Blacklight Blue (17 page)

Chapter Thirty-Four

It was apparent very quickly that Simon had been drinking. There was a slight glaze about his eyes, and he enunciated all his words too carefully to avoid slurring them.

There was a lack of warmth in his greeting for Enzo, a cursory handshake, before giving Kirsty an extravagant hug, almost lifting her from her feet. She was both pleased and relieved to see him.

‘What are you doing here? I thought you had a court case in Oxford.’

‘Prosecution dropped the charges. Right out of the blue. Seems they had misplaced a piece of vital evidence and were unable to produce it in court. So my client walked free, and I was able to come home to see my favourite girl.’

One side of the huge open floor of the warehouse had been closed off to build bedrooms and a bathroom. The rest of the space was divided only by furniture, creating defined areas for eating, relaxing, cooking. It was punctuated by enormous potted plants with fleshy leaves and fronds and flowers that breathed out oxygen to the keep the air sweet. Concealed lighting picked out the redbrick walls and steel beams. Tall windows on one side looked out onto the street below, with patio doors leading on to a wrought iron balcony at the back. Simon had lived here on his own for most of the fifteen years since his divorce, entertaining a succession of younger women, none of the relationships lasting beyond the initial flush of sex and enthusiasm.

There was a twelve-string acoustic guitar hanging on the wall. Enzo nodded towards it. ‘Do you still play?’

‘Only to entertain my lady friends.’

‘Ah. That explains why you go through so many of them.’

Usually Simon would have laughed. It was the kind of friendly insult jousting they had indulged in all their lives. But he turned away to conceal his irritation. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to feed you.’

‘We could go out somewhere,’ Kirsty said.

But Simon was quick to spike the idea. ‘No, I’ve got cheese in the fridge and wine in the rack. That should be French enough to keep your father happy.’

He opened a bottle of Wolf Blass Australian cabernet sauvignon. ‘Sorry, got none of the French stuff. I prefer Australian or Californian. Even Chilean. You’ve got to pay through the nose for a decent French wine these days.’

They sat around the table in the kitchen area, a lamp drawn down from the girders above to contain them within its bright circle of light, and Simon put out several different cheeses on a board, and some bread reheated in tinfoil in the oven. He filled their glasses and took a long pull at his, before sitting back to look at them both. ‘So you never told me what brings you to London.’

Kirsty said, ‘Dad recovered DNA from an old crime scene and tracked the killer to an address in Clapham.’

Simon flashed Enzo a dark look. ‘And you brought Kirsty with you why?’

But Kirsty answered for him. ‘I was the only one who’d really seen him. He was the same guy who tried to kill me in Strasbourg. Only it turned out not to be him at all. He has a twin brother who thought he was dead. The brother was pretty shaken up to find out he wasn’t. And then we saw the real killer outside his twin’s apartment.’

‘What?’ Simon turned his concern towards her.

‘He was waiting for us in the street, and followed us into the underground. But we lost him at London Bridge.’ She laughed and reached for Enzo’s hand, giving it a squeeze. ‘Dad was so funny. He wanted us to jump back on the train. But I told these cops with machine guns that the guy had been flashing at me, and it was him who had to jump back on the train. You should have seen his face as the train left the station with him in it, and us still on the platform.’

But Simon didn’t share her amusement. He leaned across the table towards Enzo. ‘You fucking idiot! I thought I told you to give up all this shit. You’re putting people’s lives at risk, you know that?’

Kirsty was shocked by Simon’s sudden outburst. Enzo met his old friend’s eye. ‘This guy’s trying to destroy me, Sy. And everyone close to me. You know that. The only way I can stop him is by tracking him down and exposing him for the killer that he is.’

Simon stared at him hard for several long seconds, before sitting back in his seat and draining his glass. He refilled it.

‘It’s not Dad’s fault, Uncle Sy. He’s got all of us in a safe house in the Auvergne. And he didn’t make me come to London. I wanted to. That guy tried to kill me. I want to see him caught.’

Simon took a mouthful of wine and pursed his lips. Thoughts that flashed through his mind behind sullen eyes remained unspoken. He seemed to relax a little. ‘Yeh, well, it might be an idea if you went back to that safe house and stayed there until all of this is over.’

‘That’s exactly what she’s going to do,’ Enzo said.

‘Am I?’ Kirsty seemed surprised.

‘I’m putting you on the first flight to Clermont Ferrand in the morning. I’ll call Roger to pick you up at the airport.’

‘And where are you going?’

‘Spain.’

