The Image in the Water (21 page)

At least the superintendent was thinking. The mood in the kitchen lightened slightly. Louise had another idea. A broom cupboard off the kitchen had been appropriated many years ago for Mrs Mackintosh's personal use. There she kept an umbrella, an old raincoat, two aprons and a pair of smart shoes. Mrs Mackintosh arrived in these shoes each day. As the first act in her morning ritual she changed into flat slippers suitable for housework. Louise opened the cupboard door. Its normal contents were as familiar to her as anything in her own bedroom. It was bare except for two wire coat hangers. She summoned Peter. She did not need to say anything as they stared into the void. Mrs Mackintosh had not been kidnapped. Mrs Mackintosh had left in good order. Mrs Mackintosh was a traitor to them – and a servant to whom? For the first time in her life Louise felt a stranger in Scotland. She hurried out of the kitchen to master a second wave of tears.

They were booked on the first available flight from Nice, dislodging two other passengers. Air France was flexible in such matters. The French police would drive them to the airport
from Cannes. Julia had packed quickly and wanted to leave at once. Cannes was already repulsive: she would prefer the isolation of a VIP lounge. But the police, so David told her, insisted they should stay in the hotel till the last possible minute. They were afraid that stringer journalists hanging around the airport would notice the now quite well-known British couple leaving prematurely and ask questions to which as yet there were no answers. They had an hour to wait.

‘There's time to go back to the beach. Will you come?'

‘Good heavens, no,' he said. It was as if they both realised that in this, the first disaster of their marriage, they had nothing to say to each other. ‘I can't unpack my beach things again.'

But she gathered her bag, sunglasses and novel and left the room. She had learned, perhaps from her father, to put on a calm exterior over her jangling nerves. ‘I'll be back in good time.'

Downstairs in the lobby the hotel bellmaster, greeting her, turned the circular swing door that led out on to the pavement, main road and beach. But Julia turned aside. She had to be active: the hours that morning when she had relaxed happily on the beach seemed infinitely distant. Moreover, two French police officers stood, dignified and silent, outside the main door, one of whom would almost certainly insist on coming with her to the beach. She had already noticed that past the hotel news-stand and leather shop a door led out on to a side-street.

Soon she was in the flower market, but its voluble brightness offended her almost as much as the beach would have done. She took out her mobile phone to ring her mother again. ‘No network coverage,' its tiny screen read. Naturally.
The networks of the world had seized up. It was that sort of day. In the small church abutting on the market there would certainly be darkness and quiet. The church was indeed deserted; it offered nothing to tourists except the grace of God. In a side-chapel candles flickered round a blue and white Madonna with a crude gash of scarlet across her lips. Julia knelt but could not find anything to invest in prayer. She sat back and tried to think. At least it seemed certain that Mrs Mackintosh had gone with Simon, either willingly or by force. She had learned quickly how to feed him, run his routine, settle him when he cried, updating her own ancient experience. Julia did not care a damn about Mrs Mackintosh's political allegiance so long as she could change nappies and ply the bottle.

Julia's mind switched direction as an old man hobbled up the aisle and fumbled with money for a candle to light in front of the Virgin. It was impossible to guess how David would carry himself during this crisis. She felt as if she were assessing a stranger. At that moment she found no attraction to or affection for him. So far he had, like herself, seemed stunned. What would happen when the immediate shock wore off? Like her mother in Scotland at roughly the same moment, Julia realised that David would already be thinking of Simon's disappearance as a political event. He would be weighing up the timing and content of announcements and broadcasts. This did not necessarily mean that he had no inner feelings. But he would want, as far as possible, to be in charge of the world's searchlight as it fastened its clumsy beam on his own and Julia's drama.

