cat before they saw it. It emerged meowing, and running from the shadows, to press itself up against Charlotte’s legs as it had done earlier. Enzo hissed at it and it ran, startled, back into the darkness.
“Poor thing,” Charlotte said.
He unlocked the door, and they immediately felt the chill as they stepped inside. When they got to the bedroom, Enzo turned on the heater and glanced from the window. The shutters on Jane Killian’s windows were firmly closed tonight and would, he imagined, remain so for the rest of his stay. Which, in many ways, was a relief. He turned to find Charlotte watching him. She was slightly flushed from too much wine, her eyes almost glassy.
“You shouldn’t be drinking,” he said.
“Why not?”
“You’re pregnant.”
“I’m not sure what gives you the right to care. It’s me who’s carrying him, not you. Though maybe not for much longer.”
He stood stock still, staring at her. “What do you mean?”
“I haven’t decided yet whether to go ahead with it or not.”
The shock of her words stung him, like a slap in the face. “You wouldn’t… ’
“The child deserves better than us, Enzo. And what kind of father would you make? Think about it. Are you someone your son could look up to? Twice married, old enough to be his grandfather. Climbing into bed with every other woman he meets, drinking too much.” She paused for emphasis. “Putting your work ahead of family and friends.”
“That’s not fair!”
“Isn’t it? Take a good look at yourself, Enzo.”
And the words of the Scots bard, Robert Burns, came back to him. Oh wad some power the giftie gie us, to see oursel’s as others see us. He closed his eyes. After all the years of estrangement from Kirsty, they had in the end reached a kind of rapprochement. Sophie, he knew, adored him. His career in forensic science had been replaced by a new one teaching biology and forensics at a top university. He hadn’t done so badly. But after Pascale’s death he had searched, and failed, to find love. Her life-and death-had shaped his.
“And then, what kind of mother would I make? A singular woman. Idiosyncratic, eccentric, way too independent. I’m just as brutal in my own self-analysis, Enzo. Would I be prepared to give up my work, my independence, my life? I’ve never done it for any man. If I were to do it for a child, my life as I know it would be over. By the time I got it back, you’d be seventy. And what would I have to look forward to then? Caring for you into old age?”
“If that’s how you feel… I mean, if you’re really serious about terminating the pregnancy, why did you even tell me about it? What did you come here for?”
She turned dark eyes on him, and he felt their intensity. “I was hoping you might give me a reason not to.” There was a long silence, then. “And what do I find? The night before I get here you’ve been drinking too much and end up in bed with another woman. You’d have slept with her if I hadn’t phoned when I did. And now you’re out getting into fights in the dark and falling off cliffs. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious.”
He held her gaze. His voice was low and steady. “I’ll give you one perfectly good reason why you shouldn’t have an abortion.”
“Yes?”
“We created a life together, Charlotte. But we have no right to end it.”
She gasped in frustration and turned away. “I didn’t know you’d found religion in your old age.”
“I haven’t. But I’ve spent a lifetime catching people who take lives. I’m not about to sanction the taking of one myself, just because it might not be convenient to you.”
She turned back. Eyes blazing. “He’s not growing inside of you, Enzo. You don’t have to give birth to him. And where are you going to be when he’s growing up?”
“Right here. Sharing the responsibility.”
“Oh? Just like you were with Kirsty?”
Of all the wounds inflicted on him on this dark November night, that was the deepest, and hurt the most. Not least because it was so unfair. “I never turned my back on Kirsty,” he said. “Never. It was her mother who closed that door on me. Used her own daughter as a stick to beat me with.” But no matter how many times he told himself this simple truth, he still couldn’t shake off his sense of guilt.
They lay in bed, not touching, both of them awake in the dark for a very long time. Enzo lay on his back, staring blindly at the ceiling. Everything that had happened to him tonight was somehow overshadowed by Charlotte’s situation. For the first time in his life he wished he were twenty years younger, regretted the wasted years and the passage of time. Time that was against him. Charlotte’s bald statement of fact that by the time their son had reached adulthood Enzo would be seventy had stunned him. He still saw himself as the young man he had been thirty years before. The idea that he would be seventy in the not too distant future was shocking. Seventy! How was it possible? Where had his life gone? And yet to think like that, he knew, was to throw away all the good years to come, to accept the mantle of old age and discard his youth as spent, like the greater part of a dwindling fortune.
He was not quite sure when it was that he finally drifted off into an uneasy slumber, but when he awoke with a start from some disturbing dream, the digital read-out on the bedside clock showed 2.43. He lay for several minutes, listening to his own breathing, before becoming aware that Charlotte was no longer in the bed beside him. He turned his head and saw the light from the stairwell in cracks around the door, and reluctantly he slipped from the warmth of the sheets to find his dressing gown and slippers.
Charlotte was sitting in the captain’s chair behind Killian’s desk, the black cat curled up on her lap. She ran gentle fingers back through its long fur, and Enzo could hear it purring from the door.
“I heard him meowing outside and let him in. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Would it matter if I did?”
She smiled. “No.” Then, “I couldn’t sleep.”
He nodded.
“I spent some time looking at Killian’s notes.”
“And?”
She shrugged. “Perhaps if they were in French. But I can make no sense of them.”
He moved into the study, closing the door behind him, and sat in the chair facing her. “So what did you talk about tonight, you and Jane?”
“Oh, all sorts of things. She’s a sad creature, Enzo.”
“How so?”
“Her parents split up at an early age, and she never really bonded with either of them. It was one of the reasons she was so drawn to Peter. His relationship with his father. The first time, she said, she’d known a real family. Like being a part of something special. I think she was as much in love with Adam as with Peter.”
Enzo shook his head. “My God, you never stop playing the psychologist, do you?”
“I don’t play at it, Enzo. It’s what I do. People find it easy to talk to me. You did once, too.”
“Don’t project your faults on to me. You’re the one who never talks, never telling me what’s in your head. I’m a damned open book.”
She scratched the cat under its chin, ignoring Enzo’s jibe. Whatever thoughts they had provoked, she wasn’t about to divulge them. The cat stretched its head back, eyes closed. “Killian himself would have made an interesting subject. The immigrant who sees his heritage as a stain on his new nationality. A Pole who wanted to be more English than the English, and when he couldn’t quite achieve it for himself, invested all the time and effort in his son. He turned Peter into the archetypal Englishman, baptised in the Church of England, sent to public school.”
Enzo chuckled. “And educated at a Scottish university.”
“I don’t think Adam Killian saw any difference. Only the Scots see themselves as different from the English. To the rest of the world British, English, Scottish, it’s all same thing.” She cocked an eyebrow and tilted her head, expecting a challenge. When none came, she just shrugged. “Anyway, Adam made sure that no one would ever know that Peter’s roots couldn’t be traced all the way back to the Norman conquest. They played word games
