Finn saw where she was heading and couldn’t believe it. He jumped in quickly, saying, “Hold on, Debbie. I’m sympathetic, really I am, but I’m not sure what you want of me.”
She fixed her gaze on him, her eyes rimmed with tears now. “Help to find her. I know about your career, about who you are . . . Adrienne told me.”
“Told you what? I write popular history books.”
“Before that, Finn. She told me—you were a spy or an agent or whatever it is they call them now.”
He was briefly angry with Adrienne, not so much because she’d refused to let the whole spying business drop—if anything, he admired that she’d always seen through his denials—but because she’d shared those thoughts with Debbie Portman. It proved that he’d been right never to be completely open with her, that it was best never to be completely open with anyone.
“No, no, no. Adrienne likes to believe I was a spy, but she shouldn’t have told you that because it’s ridiculous, and now it’s given you false hope. I’m not a spy, I never was. I write popular history books—”
She sprung up from the sofa. “Jesus, Finn, my daughter is missing! You’re the only person we know who might have the contacts, who might know how to help, and I’m asking you to help find her, that’s all.”
He felt hemmed in, the startling sense of exposure less oppressive than the urgent realization that he had to deny it, that he couldn’t admit to a past of any kind, no matter what the emergency.
He shook his head. “I wish I could, I really do, but I’m not who you think I am. Even if I were, I’m not sure how that would help me find a missing schoolgirl.”
“You could help. There must be something you could do, someone—”
“Debbie, I can help you as a neighbor . . . as a friend. But what you’re talking about, it’s just Adrienne’s fantasy. You know, not everyone with a gap in their CV is a spy.”
She didn’t believe him, perhaps believed him even less than before, and said with utter conviction, “You could help.”
“No, I couldn’t. Not in the way you think.”
Her eyes didn’t leave his, but instead stared hard—accusing, calculating. Adrienne’s word meant more than his, and as a result Debbie saw only a man who didn’t want to help, not a man who couldn’t. If he was honest with himself, she was partly right in that assumption, because both of those things were true.
“Bastard.” It was said with quiet hatred, and then she turned and walked out. He expected to hear the door slam, but she left with a composure and a dignity that made him feel less of a man.
He walked through to the bedroom, opened his suitcase but didn’t empty it. Instead he went back to the study, to his notes, settling back into his chair, into history, struggling to put the unpleasantness of Debbie Portman’s visit out of his mind.
He forced himself to focus, because Debbie Portman’s daughter wasn’t his problem. How to make the Abbot of C?teaux sympathetic—that was his real problem, and the key to his book. The Pope, the crusader, the citizen of Béziers . . . he could see a way of making all of them sympathetic, but none of them was the key.
How could he make his reader empathize with a man who’d ordered the deaths of twenty thousand people, a man who’d brought such destruction on the city that it had taken two hundred years to put right—and all in the name of God?
For Finn, his understanding of the abbot’s ruthlessness lay in the simple and brutal beauty of knowing it had worked. All the other towns had capitulated willingly in the knowledge of what had happened to Béziers, and surrendered the Cathars to their fate. That was enough to fill Finn with a sneaking admiration for the Abbot of C?teaux, but he doubted it would be enough for his readers.
He heard an ambulance siren somewhere in the distance and his thoughts found their way stubbornly back to his neighbors and their domestic drama. He guessed the girl was around fourteen, and his mind reeled unwillingly through the possibilities of what might have happened to her, a backdrop against which running away was the fragile best-case scenario.
But Debbie hadn’t talked of Hailey running away; she’d said she was missing. There was an implication there—one strengthened by her trenchant belief that someone with an intelligence background might be able to help in a way the police couldn’t. It made him curious. What exactly did she think had happened to her daughter? Was it just a woman refusing to believe that her precious little girl had become sick of living with her parents?