Shallow Be Thy Grave (20 page)

As she cleaned the fridge door, bent low, Sian groaned and Lily nearly wet herself. She ran to the bathroom, barely getting her trousers down before she sat on the toilet and emptied her bladder, the jet of urine like that of a horse. She pulled up her trousers and was still fastening them as she went back to Sian. “Oh my God, are you alright?”

Sian coughed and didn’t answer. She didn’t need to, with hindsight it was a stupid question, thought Lily. She clearly wasn’t alright. “Who was that?”

“I don’t know.” Sian put her hand to her throat. The skin was red, the marks on her neck almost weeping.

“I thought he’d killed you.”

“So did I.”

“Was he a burglar?” asked Lily. God, she needed a fag.

“He was saying ‘tell me the truth,’ over and over, but his French was not so good. He was saying, ‘tell me the trust’.”

“The truth about what?” asked Lily. “Fiona?”

Sian shrugged her shoulders, her face pale, a contrast to the skin on her neck, which was red and angry. Lily went to the kitchenette and came back with a glass of water. “Thank God you’re ok. We’d better call the police. There’s a madman on the loose.”

“Wait a minute,” Sian took a sip of the water, and then another one. “We need to think about this.”

“We don’t need to think about this,” shouted Lily. “That’s the last thing we should do. We need to get the police to think about this. It’s their job.”

“And what do we say about this place? This is the love nest of my husband? I need first to talk to him. Please, Lily. First I talk to him, then we talk to the police. Ok?”

Lily saw the clock again. Stuart and Jo would be worrying like mad by now. The thought of going to a foreign police station and trying to explain the whole situation didn’t fill her with any kind of positive feelings. Perhaps she needed to get Jo’s take on it first. And if they didn’t go straight away, well surely the police would blame Madame Beaumont more than Lily. She was the grown up after all. And a lawyer.

“Promise me, Lily. I don’t want to be the laughing joke.”

“Ok.”

“Promise me, Lily, please.”

“I promise.”

Sian recovered sufficiently to start reapplying her lipstick.

“I’ve got to go soon,” said Lily. She wrapped the headscarf around her face again. She didn’t fancy explaining herself to the doorman. “The others’ll be worried.”

The clock by the bed said it was already almost seven.

“That’s ok. I will stay here for a few moments. Collect my thoughts together. My husband he is not home until eight o’clock. I might meet him from work. I think we should talk away from the house. I must ring Nell.”

Sian was talking almost to herself and Lily knew she wasn’t needed any more. “I’ll ring you later tonight. Are you sure you’ll be ok?”

“Oui. I will be fine. You go. I’ll speak with you later.”

“Lock the door after me.”

 Lily decided to take the stairs. Her legs felt weak, and she wasn’t sure she could control her claustrophobia for another ride in the lift.

The stairs were at the back of the building and from the state of the décor it was clear they were only intended as an emergency exit. Lily’s hands shook as she held onto the bannister and walked down the first couple of flights. Her legs seemed to get shakier with every step. In the end she had to sit down, crumpled into a near foetal ball, sitting on the stone stair, hugging her knees. She yearned to see her sister, to know that she was ok. Who was that man and did he know something about what had happened to Fiona? Her sister’s life seemed fraught with danger and the last year felt like a ridiculous waste of life. Why had she allowed petty jealousy and insecurity to stand in the way of their relationship?

It was while she was sitting there, her head resting against her knees, that she heard a voice. “Comme ca?”

Lily’s head jerked up and she saw the younger of the two guards who’d ejected her from the building earlier that afternoon.

“It is you,” he said as she looked up. “Incognito?”

Lily pulled at the ridiculous headscarf, embarrassed. The security guard smiled at her, revealing a set of tobacco-stained teeth. They did nothing to detract from his appearance though. He was handsome, like a gypsy. Dark brown eyes, olive skin, bushy brown hair and eyebrows. She knew without having to see that he’d have a hairy chest. “Cigarette?” asked Lily hopefully.

He pulled a soft packet of some brand she didn’t recognise out of his pocket and flicked his fingers against the bottom. A solitary cigarette popped out of the packet and he lit it and handed to her. He repeated the process and lit one of his own before coming to sit next to her on the stone staircase. “Are you ok?” he asked.

