Little White Lies (42 page)

He looked at her now, her pretty face lit up by candlelight and the flush that wine always brought to her cheeks and was again overcome by a wave of emotion – not just pity, but something deeper. He was fond of her. He felt again the sharp, almost painful tug of divided loyalties that had characterised almost every encounter with her. The instructions from Big Jacques had been very clear. Get to know her, get her to trust you, share stuff with you . . . and then get her to lead you to the money. He shook his head slowly. If he didn’t realise it then, he knew it now. There
was
no money. Whatever Sylvan Betancourt had stolen from the state, he certainly hadn’t passed it on to his daughter. Christ, just look at her! Working as a receptionist in the sort of hotel she probably hadn’t known existed before the coup d’état . . . no, Big Jacques and the others had it all wrong. If there
had
been money at some point, it was hidden away in one of those Swiss bank accounts whose numbers went to the grave with the holder. Or else some other family member had already got their hands on it. He doubted it. As far as he knew, there was only that aunt in the suburbs who didn’t appear to have a dime. There was no one on the mother’s side who’d have access to state funds, either. If there
was
any money, it was stored in a vault beneath the streets of Zurich. Before they’d started sleeping together, he’d asked Big Jacques what the point was. All he’d said in response was ‘Keep at her. We’ll let you know.’ That was a year and a half ago and in that time, he’d grown fonder of Annick than he cared to admit.

It nagged at him like a toothache. What now? The purpose – to find the millions that Betancourt had supposedly squirrelled away – that had dominated his life for the past five years was suddenly in doubt, and not just because he believed it to be a dead end. Something else had happened. A slow and growing awareness of his own inadequacy had crept up on him. Part of it had to do with Annick, of course, but part of it too was to do with his own intensifying sense of uselessness. If he were to fail in the one task that had defined him for so long, well . . . what then? What next? It wasn’t something he dared admit to anyone, least of all Big Jacques, Gladwell or Guido, or any of the others, but it was slowly beginning to dawn on him that his life lacked direction. He who had had such purpose and clarity for so long. It was enough to make anyone laugh.

‘What’s the matter?’ Annick’s gentle, enquiring voice brought him up against his own thoughts.

‘Nothing,’ he mumbled, spooning rice quickly into his mouth. He shook his head and smiled at her, trying to reassure her. She was uncertain, he saw. Some memory of what his father had been like – all mercurial, flickering moods – flitted across his memory. From the little he knew of her life with Betancourt, he imagined it was pretty much the same. That was another odd thing: for all their differences and the fact that they’d grown up on opposing sides of the political track, they were oddly alike. Both only children born to powerful, overbearing men and beautiful, flighty women who’d disappeared suddenly, leaving little but shadows that still haunted those left behind. It was another reminder of the unintended consequences of a shared time and place. ‘Nothing,’ he said more forcefully. ‘I just think you should phone them, that’s all. Doesn’t matter what happened or whose fault it was. They’re your friends, Annick. You tell me you don’t have a family. So your friends are all you’ve got.’

ANNICK

Early, early in the morning, when the mechanical cleaning beasts were making their way down the boulevards and side streets, their dull whirring as familiar to her now as the sound of the pigeons on their way to and from Hyde Park had once been, she woke. From her mattress on the floor, she watched the pearly pink light come up over the city. The faint chink of breaking glass drifted up to her, dustbin men tossing the bagged bottle banks carelessly into the gaping jaws of their trucks, stopping to call out to each other in the mixture of Wolof, pidgin French and Arabic that was their particular argot. A finger of cold air came in from the broken window pane above the bed and curled around her ears. She’d complained to the landlord for months but, as usual, nothing had been done.

The faint call of a nearby muezzin drifted through: time for early-morning prayers in La Goutte d’Or. She burrowed a hand through the covers and looked at her watch. It was just after six a.m. The night before, after taking her to dinner, Yves had mumbled something about having to study that evening and he’d dropped her off outside the entrance to the block just before midnight. She’d waited shyly for some suggestion from him to come to his flat – by unspoken agreement, they never spent the night together at hers – but none came. He’d kissed her on both cheeks as he sometimes did when he was distracted. His mobile phone had rung two or three times whilst they were in the restaurant and when he dropped her off, he seemed impatient to move on. At dinner the night before, it was clear that something was troubling him. She’d asked him once or twice if there was something wrong but he’d brushed off her concern.