Julia was not sure she could bear this side of the immediate future. She left the dark church abruptly, stood for a moment,
dazzled in the contrasting glare, then walked back to the promenade. She turned east towards La Croisette, her back to the evening sun. She moved quickly, compensating with physical briskness for the emptiness of her mind. The boulevard led away from the fashionable part of Cannes. The shore to her right was no longer bright with umbrellas. The sand was unkempt, increasingly littered with cigarette packets and empty bottles. The craft in a small marina bobbed in a sea that seemed dirty: they lacked paint. Just short of the headland of La Croisette itself, a few square metres of trodden yellow grass surrounded the white bust of a writer, his nose chipped, his name obscured by graffiti in Arabic and what looked like a plea for help: ‘
liberate tutame ex feris
' – an echo of some incomprehensible feud, presumably in the Balkans. Children, gipsy or Balkan, ignored the faded instruction to keep off the grass. Julia kept moving. Her mind, too, had covered some distance from the comforts of the Hotel Carlton and the highly organised political conclave at the other end of the bay. What would happen if she just kept walking? She had cash and credit cards in her bag. She could disappear into some cheap hotel along the coast, forget the puzzles of Simon and of David and sit out the next day or two by herself. By then Simon would have been found, alive or dead, and a new set of emotions would be required. Her present set had worn out. She was numb, not knowing how she felt.

A young man approached her. Julia realised that her hair was a mess.

‘Cigarette?' he said, as if in English. He might be the elder brother of those children on the grass. He had learned a confident smile to go with his looks. Physically he was the exact opposite of David – a tall, well-shaped boy, about eighteen,
long black eyelashes, his purple shirt wide open above tight grey shorts, which needed a wash. ‘You have the time?' was his second gambit, pointing at his empty wrist. Julia kept moving. ‘You like ice-cream?'

It was enough. If she went on east, that was the world she would enter. She must already look lost and dishevelled, available for a teenage grope. Julia turned back along the boulevard, walking even faster.

A black Mercedes was parked outside the main entrance of the Carlton. Just inside the swing doors a senior French police officer wearing white gloves was talking to the hotel manager. The two officers whom she had seen before stood behind them. Julia swept past; no one made a move to stop her.

Upstairs in the suite David, now dressed in a suit, sat on the bed, inclined over his mobile phone. Typically, she thought, his phone had coverage, where hers had failed. When he saw her, he took the phone from his ear as if to turn it off, then thought better of it. ‘I must go now,' he said to the phone. ‘At once. To sum up, then, I can look after the operation here. Just let the usual people know I'm available. Do that now. As soon as we finish. Then get hold of McGovern on the lines we discussed. At once. That's right. Goodbye. I'll ring again from Nice airport.'

‘Who was that?'

‘Only Clive Wilson.'

‘Do you always give orders to the Chairman of the Party like that?'

‘Yes.' But she could not hope to hold the initiative. David got up, and jammed the phone in his pocket. ‘Where have you been? You look a mess. The police car's been waiting ten minutes at least. Your case is downstairs already.'

As they hurried through the lobby, the African chieftain came smiling towards Julia. ‘Madame?'

She had forgotten him. The necklace was in her suitcase. She was confused. Their encounter on the beach that afternoon seemed months away.

David intervened. ‘My wife liked the necklace. It seems expensive for what it is, but we will have it.' As was now quite usual David had formed the habit of carrying plenty of cash ever since the confusion over the future of MasterCard four years before. He began to count euro notes in large denominations.

‘I don't want it,' said Julia, taut and unhappy at this diversion. ‘It's rubbish, really. I can't think why …' She did not know what she wanted.

‘We don't have time to argue. The necklace is yours.' He handed six 500-euro notes to the African.

‘
Merci, Excellence. J'espère que Madame
—'

‘We must go.'

They hurried through the suburbs of Cannes up into the hills, the police enjoying the need to move faster than the law allowed. Julia expected, from her earlier life as a protected person, that they would soon turn on the siren, and police happiness would then be complete.

Then David surprised her again. ‘I spoke to you too roughly upstairs. You know why.' He took her hand and held it, for about half a minute. She noticed that, most unusually, one of his shirt buttons was undone, the third from the top.

In the intervals between thinking about Simon, she realised that, whatever else happened, her dealings with David would remain complicated. She wondered whether to fasten the button, but held back.

A few minutes later he brought their relationship back to the humdrum. ‘I'm going to say a few words to the press at the airport. There'll just be time.'

‘Words? About Simon?'

‘Not about Simon. At least, not directly.' He paused.