Simon looked from one to the other. ‘I’m not even going to ask.’

An intangible tension hung over the rest of the meal. Kirsty tried her best to ignore it, to be bright and chatty, as if nothing had been said. But Simon remained sullen, drinking more wine than was good for him, and opening another bottle when the first one was empty. Both Kirsty and Enzo refused refills, and Simon made a start on it by himself. Enzo asked if he could log on to Simon’s wi-fi, and Simon flicked his head towards his own laptop and told him to use that. It took Enzo less than ten minutes to track down a flight for Kirsty, leaving from Stansted the following morning. And a cheap Czech Airlines flight to Barcelona from the same airport. He bought e-tickets and printed them off, and when he returned to the table said, ‘We were lucky to get you one for tomorrow. There are only three flights a week to Clermont Ferrand.’

Kirsty stood up. ‘I’d better go to bed then. Try and get some sleep.’ Both men rose and she gave Simon a perfunctory kiss, and her father a big hug. ‘See you in the morning.’

Enzo and Simon sat for a long time in silence. They heard Kirsty getting ready for bed, and then it all went quiet. Finally, Enzo said, ‘What’s wrong, Sy? What’s all this about?’

Simon just stared into his wine glass. ‘You seem to be getting on pretty well these days, you and Kirsty.’

‘Yeh, we are.’

Simon grunted. ‘Funny how fast she just dropped her surrogate dad for the one who deserted her.’ He sucked in more wine. ‘You know, before all this shit in Strasbourg, I hadn’t heard from her in months. And then someone tries to kill her and it’s you she calls, not me.’ He looked up, and Enzo was shocked to see tears in his eyes. ‘All those years, I was the one she turned to. Always. And you were off fucking some woman in France. But the minute she’s in trouble it’s you she turns to. You.’

‘Well, why wouldn’t she? I’m her father, after all.’

‘Yeh?’ Simon fixed him with shining green eyes that simmered with resentment. Alcohol was releasing a flood of pent up emotion he’d kept to himself for years. ‘Well, that’s what you think.’

Enzo stared at him. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Nothing.’ Simon avoided his eye now, refocusing on his glass.

‘That wasn’t nothing, Sy. If you’ve got something to say, you’d better say it.’ All the same, he wasn’t sure that he wanted to hear it.

Simon’s breathing had become erratic. He looked up again, holding on to his glass to stop his hands from trembling. ‘She’s not your kid,’ he said through clenched teeth.

Enzo’s world stood still. His whole body tingled with shock. ‘What do you mean?’

‘She’s mine.’

‘That’s a lie!’

‘No, it’s not.’

Hurt and anger and disbelief welled up through Enzo’s confusion. ‘You’re a liar!’

‘You remember how it used to be, when we were in the band? It was always you, me, and Linda. I always had a thing for her. You know that. But it was you she wanted. It’s always you they want. That’s why I left, went to study law in London. You guys were going to get married as soon as you graduated, then I don’t know what happened. You suddenly split up. I never knew why. It only lasted three weeks, but I wasn’t to know that. I came back up from London like a shot. Linda was in a state. I got her on the rebound. And I thought, this is it. Then suddenly you guys are an item again, and the wedding’s back on.’ The secret he’d held on to for all these years was out, like pus, and Simon’s release in finally lancing the boil was patent. ‘I never knew I’d made her pregnant. Not till you left, ran off to France and left the two of them to their fate. And there’s me back in Glasgow again trying to pick up the pieces.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘That’s when she got drunk and it all came out.’

Enzo was numb. ‘You bastard!’

‘Hey!’ Simon raised his hands in self-defence. ‘I didn’t do anything wrong. Neither did Linda. When I slept with her, you guys had split up. Then, when she realised she was pregnant, and I was the father, you were getting married. So she kept it to herself. None of it came out until after you’d gone.’ He poured more wine into his glass. ‘Think how hard it’s been for me all this time. Knowing I was Kirsty’s dad and couldn’t tell her. And now, seeing you two together, like I don’t even exist any more.’

He took a mouthful of wine and leaned across the table. ‘But you can’t tell her, Magpie. You can’t ever tell her.’

Enzo sat in stunned silence. He remembered carrying her up the stairs when she was only five, singing to her as he went. He remembered standing outside Simon’s apartment less than two hours before, her head resting on his chest. He remembered threatening to do Raffin harm if he ever hurt her.

None of that had changed. She was still his little girl. He still loved her. He looked at Simon, and felt angry and betrayed, and knew that he could never think of his friend the same way again. If anything had been destroyed by the revelation, it was the friendship of a lifetime. He pushed his glass towards him. ‘You’d better fill that up.’

