She was just about to agree when her cellphone started ringing. She put a hand in her pocket, planning to turn it off without even looking to see who was calling her. But then she took it out reluctantly and looked at it, afraid that she would see the number of the Mariposa clinic on the display.
Instead, it showed the name of Father McKean.
‘Hello.’
She heard his voice, familiar but oddly different. It sounded tense, almost frightened, without any trace of the energy it usually conveyed. ‘Vivien, it’s Michael.’
‘Hi. What is it?’
‘I need to see you, Vivien. As soon as possible, and alone.’
‘Michael, I’m tremendously busy right now, I can’t-’
‘It’s a matter of life and death, Vivien,’ he said as if he had rehearsed these words to himself many times. ‘Not mine but that of many people.’
A moment’s hesitation. A moment that, to judge by his next words, must have seemed endless to him. ‘It’s to do with those explosions, may God forgive me.’
‘The explosions? What’s your connection with the explosions?’
‘Come quickly, I beg you.’
Father McKean hung up. Vivien stood there in the middle of the room, in the square of sunlight cast on the floor from the window. She realized that while she had been on the telephone, as often happened when she was engrossed, she had moved, so that she was now back in the living room.
Russell had followed her and had stopped in the doorway to the bedroom.
She looked at him. She wasn’t sure what to say. Michael had asked to speak with her alone. Taking Russell with her might mean annoying Michael and perhaps inhibiting him from saying what he had to say. At the same time, it meant confessing that her niece was in a community for drug addicts, and that was something she couldn’t deal with right now.
She made a quick choice, putting off until later the question of whether she had chosen rightly or wrongly. ‘I have to go somewhere.’
‘Does that mean you have to go alone?
Russell knew something was up: during her phone conversation, he had heard her let slip the word
‘Yes. I have to see someone and I have to see him alone.’
‘I thought we had an agreement.’
She turned her back on him, and immediately felt ashamed of doing that. ‘The agreement doesn’t apply to this.’
‘The captain gave me his word I could follow the investigation.’
She felt anger rising inside her.
She turned abruptly, a hard expression on her face. ‘The captain gave you his word,’ she said curtly. ‘I didn’t.’
The following second lasted a century.
Russell turned pale. Then he looked at her for a moment, the way you look at someone who is leaving and will never return.
Finally, in silence, he walked to the door. Vivien did not have the strength to say or do anything. He opened the door and went out into the corridor. The last sign of life from him was the door gently closing.
Vivien felt more alone than she had ever felt in her life. Her impulse was to go out in the corridor and call him back, but she told herself she couldn’t do that. Not now. Not before finding out what Father McKean had to tell her. Many people’s lives were at stake. Hers and Russell’s didn’t matter. From now on she would need all her willpower and all her courage, too much to use part of it admitting she was in love with a man who didn’t want her.
She waited a few moments, long enough to give him time to leave the building. As she waited, she remembered the words he had said to her as they were coming in. They were like an accusation now.
She had said they were a team.
He had trusted her and she had betrayed him.
CHAPTER 30
When Vivien opened the door she saw the deserted, dimly lit corridor. The semi-darkness, and the thought that the man had walked down it for years, that every day he had planted his feet on that carpet, which had become an indefinable colour, made the place feel malign and hostile.
A wrinkled old black woman with incredibly crooked legs emerged around the corner of the landing and walked towards her, supporting herself with a stick. In her free arm she carried a shopping bag. When she saw Vivien closing the door, she couldn’t help making a comment.
‘Ah, so they finally rented it to a human being.’
‘I’m sorry?’
The old woman didn’t bother to give any other explanation. She stopped outside the door opposite the one Vivien had just come out of and unceremoniously handed her the bag. Presumably, her age and condition had taught her to impose, instead of asking. Or maybe she thought her age and condition in themselves gave her the right to whatever she wanted.
‘Hold this. But remember, I don’t give tips.’
Vivien found herself with the bag in her hands. A smell of onions and bread rose from it. Still supporting herself with her stick, the woman searched in the pocket of her coat. She took out a key and put it in the lock. She answered a question no one had asked.
‘The police came yesterday. I knew that man wasn’t a decent person.’
‘The police?’
‘Yeah. They’re great people, too. They rang but I didn’t open.’
After such an open declaration of mistrust, Vivien decided not to identify herself as a police officer. She waited for the old lady to open the door. Immediately, a big black cat poked its head out. When it saw that its owner was with a stranger, it ran away. Instinctively, Vivien checked that it had all four legs.
‘Who lived here before me?’
‘A guy with his face all scarred. A real monster. Not just the way he looked, the way he acted, too. One day, an ambulance came and took him away. To an asylum, I hope.’
In her concise, pitiless judgement, the woman had hit the target. That would have been the right place for the man, whoever he was, to spend his days. The old woman walked into her apartment and indicated the table with a nod.
‘Put it there.’
Vivien followed her in and saw that the apartment was a mirror image of the one she had just been inspecting. In the room there were two other cats, in addition to the black one. A white and ginger cat was sleeping on a chair and didn’t take any notice of them. A second one, a grey striped cat, jumped on the table. Vivien put down the bag, and the cat immediately ran to sniff it.
The woman gave it a cuff on its backside. ‘Get away, you. You can eat later.’
The cat jumped to the floor and went and hid itself under the chair where its companion was still sleeping.
Vivien looked around. The room was a triumph of the unmatched. Not one chair was similar to another. The glasses on the shelf over the sink were all different among themselves. The place was a chaos of colours and old things. The cat smell in the apartment was worse than the one in the lobby.
The old woman turned to Vivien and looked at her as if she had just seen her for the first