His voice was deep and exotic and Lily felt for the first time in ages that maybe she was ok, or at least if she wasn’t ok, she might one day be ok again. She resisted the urge to lay her head against his shoulder. She could smell him, he was sitting so close. He smelled of man, of sweat and some kind of male deodorant, of cigarettes and black coffee.

“You have not found the sister?”

“No,” said Lily. “No, not yet.”

They smoked in silence for a few moments and then, “I, me, Alain.”

“Lily.”

“Lily?” He tried it a couple of times, like he was practising getting his tongue around the ‘l’s. “Here. Have you,” he struggled a moment for the word, “pencil?”

Lily shook her head.

“Wait here. One minute. Please.” He stood up, towered over her, smiled with the cigarette balanced between his lips and one eye closed against the smoke, so that it seemed like he was winking at her. He turned and jumped down the next flight of stairs, three stairs at a time, until he disappeared from view. Lily sat and smoked on her own, savouring the silence, the sense of safety. Sitting in the middle of stairs, ‘not at the bottom and not at the top’, the AA Milne poem came to her mind again, reminded her of another time, another staircase. Alain returned this time with a piece of paper. His cigarette gone. “For you,” he said, handing it to her. “If you need me.”

She looked down at the paper and saw a telephone number. She looked up at him and wanted to ask him what she might need him for, then when she saw his face, she got an attack of the giggles. He laughed with her, and then shrugged his shoulders. He waved at her, a half hand movement of a wave, looked at her for another long moment and then disappeared back down the stairs. Lily sat and finished the cigarette, staring at the number on the piece of paper in front of her.

Stuart was alone at the flat. He had his coat on and he looked both mad and relieved to see Lily. “Where the bloody hell have you been? I was about to go to the police.”

Lily almost smiled, although after the day she’d had, smiling wasn’t something that was coming naturally. But she couldn’t remember ever having heard Stuart swear before, and it sounded kind of cute. God, what was the matter with her? Her stomach growled. She was hungry, she realised, and hence light-headed. Not surprising, she’d had nothing to eat all day.

“Where’s Jo?”

“She’s not back either. We said six o’clock. It’s nearly eight. And what are you wearing?”

Lily had taken off the shoes Sian had bought her and changed back into her Docs on the Metro, despite the stares from fellow passengers. But she was still wearing the tailored trousers and Sian’s fitted jacket. “I know. It’s been a long day. You won’t believe half of it,” she moved past him in the hallway towards the kitchen and optimistically opened the fridge, knowing there was nothing in there. She was wrong though, the fridge was stocked with milk, butter, eggs, a couple of brown paper bags. “I picked up a few bits,” said Stuart.

“I’m sorry I’m late. It’s been,” she hesitated, searching for the right word to sum up her bizarre day, “busy.”

“We should get the phone line reconnected. It’s stupid us all running around Paris without any way of contacting each other.”

“Oh God. You so don’t want to know what happened to me today.”

“Go on.”

So Lily told him the events of the day, leaving nothing out. “I thought maybe that’s where they were hiding out, at the Love Shack, but it doesn’t look like anyone’s been there for a while. The strawberries in the fridge were manky.”

When she got to the bit about the intruder, Stuart’s face went pale. “Right, that’s it,” he said. “We’ve got to go to the police.”

“I promised Sian I’d give her time to talk to her husband.”

“Sian?”

“Madame Bitchmont, whatever.”

“So-” Whatever Stuart was about to say was drowned out by the sounds of Jo crashing through the front door.

“Get the ’kin kettle on,” her voice called out from the front door. “I’ve got a mouth like the bottom of my Nan’s budgie’s cage. And please tell me you’ve got one rolled already.”

Lily saw the spliff from the morning, still unlit in the ashtray. For the first time ever in her whole life it didn’t look tempting. She lit it anyway, inhaled deeply, eyes half closed. Jo burst into the kitchen. Her cheeks were flushed and her pink Mohican had flopped to one side, so it looked like only half her head was shaved. Lily took another quick, deep drag and then passed it to Jo.

“You’re probably going to need that,” said Stuart. “When you hear what Lily’s got to say.”

Jo looked at Lily. “What the feck are you wearing?”

Lily shrugged. “Stuart can tell you. I need a piss.”

