Blacklight Blue (22 page)

Chapter Forty-Four

The afternoons were getting shorter as November wore on. The sun was low in the sky now, shadows lengthening almost as you looked. There wasn’t much warmth left in the air, the heat of the day, such as it was, rising into the big, wide, empty sky above. A sky that paled to yellow in the west, and then orange and finally red, as the earth turned on its axis. The ghost of a full moon was already visible in it.

Kirsty had not come down for lunch, and the five of them had eaten in uneasy silence. Afterwards, Nicole had retired to the computer room, and Bertrand and Sophie sat down to compose the latest response to an ever increasing traffic of forwarded correspondence with the insurance company over compensation for the gym.

Enzo and Anna walked through the village wrapped in coats and scarves, their breath condensing in the final, cold light of the day. She had wanted to know how much he had found out, and it helped him clarify his own thoughts to go through it all for her, step by step.

‘It’s the strangest tale. A kid, just twenty months old, abducted from a holiday hotel on the Costa Brava nearly forty years ago. A kid who grew up to be a killer. Stolen by an Englishwoman and brought up, probably somewhere in the Roussillon, just a couple of hours away from where he was snatched. All the time unaware that just a short drive to the south his mother had refused to leave the scene of his abduction. Determined to stay there in case he should ever return.’

He looked at Anna and saw the warmth in her dark eyes, transported by his words to another time, another place.

‘At some point, sometime in his teens, he must have discovered the truth. Found out who he really was. By the time he was eighteen, he’d tracked down his real family, and found that he had an identical twin brother living in London. He stole his money, his clothes, and his identity, and embarked on a new life as his own twin.’

‘You think he’s still masquerading as his brother?’

‘I doubt it. He probably only used that as a stepping stone to another persona. But at least we know now what he looks like, and it’s a good starting point for our search.’

‘So how likely do you think it is that you’ll catch him?’

‘Oh, I’ll get him.’ There was steel in Enzo’s voice. ‘If he doesn’t kill me first. I also know where to look for the woman who abducted him. It may be that I’ll find something there, some clue that’ll take me another step closer.’ He drifted off into speculative thought before coming abruptly back to the present. ‘And we found the actor he employed to masquerade as my doctor in Cahors. Another loose end. Another thread that could to lead us to him. I’m closing in on him, Anna. Almost got him on the end of my line. And when I have, one way or another, I’m going to reel him right in.’

She slipped her arm through his and gave it a small squeeze. ‘You told me last time you were here that you thought he was some kind of professional.’

‘That’s right.’

‘So…what did you say his real name was…?’

‘Bright. Rickie, or Richard Bright.’

‘So Bright didn’t kill Lambert for personal reasons.’

‘I don’t think so. I think he was probably hired to do it.’

‘And are you any nearer to figuring out who it was who hired him, or why?’

Enzo shook his head. ‘Not at all. I figure the only way we’re ever going to know that is by getting Bright into custody and persuading him to tell us.’

They walked past the row of trees in front of the church, brittle, frosted leaves crunching underfoot. The granite stone of the village houses sparkled in the dying sunlight all along one side of the street, and the streetlights flickered and shed ineffectual electric light into the gathering gloom on the other.

Anna said, ‘You mustn’t take what Kirsty says too seriously.’

Which brought Enzo’s mind back from that other place it had wandered to again. ‘She always seems to want to hurt me,’ he said. ‘To lash out and do damage.’

‘Sometimes when we’re hurting, the only people we can take it out on are the ones we love.’

‘She spent her whole life blaming me for all the hurt in it. I thought she’d got over that.’ He wanted to tell her about the night at Simon’s. To share it with someone, to offload the burden. But he was afraid that to give it voice would make it somehow more real. And he still didn’t want to believe it. He had no way of knowing that Anna already knew, that his own daughter had told her. And so they were two people divided by a common knowledge they couldn’t share.

