Authors: Catherine Sampson
While he was talking to Veronica, I was on the landline with Maeve. Clearly upset, she described to me the discovery of Melanie’s
body and gave me the same précis that Veronica had given Finney but embroidered with miserable speculation.
Sal had left a message on my mobile, so I called him back. This man who had seen so much death so very close up and who had
reported it on national television was so distraught by the news of Melanie’s death that he was almost unable to communicate.
He sobbed uncontrollably. We did not speak for long. We said good-bye and I hung up, worried by this sudden dam burst of grief.
I sat back down at the table. The candle had blown out in the breeze, and Finney was trying to relight it. I watched its struggling
flame. It kept going out, and Finney kept relighting it, until in the end he threw down the matches in exasperation and left
it as it was. I didn’t even realize I’d started to shake until Finney went and fetched me a jacket, and I could scarcely get
my arms into it. I turned and tried to smile at him, but that didn’t work, either.
“I failed her,” I said.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I was supposed to find out what had happened.”
“Well, now you know, there’s nothing you could have done for her.”
“But the sightings . . .”
“It’s classic. Power of suggestion. Perfectly decent people, no one trying it on, it’s just a kind of mass hallucination.”
C
OME away with me for the weekend,” Finney said next morning, leaning over me as I lay staring at the wall, “we both need a
break.”
I rolled over and gazed up at him. I had not slept all night. Hannah and William had crawled into my bed in the early morning.
Usually when Finney is there they cling grimly to the outer edge of my side of the bed, but this time they had set up camp
in the valley between my pillows and Finney’s. They were still asleep, squashed together, a mountain range of arms and legs.
“Come on,” he said, “I’ll talk to Carol. She’ll understand.”
“I’ve been away a lot, William’s not keen.” Did Finney understand, I wondered, that this kind of competition for my time and
attention was one of the things that frightened me?
“Give me two nights.”
Taking my leave of Hannah and William was a long-drawn-out affair. There were so many final hugs and kisses that I nearly
missed the last call. At Heathrow I ran through the departure hall and at last caught sight of Finney. I shouted his name,
and he looked to see that I was carrying luggage, and it was only then, when I hoisted my bag over my head so that he could
see, that he allowed himself to smile.
It was a short, bumpy ride to Paris, an hour of enforced closeness, Finney’s knees jammed up against the seat in front, our
shoulders pressed together.
We checked into a small hotel on the rue de Seine on the Left Bank, where Finney surprised me by addressing the receptionist
in more than passable French. Our room was tiny, on the fifth floor. The wallpaper was decorated with little pink flowers,
and there were plump embroidered cushions on the bed. I opened the window and looked out at the street, the warm noise of
city traffic wrapping itself around me. I had spoken that morning to Beatrice on the telephone, and the conversation had been
going around and around in my head ever since. Finally Beatrice had some of her answers. She had a body to bury. But the discovery
had only made her other questions more urgent. Who could have done this to her daughter? Finney came and stood behind me.
I closed my eyes and leaned back into him.
“I have a life-affirming idea,” I said eventually. “Let’s eat.”
We ate in a small restaurant in the maze of streets off the boulevard St. Germain. I could not face crowds, so we chose a
restaurant that was quiet and expensive, decorated not in the rich colors of the tourist bistro, but in shades of gray. There
were a few tables of affluent local residents at a comfortable distance from us, their conversations providing an agreeable
background noise for our meal. We ate and drank in almost total silence.
After our meal, we walked by the Seine, below the golden Gothic spires of Notre Dame, and then went back to the hotel, to
our womblike room. Finney opened the windows to let the city in, and we undressed in silence and went to bed.
The next morning, breakfast consisted of coffee and toast at a café on a cobbled street, tourists gathering around us, one
group looking noisily for eggs and bacon and English tea.
“So how do you know where to stay in Paris?”
He looked less like a police officer than ever here in the sun, relaxed, happy. I realized how much my view of him was defined
by the way I had met him.
“You think I’m a Philistine, don’t you.”
“No. . . . Well, a little bit.”
“I spent six months here with the Paris police force, supposedly coordinating our efforts to curtail drug-smuggling operations.”
