“Both, I think.”
A young, bored-looking waitress appeared from somewhere deep in the bowels of the cafe. She paused by our tables, scowling. Madeleine asked for more espresso, much to the girl’s obvious disgust. I ordered the same, just for badness. She stopped just short of tutting out loud, and sloped away again.
We didn’t speak until she’d rattled a cup down onto each table top in front of us and retreated, not bothering to remove Madeleine’s empty. Milk and sugar, it seemed, were not an option.
“You seem to know an awful lot about Sean’s private life,” I said then, taking my first sip of real caffeine for over a week. It plugged straight into my nervous system like a set of jump leads.
“I’ve worked with him since he first set up on his own. I’ll admit there was a time when I had hopes in that direction – before I met Dominic, of course,” Madeleine said, pausing to smile wryly. “One evening, not long after I’d started working there, I managed to contrive getting Sean round to my flat and cracked open a bottle of wine. I thought once he got some alcohol inside him he might loosen up a bit.” She lifted her head and glanced over at me. “Instead, all he did was talk about you.”
I said, “Oh.”
It was like one minute I’d been walking along a sunny beach without a care and the next a big black cloud had moved across the face of the sun, the tide had turned with a vengeance, and the last step I’d taken had been onto sand that felt suspiciously soft under foot.
It’s not the first time I’ve thought I should listen to that voice in my head more often.
But I didn’t.
I’d said it as a statement, but Madeleine took my single word as a question. She swirled her coffee round in its cup for a moment, disturbing the sediment at the bottom, then said calmly, without looking at me, “He told me you’d spent an amazing spur-of-the-moment first weekend together in a chalet built into the side of a cliff somewhere on the Welsh coast. Said you’d spent the whole time in bed and that it was sensational.”
I felt my face heat at her dryly delivered words, but I didn’t deny any of it. There was little point when it was quite true.
The chalet had indeed been built into the side of a cliff, with a long set of winding stone steps leading down to it. They were so steep that if we’d had luggage it would have been a perilous descent, but we hadn’t thought much further ahead than the clothes we stood up in. And how fast we could get each other out of them.
I turned away so Madeleine couldn’t read the thoughts chasing through my head, and stared out of the window again. Outside I could see a couple of the students standing on the far side of the square with a map in their hands, pointing to various key points of the roof-line opposite. So much for unobtrusive observation. They couldn’t have made their purpose any plainer if they’d been wearing sandwich boards proclaiming it.
I turned back to Madeleine and picked up what was left of my own coffee. It had turned cold, and black, and bitter.
“Was that all he told you about me?” I said, with more than a touch of bite. “That I was a good lay?”
Madeleine regarded me with a level gaze, shaming my unworthy comment. “He told me you were fearless, quick, funny, clever, mentally stronger than anyone he’d ever met,” she said. “He said you were the best thing and the worst thing that had ever happened to him.”
“He couldn’t understand how you came to betray him after what you’d shared together,” she went on, into her stride now, relentless. “He couldn’t understand how you could tell them about your affair, could claim he’d raped you, to try and save your own skin.”
“I didn’t,” I denied automatically, but without heat.
“He knows that now,” Madeleine agreed, “but he didn’t then.”
When we’d met again last winter, Sean and I had solved the mystery of just how the army had uncovered the details of our clandestine relationship. It had been a relief to find that he hadn’t, after all, abandoned me as I’d thought, but by then it had been almost too late for it to matter.
I suppose it might have cleared the air between us.
Human history is littered with might-have-beens.
I’d heard enough. I got to my feet again, throwing down enough change to cover the cost of my coffee.
This time, I almost made it to the doorway before Madeleine’s cut glass voice stopped me in my tracks.
“You’ve never told him, have you?” she said. “What really happened to you.”
I stilled like she’d just jerked a snare around my neck. I swallowed, and my imagination felt the cut of the wire into my throat. Without turning, I asked, “How much do you know?”
“All of it, more or less,” Madeleine said. “Don’t you think Sean has a right to know it, too?”
Anger lit me. I took another couple of steps towards the door and yanked it open. I gripped the handle tight, making sure I had my escape route before I glanced back towards her.
“He doesn’t have to know,” I managed through lips that seemed suddenly stiff, unyielding. “It wouldn’t do any good for him to know.”
“Why not, Charlie? It might make him understand what you went through.”
I shook my head. “No. I’d rather he thought of me as a ruthless bitch than a helpless bitch,” I bit out. “Don’t tell him, Madeleine.” In my head I’d summoned up the words as an order, a cool command, but instead they came out shaped as a plea.
She shrugged. “OK, it’s your choice,” she said, frowning, “but I go home tomorrow and Sean’s planning on coming out here himself to take over. You know what he’s like. You can’t keep something like that from him forever.”
“I can try.”
Fourteen
The full effect of my dramatic if rather flouncy exit from the cafe was somewhat spoiled by my immediately colliding with a person who’d been hurrying along the pavement outside. I spun round without caution from slamming the outer door shut behind me and my momentum nearly sent both of us sprawling.
On a reflex, I grabbed at their jacket. It was only when we’d steadied that I realised who it was I’d got hold of.
“McKenna?” I said, my voice sharp and incredulous. “What are you doing here?”
But the youngster just threw me a panicked glance, jerked himself free, and hurried away. I watched, puzzled, until he’d turned the corner. He looked dreadful, his skin grey and clammy. He hadn’t come across as the type dedicated enough to the course to drag himself from his sick bed to take part in a group exercise.
I shrugged and let it go. I had other things on my mind as I stalked across the square with my shoulders hunched down into my jacket and my anger bubbling away under the surface.
Blakemore was just the unlucky one. He was the first of the instructors I came across, but even so, he was the one I suppose I had the most faith in. Maybe it was just fate that it happened that way. I caught him just as he was climbing onto the FireBlade, with the engine already fired up and ticking over.
He nodded when he saw me approaching, unconcerned, but when I reached across the tank and hit the kill switch his eyes narrowed under the open visor of his helmet. I stood there and stared long enough and hard enough for him to slowly sit back, undo the chinstrap and pull off his lid. He put it down on the tank, folded his arms and regarded me, stony, one eyebrow raised.
Temper is never the best thing to wear to a confrontation. It has a nasty habit of disintegrating into tatters just when you need its protection most and the colour has never suited me.
I said, “Tell me about Kirk Salter.”
Blakemore’s eyebrow shifted up another few millimetres. “How do you know Salter?” he hedged. He flashed a quick, almost nervous smile. “What’s he to you? Old boyfriend?”
“Old comrade,” I said, adding deliberately, “We trained together.”
It took a moment for that one to track from starting point to logical conclusion. Blakemore looked up. “He