***

She had only settled in her bed for a minute, when she remembered that she hadn’t taken her pill. With a curse under her breath, she had got up to go to the bathroom, and only just opened the door when she heard her father say,
Well, why wouldn’t she? I’m her father, after all
. And Simon’s response.
Yeh? Well, that’s what you think
.

Now she stood with her back pressed against the bedroom door, their whole confrontation echoing in her head. Ending with Simon’s insistence,
You can’t tell her, Magpie. You can’t ever tell her
.

Too late, she thought. And she felt nothing beneath her feet. No floor, no earth, no world, as she dropped soundlessly into the abyss.

Chapter Thirty-Five

The Essex plains were thick with early morning mist, and the flight was delayed by more than half-an-hour. Enzo and Kirsty sat in the concourse looking out through tall windows at the grey expanse of dull, wet, southeast England fading off into an uncertain distance.

They had hardly spoken on the train ride out from London, each lost in thoughts that couldn’t be voiced. There was an awkwardness between them that neither knew quite how to dispel. Enzo bought a newspaper, and buried his face in it while they waited. But he wasn’t reading. And when finally Kirsty’s flight was announced, he folded it up and left it on the seat beside him.

They walked together to the gate, and stopped short of it, not knowing how to say goodbye. How to be natural with each other. He put down his overnight bag and wrapped his arms around her. At first she was reluctant to respond, and when she did he tightened his hold on her.

In the end it was Kirsty who drew away, and they stood looking at each other. ‘Are you alright?’ he asked. She was so pale.

She nodded. ‘Just tired. Didn’t really sleep well.’ She glanced towards the departures board. ‘They still haven’t announced your flight.’

He shrugged. ‘The fog’s put everything back.’

‘How will you get there from Barcelona?’

‘I’ll rent a car. It’s probably only about an hour-and-a-half by road.’

‘I’d better go.’ She reached up and brushed his cheek with her lips. ‘See you when you get back.’

‘Yeh.’ And he watched her go through the gate with a breaking heart.

***

The flight passed in a haze of uncertainty. If she had slept at all during the night she hadn’t been aware of it. Her head ached, as did her throat, and her eyes felt raw from the tears that had soaked into her pillow. It occurred to her, thinking about the little boy who had been abducted all those years ago in Spain, that there must have been a moment when he discovered that he was someone else. A stranger who had lived a lie all of his life.

Just as she wondered, now, who
she
was, who
she
had been.

And yet on the surface, nothing had changed. Not a single moment of her life had passed any differently. A childhood filled with the love and certainty of a father whom she had thought would always be there. And then all the years without him, resenting him, even hating him. The constant presence of Uncle Sy. Someone she’d been fond of, but who could never have replaced her dad. Her
real
dad. And now it turned out that he
was
her real dad. So what difference did it make? It was all just genetics, blood, and family. How did that change her relationship with Enzo? But somehow it did.

The thought brought fresh tears to her eyes, and she turned her head towards the window to avoid the stares of a man across the aisle who’d been eyeing her lasciviously since they boarded the plane. She let her head rest against the cool glass and couldn’t wait until she saw Roger at Clermont Ferrand. Someone to confide in. A shoulder to cry on. Strong arms to hold her. Her only grasp left on a world disintegrating around her.

***

She was disappointed when it was Anna who met her in the arrivals hall. The older woman kissed her on both cheeks.

‘Where’s Roger?’

Anna hesitated. ‘He had to go back to Paris.’ She peered at Kirsty. ‘You look terrible.’

‘Thank you. You look pretty good yourself.’

Anna smiled. ‘I’m sorry. You just looked like maybe you’d been crying.’

‘I didn’t sleep very well, that’s all.’

They walked outside to the car park, and bright winter sunlight angled down from the mountains to the sprawling, flat basin of land that cradled the city of Clermont Ferrand high up on the Massif Central. It was colder here than in London, but a welcome change from the grey misery of a damp southern English November.

They took the A75
autoroute
south before leaving it at Massiac and heading west on the N122, up into the mountains of the Cantal. Kirsty sat staring from the window, but barely registered the changing landscape, the dramatic swoop of fir-lined hills crowned by jagged peaks of snow-covered rock. The road turned and twisted through mountain valleys that never saw the winter sunshine, before emerging suddenly into patches of dazzling sunlight squinting down between the peaks.

