could coax him out, tell him about the case. If he's down there he's probably still receiving emails. Reckon.'
Simon sat back. Sanderson confessed: 'I didn't get very far. Not good coppering. Tut fucking tut. But hey, at least I saved your Danish — just in time.'
The policeman's weary smile was warm: genuine and warm. Simon felt a little better. Then he remembered the expression on Tomasky's face. The growling anger. Ferocious. He felt worse.
Simon was quiet for the rest of the journey to New Scotland Yard. He was subdued during the debriefing; he was almost silent when he got home and hugged Suzie and embraced Conor with a fierce paternal love that almost broke his own heart, and his son's ribs.
The subdued feeling hung around like an unwanted, overstaying visitor, like the bloodstain that couldn't be removed from the hallway floor, no matter how many times it was sanded and polished. The journalist was melancholic and disquieted. He watched the fat housewife put out her fat housewifely washing. The fat black crow hopping along the garden. A policeman came to live with them, sleeping in the spare room. His radio buzzed loudly at odd times. He had a gun. He read football magazines.
Meanwhile, Simon researched Catholic sects and Polish skinheads. He drank too much coffee and researched genetics. He emailed David in France, and got a couple of emails in return. The emails were fascinating, and full of information, but they also added to his sense of danger and guilt. Simon felt guilty that he'd told the police about David: because Martinez and his friend — Amy — were, it seemed, suspicious of police involvement. Everywhere and everyone was suspect, unreliable, a menace.
And now Simon wondered if he could really trust Sanderson. Tomasky had, after all, seemed trustworthy and funny and decent; he had rather liked Tomasky — and Tomasky had tried to kill him. Who was to say that Tomasky's superiors were in the clear? How deep, how high, how far did this go?
This isn't any old fish and chip job, Quinn, this isn't a fish and chip job.
Five days later, sitting at his desk, bleakly daydreaming — yet again — he got a call from a distraught Polish woman.
Tomasky's sister.
Her English was appalling but her meaning was obvious: she was harrowed with guilt for what her brother had done, she wanted to apologize to Simon. She had tracked him down through 'The Scottish Yard policing man'.
He listened to her sincerely weepy, flamboyantly Slavic grief for several minutes, feeling his own awkwardness. Even if Tomasky had attacked Simon, the poor woman's brother had died. What could you say? Never mind, it wasn't that bad?
The woman was burbling again.
'Andrew was a good Polish man, Mister Quinn. Good man, regular guy! Regular.' Her words retreated into a taut, choking silence. 'He like smalec and piwo. He good. Normal. Like any men. But then the place change him, it change him.'
'Sorry?'
'Yes! Strasne. The monastery…the monastery Tourette in France.' Another suppressed sob. 'When he go there something happen. Something very bad like it change him. Pyrzykro mi. I am very sorry. Pyrzykro mi.'
The sobs came, and the phone call ended.
27
'Bonjour!'
Leaning out of his hotel window, on his tiny balcony, David returned a nervous hello to the affable, middle- aged French gentleman, sitting with his copy of Le Figaro on his lap, on the next balcony along. David weakly smiled — then turned resolutely away. He didn't want to talk, he didn't want to be recognized and acknowledged. He wanted pure and inconspicuous anonymity.
So he stared in the other direction, along the Biarritz seafront. The scene was boisterous: the beaches were wide and golden, hemmed by the glittering lace of the crashing waves; the architecture was a remarkable mix of Victorian townhouses, concrete casinos, and pink stucco palaces. The strange and clashing mixture matched his mood.
They'd been hiding out in this hotel for a several days, using only payphones, and occasionally sneaking out to cybercafes to send and receive emails. He'd got two emails from Simon Quinn, updating him. Which was useful.
But it was still a dislocating sensation. Being here. And the disorientation was compounded by one dazzling new fact: he and Amy had begun sleeping together.
It had happened their second night in Biarritz. They'd decided they'd had enough of skulking in their tiny adjoining hotel rooms, so they had quietly wandered to the Rock of the Virgin, the local beauty spot high on a promontory, and when they got there they had shyly stared at the lamps and the stars and the moon over the bay and the tourists downing oysters by the Porte des Pecheurs — and she'd started crying.
Her tears were unquenchable. She had cried for half an hour. Unsure what to do, David had escorted her to his room — and there she had shuddered and slipped into his bathroom to shower. He sat there, listening to the noise of the water hissing fiercely against the shower-curtain. He began to worry: was she OK?
Then she emerged, wrapped in white hotel towels, her face pink and her hair damp, her body shivering. Her blue eyes were filled with a depthless grief: she looked down at herself. Then she stared his way, her gaze honest, and brutally sad.
She said she felt dirty, and unclean. Tainted.
He asked why.
She started, then stopped; then she confessed, her words halting yet clear. She said she felt soured and bitter because she had once loved Miguel. And therefore it was all her fault. Everything. Because she loved him once, she had poisoned everything. She was the unclean one.
Amy was naked but for the towels. They were inches apart. He could smell the French soap on her roseate skin. Amy shivered again and then she turned to him and whispered I shouldn't have loved Miguel and the way she said I shouldn't have loved Miguel was so dark, so lushed, so violet and yielding, he'd felt commanded, he felt he had no choice: he leaned forward, and his lips had sunk onto her wet mouth, and the word Miguel became a kiss, a ferocious kiss, and then his hand slipped into her damp yellow hair, and between their kisses she whispered make me clean and then she said make me clean once again and then she said fuck me.
It had been one of the best moments of his life, and one of the most complex.
David was unnerved, and remained unnerved, because their lovemaking was so charged, so fierce, so freshly different. He had experienced nothing like it. The sex left them both breathless, shining with perspiration, with the balcony doors flung open to the cool night breezes off the sea, cooling their nakedness. And so it had continued ever since: agitated and wild. Fucking. Her scratches on his back were so deep they stung him when he showered in the morning.
Sometimes David wondered why their sex was so exquisitely savage — so tenderly brutal. Their twinned loneliness? The unhappy past they shared? The fact that death had seemed so close? Sometimes she talked of her Jewishness, her family, her dead father — even her relatives killed in the Holocaust — and he detected a kind of deep-rooted guilt. Survivor guilt. And maybe that's what he had too. Survivor guilt.
And maybe that was it — what drove them together with such passion. They were alone and they were survivors. They were like starving people falling on the first food in many weeks: they craved each other's bodies, feasted on each other, grabbed at each other, sometimes she bit his shoulder until he almost bled, sometimes he pulled her hair very hard, and often she swore when he turned her over, fighting him, then yielding, then fighting, her sweet brown legs kicking at the sheets. Screaming into the pillow, clawing the bedboard.
Harder, she said, do it harder.
And all of it, everything, was haunted by Miguel. The memory of Miguel ravishing her in the witch's cave. David wanted to deny it but he couldn't. Miguel was always there. He was there even when they had sex. Maybe especially when they had sex.
Eusak Presoak! Eusak Herrira! Otsoko.
