She shrugs. “Sort of. Maybe.” Again, the effortful smile, through tears that can’t be far away. “You?”
I shrug. “Pretty much the same.” Though in my case there are no tears hovering, I won’t allow myself to wallow again. I take a sip of the wine. It will go to my head quickly tonight if I’m not careful. “Come on. Let’s order the curry and watch the film. We can do all the spilling later.”
And so I spend the evening with Lara. It’s a nice evening; an evening that harks back to happier times. We watch a romcom, we eat too much curry, we drink too much wine. It’s comforting, this old habit of ours; the only thing that has changed over the years is the quality of the wine. Severine stays away, which isn’t really a surprise; I’m well aware she’s a figment of my (frankly, fevered) imagination, and my imagination cannot possibly conjure an image of Severine watching anything containing Reese Witherspoon. I see her more as an art house kind of girl.
But in truth more has changed than our wine budget. When the film has finished we can’t avoid the dual elephants in the room. “So,” she says again, turning to face me and arranging herself cross-legged on the sofa we’re sharing. She’s borrowed from my wardrobe a pair of slouchy pajama bottoms and a hoodie; on me, they’re definitely hide-at-home clothing, but on Lara they’re transformed by her blondness, her bustiness, her sheer wholesome sexiness: she could be an advert for Abercrombie & Fitch. No wonder Tom continues to hold a torch for her. It never bothered me before, but now I find I’m analyzing: score 1 for Lara for instant sex appeal; score 1 for Kate for her quick intelligence; score 1 for Lara . . . I am appalled at myself—has one single drunken kiss with Tom really dragged me down to this level?—but still I can’t completely stifle the ugly green-eyed monster lurking within me.
“So,” I counter. “How are things with the dear detective?”
“Ah.” She looks down and traces a circle on the sofa with her finger. “It’s . . . complicated.”
It seems she’s ready to talk. I rearrange myself on the sofa to mirror her position. “Where is he tonight?”
“He went back to France.”
My heart leaps. “For good?”
“No, he’s coming back on Monday; it’s just for some family thing. A christening, I think. Not because of the case.” She’s still making the circles. “Not that he’d tell me if it was because of the case; he won’t talk about it with me since . . .”
“Since?” A blush is crossing her cheeks, and suddenly I know exactly what she means. I wonder how she will phrase it.
“Since we . . . ah . . . crossed that line.” Bravo, neatly put. I can’t bring myself to ask any of the usual gossipy questions, and she doesn’t seem to expect me to: she glances up at my face, both embarrassed and rueful, and adds, “So, sorry, but no insider information here.”
“A man of principle,” I say, only half ironic.
“He is!” She’s leaning forward, her whole body imploring me to listen, to understand. “I mean, I know how it looks—he’s screwing one of the witnesses in his case—but we’re keeping it totally separate; he won’t discuss it at all with me, not a word, and anyway, it’s not like I’m under suspicion.”
“No, but I am.”
She pauses, then nods dejectedly. “Yes, I think you are. It doesn’t make any sense to me, given she was alive on Saturday morning, but you are. And Seb and Caro and Theo.”
“But me more than most. On account of Seb’s complete lack of self-restraint.” Tom would be annoyed with me for talking with Lara about this. A streak of rebellion surfaces: Tom is stratospherically annoyed with me anyway, so what the hell.
She shakes her head. “I don’t . . .” Then her blue eyes widen as she twigs. It’s a gratifying confirmation that Modan really isn’t talking to her about the case, though I hadn’t planned it as a test. “Seb and Severine? Really? I would never have guessed that . . . I mean, I knew he found her attractive; all the guys love a bit of that French ooh-la-la, soooo predictable . . .” She rolls her eyes. I can’t help a private smile at Lara of all people, who plays the Swedish blond bombshell angle to maximum effect, being so dismissive of Severine’s application of her own cultural advantages. Lara is still absorbing. “Wow. What a complete fuckwit Seb is. Was. Still is, I should think.” She shakes her head again. “When did you find out?”
“Just recently. I had started to wonder, and then Seb—apropos of absolutely nothing—admitted it to me last night. Only because he’s already told Modan, and he didn’t want me to hear it through that avenue.”
Lara is frowning. “But—how? They must have been very discreet. We were pretty much on top of one another in the farmhouse.”
“Apparently it was just the last night.”
“Oh. I suppose it was a pretty crazy night all round.” She shakes her head, still digesting. “I can’t believe I missed that. God, what else did I miss?”
She means it as a rhetorical question, but it’s actually the question, the all-important nub of the matter. “Yeah, I’ve been wondering that myself,” I say quietly.
“You don’t mean—but she was alive on the Saturday morning,” Lara says impatiently. “She got on the damn bus.”
I nod. “Agreed, she did, in which case what happened to her has nothing to do with any of us. Or she didn’t; it was just a coincidence that someone fitting her description got on at that stop—”
“Hell of a coincidence. How many girls even exist in the world who are that height, and build, and who wear a red chiffon scarf over their hair?”
“True, but just a coincidence, in which case . . .” I spread my hands and shrug. “It seems your Modan is rather taken with the latter possibility.”
“He’s not my Modan,” she protests, though without any conviction.
“Really? He does seem to be yours. Head to toe, heart and all.”
“I would think so, except . . . he won’t talk about what’s going to happen after all this is over and he goes back to France.” She looks at me, her eyes over-bright. “I know he had a long-distance relationship before, and he hated it . . . It’s crazy, I can see it’s crazy, we hardly know each other, but . . .” She lifts her hands helplessly, and suddenly I sense her desperate fear: she knows she has already jumped off the precipice. “And he won’t even talk about it. He just says we’ll figure it out. How are we supposed to do that if he won’t talk about it?”
“Maybe he needs to concentrate on one thing at a time. Maybe he just wants to get the case over so you two can stop skulking around.” I can’t believe I’m defending the man who seems intent on painting me as a murderer. But I’ve seen how Modan looks at her. It’s unmissable, it’s cinematic—as if he’s a reformed alcoholic and she’s the very drink he’s been craving for years: that man has no intention of letting her go. “Maybe he’s worried about how you will feel when he puts your best friend in prison,” I add sourly.
“But she got on the fucking bus!” She smacks her hand into the sofa in frustration.
“I know, I know. But that aside . . . if you were constructing the case, who would you have as your prime suspect?”
She pauses, considering. “Not Tom, or me, for obvious reasons—and don’t think you’re off the hook on Tom, I’m coming back to that—and I know it wasn’t you; you didn’t even know about the affair till just now, so what possible motive would you have?”
“Not a rock-solid basis for excluding me,” I tease.