and the farm he had described to Max’s boys. Why
there
? he thought. Why go back
there
? And for an instant he saw a different place, one unsuited to the simplicities of fairy stories, an ugly, cramped, damp homestead where generations of his father’s family had scraped an existence. It had four damp, tiny rooms, no hot water, no bath, an outside lavatory. There was a yard, a cowshed, three sties, and four fields. Rowland loved it and also hated it. There, his parents toiled; they rarely spoke to each other. The rooms smelled of resignation and delusions and hopelessness. Sometimes, when his father had been drinking, silent hostilities would flare into violence, outright war.

Why did he alter and sentimentalize that world for the benefit of Max’s sons, Rowland thought now, walking faster. Why return to that place, in fictional form, when it was one he avoided at all other times? His mother, forty when her only child was born, had been dead a decade; his father, crushed beneath a borrowed tractor, had died when Rowland was seven and a half years old. He had not set foot in Ireland, let alone his childhood home, in almost thirty years—so why return there now?

There was a mystery, of course, a family romance. Why had his mother, the least impulsive of women, married a man eight years her junior, without a penny to his name, a feckless, sweet-natured, heavy-drinking Irishman who could barely read, though he could talk like an angel if he chose? She had been a thirty-eight-year-old English spinster with a two-room flat in a cheap area of Birmingham, and a job teaching literature in a grim inner-city school, a job she had embraced with zeal and come to loathe. She met his father when he was briefly in England, working for a builder, trying to scrape some cash together, and had come around to fix some gutters.

What happened? Was it sexual attraction? Was she secretly desperate for a child? She was a conventional, even narrow-minded, middle-class woman. Why would she, of all women, fall for an Irish manual laborer, however handsome, however gifted with charm?

And his father, why had he succumbed? Had he had his eye on the proceeds from the sale of his new wife’s little flat, the two thousand pounds that kept his farm solvent for a while? Could he have loved this tight-lipped, humorless woman—or had she been different once, before Rowland was born, before she made the decision to focus all her silent, bitter energy on the rearing of her child?

Christ,
Rowland thought, and tried to push the memories down. He stopped abruptly, staring across the windswept hills. He could not recall his father’s face anymore, time had blurred its detail, but he could still hear his voice, and he could still see, almost thirty years later, the precise shape and texture of his father’s large, dirty, callused hands. They were dexterous. Gazing out across an English landscape, Rowland watched a dead man twist wires, assemble snares.

Long gone: he bent, picked up a shard of limestone, then threw it down. For his father’s funeral, there was a wake, that was expected. His mother might be foreign, but she did her duty to the last. When it was over, his mother started packing very fast. Three suitcases. She was wearing black; a black coat, black shoes, black nylons, a new incongruous black and white polka dot scarf. He could feel the room trembling with anticipation, perhaps happiness. She buttoned on his mackintosh, belted it. She said, “Rowland, the ferry’s booked. We’re going back to England. We’re going home.”

Not the stuff of fairy tales. No happy endings. Rowland raised his eyes to the sky. Just for an instant, borne on the wind and a tide of rising unhappiness, he could hear another voice, Esther’s voice: such an ordinary sentence—
I’m just going out to the grocery store. We’re out of milk I’ll be back in twenty minutes.

Forty minutes later he’d heard the sirens. One hour later the squad car pulled up outside the door. Two hours later he was in the morgue, making the identification. Six years later a part of him still waited for her return.

“God help me,” Rowland said aloud. The wind touched him, and he swung around. He was alone, of course. He stared into the darkness, and into the wind. Too many graveyard memories. With a gesture of sudden anger he turned, and, increasing his pace, made for the first crest of hills.

Rowland paused, looking back the way he had come. Max’s house and village were now invisible. To his west lay Cheltenham; he could see its city lights staining the sky. To the south was the air base where that man Landis was senior officer; he could see the runways clearly, lit by arc lights; he could make out the shapes of huts and hangars. To his north and east there were no lights, just stone walls, bare fields, clumps of thorn trees bent and twisted by the wind. The isolation, and the absence of human beings, had calmed and revived him. He could still hear the music, but his desire to investigate had left him. He would walk on, he decided, for another few miles, then return to Max’s home.

There was a good track here, traversing rising ground. He followed it for about a mile farther, then paused once more in the shelter of some thorns. He felt refreshed and invigorated. He leaned back against a drystone wall, letting the past wash away from him. He looked up at the constellations and tried to identify them; he shifted his feet, glanced down, and saw the girl.

With a low exclamation he bent down. Until he touched her, he was almost sure he had imagined her, that she was a trick of moonlight and shadow, an accidental resemblance, a composite of dead branches and white stones.

Then he touched her, and understood: this was no illusion, the woman was real. Her legs and feet were bare, and she was dressed in dark clothes. He pushed some brambles aside, touched a cold hand; the woman did not move.

She was huddled against the side of the ditch, and her face was obscured. With practiced hands he felt her neck, then her spine. When he was sure there was no injury there, he risked moving her. Very gently, he turned her toward him, into the recovery position, on her right side.

Her body was limp and unresisting. As he moved her, moonlight struck her face, and Rowland froze. She was very young, little more than a child. Her eyelids had some metallic paint on them; there was mud on her face, and her lips were blackish. He felt for a pulse on her neck but could not find one. He reached for her wrist, and as he did so, he saw that the backs of her fingers were tattooed with the word HATE, one letter to each finger, and that the fingers were already beginning to stiffen into claws.

He felt a cold anger, then a flood of pity. He checked again for a pulse, although he knew he would not find one, not in a girl who must already have been dead several hours. He laid her gently back down, took off his overcoat, and covered her. Then he rose and ran back the way he had come, two miles to Max’s, to a phone.

By two-fifteen he had called the police, roused Max, told him where the girl was, and was on his way back across the fields.

It seemed right that someone should stay with her, so he stood beside her body, staring out across the hills. He tried to puzzle out how someone so young, dressed in this way, should end up in this remote place, when it was so late, and so cold.

Shock had slowed his thinking, and it was several minutes before he made the connection between the lights, the music he had heard, and the girl. He swung around, realizing for the first time that the music had stopped. The only sound he could now hear was his own breathing, and the wind as it moved the branches of the thorns.

But if the music explained the girl’s presence, it did not explain her death. He knelt beside her huddled shape, trying to work out how she came to be here, and dead, when she seemed physically uninjured and unharmed.