I'll Keep You Safe

Chapter Thirty-One

Braque came down the carpeted staircase from her room and found Gunn sitting at the bar in the lounge where she had left him. He was nursing the same pint, and she thought that probably alcohol was another item on the banned list that the doctor had given to his wife.

‘Sorry about that,’ she said. Condensation from her glass of Chardonnay lay in a pool around the bottom of it, and the wine had lost its chill.

Gunn glanced at her and said, ‘What’s wrong?’

She darted a quick look in his direction. She was, it seemed, an open book to everyone but herself. ‘It’s that obvious?’

‘I’ve been interviewing folk for nearly thirty years, Ma’am. I think I know when something’s amiss.’

She shrugged helplessly. Confiding in others was a habit she had lost in these last years. But maybe it would be easier with a stranger, and certainly after a glass or two of wine. ‘Do you have children, Monsieur Gunn?’ And she immediately saw disappointment in the set of his mouth.

‘Afraid not, Ma’am. Something we were never blessed with.’

She shrugged, toying with her fingers on the bar in front of her. ‘They can be a blessing. And a curse.’ She glanced across at him. ‘No doubt your wife would have stayed at home and looked after them.’

‘Probably.’

‘But, you see, I couldn’t stay home. I had a job. And not the kind of nine-to-five job my husband had. It was a job that could call on me at any time, keep me out half the night, make me give up my days off. And Gilles was the one who ended up looking after the girls.’ She paused to clarify. ‘Twins.’

‘Gilles? That’s your husband?’

‘Was,’ she corrected him. ‘We split up a couple of years ago. He found someone else. After we broke up, he claims. But I figure it started long before.’ She glanced at him again and saw his discomfort. This was personal, not professional. But it felt good just to talk. She drained her glass and waved at the barman to refill it. ‘I got custody, but the truth is that they spend more time with him than me. I just can’t seem to be a mother and a police officer at the same time. And do you know what day care costs?’

Gunn didn’t.

‘Much more than I can afford. So Gilles takes them. All the time. And now he wants to revisit the custody agreement.’

‘Would that not be for the best?’

She gazed gloomily into her glass. ‘For the girls, maybe. Not for me. I can’t bear the thought of my babies looking on someone else as maman. Which is what would happen.’ She took several swallows of wine. ‘I’m just off the phone to Gilles. Been trying to get him for two days. It turns out that Claire is not well.’

‘That’s one of the twins?’

She nodded. ‘She’s got a fever of some kind, and he’s had to call the doctor.’ She turned imploring eyes on Gunn. ‘I should be there.’

‘Aye, Ma’am, you probably should.’

‘But I’m here.’

‘Aye, Ma’am, you are.’ Gunn pursed his lips and drew a long slow breath through his nostrils. ‘But you know, sometimes you just have to make choices. It wouldn’t make any difference to Ruairidh Macfarlane if you were to go home now. He’ll still be dead. And as for whoever killed him, they’ll just put someone else on that.’

‘Yes, and I’d probably lose my job.’

Gunn shrugged. ‘Choices again, Ma’am.’ And she heard the echo of Madeleine’s voice in his. He sipped on his beer, but he was still less than halfway through it. ‘When I had my heart attack in March, there was a time I thought I wouldn’t see the year out. There’s nothing quite like death, or the threat of it, to bring home to you just how precious and precarious life really is. It made me think about what was most important to me, about where my priorities should lie. With my wife or my job.’ He scratched his head. ‘I know it’s different for me. Being a policeman in Stornoway is quite another thing from being a policeman in Paris. And I was lucky, I was able to keep both. But, believe you me, if I’d had to choose between this —’ he took out his warrant card and slapped it on the bar — ‘and my good lady... being any kind of a policeman would have come a very distant second. Because in the end, people matter more than jobs. Your heart is more important than your pay packet.’

Braque looked at him with something like envy. How wonderful, she thought, to have such a clear vision of life. To cut through all the fog and obfuscation to make unequivocal choices. Maybe only proximity to death can force such focus. She said, ‘I’ll go home after the funeral. Day after tomorrow.’

He nodded. ‘I think that’s a good idea, Ma’am.’

When he was gone, she was tempted to order yet another glass of wine, but in the end decided against it and climbed wearily back to her room. She stood for a long time at the window gazing out over the inner harbour, seeing how the early-evening sunshine cast long shadows on the water. Gilles was right. She was a bad mother. And wife. There had only ever been one real focus in her life, and that had been her job. Other people sacrificed personal ambition for family. Not Braque. She had always put herself first. And now, as she found her life slipping away only too quickly and easily towards single middle age, here she stood, lonely and alone, in some strange hotel room far from home with no one to turn to but an island policeman she had just met. And herself. They both had damaged hearts. And she came up wanting.

The trill of her mobile phone drilled into her consciousness, dispelling introspection, and she fumbled in her bag to find it.

‘Lieutenant, it’s Marc Bouquand.’

It took Braque a moment to place him, before remembering that he was the ANSSI computer expert on attachment to her department. He had briefed her on the Dark Web, and found deleted emails on Georgy Vetrov’s hard disk.

‘I got that email you forwarded to me. From well wisher to Ruairidh Macfarlane. Interesting, when you start looking at the e-trail all these phoney IP addresses leave in the ether.’

‘It helped?’

‘Oh yes. With three different paths to follow you start to come up with points of correlation, which in the end lead you to the source.’

Braque felt her heart skip a beat. ‘You mean you know who sent them?’

‘Not who sent them, no. But it would seem you are in the best place to find that out. I know where they were sent from.’

‘The Isle of Lewis?’

‘More specifically, Lieutenant, from two different computers in the public library in the town of Stornoway. Two from one, one from the other.’

Braque felt her jaw go slack. She had walked past the library during a stroll through town the previous night. It was just around the corner in a rust-painted building next to the Argos store. ‘I’ll get back to you,’ she said quickly and hung up. She slipped her phone into her pocket and ran down the stairs, out into Castle Street and down to the harbour, hoping that she might catch Gunn before he drove off. But he was long gone.

She dialled his number and hurried back into the hotel. It was still ringing as she climbed the steps, then switched to voice mail when she went into the bar. ‘The emails were sent from the public library right here in Stornoway, Monsieur Gunn,’ she whispered into the phone. ‘Call me back.’ She hung up and found the barman looking at her curiously. ‘Do you know what time the library closes?’

The barman checked his watch. ‘You’ve missed it, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘It closes at five on a Tuesday.’