“No.” She puts down the biscuit without having taken a bite. Once again I’m caught in her hazel gaze. She ticks all the boxes I had always imagined Seb’s wife would have to tick, but still she is not what I expected . . . She’s more reserved, more intelligent, more herself. I wonder if Seb has gotten rather more than he bargained for. “I rather think Caro is trying to steal my husband,” she says without preamble or apology. “He’s in quite a bad place at the moment: his job, the drinking . . . I know you were at Tom’s last night so I hardly need to bring you up to speed on that.” Only two red spots high on those perfectly sculpted cheekbones reveal the humiliation I know she must feel on discussing her husband’s failings with a near-stranger. “The thing is, it’s Caro who is getting him so worked up about it all. Ever since they reopened the investigation on that girl, she’s been on the phone nonstop, trying to get her little tendrils into him—” She stops abruptly, cutting off the passion that was threatening to spill into her words.
I stare at her. This is so far from what I was expecting—not that I knew what I was expecting, but this isn’t it—that I have to mentally shake myself into responding. “They’re not having an affair,” I say at last. Perhaps it’s a good thing this is such a strange conversation: I can be forgiven for being a little slow on social cues. It wouldn’t be appropriate to say what I’m thinking: I’m about to be arrested for a murder that in all probability was your husband’s fault, so please excuse me if I can’t get worked up about the state of your marriage.
“I didn’t think they were—not yet, at least. Though I’d be interested to know what makes you say that.” One part of me notes that the control she has of her emotions is terrifyingly impressive.
“Caro kept ringing last night. He wouldn’t pick up. Tom asked why she kept calling, and Seb told him he wasn’t sleeping with her, if that’s what he was thinking. He said he never had.” I remember the words escaping his mouth in the dim living room, and more besides. Barely even kissed her. So he did kiss her, at least once then. I wonder when. Probably sometime when they were teenagers. Not that it matters. Not that any of it matters. But she’s here, and so am I, and there are motions I should go through. I shrug. “So if you believe in the old saying in vino veritas . . .”
“I do, actually,” she says thoughtfully. Perhaps I detect a slight relaxation within her, but equally I could be imagining it. She looks at the biscuit carefully for a moment, as if considering if it’s worth the risk, but it remains on the table in front of her. She looks at me again. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” I’m still puzzled as to what she’s here for.
“Tom said you and Caro don’t really get on.”
Tom. “Well, we certainly didn’t in the past, but that was a long time ago.”
“I thought perhaps you would be a good person to speak to.”
“My enemy’s enemy is my friend?” But I see Caro again, admitting to her own mother’s disapproval, and I feel that moment of warmth between us. Caro is not an enemy. Nor a friend, either. I’m not sure I know the correct word in the English language to describe what she is to me. Though if she really is to blame for the Mark Jeffers situation, I’m sure I’ll find one.
“Exactly.” Alina smiles briefly, a genuine smile, not one out of politeness. On another day, I know it would feel like a gift: I don’t believe Alina offers a genuine smile terribly often. “I don’t really know what happened in France: Seb doesn’t like to talk about it. He says he doesn’t want me to worry about anything with the baby coming.” She frowns. “But whatever happened, I think it’s somehow giving Caro some, I don’t know, leverage over him. And quite frankly I find that rather more irritating than the investigation. I mean, it’s not as if Seb would really have killed a random girl, is it? He should have nothing to worry about. But she has him all worked up; he’s talking to her and not to me, and I need to find a way to put a stop to it.”
I look at her blankly. Surely as Seb’s wife, she must know more than this? But there is no artifice in her face, simply frustration and a hefty dislike of Caro—Seb really hasn’t filled her in. It’s probably not my place to do it, either, but in spite of my preoccupation, my distance, I do have some empathy for her. She shouldn’t be left in the dark. “Alina,” I say carefully. “You do know that Seb slept with Severine, don’t you? The girl who died? That he was the last person to see her alive?”
