I'll Keep You Safe

Chapter One

The last hours of their life together replayed themselves through a thick fog of painful recollection. Did people really change, or was it just your perception of them? And if that was true, had you ever really known them in the first place?

The change in a relationship happens slowly, without you really noticing at first. Like the transition between spring and summer, or summer and autumn. And suddenly it’s winter, and you wonder how that dead time managed to creep up on you so quickly.

It wasn’t winter yet. Relations between them hadn’t got quite that cold. But there was a chill in the air which seemed to presage the plunge of Arctic air to come, and as they moved with the flow of the crowds leaving the Parc des Expositions, Niamh shivered, even though the air of this September evening was still soft and warm. Only the fading light betrayed the changing season.

It was standing room only on the RER, and the train rattled and clattered its way through the north-eastern banlieues of Paris. Villepinte, Sevran Beaudottes, Aulnay-sous-Bois, where no one got on or off. She was uncomfortable, bodies pressing in all around her, male and female. The smell of garlic on sour breath, of sweat on man-made fabric, faded perfume, hair gel. Her knuckles glowed white, fingers clutching the chrome upright to keep her from falling as the train decelerated and accelerated, in and out of stations, and she tried to hold her breath.

Ruairidh was sandwiched between a tall man with an orange face who painted his eyebrows and wore lipstick, and a girl with tattoos engraved on every visible area of skin. Her dyed black hair and facial piercings seemed dated. Goth. Retro. Niamh saw Ruairidh force a hand into his pocket to retrieve his iPhone. The glow of its screen reflected briefly in his face and drew a frown that gathered between his eyes. He stared at it for a very long time before glancing, suddenly self-conscious, towards Niamh and thrusting the phone back in his pocket.

There was an exodus of passengers at the Gare du Nord, but a fresh influx of bodies from a crowded platform, and it was not until they got off at Châtelet les Halles that she was able to ask him about it. ‘Bad news?’

He glanced at her as they climbed the steps to the street, and the same frown regrouped around the bridge of his nose. ‘Bad news?’

‘Your email. Or was it a text?’

‘Oh. That. No. Nothing.’ He shrugged an uncomfortable indifference. ‘Shall we get a taxi?’

The Whisky Shop Paris threw light out across the Place de la Madeleine, casting shadows among the trees in the gathering gloom. Inside it seemed unnaturally bright, hanging globes reflecting light from white walls, whisky bottles glowing amber on lines of glass shelves. The sweet smell of it permeated the air like perfume. A girl took their coats at the foot of the stairs, and they climbed to the reception room on the first floor.

Harris Tweed Hebrides had imported two young island lads to provide the Celtic entertainment, and they stood in a corner, accordion and violin infusing the atmosphere, like the whisky, with a sense of home. Incongruous here in the heart of the French capital.

Ruairidh accepted his whisky cocktail, but Niamh was not in the mood for alcohol and they stood self-consciously amidst the buyers and designers and agents, feeling oddly alien. Their hosts, after all, were really the competition, though they clearly didn’t see themselves as such, and were happy to share a stand with Ranish Tweed at Première Vision. They were all Scots, weren’t they? Islanders. Selling the Hebrides as much as their cloth.

Different markets anyway.

Ruairidh was examining his phone again. ‘I’m going to have to go to the offices of YSL after we get back to the hotel.’

‘Why?’ Niamh felt a cold mist close around her heart.

‘Forgot to initial the contracts,’ he said. ‘Head office won’t process them until we do. And there’s no time tomorrow. We’ve got an early flight.’ As if she didn’t know. In any case, she didn’t believe a word of it. Ruairidh had lunched with the buyer from Yves Saint Laurent earlier that day, or so he said, while she manned the stand. It was an important order. One of several they had secured at this year’s Paris textile fair. Forgot to initial the contracts? She decided to test him.

‘Want me to come with you?’

‘No.’ His response came just a little too fast. He tried to take the curse off it. ‘Won’t take long. I’ll be back in no time.’

They were on the stairs to go, having stayed for what they deemed a respectable period of time, when the PR man called them back. ‘You can’t go yet, folks,’ he said. ‘We’re just about to draw the raffle.’ They had been given tickets when they arrived. The winning number, drawn from a hat, would secure Ian Lawson’s extraordinary photo book, From the Land Comes the Cloth, a visual evocation of how the colours and patterns of Harris Tweed have drawn their inspiration from the landscape since the time islanders first began weaving it. A huge and weighty tome, it sold in special editions for around two hundred euros. Harris Tweed Hebrides were clearly keen that it should end up in the hands of a favoured customer, but politeness had demanded that all their guests be included.

