The Last Witness (41 page)

‘I’m sorry…
I’m sorry.’
Mikaya shook her head again and looked close to tears. She kept her eyes stoically from meeting his, as if afraid of what he might see there. ‘I just can’t help you.’ She pulled her arm back and turned away.

‘
Please…
what about the pregnancy?
Anything
you can tell me.’

  Gordon had to raise his voice slightly because she was already a couple of paces away. Others in the café did hear this time, confirming their suspicions. But Mikaya was head down, shoulder bag clutched tight to her along with her secrets, and didn’t look back as she headed out.

* * * *

Elena didn’t look round at first as the policeman walked in the shop, she was too busy trying to watch and direct what Lorena picked up from the shelves: left to her own devices she’d pick up an armful of sweets, pop magazines and CDs, when all they’d come in for was some soft drinks and a chocolate bar. It was quite a large
depanneur
, almost a small supermarket.

  She only half turned as she felt the presence of the figure a couple of paces behind: black leather jacket and dark navy trousers, motorcycle boots, wide black belt with baton and gun, French writing arched over an insignia on his jacket epaulette. A tall, rangy man, at least six-three, with his crash helmet making him look even taller. She looked away hastily, her heart thudding wildly, put her gaze back stoically on Lorena as the policeman shuffled closer behind, browsing along the newspaper and magazine shelf displays to one side.

  ‘Look, they’ve got the Spice Girls – but I think it’s in French.’ Lorena was looking down a rack of CDs. ‘They’ve got Billie too, and this one’s in English. Do you think I could have it?’ Lorena lifted it out of the rack with a hopeful smile.

  ‘Yes, fine. Fine.’ The last thing Elena wanted to do was protest and lengthen the conversation. If Lorena had picked up 10 CDs she’d have just dumbly nodded: Right. Great. She didn’t want to hiss
‘Let’s go,’
which was her first inclination, the policeman might pick up on the tremor and haste in her voice, tune into some problem. So she just glared at Lorena and shifted her eyes slightly to indicate the problem behind. But Lorena couldn’t see the policeman because of her height and the shelf rack in between, and before Elena could catch her eye she was absorbed back with the CDs for a second before moving further down: pop posters, cards, chocolates.

Lorena picked up a chocolate bar and a bag of toffees. ‘Do you think they might have J-17?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. The magazines are mostly in French.’
Come on,
Elena silently screamed. The policeman was now just two feet away, she could almost feel his breath at her left shoulder. She’d injected a slight American lilt to her speech, tried not to sound so English, and she hadn’t wanted to say straight out that they wouldn’t have magazines from England. Her pulse was racing, she could feel it wildly pumping a vein in her neck and her throat felt tight; she could hardly swallow. They could easily have traced where she’d gone by now: a dispatch alert rattling around in the back of policeman’s mind about an English woman with a young girl, and then as he hears them talking it all finally gels.

  The policeman approached the counter with a newspaper and magazine, said something in French, and handed across a note. The boy at the counter, pimply and barely out of his teens, cashed it on the register and held out the change. But the policeman seemed to remember something else at the last moment and pointed behind the boy. ‘Et vingt Winston.’

Elena observed with a sideways glance towards the till counter and the boy, she didn’t trust herself to look around fully at the policeman now directly at her side. She stood there clutching a bottle of orange juice and a coke, and could feel the policeman’s eyes on her for the first time as the counter-boy reached behind for some cigarettes.

  ‘Cinquante-cinq cent plus.’

  The policeman handed some coins over, and at the moment Lorena emerged from behind the shelves.

  ‘Maybe they’ll have Sug…’ She stopped as she saw the policeman and her eyes went wide. Her hands suddenly seemed to lose co-ordination on the items she was clutching and she fumbled and dropped the bag of toffees. Her face flushed heavily as she bent to pick them up.

  Elena stepped sharp and got there before her: she could just see Lorena dropping everything in panic as she stooped.

‘Okay. That’s everything now.’ A statement so that Lorena didn’t have to respond.

  As she straightened, the policeman was smiling lightly at Lorena: hopefully thinking that Lorena was merely surprised at seeing someone so large in uniform rather than anything else.  Elena gave a tentative smile back as she put everything on the counter. She pressed her hands against the counter so that hopefully he wouldn’t notice them shaking, and with a brief nod – Elena wasn’t sure if it was at them or the counter-boy, she’d pulled her eyes swiftly away – he turned and left.

  The heavy step of his motorcycle boots receded almost in time with her pounding heart, and she thought: never again. She couldn’t stand another minute of this, let alone hours or days.

* * * *

  ‘We’re looking. Believe me, we’re looking.’ Jean-Paul closed his eyes for a second and held out one hand. That’s all he seemed to have done these past long hours: make excuses, make penance.

  Simone shook her head. ‘It’s almost two days now with no sign of him. Nothing. I know something’s wrong, seriously wrong. I can
feel
it.’

  They were in Jean-Paul’s study. Raphael had been talking to Francesca the house-maid in the corridor outside, enquiring whether two of his favourite sweat shirts were in the laundry or not, and they’d shut the door for privacy. Simone looked worse than when she’d first confronted him after her furious drinking binge. Two nights of fitful sleep and her worst fears bedding deeper with each hour had put dark circles under her eyes, and her hair was lank, unwashed, her usually immaculate make-up scrappy. She chewed nervously at the side of one nail.

  ‘How do you know Roman’s not done something to him already?’

  ‘I can’t be sure, I know.’ His eyes closed for a second again: more contrition. ‘I’m stuck with taking his word. But if it’s a bluff – it’s a good bluff. Don’t forget it’s Roman that right now has got half of Montreal looking for him.’