‘Aren’t you going to answer that?’ she’d asked when his mobile buzzed dully inside his shirt pocket for the third time.

‘No.’ He didn’t look at her.

‘Why not? It might be someone important. Your mother, maybe?’

A look flickered across his face momentarily before he quickly snuffed it out. It took her a while to understand that it was the same look her own face carried at times. He’d told her his adopted parents lived in Clermont-Ferrand, a few hundred kilometres away. He seldom seemed to visit and said almost nothing about them. When she first met him, it suited her. The less he spoke about his family, the less impetus there was for her to speak about hers. She’d told him a partial truth; both her parents were dead. A car accident, she said warily. ‘When I was a teenager.’ He knew there was an aunt somewhere in the suburbs but that was about it. He appeared to have no siblings. There was at least that in common – but, equally, curiously, aside from the phalange of bodyguards with whom he worked, he appeared to have few friends. None, in fact. He never made reference to his studies, or what he did during the days and nights he wasn’t guarding
le patron
and wasn’t with her. They didn’t sleep together very often and when they did, it was always followed by a strange withdrawal on his part, as though he had to put some distance between them that making love had somehow crossed.

She turned her head. Her mobile phone – a cheap, Chinese copy – lay on the pillow beside her. It was Yves who’d insisted she get one. ‘
I’ll
get you one,’ he’d said in exasperation. ‘It’s absurd that you don’t have one.’

‘You don’t need to
buy
me a phone,’ she’d retorted sharply. ‘I’ll get one myself.’ A touch of the old Annick resurfaced.

‘Fine. But
get
it. I don’t like not being able to reach you.’ It was that last comment that did it. Someone cared enough about her to be worried when she couldn’t be reached.

She’d held it tightly in her hand the night before, daring herself to make the call. She didn’t. She fell asleep instead. She reached for it now. There were so few numbers stored in its small memory –
Yves, Aunt Libertine, Hotel du Jardin, Claudette, Wasis
– numbers that she actually dialled from time to time. Then there were four others that she’d entered but never rung.
Tash. Rebecca. Home (London). Home (Lomé)
. She scrolled down to Tash and Rebecca. But what would she say? They’d have heard about the coup d’état, of course. It had been in the papers for weeks. But she’d left everything that might have identified her behind – the flat, her possessions, her phone. There’d have been no way for them to contact her. Neither knew where she worked, not that it would have helped. She’d never seen or spoken to any of her colleagues since. It was
she
who ought to have made the first move. She fingered the buttons nervously. What to say? She stared at the screen until her eyes hurt.
Tash. Rebecca
. Then she put it slowly away from her and rolled over onto her side. She shut her eyes tightly but the psychedelic image stubbornly refused to fade.

TASH
Paris

Afterwards, when the buzz and the noise and the fuss had died down, there were only a few of them left in the bar. Tash, Rosie Trevelyan from
Style
, a couple of other journalists whom she recognised but chose to ignore and a restless, hyped-up photographer from
Vogue
whose name she couldn’t recall but who kept looking around as if expecting one of the models to walk in and sit next to him, presumably. She sat awkwardly perched on the stool, one hand curled around her glass of amber-coloured whisky, the other lightly touching her Blackberry, nestled in her pocket. Rosie, most unusually, was drunk. It was the closing night of Paris Fashion Week and, to Tash’s great surprise,
[email protected]
had won one of the industry’s highest awards, the Fashion Forward Award, given to the year’s most innovative retailer.

‘Bloody well done, Tash,’ she drawled. ‘Bloody well done.’

‘Er, thanks.’