‘You can’t underestimate how vulnerable she is right now, Enzo. She barely escaped with her life in Strasbourg. Her best friend was killed. She thought her father was dying, and then he was arrested for murder. And now her lover’s been shot, and she doesn’t know if he’s going to survive.’ There was more, but like Enzo she wasn’t going to go there. ‘You’re at the centre of it all. So who else is she going to blame?’

Enzo stopped and took her face in his hands. He gazed into the dark eyes she turned on him, and kissed her softly on the lips. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done without you, Anna. I really don’t.’

She kissed him back. ‘You and me both.’

‘Just promise me…If I have to leave again, you won’t let her go to Paris.’

She smiled. ‘I won’t let her do that, Enzo. I promise.’ And then her face darkened, as if a cloud had passed over it. ‘You know why he left?’

‘Who?’

‘Roger. Why he
really
left?’

Enzo tensed. ‘He said he needed to get back to work.’

‘He made a pass at me. Damned near raped me. If I hadn’t been as fit as I am he might have succeeded.’

‘Jesus! Does Kirsty…?’

‘No, of course not. I made it clear to him that if he didn’t pack his bags and get out, then I would tell her. And that the only reason I wouldn’t was to protect her, not him.’

Enzo felt a wave of fatigue wash over him. He wasn’t sure how much more of this he could take. It just seemed to be one thing after another. ‘She mustn’t know, Anna. You mustn’t ever tell her. If Raffin survives, then I’ll deal with him myself.’

***

It was dark by the time they got back to the house. Light from the kitchen spilled out into the unlit hall. Sophie and Bertrand were watching television in the
séjour
. Some girl singing badly, and a voice-over which Enzo recognised as belonging to the host of
Star Academy.
There was still no sign of Kirsty. The door to the computer room stood ajar, and a crack of light zig-zagged its way up the first few steps of the spiral staircase. Nicole’s voice called out of the darkness. ‘Is that you, Monsieur Macleod?’

‘Yes, Nicole.’

‘I’ve got some information for you.’

When he went into the computer room she turned and beamed at him, clearly pleased with herself. Anna leaned against the door jamb and listened.

‘What did you find?’

‘Well, it’s not easy getting access to confidential medical information online, Monsieur Macleod. So I telephoned the Hôpital St. Jean, the
centre hospitalier
in Perpignan, and told them I was a researcher at the Ministry of Health in Paris. I said I needed access to the register of hemophiliacs living in their
département
.’

‘And they believed you?’

‘Why wouldn’t they? I mean, why would anyone else want that kind of information?’ She grinned. ‘Anyway, I did a little research before I made the call. You know, there are only about three-and-a-half thousand hemophiliacs in the whole of France. Which means that, statistically, in an area like the Pyrénées-Oriental, with a population base of less than half a million, there are only likely to be around twenty-three.’

‘It’s a rare disease, Nicole. Where’s this leading us?’ Enzo was struggling to contain his impatience.

‘Well, statistically again, they’re all likely to be men.’ She paused dramatically. ‘So guess what?’ But she didn’t wait for them to guess. ‘There were actually twenty-two on their list.’ She lifted a sheet of paper from the printer and handed it to Enzo. ‘And contrary to statistical expectation, one of them is a woman.’

Enzo looked at the printout held in trembling fingers. He remembered Raffin’s words in Paris.
He’s just a breath away. I can feel it
. And for the first time he felt it, too. That Rickie Bright was just around the corner. Very possibly biding his time, simply waiting for Enzo to appear.

He barely heard Nicole’s triumphant
coup de grace
. ‘Her name is Elizabeth Archangel. She lives in an old fishing port on the Mediterranean, not far from the Spanish border. It’s called Collioure.’ The tiniest pause for emphasis. ‘And she’s English.’

Chapter Forty-Five

Enzo parked in the Place du 8 Mai 1945, in the shadow of the Château Royal. In the tourist season, he knew, it would be virtually impossible to find parking here, but
hors saison
the town was almost deserted, a creeping air of neglect in the cool haze of misty morning air that dropped down from the foothills of the Pyrénées. Shops and galleries and restaurants had closed up for the winter. Pavements, stripped bare of colourful summer displays of goods and art, seemed sad and empty. The plane trees all along the Avenue Camille Pelletan had shed their leaves along the quayside, where only a month before people would have sat dining at tables in the soft, Mediterranean autumn. Now these same tables and chairs were stacked up and covered over until next Spring.