“Supposedly?”
“Coordinating is a fine art.”
I sipped at my coffee. “Why did you join the police, Finney?”
“Why not? You don’t share your father’s view of the police as the reactionary forces of oppression, do you?”
“No . . . well . . . a little bit.”
He scowled. “We’re a necessity.”
“So are sewers.”
He raised his eyebrows. There was an irritated glint in his eye. “Thank you. Look, I’m a steady guy. It’s a steady job, a
steady income, steady demand,” he told me. “Isn’t that what your media friends think?”
“You like to stick your nose into other people’s business, just like me,” I said. “You lot are no different from journalists.”
“Now that,” he said, “is below the belt.”
Across the street, a table of backpackers were photographing one another, their poses getting a little more raunchy with each
click of the shutter, their laughter getting louder, reaching a crescendo of delight when one of the girls hitched up her
skirt, sat astride the lap of another girl, and kissed her. Finney had his back to them.
“What are we going to do?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said vaguely, not wanting to apply my mind. “More of the same, I suppose.”
We smiled at each other. We had agreed, in the middle of the night, that we would not be distracted. With Melanie dead, the
urgency of my quest was gone anyway. I had wanted to save her, not find out who had killed her. The shock of the discovery
of her body had receded, and in its wake I realized that we had, all her friends, been mourning her for months. It was her
body, decayed and destroyed, that was the shock, that and the knowledge—
now a certainty, not a suspicion—that she had died at someone else’s hand, with real violence. It had been a long and lingering
death for those left behind. But at least we knew it had not been a long or lingering death for Melanie.
Despite our resolution not to be distracted by her, we had used the hotel computer to check the news on the Internet. We learned
that initial indications were that Melanie had been killed by a gunshot wound to the back of the head. It had been a clean,
professional killing. The remnants of a hood remained, covering her head. There were no indications of rape or of mutilation.
One newspaper was reporting that the last call to Melanie’s mobile phone was from Fred Sevi, at two minutes to ten in the
evening on January 10.
“It was him,” I muttered. “Why did I get so hung up on Mike?”
I buried my head in my hands. Panic overwhelmed me. I had made a man’s life hell. I had repeated history, only this time I
was the predator.
“Stop jumping to conclusions,” Finney said. “It’s a mobile phone, not a gun. Sevi could have been calling her from Dundee.
They’ll go over all that.”
“I know that,” I said, “but why did she come out of the bar if not to speak on the phone? You heard Andrew Bentley. Why did
she walk outside, if it wasn’t to speak on the phone?”
“You heard Bentley, too. She may just have wanted a cigarette.”
I shook my head. “Whoever wanted to kill her needed to get her outside, he couldn’t just hang around and wait.”
We walked by the Seine for an hour, and every time I tried to bring up Melanie’s death, Finney blocked me. Eventually I gave
up. And when I had been silent for a long time, he spoke again.
“I thought,” he said carefully, “that we might try to track down the mysterious Sabine.”
“I thought,” I said equally carefully, “that you were fed up with my crazy family.”
“You are all barking mad. With the exception of Patrick.”
“Patrick? Why should he be let off the hook?”
“He’s male, and he has no Ballantyne blood,” Finney said with forensic accuracy. He made a gesture, resting his case, and
I scowled.
“Anyway,” Finney went on, “if, as seems possible, I’m stuck with them—you—then it follows that I should know the worst.”
I gazed at him. “If you know about Gilbert, you know the worst.”
Adding Gilbert to our holiday was like igniting a stick of dynamite. But if there was one thing that united Finney and me
(and surely there must always be one thing, beyond sex, that keeps unlikely couples together), it was a restless curiosity.
So that if a stone presented itself, however innocent it looked, we were both incapable of leaving it unturned.
“You have your sources,” I suggested.
“I have my sources.”
We took the subway to Montmartre, to the rue Ravignan. I expected nothing and expected even less when we found ourselves faced
with a locked door and an entrance buzzer. Finney pressed an apartment number and, when a woman answered, said, again in good
French, that we had been sent by Gilbert Ballantyne. To my surprise, the woman buzzed us in. We climbed a winding, red-carpeted
staircase to the second floor, where a girl dressed in black was already waiting for us at an open door. She looked at us
with mousy eyes half-hidden by lank hair, obviously disappointed that Finney was not whom she had expected.