  She switched off from what he was saying halfway through, was lost again in her own thoughts. ‘It’s just what Georges feared – was why he asked me to talk to you.’

  ‘Like I said before, Simone, I just don’t think Roman would do something like that without my sanction. He might be hot-headed and irrational at times, but he’s not completely suicidal.’ Her first screams of accusation, at first light the day after Georges’ disappearance, had been directed at Jean-Paul with Roman merely doing his dirty-work. Jean-Paul fired back that a six-month cooling-off period in Cuba or Mexico was what he’d had in mind.
‘That’s not how I do things any more, and you more than anyone else should know that.’
His reprimand, carrying with it Pascal and all he’d fought so hard for since to make amends, made her flush and softly say she was sorry, and they’d turned their thoughts to Roman possibly acting on his own. Jean-Paul had pointed out that there was little point in Roman investing so much time convincing him that there was a problem with Georges, only to then suddenly jump the gun and take action himself. ‘Even if he was of a mind to do it himself, he could have done it long before. He didn’t need to waste breath on me.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re probably right,’ Simone agreed dolefully, looking down. She stopped nibbling her nail and pulled a lank strand of hair behind one ear. The photos were back before them as the only reasonable explanation for his disappearance. He knew that they’d been found and was embarrassed as hell, knew that she’d be furious and so he’d gone to ground for a few days until she cooled off. He was right on that count: she’d phoned at least thirty times between the two numbers, each time ready to slam the phone straight down.
‘Good, now that I’ve got you – this is just to say fuck off and
never
phone me again!’

   ‘Maybe he’s looked up an old friend up-Province or out of Quebec or headed to a ski-cabin for a while to re-think and re-evaluate.’ Jean-Paul didn’t add that the main reason he had Roman trawling half of Quebec wasn’t to find her lost albeit fallen-from-grace love, but because Georges going to ground could be the final signal that he was about to talk to the RCs. Roman could have been right all along. ‘Or maybe even he’s gone on a short hop to Mexico. He’s got a lot of friends and contacts down there now.’

  ‘Yeah. He’ll probably surface later tonight or tomorrow and call me.’ She eased a tentative smile, the first in forty-eight hours. ‘And then
I
can kill him.’

The policeman was a bad start to the day, seemed to have sapped all of Elena’s energy barely a half an hour into her door-calls. Or maybe it was the build-up of nerves, the lack of sleep and the valerian pills and whisky – she’d downed the two remaining miniatures last night, then had nursed another two at the hotel bar with Alphonse after Lorena had gone to bed.

  Now she’d sunk another three valerian straight after leaving the
depanneur
with the policeman to steady her nerves. She was a quivering jelly, frantic. Her trembling was clearly visible, and as she looked in the car’s vanity mirror after sinking the pills she noticed a small muscle spasm at intervals below her left, very bloodshot eye: she looked more like a hardline heroine case.

  The spasm eased after twenty minutes and her nerves settled, she just felt numb. But the problem was the numbness was all over her body, and her step felt heavy, laboured, as she made her way towards the front door of her second call of the day. Her thighs and legs felt leaden, as if they were weighted with sacks. She’d hoped to squeeze in three or four calls before Lowndes’ session in just under an hour – but the way she felt now this would probably be the last.

  Or maybe it was the repetitive nature of the calls, the endless chain of head-shakes, frowns and ‘sorry’s’ creating her lethargy, steadily grinding her down so that now she couldn’t raise the faintest spark of hope or enthusiasm as she approached a fresh door. It just wouldn’t be any different. More head shakes and frowns with nothing left but to trudge on to the next. And the next. And the…

She felt dizzy, disorientated, felt herself sway slightly, her step unsteady.

She was deep inside the chine and with dusk approaching the light at its end was fast dying. She started to head back up the slope to home, but her legs felt heavy – the same heaviness she felt now as she made her way up the four steps to a cream front door – progress was slow, she started to fear that she might not make it back up before the light died completely. She wouldn’t be able to find her way any more: the darkness of the chine was intense, no trace of moonlight or starlight filtered through the thick blanket of trees above. And it suddenly hit her that the light at the end didn’t just represent hope, but that without it she wouldn’t be able to find her way at all. She was totally lost.

  She rang the bell. Its chime lingered in her head for a second after she pulled her finger away.

But didn’t she know her way in and out of the chine practically blindfold, she been there so many times? Muted sound of footsteps approaching the other side. Suddenly she wasn’t so sure – she wasn’t sure of anything any more.

And when after her standard pitch the man confronting her, a Stephanou in his late fifties, nodded and with a strained grimace opened the door wide – ‘You’d better come in’ – she was still grappling with reality, slightly lost. It took her a moment to finally respond and walk into his house and realize that the light at the end of the chine was suddenly back again.

TWENTY-THREE

 
‘Pardon.
Bell
Canada
, Madame.’

 
‘Oui, oui. C’est vite.’
Odette Donatiens opened the door wider to let the man in. ‘We noticed the line was dead – but we haven’t even reported it yet. I was just about to go to my neighbours and phone in.’

  Carlo Funicelli shrugged and smiled amiably. ‘We found a junction box burnt out with a short that effects you and three other houses. Which means that one of you has a problem with too much resistance on the line.’ He followed her down the hallway. Slightly broad in the beam, but still a good figure for what he’d heard from Roman was a mid-fifty year old: the grey track suit and trainers maybe helped her look more youthful and there was only a touch of salt in her auburn hair. ‘So we thought we’d better check.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ She could see him scanning to each side of the lounge. She pointed. ‘It’s over there.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Funicelli smiled back at her as he reached the phone, as if to say ‘it’s okay now’, hoping that she’d disappear for a moment and leave him to it. But she just stood there looking at him as he undid the phone cradle casing. ‘Could take a little while.’