Julia realised how difficult it was for her husband to speak directly about anything. Sometimes this made for slow speech. There were layers of calculation beneath most of his utterances. This could mean strenuous work for brain and tongue as they combined to make sentences. She interrupted his thought, impatient to push him on. ‘Has anything come out yet about Simon disappearing? Who is McGovern?'

‘Nothing yet. The Grampian police want to keep it quiet for as long as they can. They think publicity will confuse their investigations.'

‘That won't be long. I've never known the police keep a secret more than an hour or two. There's always a sergeant somewhere with a hot line to the
News of the World
.'

‘That's as may be.' David sounded disapproving. Julia remembered that, despite his hardness, David was inexperienced about some practicalities of life at the top, which she had known, willy-nilly, through all the years with her parents.

‘And McGovern?'

That pause again. There was some justification since neither of them could be sure how much English was known by the driver or the inspector of police in the front seat of the car. David spoke in a low voice; now in the idiom of a lawyer presenting facts to a court. ‘It's reasonable to assume, though not certain, that Simon has been kidnapped by the SLA, that's the far-out Nationalist group that snatched the lawyer, Cameron. McGovern is an old Labour MP who is in touch
with these people. In turn Clive Wilson is in touch with McGovern. He has been for several weeks. Nothing to do with Simon, of course, or with Cameron, just politics. They've been in touch again today. McGovern believes the SLA want a political declaration out of me. I don't know what grounds he has for this. He's a foolish man, but well connected. Anyway, I've decided to make such a declaration. In five minutes, from Nice airport.'

The car was down from the hills now, and the signs directing to this or that outpost of the airport were multiplying along the roadside.

Julia was afraid that he would begin to tell her about the content of his coming declaration, a matter in which she had little interest compared with the main question. ‘And if you do this they will let Simon go?'

‘I can't tell. I really can't tell. But it's the only line we have. Do you know a better?'

‘Of course not.' She subsided, dead tired at different levels from the sun on the beach, her flurried walk to La Croisette, and the crushing anxiety. She had no will to challenge her husband and, as he said, no alternative plan. She recognised in him the pleasure that comes to a man who has taken a difficult decision, a pleasure that provides able men with one of the main motives for entering politics. She hoped that beneath this she could find a real anxiety for Simon, and perhaps also, though of this she was less sure, a few particles of affection for herself.

Clive Wilson's telephone calls to London editors had produced only a scanty presence of reporters in the airport press room. The editors had done David proud with their coverage
of his speech at the conclave in Cannes the day before. A couple of columnists in Conservative papers had, with insular exaggeration, described him as taking a lead for the first time in discussion among fellow party leaders.

But the indication, portentously conveyed from Conservative Central Office, that the leader of the Party wanted to impart an important modification of his policy on Scotland had created little excitement. Two men and a girl were present in the press room at the airport. They were stringers, who normally hung about the terminal for a lucky glimpse and quick, shouted interview with some Riviera celebrity: a plump divorced millionaire, a group of pop stars haggard with drugs, an ancient princess with her latest toy-boy. With these they were familiar. But to them David Alcester on a hot summer evening was a mystery and a bore, and as for his wife – she had a good figure but who was she and where on earth did she get her hair done?

‘Thanks for coming,' said David. ‘I apologise for the short notice.' His manners were always better in public than in private. He had done up the loose button. Air France would hold the flight a little longer, but he had to be quick. No time for elaborate introduction or explanation. ‘I have decided to advance Conservative policy on Scotland in one important respect. We have been by tradition a Unionist party. We have always hoped that the majority of the Scottish people would stay loyal to the United Kingdom. We have not wished to desert those Scots who were genuinely loyal. We have wanted to redress the balance of the Union, to remove the obvious injustice to England of the existing system whether in money or in political power. As you know, that has been my main theme since I became leader. But there comes a time when
one has to face facts, however unpalatable. The Union is no longer functioning in a manner acceptable to either English or Scots. It should therefore be brought to an end as soon as possible. I am calling a meeting of the Shadow Cabinet in London tomorrow and with their authority shall write to the Prime Minister Mr Turnbull demanding the immediate introduction before the summer recess of a Dissolution Bill conferring full independence on Scotland.'