“Nothing,” I say quickly. Clearly Lara hasn’t considered the possibility that she is being used for ill rather than good. She at least is convinced of his affections. Does that signify? I wonder what Tom will make of it all; there’s no question in my mind that I will tell him. Tom may not want a relationship with me, but presumably I can trust a man who was once in love with me to be on my side. Will Tom trust in Modan’s feelings for Lara? It suddenly strikes me that I’ve been wrong before where Lara is concerned; wrong for years, in fact.
“Lara, when—” Something slams into the window right beside us with a loud thud. We both jump, knocking the table; our coffees slop everywhere. I feel the instant prickle of adrenaline sweeping over me again.
“Jesus, what was that?” gasps Lara, her face utterly drained of color.
The window is intact. I’m standing up, craning my neck with my head pressed against the window to look through it, past the coffee shop slogan stuck on the glass to the pavement below. “A bird,” I say. “A pigeon.” The dirty, gray-feathered body is lying in a heap on the paving. “It’s stunned itself.”
“Jesus,” says Lara again.
I straighten and glance around the coffee shop. The barista continues to serve, conversations are continuing among the paired clientele, mobile phones continue to be inspected by those sitting alone. Nobody else seems to have noticed. I look out of the window; passersby hurry on, unheeding. Severine is among them, in her black shift, blood trickling from her right temple. It doesn’t seem to be affecting either her balance or her self-possession.
“That was weird.” I grab some napkins and start to mop up our spilled coffee. “There must have been a reflection in the window; it must have thought it was flying into sky.”
“That used to happen at school in Sweden sometimes.”
I settle down again and return to my almost cold coffee. “Lara, why did you and Tom never give things a proper go?”
She looks up from her coffee, startled. “After France, you mean?”
“Yes.” I’m suddenly very self-conscious. Should I be holding eye contact, or not? What impression am I giving about how vested I am in this answer? “I always thought he wanted to but you didn’t.”
“Oh.” She’s blushing a little. It underlines how pale she’s been this afternoon. “Actually . . . it was more the other way round. To be honest, I would have been up for it—at the time, I mean, not now—but he was definitely not into anything more.”
“Oh.” I consider that. “Why did I think it was the other way round?”
“I don’t know.” But she really is too honest to leave it like that. “Except maybe . . . perhaps I gave you that impression. I felt a bit, well, rejected, I suppose. You weren’t really around at the time; right after France you and Seb were splitting up and your dad died and then you were up north for ages, and in quite a state even when you got back . . . I think you made the assumption and I never really corrected it, out of pride I guess.” I can see the guilty embarrassment squirming inside her; I can see the Lara of years ago, hardly unable to comprehend the concept of a man who doesn’t want to climb back in the sack with her. “It hasn’t messed things up for you and Tom, has it?” she asks, suddenly anxious.
“I don’t think there is a me and Tom.” Just like there was never a Lara and Tom. I got that wrong, for all those years, along with just about everything else. Am I wrong about how Modan feels about Lara? Am I being played? “Would you mind if there was?”
“No.” She says it hesitantly, like she’s testing her answer. “It feels a bit strange, but . . .” She shrugs with a hint of a rueful smile. “I’d have no right to mind, even if I did.”
An interesting response. An honest one, I think. I sigh. “Well, it’s a moot point anyway. Since I’m apparently going to jail.” A French jail, to boot. I wonder, in an abstract way, if that is any better or worse than a British jail. And then it strikes me that it’s no longer an abstract consideration.
“It’s not funny, Kate,” Lara says tersely.
“I’m not laughing.” I feel clammy and ill again; I am definitely not laughing. We’re many, many steps away from jail, I remind myself. Don’t think about being arrested. I lean toward the glass and peer out of the window again, down toward the pavement. The gray-feathered heap has gone.
“You have to speak to Alain. You have to give him something, cooperate. You have to tell him—”
“What? What can I tell him? I don’t know anything to tell him.”
“Yes, you do. You can tell him about Caro. You can tell him about the drugs.”
My eyes leap to Lara’s, and she gazes back at me, clear-eyed and unflinching. I look across the divide between us, the corridor of air, and it’s like staring down a tunnel through the years, back to where it all began, back to France and Severine. How far we’ve come, to get to this point, the point where you throw friends under buses. Except Caro is not really a friend, exactly—but I’m splitting hairs. I start to form, then discard, any number of responses.
“What are you going to do?” presses Lara.
A garden rake. “I’m going to call my lawyer.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I leave the café, already dialing my lawyer, but she’s busy and unable to take my call. Of course she’s busy; she’s a professional at the top of her game, high in demand, which is exactly the sort of lawyer one would want to have—only I want her sitting in her office, staring at her telephone and twiddling her thumbs, doing nothing of note except eagerly awaiting my call. I have half a mind to jump in a taxi to her premises, but I resist the urge and instead choose to walk back to my office.
The fresh air fails to do me good. My mind is racing, unable to break free from a spiral track that leads inexorably to a dark pit of all the things I’m not yet ready to face. Surely there must be a way out, a bargain to be made with a God I don’t believe in . . . How can this be happening to me?
“Jesus,” says Paul. He doesn’t look up as I enter the office. “Did they have to get the coffee beans from South America?”
It takes me a minute to process the words and divine his meaning, then I glance at my watch. I’ve been gone over an hour and a half. But surely not . . . the taxi there, plus the time spent with Lara, plus the walk back: it doesn’t quite seem to add up. But my internal clock and the reckoning of my watch cannot arrive at a mutually agreeable answer. I have the sensation that time is rushing past me, rushing through me, like I’m no more substantial than a ghost and there’s nothing I can do to stem the tide. “I forgot I had a call with Gordon.” It’s hard enough to invent an excuse, let alone give it some expression. “I took it at the coffee shop.”
Paul looks up from his computer screen at that. “Not a problem there, is there?” he asks anxiously. “I thought Caroline Horridge was the liaison now.”
“No problem. Gordon just likes to keep his finger in the pie.” The words make sense, but they mean nothing to me. Perhaps in a while Paul and the business and all those small concerns that add up to mean life will catch at me with little hooks and lines, pulling me back into phase with the world, but for now I feel like nothing exists except the looming dread of a French jail. Shock, I realize. I must be in shock.
“Well, I’ve loaded the Jeffers file now if you want to take a look.”
“Thanks.”
“Oh, I nearly forgot. Someone called for you when Julie was out at lunch, wanting to know when you’d be back, but wouldn’t leave a message. A woman, posh sounding.”
“Well, that certainly narrows it down.” I’ve refound irony: I must be anchored back in the real world now. Except—I glance quickly around—Severine is not here . . . but no, I’ve got that wrong; Severine is not real, Severine is not normal . . . My head is pounding. I sit down quickly.
“Are you all right?” I hear Paul ask distantly.