I’m walking back to my office, but it occurs to me that he will very likely follow me all the way there. I definitely do not want Paul and Julie exposed to the charming Alain Modan and the no-doubt innocent-sounding questions that he would produce. I stop walking and look at him. He cocks his head and smiles his most beguiling smile, the deep lines in his long face curving to frame his mouth.
“I’ll listen. That’s it.” I take a detour toward a nearby courtyard with a bench that will be in the sun, if there’s any sun; it’s warm enough today to justify eating outside. The bench is empty; I navigate to it carefully given that cobblestones, a cup of coffee and kitten heels are a difficult mix, but I make it there unscathed and sit at one end, with my coffee placed precariously on the arm of the bench. Modan sits also, at the far end, spreading his arms along the back of the bench. The sun makes an unexpected appearance, and he tips his head back to enjoy it, eyes closed. Today he’s wearing a pale pink shirt under his suit, with a silver gray tie; very Eurotrash, but it works for him. I wonder if he looks at my clothes in abject horror: this dress is probably two years old. At least I’m wearing designer shoes.
“Alors,” he says, pulling himself upright into business mode. I’m unpackaging my chicken wrap and pay him no heed. “So, I talk. As promised. We have the answer on when the well was filled in.” He looks at me expectantly. I remember that I’m not supposed to know this and raise my eyebrows obligingly over my mouthful of wrap. “Saturday the sixteenth.”
Having a mouthful is useful; it gives me time to think. About what to say, how to say it; about whether to say anything at all. “You said Friday before. Now you say Saturday,” I comment mildly when I’m done chewing. “What makes you so sure you’ve got it right this time?”
He inclines his head: a silent touché. “The papers say Friday, but Monsieur Casteau—the younger one—tells me it was Saturday. He remembers that his girlfriend arrived in town unexpectedly, so they went off to . . .” He spreads his hands eloquently. “He came back on Saturday to finish the job.” He looks at me again as if waiting for a comment, but when he sees I have another mouthful he goes on, with a wry twist to his lips. “He wrote down Friday on the paperwork because of the contract: there was a bonus if the work was finished on time. On Friday. You see?”
I do see why Modan believes Monsieur Casteau the younger; even I believe this, and I’m hearing it secondhand. “Does Theo’s dad plan to sue him for return of the bonus?” I ask, tongue in cheek.
Modan’s lips quirk. “I don’t believe he considers it a high priority.” He gives this last word the French pronunciation: priorité.
I take another mouthful and chew thoughtfully. Saturday. The day we left. Modan tips his head back to enjoy another brief appearance of the sun.
I try to nudge the conversation forward when I have finally swallowed. “What time on Saturday?”
He’s been waiting for this; for him this is all a game that he’s very, very good at. He tips his head forward again and blinks a few times while his eyes adjust. “He doesn’t remember exactly, but he thinks perhaps lunchtime.”
Lunchtime. Severine would have had plenty of time to return from the bus depot and then . . . what? Get herself killed by person or persons unknown and stuffed in a well? My breath catches: it’s not a game; I don’t want to play. I put down my suddenly very unappetizing chicken wrap. “I presume you’ve considered Monsieur Casteau,” I say in a rush. “Younger or elder.”
“Bien s?r. Of course.” He purses his lips and moves his head this way and that as if trying to look at something from different angles. “They do not seem to . . . fit.”
“And neither do the rest of us.” I can’t hide my frustration. He gives an equivocal one-shoulder shrug. I stand up to dump my leftovers in a nearby bin, annoyed with myself as well as Modan. I have no lawyer. I shouldn’t be here. I pick up my handbag and my as-yet untouched coffee.
Modan watches me gather myself together without getting up, his long arms still laid across the back of the bench, the very picture of relaxed elegance. “Stranger danger,” he muses. “That is what you say, n’est-ce pas? That is what you teach les enfants at school? For murder, it is most of the time . . . bof, most of the time it is rubbish. Most of the time the murderer is in the home, or the street, or the place of work. Someone nearby. Someone known.”
“Thanks for that,” I say sweetly. “On that cheery note, I must get back to work to spend the rest of the day in fear of my colleagues and neighbors.”
“Ha!” He seems genuinely amused by this; his long face is split by his smile. “Have a good afternoon.”
* * *
—
But I don’t have a good afternoon. I have a busy afternoon, even a productive afternoon; I have an afternoon that in the ordinary course of events would be a perfectly fine afternoon, but not in this world, not after these events. Not with the shadow of Modan looming over me and the ghost of Severine flitting through my office at will.
Caro calls; I get Julie to take a message. She’ll be calling about either Seb’s welcome dinner or to pump me for information—likely both; and I have no energy for either.
I meet Lara for a drink after work: investigation or no investigation, I can’t avoid my closest friend. I can’t remember ever deliberately keeping something from Lara. Seb cheated on me with Severine. The words beat around inside me, looking for an exit, but I force them down. Denied escape, they become a solid ever-present weight that sits in my stomach.
But Lara doesn’t notice anything amiss—she’s too busy keeping her own secrets. She doesn’t ask me if I’ve seen Modan; she doesn’t ask me anything about the case. She’s trying far too hard to avoid the subject. I wonder whether she’s seen him, or talked to him on the phone. I wonder whether they have put into action those desires whispered in an airport bar. The weight in my stomach grows heavier as we talk of all the things we usually talk of, which no longer matter at all.
“Oh, Caro called me,” she says suddenly, wrinkling her pretty nose in distaste. “She’s got that dinner she’s been planning for Seb arranged for Thursday.” She cocks her head and looks at me pleadingly. “Will you come? Please?”
Will I? I hadn’t intended to go, but now I think about it. “I suppose so.” I’m bound to run into Seb sooner or later; I may as well get it over with.
“Yay! It will be no fun without you, and Caro kind of forced me to say yes. She’ll probably put the full-court press on you, too, at some point. You know,” she muses, “much as I hate to admit it, it is nice of her to have arranged it all. I bet Seb will be really touched.” She takes a sip from her wine, then asks hesitantly, in an almost word-perfect repeat of Tom’s question on Saturday: “Do you still care? After all this time?”
I look at our half-drunk wineglasses, Lara’s with a distinct lipstick smudge on one side, mine with only the merest suggestion of a lip print. In my darkly introspective mood even that seems highly symbolic, a deliberate motif designed to illustrate that I move through life leaving barely a trace to show I was ever there. “I don’t know,” I reply at last. I think of Tom’s follow-up—why did you think you broke up?—and I see Seb’s eyes when he told me it was over; I see the way they slid away from mine. I thought that underneath it all he felt guilty, for a myriad of reasons but one particular being he was ashamed that for all his assertions that background didn’t matter, in the end he had to acknowledge that he wanted someone from his world, someone who fit. Now I have a different thesis about the source of that guilt, though not one I can share with Lara. “It’s hard to say. I haven’t actually seen him since—well, since he dumped me, actually.”