‘Knew you had it in you, though. Right from the start. I always said it to the others,’ she waved a red-tipped finger in the direction of some nameless, faceless ‘other’. ‘I always knew you’d go far. You had a—’

‘Rosie, no offence, but I think I’m going to turn in,’ Tash interrupted her quickly. She stood up, knocked back the rest of her whisky and hurriedly left the bar. The memory of their last meeting when she’d walked out on Rosie still rankled. Especially now, as the older woman tried to make out she’d spotted Tash Bryce-Brudenell’s ‘potential’ all those years ago. Success, she mused as she made her way upstairs, was an odd thing, a very odd thing.

The lift doors opened on her suite. She stood for a moment in the doorway, taking it all in – the acres of pale carpeting, thick velvet curtains, sleek, gleaming furniture and the enormous bed that had been carefully turned down, requisite chocolate on the pillow and a flower beside the lamp. She shook her head with a sense of disbelief. How had
she
got here? She walked over to the bed and sat down heavily. She kicked off her shoes, rolled over onto her side and opened the minibar. She needed a drink. She poured out a generous measure of whisky into one of the heavy crystal glasses, slipped in two lumps of ice and a splash of soda. Taking a sip, she set the glass carefully down and picked up the phone. It was nearly midnight in Paris, eleven in London. It was late but she was the boss and there was something she had to do.

James answered on the second ring. From the background noise, she could tell he was out. ‘Tash? What’s up?’ He was charmingly affable. Thank God.

‘James . . . sorry to call so late. I need you to do me a favour.’

‘Sure, of course. What d’you need?’

‘I need to find someone. I don’t have much to go on, I’m afraid, but it might just be enough. Her name’s Libertine Betancourt. She lives in Paris, or at least she used to. Somewhere near the Bois de Boulogne, if I remember rightly. Find me an address or, better still, a telephone number if you can. I need it by tomorrow.’

‘I’m on it. I’ll call you back first thing.’

‘Thanks, James. I owe you one.’

‘Are you
kidding
?’ Still chuckling, he put down the phone.

She lay back against the pillows, her heart thudding. Why hadn’t she thought of contacting Aunt Libertine before? You could find anyone if you tried hard enough. She closed her eyes. The truth was, she
hadn’t
tried. Until tonight. She didn’t know why the idea to find Aunt Libertine had come to her now, after all these years . . . it had something to do with sitting in the bar downstairs after the awards ceremony with only Rosie and the half-smashed photographer for company. It was one of the most important nights of her life to date and she had no one to share it with. No one who mattered. Rebecca was in Israel with Julian and the family; Edith was at home in London with her grandchildren; James was out with his girlfriend. Lyudmila, in all likelihood, was asleep, a half-finished glass of brandy or port still clutched in her hand. Everyone had
some
one. Everyone except her. She took another sip. The whisky helped her think more clearly. She knew what she had to do. James was only the first step, but at least she’d taken it. It was time to make amends.

She got out of the train at Boulogne-Billancourt and looked around. It wasn’t quite what she’d been expecting. Pretty, but ordinary. Not the sort of place she’d imagined Aunt Libertine would live. She shouldered her bag and walked to the taxi rank. ‘Rue de Verdun,’ she instructed him as she got in.

‘
Très bien
.’ He pulled away from the kerb. ‘
Ce n’est pas loin
.’

Five minutes later he pulled up outside a small, neat little house with a slate mansard roof and ornate wrought-iron balconies. Number fourteen. It was slightly smaller and shabbier than its neighbours, with a white wooden gate. She checked the address James had given her. Yes, this was it. She paid the cabbie and got out, listening as the sound of his tyres on the cobbled street faded away. There was no latch on the gate; it swung open easily. There was a small buzzer to one side of the peeling front door. She pressed it cautiously. She waited for a few moments, then pressed it again. There was still no answer from within. She stepped back and looked up at the windows. It was five o’clock on a Saturday afternoon – a good time, she’d thought to herself, to catch someone at home. A sudden movement behind the curtains of the window directly above her caught her eye. She squinted. Someone was peering down at her. She hesitated, and then lifted a hand in a half-wave. She’d met Aunt Libertine once, many years back. From the little she remembered of her, she was a frosty, very formal woman who smiled little or not at all. The curtain twitched shut immediately. She bit her lip and was just about to turn away when she heard a door close somewhere inside the house, followed by the tread of feet on the stairs. Someone was coming downstairs.