There were a few vehicles parked in the gully below. A dangerous place to leave your car during summer storms, when heavy rainfall would bring run-off from the hills coursing through its dry stone bed to sweep out into the bay. But today there was no hint of rain in the chill-edged breeze that blew off the sea.

Enzo made a mental note of the sign in the window of the Café Sola on the far side of the Rue de la République—
Accès Wifi
, wireless internet access—and walked along the Quai de l’Amirauté, past the
boulodrome
, to the little bridge that spanned the gully. He stopped on the bridge and watched as soldiers under the command of the Centre National d’Entraînement Commando, were put through their paces by barking officers. Young men burdened by full kit, with close-cropped hair and lean, determined faces, pushed rubber dinghies out into the bay. The same routine, though he wasn’t to know it, that the young Rickie Bright had watched daily on his walk home from school thirty years earlier.

He got a street map from the tourist office opposite the Police Municipale in the Place du 18 Juin, and walked through an arch in the old town wall to the Boulevard du Boramar. From here there was a view across the shingle beach and the bay to the diving school opposite, where boats rose and fell on the gentle pewter swell, tethered and covered over for the winter.

At the south end of the boulevard was the Eglise Notre Dame des Anges, with its golden domed bell tower. At the north end was the quay made famous by André Derain’s painting of garishly coloured fishing boats with canted masts and rolled up sails. A couple of them still remained, a reminder for tourists of what life had been like here in Derain’s day, nearly a century before. Collioure was a town rich in art and history. A refuge for Spanish and French artists fleeing war and persecution. A place where penniless painters had paid for food and lodgings with paintings alone. Desperate men who really had lived by their art. And innkeepers who had profited handsomely from their future fame.

He turned south and then north into the old fishing port which climbed the hill towards the fort. The Rue Bellevue, on its south side, was bounded by the remains of an ancient fortified wall. Enzo stopped to peer through a crumbling arrow slit down to the grey seawater breaking green and white over the black rocks below. Three-storey pink, and cream, and peach-painted former fishermen’s dwellings, dominated the north side of the street as it rose steeply to the top of the hill, where a row of stone cottages was built along the edge of the cliff. Red-leafed vines twisted around rusted iron trellises that in summer would provide a shady respite from the southern sun. A fleshy-leafed cactus looked tired and careworn. A cobbled passageway led to a flight of steps beside an arched gate, and Enzo climbed them to a small parking area that served the clifftop cottages.

Below him, the little brick-arched gateway led to a private garden full of flowering winter shrubs, a stone fish perched precariously on its wall. Off to his left, an area of coloured paving, filled with trees and terracotta potted plants, led to the first door in the row. An old wrought-iron sewing table and folding chair sat on a tiny, shaded terrace. Blue shutters were closed over square windows. There was an old, rusted ship’s bell attached to the wall beside the door, and Enzo pulled its rope. The sharp, resonant ring of metal on metal vibrated in the cool air, and after several moments, Enzo heard a lock turning in the door.

It opened into a long, narrow hallway, and beyond it Enzo could see into a sitting room with large windows looking out over the Mediterranean. A small lady with short cut white hair peered at him from the gloom. A lady in her late sixties or early seventies. Her skin was remarkably unlined, but her age was betrayed by the brown blemishes on the pale skin of her face and hands. She wore a knitted cardigan over a white blouse and a checkered tweed skirt and had a short, pink, silk scarf tied at her neck.

Enzo said nothing, and she looked at him for a long time with blue eyes so pale they were almost colourless. And then realisation washed over her, and she wilted visibly, eyes clouding suddenly as if by ripened cataracts.

‘You know, don’t you?’ Her voice was a whisper barely audible above the sigh of the sea thirty feet below. Enzo nodded and she said, ‘I’ve been expecting you for nearly forty years.’

