Good Bait

46

The Centre Hospitalier de Guingamp was on the rue de l’Armor, one of the principal roads winding north from the town centre. Kiley had spent enough time in hospitals to recognise the antiseptic smell, the mixture of frayed hope and resignation on patients’ faces, the hushed purposiveness of staff as they busied this way and that. He could remember the forced cheerfulness of the surgeon after the second, failed, operation on his leg. Find a more sedentary game after this, perhaps? Less in the way of physical contact. Ping-pong? Chess? Soccer for you henceforth, Jack, will be Match of the Day, I’m afraid, Saturday nights. You and Gary Lineker. It twinged now, the leg, at the memory.

Cordon was in a side room at the end of the ward, a window looking out on to a phalanx of tall firs, their branches bright from the recent rain.

A drip had recently been detached, the stand still close alongside the bed. Bandages around the head, traversing the corner of one swollen eye, stitches threading their way across bruised skin.

The rest of his face was bloodless, pale.

In the way that people in hospital frequently did, he looked to have aged ten years at least.

‘Took your fucking time,’ Cordon said.

‘Few things to arrange. Came when I could.’

‘Good of you to bother.’

‘Call I got, made out you were at death’s door. ‘Stead of a few bumps and bruises. Couple of cracked ribs. Might not’ve hurried if I’d known.’

‘Bastards must’ve put the boot in when I was out.’

‘Lucky it was nothing worse.’

Cordon knew it to be true: he could have lost an eye; he could have been dead.

‘Want to tell me what happened?’ Kiley moved a book, sat on the side of the bed.

‘What’s to tell? Whoever it was got somehow into the house, a window at the back somewhere, I don’t know. Suckered me. Left me unconscious. When I came round, Letitia and Danny had gone. Car disabled, something with the carburetter, I don’t know, tyres fucked. After God knows how long I managed to crawl as far as the lane, rouse the old man. Must have passed out again after that. Woke up here. Tubes sticking out of me like some bloody porcupine. Someone from the local gendarmerie waiting at the end of the bed.’

‘How much d’you get away with telling them?’

‘Between my French and his English, not a great deal. Attempted burglary, that’s what I said. Woke and caught them in the act, got this for my troubles. Too dark, too quick to be able to give a description. Left it at that.’

‘You didn’t mention Letitia? The boy?’

Cordon shook his head.

‘How about Kosach? Anton?’

He shook his head again. Not a good idea. Winced at the pain.

‘Down to him though, you reckon?’

‘Difficult to see what else.’

‘And you think that’s where they are now? With him?’

‘Good bet, I’d say.’

‘He can’t just keep them prisoner.’

‘He can try.’

A nurse stepped into the space, hovered, went away. The low hum from the central heating continued, unabated. Outside, the rain had started up again, buffeting the windows.

‘When this happened,’ Kiley said, ‘there was no warning?’

‘No.’

‘I’m surprised they got the drop on you, all the same.’

‘Preoccupied,’ Cordon said. ‘A little preoccupied.’

Kiley read the look in Cordon’s good eye. Made the universal sign. ‘Thought it wasn’t like that between you?’

‘It’s not.’

‘What was this then? A one-off? Pair of you got carried away? Or just a little something to alleviate the boredom?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Not to me. But it might make it tougher for her with Anton, if he knows she’s been screwing around.’

‘I wouldn’t exactly call it that. Besides, he knows she’s no angel. And Danny’s what he wants, not Letitia.’

‘In that case, why not just take the boy?’

‘Would have been difficult, bringing him out of France, back into the country on his own. All that much easier if Letitia agrees to play along.’

‘She’d do that?’

‘Pragmatic, that’s Letitia. Besides, I can’t see she’d’ve had a lot of choice.’

Kiley walked across to the window and looked out. The sky, shadings of deep purple and the occasional yellowish streak, was a similar colour to the skin round Cordon’s left eye.

‘You know,’ Kiley said, ‘I came to Brittany once when I was a kid. First time ever in France. Cycling holiday with the school. Some kind of exchange. First night a bunch of us shook off the teachers, went into town. First one cafe, then the next. One after another, pointing at the bottles behind the bar. Spending what little bit of money we had fast as we could. Sick, sick, sick as a dog. After that there was a curfew. Local police on duty to keep the stupid Anglais from causing any more commotion, getting drunk. Couldn’t have been much more than sixteen stupid years old.’

He smiled. ‘Met my first girlfriend on that trip, too. Pen pal more or less till I left school.’

‘Thinking of looking her up?’ Cordon asked caustically.

‘I did once. What? Dozen years ago? On holiday with a couple of friends. She was still living in the same place, little village outside Vannes, out near the Atlantic coast. Mistake. Five kids, moustache, wide as a house.’

‘What did you expect?’

‘I don’t know. Things like that, they nag at you.’

‘What kind of things?’

‘Oh, missed chances. Roads not taken. Relationships allowed to drift. Always that nagging question, what if, what if?’

‘French air, is it?’ Cordon asked. ‘Bringing out all this philosophy?’

‘I dare say.’

‘’Cause if it is, sooner you get back across the Channel the better it’ll be.’

‘Had a word with the doctor on the way in. Four or five days it’ll be before you’re discharged. That, at least.’

‘Nothing to say I can’t discharge myself,’ Cordon said. But, as he moved, some unspecified pain speared through him and he gasped loudly, hands gripping the sheets.

‘When I come back later,’ Kiley said, ‘I’ll bring grapes. A deck of cards. See if I can’t win some money off you while you’re disabled.’