Anna contained her curiosity until they were nearly home, climbing steadily through the trees towards the ski resort of Le Lioran. Another few kilometres and they would begin their descent into the tiny valley that cradled the village of Miramont. Finally she glanced across the car at her silent passenger. ‘What’s wrong, Kirsty?’

Kirsty awoke as if from a dream. ‘What?’

‘You haven’t said a word all the way from Clermont.’

‘Sorry. I was just thinking about what happened in London.’

‘What did happen?’

‘It wasn’t the killer’s DNA in the database. It was his twin brother’s, a brother who was abducted in Spain when he was just a child. Everyone thought he was dead.’

‘Is that why Enzo didn’t come back with you?’

Kirsty nodded. ‘He’s gone to Spain.’

She turned to look at Anna. ‘We saw him, you know. The killer. He was stalking us in London. But we managed to lose him.’ She was lost in thought for a moment. ‘It was really scary.’

‘That’s not why you’ve been crying, though.’

Kirsty’s head snapped round. ‘Who says I’ve been crying?’

‘Kirsty, I’ve seen enough red-rimmed eyes looking back at me from the mirror to know when someone’s been shedding tears.’

Kirsty held her gaze for a moment, before turning away, and Anna flicked her indicator and braked suddenly, pulling them round into an unexpected left-hand turn. Kirsty saw the welcome sign to Le Lioran, and the road dipped down into a sprawling car park. Pine covered slopes rose all around the nearly deserted ski resort. Alpine cabins, an ugly apartment block, a hotel, a tiny shopping mall, stores filled with ski equipment and souvenirs. Chair lifts were threaded up between the trees, but the chairs hung silent and empty, swinging in the cold wind that sheered off the mountains. There were hardly any cars in the parking.

‘The season hasn’t started yet,’ Anna said. ‘And the summer tourists are long gone. Looks like we’ve got the place pretty much to ourselves.’ She pulled up her car and switched off the engine. She turned towards Kirsty. ‘So are you going to tell me, or are you going to bottle it up forever?’

Kirsty shook her head. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’ But she wasn’t sure she could keep it to herself for very much longer.

‘Trust me, Kirsty. I have an instinct for these things.’

Kirsty was fighting now to contain her tears, staring straight ahead of her at nothing. ‘How would you feel if you suddenly found out that your dad wasn’t really your dad?’

Whatever Anna might have been expecting, it wasn’t this. She sat silently for a few moments absorbing the revelation. ‘Does
he
know that?’

‘He found out at the same time as I did. We were staying with his oldest friend. My sort of surrogate dad. The one who was always around when Enzo wasn’t. He was drunk. Jealous, I think. And there was some kind of tension between them. Then it all came out. I’d gone to bed. I wasn’t supposed to hear, but I did.’

‘So he doesn’t know that you know.’ Kirsty shook her head. ‘Are you going to tell him?’

Kirsty stared at her hands. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t know what to do.’

‘And how do you feel about it?’

‘How do you think I feel about it?’

‘No, I mean, how do you feel about Enzo? Does it change anything?’

Kirsty flashed her a tear-stained look. ‘It changes everything.’

‘How?’

Kirsty became shrill. ‘I don’t know. I can’t explain it. It just does.’

Anna put a hand over hers. ‘I’m sorry. I guess you’re pretty confused right now. I didn’t read the warning signs very well:
Private. Keep Out
. Right?’ Kirsty took her hand and squeezed it tightly. Anna waited until the grip on her hand relaxed, before reclaiming it to open the car door. ‘Come on, there’s something here you should see.’

As she slammed the door shut and rounded the car, her breath billowed around her head, caught in the sunlight that streamed across the frozen car park. Kirsty sat for a moment, before getting out of the passenger side. ‘What is there to see in a place like this?’

Anna took her hand. ‘I’ll show you.’

There was no snow here in the resort, or on any of the lower slopes. But the peaks above them glistened white against a diamond blue sky. The
bar-brasserie
was empty. In the covered shopping strip, only a handful of desultory figures wandered amongst the stands of cards and mugs and ski jackets. Shop signs swayed in the wind.
École de Ski Les Yétis, Spar Alimentation, Salon de Thé
. A bored-looking receptionist doodled behind the counter in the empty lobby of the drum-shaped hotel above the mall.

They climbed steps into the large terminal building of the Téléphérique, and in the deserted ticket hall Anna bought them a couple of return tickets on the cablecar that would take them to the peak of the Plomb du Cantal, the highest mountain in the range. Summer and winter there would have been long queues standing patiently on the concrete concourse upstairs. But in this dead time between seasons there wasn’t another soul, and a frozen-looking employee punched their tickets and waved them through to the landing stage.