“Sabine?”
“Maman?”
she called back into the apartment, and an older woman appeared, her blond hair swept onto her head, pale, sun-spotted skin
stretched tight over high cheekbones, long earrings dangling almost to her shoulders, a younger, thinner, taller version of
my mother. And living in an alternative universe. She stood, an elegant and sophisticated woman in an elegant and sophisticated
hallway. My mother would not have endured this lack of clutter. It was indecently tidy.
Finney filled the gap left by my confusion, introducing us as friends of Gilbert Ballantyne. The woman’s face fell. She flapped
her hand, urging us inside and looking up and down the corridor outside to check that no one had seen or heard us.
“Gilbert, il n’est pas ici,”
she said defensively. I took in polished wood, gilt-framed glass, pretty pictures, flowers.
“Do you know where he is?”
The woman looked helplessly at Sabine.
“Il a disparu,”
she said, and made an explosive sound that she matched with her hands and that I guessed meant “just like that.”
“Mais, c’est normal.”
“Normal?” I echoed.
“Lui, c’est comme le soleil. Un jour il est là et puis il disparait.”
I stared at Sabine. She regarded me with something that I could describe only as malice.
The woman was examining Finney.
“Vous êtes de la police?”
she asked nervously.
Finney shook his head. Not here, not technically. He pulled a face that suggested the very thought was laughable.
“Alors?”
She raised her hands. She was not being impolite. She simply did not know what to do with us. Nor did we know what to do
with her. Finney kept her chatting—no, she had no idea when Gilbert would be back. No, she had no forwarding address for him.
Did Gilbert owe us money? It sometimes happened that people would come to this door claiming that Gilbert had borrowed from
them. Were we journalists? I knew Finney was giving me time to think, time to decide how much to tell her of my identity.
The daughter—this girl I now realized must be my half-sister—watched me through narrowed eyes. She knows, I thought. And she
wants nothing to do with me. Nor I with her.
“We’re late,” I said quietly to Finney. “It’s time for us to go.”
He nodded. We made our excuses.
“You don’t want to get to know them better?” he asked me as we walked away. We could feel the eyes of Sabine and her mother
on us from the doorway. I remembered the accounts Finney had gathered for me, the suggestion of Sabine’s facility with lying.
“I know enough already,” I told him. “The woman is nothing to me. And the girl . . . her mother’s a charming romantic, and
her father’s a petty crook. But she’s something else altogether. Something nasty.”
We walked in silence for a moment, and I thought Finney might be thinking me mad. But eventually he said, “You may be right.”
I wondered what more he knew about Sabine, but this time I resisted the urge to find out. Did I envy Sabine and her mother
their shrug of the shoulder, the lack of accusation? I couldn’t imagine any one of my family comparing Gilbert to the sun.
Not with a straight face.
Finney had little patience with sightseeing. By early evening we had abandoned the line at the Louvre and instead walked by
the river. I lit a candle for Melanie in Notre Dame. Then I surprised myself by lighting one for my father.
We returned to the hotel to shower and found ourselves once more in bed, and later we lay there and watched the sun set slowly
over the city. Eventually, as hunger reminded us that it was dinnertime, we pulled our clothes back on. When my mobile rang,
I seized it up from the floor where it had fallen, my imagination suddenly, guiltily, with the children. It was Jane. I breathed
again. Then immediately I wondered why she was calling me here. I assumed she was wallowing in cosy domesticity with Q, both
of them absorbed in baby Rosemary. I could hear the baby crying.
“Hi,” I could hardly hear her. “Rosemary sounds unhappy.”
“She’s got colic. I don’t know what to do about it, she doesn’t sleep, I don’t sleep . . .” I could hear the shudder of real
exhaustion in her voice. I realized guiltily that my hugely competent friend Jane had joined the ranks of mothers on the edge
of collapse and that I had been leaving her to get on with it. “Anyway,” Jane’s voice dragged on wearily, “I know you’re not
interested in colic. Did you hear the news?”