Deadlight (51 page)

The smile on Marie’s face was fading but Winter wasn’t about to stop.

‘Something else …,’ he said. ‘Tell Baz I’ve sussed him. I know what he’s up to. And to be frank, my love, it’s not my job to help.’

‘Help how?’

‘Help him get his knighthood … or whatever else he fucking wants. The guy’s creaming it. The business is making you a fortune. And this is
legit
money. So why on earth do you need the Tide Turn Trust?’

‘Because Baz wants people to take him seriously.’

‘Exactly. The knighthood. The gong. But not me, eh? Not through my bloody efforts.’ Winter folded the menu and sat back, turning his body away from the table, staring out at the street. He seldom lost his temper but on this occasion he knew it he had no choice. Marie would carry every word of this conversation back to Bazza, and Bazza had to know that Winter meant it.

‘He wants to go into politics, Paul.’ She said it softly, as if it was a family secret. ‘The Trust’s all part of that.’

Winter didn’t move. The street outside was a river of blue shirts.

‘He wants to do
what
?’

‘Go into politics. Get himself elected. Sort this city out. He told me the other night.’

‘He was pissed.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘He meant it?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Really?’ Winter finally abandoned the street. Marie’s smile had gone.

‘It gets worse,’ she leaned forward. ‘I think Ezzie’s having an affair.’

D/I Joe Faraday stepped into the chilly gloom of the Bargemaster’s House. After the overnight flight from Montreal, he’d paid a surprise visit to his son, still living in Chiswick. J-J, as it turned out, had acquired company in the shape of a Russian actress called Sonya and all three of them shared an awkward breakfast before Faraday cut his losses and hit the road again. The flight, the breakfast, and then the drive back down to Pompey had wiped him out.

He bent to the doormat and quickly sorted through the pile of post. Apart from a Mahler CD from Amazon and the May edition of
Birdwatching
, he was looking at nothing but bills, freesheets, credit card offers, and pleas for cash from sundry charities. Ten days away, he thought, and I come back to this.

He dumped his bag in the lounge and gazed at the stairs. Gabrielle had left the week before Christmas, flying to Montreal to take up the offer of a visiting fellowship at McGill University. The offer had come out of the blue, the kind of bombshell that he’d always dreaded. At first she’d dismissed it. She loved the Bargemaster’s House. She adored living with her grumpy
flic
. She was looking forward to throwing herself into the research for a new book. It was all, in a word,
parfait
.

Too perfect. Watching her face at the breakfast table that morning, the way her eyes kept returning to the letter, Faraday knew that this new life of theirs, the relationship they’d so carefully built, was doomed. As an anthropologist, her publications were beginning to attract serious attention. It was only a matter of time before someone came knocking at the door, seeding that curiosity, that hunger for the unknown, which was the essence of this woman who’d come to occupy the very middle of his life.

And so it had proved. As autumn slipped slowly into
winter, Gabrielle spent longer and longer on the internet, exploring the implications of saying yes. The fellowship was only for a year. Montreal was an interesting city. Canada was a mere six hours away. They could take it in turns to make the trip over. The twelve months would be gone in a flash. All of these things were true but deep down Faraday knew that their affair, their life together, was probably over.

Confirmation came on the day she left. Gabrielle always travelled light. Years of fieldwork in remote corners of the world had taught her how to survive on the contents of a sizeable rucksack, yet it gutted Faraday to realise just how little of herself she’d deposited in the Bargemaster’s House. Carrying her two bags out to the car for the trip to the airport, he’d somehow assumed he’d return that evening to find lots of her stuff, her books, a handful of clothes, her
smell
, still strewn round the bedroom. Yet there’d been nothing, not a single item to remember her by. Standing in the darkness, listening to the carol singers up the road, it was as if their time together had never happened.

He remembered that moment now, a feeling of despair, of abandonment, even of betrayal. It had taken him weeks to come to terms with it and if he was honest with himself he knew it had never really gone. There were ways of burying it – work, for instance – but even a series of challenging homicides, one still unsolved, were no substitute for the anticipation of another evening together, of meals round the kitchen table, of conversation spiked with laughter and bottles of Côte du Rhône, of the countless ways she untangled the knots inside him and left his soul at peace. Without her, without what she’d brought to this solitary life of his, he was nothing.

Now, he stooped for his bags and climbed the stairs. The PC was on the table by the window. He fired it up,
gazing out at the brightness of the afternoon. Breaths of wind feathered the blue spaces of the harbour and he reached automatically for his binos at a distant flicker of movement. A raft of Brent geese. A pair of cormorants. Closer, only yards from the foreshore, a lone turnstone.

He turned back to the PC, pulling the curtain against the glare of the sunshine, scrolling quickly through ten days of emails. For once he didn’t pause for birding news from an e-chum on Portland Bill. Neither had he any interest in a message flagged urgent from his bank. All he wanted, needed, was word from Gabrielle. He’d left her barely twelve hours ago, a goodbye hug in the departure hall at Montreal-Trudeau. It was less than an hour back to her third-floor apartment in St Michel. She’d have had the rest of the evening to compose the email of his dreams: how much these last ten days had mattered, how nothing had changed between them, how much – already – she missed him.

Nothing.
Rien
.

He sat back, staring at the screen, knowing in his heart that it had to be this way. The essence of Gabrielle, that quickness of spirit that had captured him, was what had taken her to Montreal in the first place. She was a bird of passage. Her life was a series of roosts. Lucky the man who got to share even one of them.

He reached for the keyboard and began to compose a message of his own but the phrases felt leaden.
Easy flight. J-J shacked up with some Russian actress. All well at home
. Was this the way he really felt? He deleted everything and started again, the truth this time.
I miss you. You should be here. We had a brilliant life, didn’t we? What did I ever do to drive you away
? He stopped, knowing he’d never send it, knowing he was talking to himself.

The fact was he’d never driven her away. She’d gone because another door had suddenly opened and she couldn’t resist finding out what lay on the other side. That was her nature. That was what had turned her into one of life’s nomads. Already, the head of her faculty had hinted at a permanent academic post, most likely a lectureship. Soon, there’d be someone else in her bed. Both men, inevitably, would be disappointed. Because Gabrielle, a slave to her own curiousity, would inevitably move on.

Dommage
, thought Faraday.