***

She served them tea in bone china cups, pouring from a long-spouted teapot in the sitting room with the sea view. It was a small room, in which all her furniture seemed large. A walnut buffet against one wall, a Welsh dresser against another, and a big, soft, old sofa with two matching armchairs, hand-embroidered antimacassars on the arms. Every wall and shelf space was covered by framed photographs. A record of a life, a young boy in all his stages from toddler to teenager. A record that seemed to stop abruptly in midteens. In most of them he appeared to be scowling, but there was one that stood out from all the others, his face transformed by a radiant smile, blond curls tumbling across a wide forehead. He wasn’t smiling at the camera, but at something to camera left. An unusually happy moment caught in an unhappy life.

Elizabeth Archangel followed his eyeline. ‘Yes, it does stand out, doesn’t it? He was not a boy prone to smiling, or to expressing any kind of emotion. I often felt, during all those years, that he somehow knew, that he had always known, and resented me for it. But, of course, he couldn’t have. Sugar?’

She held out the bowl, but Enzo shook his head. ‘No thank you.’

‘Of course, it wasn’t me he was smiling at. He would never have smiled like that for me. It was Domi. His dog. Normally I wouldn’t have had animals in the house. Too big a risk of scratches or bites. But there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t have done for Richard, even if he never did appreciate it.’

And Enzo realised that she had kept the boy’s name. His real mother had called him Rickie. The woman who had stolen him preferred the more formal Richard. So he had grown up as Richard Archangel.

‘Of course, it was me he blamed when we had to have the dog put down. Even though I wasn’t the cause of it. It had been alright at first, but he somehow developed an allergy to the animal. So bad my doctor felt it could be life-threatening. I had no choice.’ She paused, lost in sad recollection. ‘He never forgave me.’

Enzo looked again at all the pictures, and felt nothing but a simmering hatred for this child who, even then, must have borne the seeds of destruction in his soul. He had to force himself to remain objective. He turned to the old lady. ‘Why did you steal him?’ It seemed odd to speak of
stealing
another human being.

She closed her eyes and her head trembled a little. ‘Be careful what you wish for, lest it comes true. That’s what they say, isn’t it?’ She opened her eyes again. ‘I had a difficult childhood, Mister Macleod. I couldn’t take part in any of the games the other children played. I was wrapped in cotton wool and kept safe from the world. There can’t be anything much worse that watching life slip by your window and never be able to participate in it.

‘My parents were paranoid. That it was their fault never seemed to occur to them. My mother always claimed she didn’t know she was a carrier, but I’m certain now she knew and wanted a child anyway.’ She added quickly, ‘Not that I blame her. I didn’t understand then. But when I became a woman, I knew what it was to want a child of your own. And when you know you can’t have something, you want it more than anything in the world.’

She sipped her tea and gazed out over water reflecting a leaden sky. The wind was rising, banishing the mist, and raising little white crests on the ruffled surface of the sea. ‘I don’t have the worst form of hemophilia, Mister Macleod. My blood was always possessed of at least a few clotting agents. And with obsessive parental care, I made it through childhood almost without incident. But they couldn’t protect me from puberty. That’s when the real nightmare began. With menstruation. There were times it simply wouldn’t stop. I had repeated transfusions, and then they put me on drugs, hormones, to try to control it. They kept me alive just long enough for the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960. I was one of the very first to take it, prescribed and paid for by the good old British health service. Estrogen and progestin to make my body think it was permanently pregnant, to make it stop producing eggs, and to hold my endometrium together so I wouldn’t bleed. The irony being, of course, that I could never get pregnant in reality. Not without facing almost certain death.’

‘So you stole someone else’s child.’

‘Oh, no, Mister Macleod. I wasn’t that desperate. Not yet. And I did something much worse before I resorted to that.’