From here they had a view of the twin cables stretched between stanchions, rising steeply through the grassy gap between the trees towards the snowline. Their cablecar stood in its dock. The other had just left the landing stage at the peak, a distant speck descending through a blaze of white.

They crossed the docking area, with its red-painted barriers, and walked through open doors into the empty cablecar. It had sliding doors at each corner, and panoramic windows at either end. A notice warned that the car was limited to eighty passengers maximum. But it seemed that today there would only be two. Anna leaned back against the blue rail and folded her arms. She said, ‘I grew up here in the Cantal. This is where I learned to ski.’

Kirsty said, ‘I’ve never skied.’

Anna looked at her in disbelief. ‘And you come from Scotland?’

‘I grew up in Glasgow. There weren’t many ski slopes in Byres Road.’

‘You have to try it. It’s wonderful.’ Her face glowed from some kind of inner passion. ‘Exhilarating. Once you lose your fear, there’s nothing quite like it.’

‘I’m not sure I’d ever lose the fear. I’m not good at balance. I can’t even put on roller skates without falling down.’

The man who had taken their tickets emerged from the terminal, stamping his feet and clapping his hands. He entered the cablecar through the far door, opened a wall panel to access the controls and pressed a button to shut the doors. He nodded towards Anna and Kirsty. ‘
Mesdames
.’

He pressed another button and the cablecar jerked, the whine of an electric motor engaging the wheels on the cable above, and they bumped their way out of the dock to begin rising away from the terminal. Rows of empty wooden picnic tables set on the apron around the hotel rapidly became tiny, like furniture in a doll’s house, and green pasture opened up all around the resort, reaching up to the treeline and the snowy peaks beyond.

There was a sense of floating, almost flying, dipping suddenly at the first support pylon, then rising ever more steeply. The world began to spread itself out below them, the horizon dropping away on all sides to a ragged, snowy fringe on the skyline, patchwork sunlight on green and white. The other cablecar, making its descent, passed them on their right, hanging from the upward curve of the arm that hooked around the cable, only a few hardy souls aboard it.

And then they passed the snowline, black rock breaking in ragged patches through the still scant covering. Anna and Kirsty moved from the back of the car to the front as they approached the terminal building on the peak, a square structure of wood and steel and concrete built out on struts to allow the cablecars to dock. They stepped out on to a grilled platform, the mountain falling away disconcertingly beneath their feet. Then up steps onto solid concrete, huge yellow wheels set in the roof overhead to haul the cables.

The cablecar operator lit a cigarette and watched as they passed through open doors into a concrete hall, water lying in icy patches on an uneven floor. A sign advertised Stella Artois, but the cafeteria was shut. They passed through a short corridor, then out through swing doors into the icy blast. The snow lay thick, beneath a towering radio mast, and a well trodden trail led up the final three hundred metres to the summit. There were just a few other hardy souls up here on the roof of the world, in fleeces and boots, examining a representational mountain map with its trails and ski slopes, before heading on up to the peak itself.

Kirsty drew her coat more tightly around herself and felt the icy edge of the wind burn her cheeks. ‘Why did you bring me up here?’

‘You’ll see. Come on.’ Anna held her hand and led her past a line of fenceposts sunk in the snow, over a rise that took them above the cablecar terminal. The world sheered away beneath them. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Just look at it, Kirsty.’ And Kirsty looked, turning slowly through nearly three hundred and sixty degrees. France shimmered away in every direction to a horizon lost in unfocused distance. ‘You can see for, literally, hundreds of kilometres. It’s glorious. Can’t you feel it? That sense of…’ she searched for the right word. ‘…insignificance. You, or I, just one tiny little speck on the edge of infinity. I used to come up here any time life was getting on top of me. Every time I started to obsess about myself and my problems. And I always found a kind of equilibrium. That sense of balance that comes with perspective. With remembering that whatever troubles you have, they are nothing in the grand scheme of things. Nothing compared to this.’

Whether it was the lack of oxygen six thousand feet up, or the pure, bracing quality of the wind in her face, Kirsty found herself almost intoxicated by the sense of insignificance that Anna spoke of, like staring drunkenly at a star-crusted sky on a summer’s night and realising that it had no beginning and no end. She breathed deeply, and felt some of the burden of uncertainty slip away. But she could find no words to describe her feelings, and her only response was to turn to Anna, a reluctant smile breaking across her face, and silently nod her understanding.