She eyed him cautiously. “In what way?”
“The boy she’s with is only thirteen,” he told her.
The flash of pain that crossed her face made him susceptible to empathy again and he didn’t want to feel that for her. It also meant she knew something.
“Tell me about the boy,” she said in a low voice.
“I can’t,” he said patiently. “He’s a child. His privacy is protected. Every student and parent connected to the tour has signed documents stating they won’t reveal his name.”
She looked around the room. “Are we being monitored?”
Bish actually had no idea. “Not by me. Are your visits usually recorded?”
“I rarely have official visits,” she said.
“So let’s presume that the people who sent me to interview you trust that I’ll tell them everything and haven’t felt the need to record us,” he said.
She shifted a little closer to him.
“Then answer me a yes or no,” she said, and something in her eyes begged him, so Bish nodded.
“Is his name Eddie Conlon?”
After getting nothing more from Noor LeBrac, Bish stopped by the off-license on the way home. He had learnt the art of not always going to the same place. Didn’t want to see the look in the eye of the same someone behind the counter. He’d become a master disguiser of it all. In the end he didn’t know who he was disguising it from. And by the time he finished the bottle of Scotch that night, he didn’t care.
15
He stayed in bed late the next morning to sleep off his hangover. His dreams were a mishmash of drowned bodies. In one, the body in the French morgue belonged to his son. In another, Stevie was weeping, asking, “Who’s the girl in the channel, Daddy?” It was Noor LeBrac who comforted his boy, while Bish could only watch, just as he had from behind the mirrored prison wall. In his dream she stared at him smugly. “I’m taking your child the way you took mine,” she said.
When he woke his face was wet with tears. He opened another bottle of Scotch, downed a glass, then one more. He found his phone and deleted every message from Grazier and Elliot. Then drank straight from the bottle.
Later in the day, in the muffled crowded blur of his head, Bish heard footsteps downstairs. He tried to get up, but his hand caught the glass on his bedside table and sent it shattering to the ground.
“Bish?” Rachel was outside his room. He managed to get out of bed and attempted to put on some clothes, despite the fact that they’d been married for sixteen years and she’d seen it all.
She knocked again and opened the door just as he pulled on a pair of trousers.
“I’ve been ringing for ages,” she said. “I found the spare key.”
He saw the look on her face as she took in the room. It was pity and it shamed him.
“Sorry. I’ve had this bug since I got back,” he lied.
“I’ll be downstairs making you a cup of coffee.”
The coffee sobering-up myth irritated him but he figured she made the offer to give her something to do. He showered quickly, his head hammering with the familiarity of too little food and too much Scotch.
She was cleaning up when he came downstairs. A week’s worth of plates and rubbish.
“I’ll do it,” he muttered, because his overly pregnant ex-wife cleaning up after him was enough to make him feel like a bastard. “Did you drive here?”
“No, I had to go into the city today. David will be here soon to pick me up.”
Great.
“Don’t let our daughter see you like this,” she said quietly. “She might seem as if she doesn’t give a shit, but she’s flirting with depression right now and it’s scaring us.”
Bish hated it when Rachel referred to “us.”
“She’s staying with your mother at the moment. Says we’ve suffocated her since she returned from France.”
He could hear the hurt in her voice.
“She’s being a bitch about the baby. Acts as if I’ve put on fifteen kilos eating Cornish pasties.”
He sipped the coffee. Pretended he wanted to be sipping it. Did a lot of pretending while he watched Rachel, all round-bellied, ready to pop out a son for David Maynard any moment now. Not Bish’s son. Theirs was lying cold in a grave.