And so smiles were fixed when it was Ruairidh’s number that was drawn from the hat. Niamh masked her embarrassment by suggesting they forgo their good fortune and offer the book back for another draw. But no one would hear of it, and now they sat either side of it in the taxi, where it had morphed into a physical manifestation of the barrier that seemed to have materialized between them. Ruairidh said, ‘I’m glad they wouldn’t take it back. I’ve always wanted that book.’ He could have bought it a hundred times over, but somehow had never got around to it. In the end it was luck that had delivered it into his hands. The same luck that would desert him in less than an hour.

When their taxi dropped them outside the Crowne Plaza in the Place de la République, darkness had fallen, and the nightly gathering of police trucks and vans was already lining itself up along the pavement. Armed officers in flak jackets stood around in groups cradling automatic weapons and drawing on cigarettes. You could smell the smoke in the cool of the night, and sense the conflicting emotions of boredom and fear that stalked them, like the ghosts of both the terrorists and their victims whose blood had stained the streets all around this quartier. You just never knew when something might happen. The reality, these days, of life in the City of Light.

They took the lift to the second floor in silence. Niamh stole a glance at her man, but he was somewhere else. Somewhere, it seemed, that she was no longer welcome. He appeared older, suddenly, than his forty-two years. Short dark curls greying around the temples, shadows beneath blue eyes that had spent much of their time avoiding hers these last weeks. And she ached with a sense of loss. What had happened to them? A lifetime of love, ten years of marriage, evaporating before her eyes like rain on hot tarmac. It didn’t seem possible. Any of it. And it made her all the more determined to guard the secret she had been keeping from him.

As he held the door of their club room open for her she saw the slim package in its brown paper wrapping lying on the dressing table where she had left it. She hurried across the room and slipped it into her bag before he could see it and ask what it was. ‘I’m going to take a shower,’ he said, and he threw his jacket on the bed and went straight into the bathroom.

She heard the water running, and it only emphasized the silence in the room and her sense of loneliness. So she turned on the TV, just to create the illusion of life. Of normality. And walked to the window to gaze down into the courtyard below. Guests sat around tables beneath large, square parasols, eating and drinking, their chatter animated, laughter reaching her on the gentle night air, as if in rebuke for her unhappiness.

She didn’t turn when Ruairidh came out, wrapped in a towelling robe, and she heard him rummaging in his case for a clean top and underwear. Then he was in the bathroom again, and she heard the spray of his deodorant and the slap of palms on cheeks applying aftershave. This time, when he emerged, she smelled him. When finally she turned, he was pulling on a black polo shirt and running his fingers back through still damp hair. ‘Making yourself beautiful for your girlfriend?’ She couldn’t help herself.

He stopped, with his hands still raised. The frown again. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Irina.’

‘What?’ His incredulity was almost convincing.

‘Oh, come on, Ruairidh. Irina Vetrov. You’ve been having an affair with her ever since you came to Paris last spring to seal that deal to provide Ranish for her next collection.’

He almost laughed. But there was something not wholly convincing about it. ‘Irina Vetrov? You think I’m having an affair with her?’

Niamh knew that people often repeated an accusation to play for time, to compose a response. But she didn’t want to hear it. Instead, she walked briskly across the room to the wardrobe, throwing open the door and crouching to unlock the safe. She really hadn’t meant to confront him, but somehow there was no avoiding it any longer. She took out her iPad and flicked open the cover. A four-digit code brought up the welcome screen, and a couple of swipes opened her mailer. She stabbed a finger at the screen and held it out towards him.

He took a step towards her, consternation now in his eyes, and took the iPad, glancing down at the screen. She knew what he was reading. Words engraved in her memory. Read, and reread, and read again. Your husband is having an affair with Irina Vetrov. Ask him about it. She watched closely for his reaction. He looked up. His frown had become a scowl.

‘Jesus Christ, what the hell’s this?’

‘Self-explanatory, I think.’ Her certainty already wavering.

He lowered his eyes to the screen again, and read, ‘a.well.wisher.xx@gmail.com?’ Then raised them to meet hers. ‘Who the fuck is that?’

‘You tell me.’ Which immediately struck her as a stupid thing to say, since he clearly didn’t know. He threw her iPad dismissively on to the bed.

‘It’s crap, Niamh. Just not true. I can’t believe you think it is.’