Her eyes fly to my face. “That’s not . . . I don’t . . .” She starts to shake her head and then stops, considering, a frown corrugating her ordinarily smooth forehead. “But I thought he was going out with you then,” she says, confused.
“He was,” I say wryly.
“Oh.” Expressions flit quickly over her face before it settles on a look of resignation. “I rather think I’d better hear about all of this from you.”
So I tell her the bare facts, bereft of any speculation, though I leave out the garden rake since that’s information I’m not supposed to possess. She listens carefully, those yellow brown eyes taking account of me throughout. At the end she blows out a breath and mutters fiercely, “Damn you, Seb.” Her words catch me and throw me years back, to a time when I would have been the one with such exasperation in my voice.
“I’m sorry,” I admit truthfully.
She doesn’t answer; she has finally picked up the biscuit and is working her way through it. “Well, it wouldn’t have been Seb,” she says definitively, when the biscuit is gone. “I mean, why on earth would he want to kill her? The police can’t possibly suspect him.”
“They might think it was an accident.”
She waves it away. “But you know what he’s like when he’s drunk—he passes out; he can’t hold his own body weight, let alone carry someone to a well.”
“Someone else might have done that bit.”
“Who?” she says, disbelieving. “Tom? Caro?” I see the precise moment the penny drops. The color leaches out of her face, and her mouth works wordlessly before she clamps her lips together. I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say.
“Leverage,” she finally says, almost hisses, though more to herself than to me. “That fucking bitch.” She looks across at me again. “Is this what the police think happened?”
No. Luckily for your husband, the police think it was me. This is what I, Kate Channing, think happened. “I don’t know.”
“This can’t be happening,” she mutters, again to herself. Then, louder, looking at me fiercely this time: “This can’t be allowed to happen.”
At that moment my mobile rings out; I grab it as if it’s a lifeline. “My lawyer. Sorry, I’ve got to take this.” I duck outside the café before she can answer.
“Interesting,” says Ms., Miss or Mrs. Streeter, when I’ve downloaded Lara’s discoveries. “Not enough, though, even if the rake shows up your DNA, or anyone else’s. Still simply circumstantial.”
“Circumstantial enough to make it to trial?” I left my coat at the table with Alina. I wrap my free arm around myself, shivering a little. I can feel my ribs beneath my thin wrap dress. They feel worryingly insubstantial. I am too breakable for what life is throwing at me.
She’s silent for a worryingly long pause. “Ordinarily no,” she says at last. “But with the political pressure on this one, it’s hard to say. Have you thought any more about cooperation?”
“Yes.” Cooperation. A deceptive word. It sounds so collegiate, warm and friendly, yet in truth it’s slyly partisan, with its own agenda. Cooperation with the police means betrayal of someone: but who? Seb? Caro? Both? I never thought I was someone who would stoop to this, yet here I am.
“And?”
I close my eyes and speak in a rush. “Caro had cocaine. She smuggled it into France in my suitcase; I knew nothing about it. That’s what the arguments were about on the last night—I found out she’d done that. I honestly didn’t think it had any bearing, so I never wanted to bring it up.” I open my eyes. I never mentioned the drugs all those years ago, and I haven’t mentioned them up to now, but in the space of a few short seconds all that counts for nothing: it’s done. I wonder what Tom will think of me for it, and then I have to screw my eyes tightly shut again to block out the opprobrium I imagine in his face.
“Did you take any drugs that night?” Her voice is clipped, tightly professional.
“No.”
“At any point during the holiday?”
“No. It’s really not my thing; ask anybody.”
“Believe me, the police will. Have you ever taken any drugs?” she continues, unrelenting.
“What, ever in my life?”
“Ever. As in, at any point whatsoever.”
“I smoked pot once or twice at uni, but it just sent me to sleep; plus I don’t like smoking.”
“Once or twice? Be specific.”