Enzo frowned. What could be worse? ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I fell in love. Met a man who stole my heart, and all my reason and married me. Not that any of it was his fault. He knew, right from the start, that we couldn’t have children. He knew that making love to me would be a tentative and dangerous thing. That he would have to take the utmost care never to make me bleed. And he never did. I’ve never known anyone so gentle and caring. It was always me who wanted to throw caution to the wind. I had a passion in me, don’t you see? I needed to live, after all those years of deprivation, even if it meant I would die in the process. Which is why, in the end, I stopped taking the pill.’

She exhaled deeply.

‘Of course, I didn’t tell him. He had no idea why I was making such sexual demands of him night after night. Not that he objected. But I knew, that if I could get pregnant in reality, then I would survive stopping the pill. The only question then, was whether I would survive giving birth.’

‘And did you? I mean, get pregnant?’

‘To Reginald’s absolute horror, yes. He couldn’t believe I had put myself at such risk. He had always accepted that we would never have children. But I couldn’t. And I was prepared to die trying. He just couldn’t comprehend that.’

Enzo looked at the little old lady sitting in the armchair across the coffee table, and realised that she must have been driven in a way that he, just like her husband, would never comprehend. What instinctual urge could possibly motivate you to want children more than life? He found himself drawn into the horror of the Archangels’ lives, empathising with the distraught husband who had unwittingly made her pregnant, and who lacked any real understanding of his wife’s obsession. ‘So what happened?’

She sighed heavily, draining the last of her tea, and placing the cup carefully in its saucer. ‘You may remember a plane crash near Manchester in March, 1968. No doubt you were just a teenager then, so maybe not. It was a flight from London to Glasgow. A hundred and thirty-three people died. My Reginald was one of them. I was three months pregnant, and the love of my life was gone. Somehow, then, it was all the more important that I go through with it. That I have my baby. It was all I had left of him.’

She was becoming agitated now, wringing her hands in her lap, unfocused, almost unaware of the presence of the big Scotsman sitting opposite. ‘The doctors did everything they could to prepare me for the birth. But it is almost impossible to avoid even the smallest tear. And I very nearly bled to death. It was touch and go over several days and many transfusions. The bleeding was internal, you see. Very difficult to stop. But they did, and within a week I was holding my own baby boy in my arms, the only surviving part of his father.’ Her face darkened. ‘But that’s where all resemblance between father and son ended. He owed too much of himself to his mother. I’d given him my curse. A fifty-fifty chance. But for him the coin had landed the wrong way up.’

Her focus returned, along with a certain calm, and she looked at Enzo as if she were surprised to see him. ‘More tea?’

‘No, thank you.’ He laid his cup and saucer in the tray. ‘What happened to your son, Mrs. Archangel.’

‘Why, he died, of course. Just eighteen months old. I had taken such care, Mister Macleod, to protect him against any possibility of injury. Worse than my own parents with me. I never let him out of my sight. I was planning, when it came time, to educate him at home.’ She shook her head. ‘Perhaps, in some perverse sort of way, it was better for him. What sort of life might he have had, isolated from the world in the bubble I would have built for him?’

She turned towards the window, biting on her lower lip. ‘I was with him when it happened. Saw him go down, and couldn’t do a thing about it. The exuberance of a toddler learning to walk, the lack of coordination. Clumsy feet. We were in the kitchen. A stone floor. Very unyielding. He tripped and pitched forward. Landed right on his face. I almost heard his nose burst. And then there was the blood. And I panicked. Oh, God, how I panicked. Because I knew, you see. I just knew. I phoned the ambulance straight away, but it was never going to get there on time. I did everything I could, but the bleeding just wouldn’t stop. Such a tiny body. Just a little person. Not that much blood to start with. He was dead within minutes.’

She lifted the teapot. ‘Are you sure I can’t help you to more tea?’

Enzo shook his head, and she poured another cup for herself, concentrating on the minute processes. The single sugar cube, stirred till dissolved. The splash of milk. The swirl of the spoon. The cup brought slowly to the lips for the tiniest of sips. Then she lifted her eyes again to the sea, that seemingly endless, ever-changing expanse of water that she must have gazed upon during untold solitary hours.