Ruiz can’t find his shoes. A man can’t go to his daughter’s wedding without a decent pair of shoes. He should have looked earlier. He should have polished them. The polish is somewhere under the stairs with dozens of other things he won’t be able to put his hands on when he needs them.
“When did you last wear them?” asks Joe O’Loughlin.
“I can’t remember.”
“Try.”
“A funeral maybe…”
“When?”
“In March.”
Ruiz looks at his full-length profile in the mirror, sucking in his stomach, his chin up, not too shabby, he thinks. He’s been working out for the past few days, curling sixty-pound barbells and doing push-ups. His trousers are too loose and he needs a haircut.
Claire has been on the phone twice already and it’s only ten o’clock. She and the bridesmaids are getting ready at Phillip’s house. The groom has been banished to a hotel in Hampstead so he doesn’t see the bride in her dress.
“It’s supposed to be the biggest day of her life,” the professor reminds him.
Ruiz grunts. “One day she’ll get pregnant, she’ll have a child, then she’ll know a big day.”
“A wedding is still in the top three.”
“None of mine were top three.”
“What about the first?”
“Yeah, well, maybe the first.”
“You’re such a romantic.”
Ruiz hooks a finger inside his collar, trying to make it stretch, feeling as comfortable as a penguin in a microwave.
“Let me tell you about romance in this day and age, Professor. You might appreciate the lesson since your Charlie is going to be dating some time soon. My daughter’s fiance has been putting his Ukrainian Kovbasa into my Claire’s vagina for the past two years-which is a sentence I wish I had never uttered out loud or in my head. Where is the romance in that? Whatever she had to give away, she’s given away… pretty frequently.”
“Kovbasa?”
“It’s a sausage.”
“Oh. You didn’t sleep with Laura before you married?”
“Nope.”
Joe stares at him in disbelief.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“No reason.”
Ruiz gets annoyed. “I mean, I wasn’t a virgin, but Laura had this thing about waiting.”
Joe has found Ruiz’s shoes beneath the laundry sink. He wets a dishcloth and wipes the dust from the leather. Ruiz breaks a lace and curses. He steals one from another pair of shoes and checks the street before they leave. In a house on the far side of the road he sees a figure silhouetted in a window. He wants to believe it is an ordinary person, a good one: a mother putting a baby down for a nap or a shift worker going to bed after a long night.
That’s the thing about trying to protect someone-or failing to-you start to think that danger lurks around every corner and that shadows hold secrets. Holly Knight needed his protection but he let her down. Now he has no way of finding her unless she contacts him.
The wedding is at a church in Primrose Hill, opposite Regent’s Park. Ruiz has to pick up his mother from the retirement home in Streatham and then go to Claire’s house.
Daj could be a problem. Some days her dementia is so profound that she refuses to believe Ruiz is her son. Either that or she mistakes him for Luke, the brother he lost as a child. At other times she remembers every single detail of her past, which is almost as tragic.
Somewhere in her rambling mind is the riddle of Ruiz’s existence. Daj fell pregnant in a concentration camp. She was a teenage gypsy girl used as “recreation” by the SS officers and guards. One of the officers took her out of the camp brothel and had her cleaning his house and warming his bed. Ruiz had never discovered the officer’s name. Daj claimed to have forgotten. Instead she talked about an attempted abortion and how the “bastard child” had “clung to my insides, not wanting to leave, wanting so much to live.”
She was three months pregnant when the war ended and the camps were liberated. She spent another two months looking for her family but they were all gone-her twin brother, her parents, aunts, uncles, cousins… No countries were accepting gypsies as refugees. Daj lied on her application form at the displaced persons’ camp. She took the identity of a young Jewish seamstress who was nineteen, instead of sixteen.
Ruiz was born in a county hospital in Hertfordshire that still had blackout curtains and tape across the windows. They bulldozed it in the seventies-did what the Luftwaffe couldn’t do. Progress marches in jackboots.
Parking the Mercedes outside the retirement home, Ruiz and the professor go through the reception and find Daj in her room. She is watching a daytime chat show where people seem to be shouting at each other and throwing chairs.
“Hello, Daj, do you remember Joe?”
“Are you a doctor?” she asks suspiciously.
“No, I’m a friend of Vincent’s.”
“I have a son called Vincent.”
“That’s me, Daj,” says Ruiz.
She looks at him suspiciously. The skin of her face seems to be covered in finely lined tissue paper and her hands are bony branches. She’s wearing a floral dress and a short jacket. The nurses have helped her put on lipstick.
“Are you ready, Daj?”
“Where are we going?”
“To the church.”
“I don’t like churches.”
“It’s the Catholics you don’t like,” says Ruiz, and then to Joe, “A priest comes round once a week and Daj tries to convert him to atheism.” He looks back at his mother. “Claire is getting married.”
“Claire?”
“Your granddaughter.”
“She’s too young.”
“She’s thirty-two.”
“Nonsense. I want to talk to Michael.”
“Michael’s not here.”
“Is he coming to the wedding?”
“We’re not sure.”
Ruiz feels a pang of guilt. He hasn’t seen his son in nearly four years. They talk every three or four months, snatched conversations from whatever port Michael has washed up into after a month at sea. Duty phone calls, he calls them, but every time Ruiz feels aggrieved, he remembers his own youth, working as a young police officer in London, rarely phoning home, visiting even less often.
“Bring a cardigan-it gets cool of an evening.”
“Where are we going?”
“The church.”
“I hate churches.”
“I know that, Daj, but Claire is getting married.”
This is how the conversation doubles back on itself and loops into elaborate knots that confuse Daj even more as they drive across the Thames, heading north to Primrose Hill.