She stayed in the bathroom longer than was strictly necessary, but she couldn’t bear the thought of recounting her whole day again. When she’d finished, she went first into the bedroom and changed back into her own clothes. She wasn’t sorry to lose the blouse or the scarf, but the fitted trousers were actually quite comfortable. Tight black canvas pants weren’t that well designed for the hotter climates, she was discovering. When she went back into the kitchen, Jo looked at her with alarm. “Who do you think it was?”

“I don’t know. I only really saw the back of his head. I mean by the time I’d clocked that it wasn’t Monsieur Beaumont, he was halfway out the door.”

“Do you think it was a burglar? A coincidence?”

“I don’t know. Weird place for a burglar though. I mean, I couldn’t get past the doorman. I wonder how he did?”

“Would you recognise him, I mean, if you saw him again?”

“I don’t know,” the frustration in Lily’s voice was clear. She had no intention of ever seeing him again.

Jo heard it and turned her attention to Stuart instead. “What about you? Did you find out anything from the neighbours?”

“I was hoping you wouldn’t ask me that.”

Lily glanced across the table at him, hoping for some sign he was joking. She wasn’t sure how much more her brain could take. “What?”

“Well, first of all, it was hard to get anyone to say anything. There seems to be a culture of hear no, see no, speak no. They all thought I was either a copper or a bailiff.”

“So?”

“Well, I finally managed to convince the tenants of the flat above that I wasn’t going to steal their TV. According to the lady, and I use that word in its broadest sense, in 5b, which is directly above this one,” he pointed to the ceiling, “Brigitte is not only an illegal immigrant, she’s a drug user and-”

“We all have our crosses to bear,” interjected Jo, her face barely visible through the sea of smoke around her.

“And a prostitute,” Stuart continued.

“Oh, God.” Lily sank her head into her hands.

“She said she heard an argument between Brigitte and one of her clients on the Friday,” said Stuart.

“How does she know it was a client?” asked Jo.

“Woman’s intuition, I think.”

“So, Brigitte had clients back here?” Lily’s face was a study of confusion. “What the feck did Fiona do while Brigitte was entertaining? Make cups of tea?”

“You don’t think they were, well, working together, do you?” asked Jo.

“No,” said Stuart.

“You get a truckload more money if you come with a friend,” said Jo. Then as the other two stared at her, she added, “Andy says.”

Lily’s heart sank further. After the last few days, she truly thought she was capable of believing anything.  “I take it you didn’t find Bruno?”

Jo didn’t reply for a moment. Instead she smiled, a big grin that spread across her face, and Lily was struck, as she occasionally was, by how beautiful Jo could be. It was probably fair to say she didn’t make the most of her looks. But at times like these, caught unawares, her eyes sparkled and her fluorescent pink hair brought out the colour of her plump lips. “Well, that’s where you’re wrong,” said Jo. She let other two digest the sentence for a moment, before adding, “As a matter of fact, I did find Bruno.”

“Well, go on then,” said Lily as Jo inhaled on the spliff and looked like she was so proud of herself she might float off into the ether.

“Not only did I find him, I got the diary back.” Jo rummaged in the large canvas bag that went everywhere with her and pulled out the familiar green book.

“Wow, that’s fantastic,” said Lily, genuinely pleased.  She hadn’t wanted to admit it, not even to herself, but telling Fiona her diary had been nicked was one reason she was almost relieved they hadn’t found her yet. “What happened?”

“Well,” said Jo, lowering her plump frame into the sofa. “Andy helped. I gave him Brigitte’s names, Chance and Stolz and he managed to pull a few strings and get the French police to see if there was anything on their police system thing.”

“And?”

“Brigitte Stolz was cautioned for possession of cannabis two years ago.” She flicked open her notebook. “3
rd
September 1988. Brigitte Chance wasn’t on the system. But then he asked them to search for a Bruno with the same last name, just in case he is part of her family.”

“And?” Lily hated Jo when she was this puffed up. It was like pulling teeth.

“Nothing for Bruno Stolz, but Bruno Chance… Bingo!” Jo looked from Lily to Stuart and then back to Lily. Her eyebrows were raised.

“Come on Jo, spit it out. The suspense is killing us,” said Stuart.

“He’s got form.”

“He’s got form? You sound like Dennis bleeding Waterman,” said Lily.