‘Well, what am I supposed to think? You’ve been so secretive recently. Meetings and rendezvous without me. The little wife left to keep shop.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’

‘Do you deny it?’ She could hear herself getting shrill.

‘That I’m having an affair with Irina?’

‘Yes!’

‘I think I just did.’

‘So why would someone write and tell me you were?’

‘I think you’d have to ask them that, but I haven’t got the first idea.’ He seemed genuinely hurt. A glance at his watch and he said, ‘I have to go.’

‘Where?’ She turned, catching his arm as he walked past her. He pulled it free.

‘I told you.’

‘YSL?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

He stared at her long and hard. ‘They say that when trust is gone, love is dead. Don’t wait up.’

He slammed the door behind him and she stood, a cauldron of mixed emotions bubbling inside her. Now she felt guilty. As if it were her fault. As if the lack of trust she had just so clearly demonstrated was without cause. But it was justified, wasn’t it? The way things had changed between them recently. His strange, guilty behaviour.

The email.

She perched on the edge of the bed resisting the urge to weep. She wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. Then realized he would never know if she did. But she would. And she was determined not to.

To her left the screen of her iPad, still lying on the bed, had dimmed a little, but the words of the email remained clear and legible. Your husband is having an affair with Irina Vetrov. Ask him about it. Well, she just had, and all it had brought was pain and confusion. Don’t wait up, he had said. But how could he even imagine she could go to bed with everything that had just happened between them left unresolved?

She sat for what felt like hours, but was probably only minutes, before she got up and wandered to the window. People were still eating and drinking and laughing down there. How she wished she were one of them. That things could just be back to how they were before. They had been through so much together, she and Ruairidh, and always come out the other side of it stronger. Or so she had thought.

She stiffened and felt the skin stinging across her scalp. Ruairidh had just emerged from the bar into the courtyard below, a glass of beer in his hand. He sat at an empty table and placed his beer on it, untouched. She watched as he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, before dropping his head briefly into his hands. When he raised it again, he sat back folding his arms and stretched his legs out, gazing at the fizzing amber liquid in his glass. But he made no attempt to drink it.

Niamh watched for a long time, aching inside. So many moments of magic, and madness, between them. So many memories. She was tempted to go down and join him. To say sorry for doubting him. To ask him what it was that had gone wrong and how they could put it right.

And then Irina stepped from the bar. Niamh saw her look around before spotting Ruairidh and walking towards him. She was shorter than Niamh, willow-thin, with long chestnut hair cut in a straight fringe that hung in a curtain over her eyes. Almond eyes, almost slanted. So dark they seemed to soak up all the light. Everything about her was feminine. The way she walked, the way she held her hands, so elegant with their long, slim fingers. The seductive, slightly hoarse quality of her voice. Niamh had only met her once, but she had made Niamh feel big and clumsy, which by any normal standards she was not. Tall, yes. Nearly five-eight, but certainly not overweight. Her long, slender legs had been the envy of all her friends at the Nicolson. And her thick-cut, shoulder-length wavy blonde hair gave her the air of a thirty-year-old, rather than the forty she had just turned this year. Still, she had felt oversized next to the petite Irina, and watched her now with a growing jealousy.

Ruairidh stood up when he saw her coming and kissed her on both cheeks. They exchanged a few earnest words and Niamh wished she could lip-read. Then they turned and walked out together into the bar, leaving his beer undrunk.

Niamh felt a sense of hopelessness wash over her. And then desperation. If she let him go now, let him walk out of the hotel with Irina Vetrov, she feared she would be letting him walk out of her life. For ever.

An impulse led her to snatch her Ranish Tweed jacket from the back of a chair, and her bag, and almost run across the room to the door. She was still pulling on the jacket as she hurried down the hall, turning right past tall arched windows that looked down on to the courtyard. She pressed the call button for the lift several times and was considering running down the stairs when suddenly it arrived. By the time she got to the lobby, Ruairidh and Irina had left the hotel. Through glass doors that gave on to the square, Niamh saw them getting into Irina’s car, a white A-Class Mercedes, its hazard lights flashing.

Niamh sprinted through the lobby, pausing breathlessly to let two sets of sliding doors open, before running out on to the pavement, assailed by a thousand city smells and sounds carried on cooling night breezes. The Mercedes was already accelerating away, past the lines of police vehicles, towards the traffic lights at the far end of the Place.

A classical-looking building on the block beyond the Crowne Plaza was clad in scaffolding, and simmered darkly behind mesh screening. Workmen’s trucks and a couple of skips lined up along the pavement in front of it, abandoned for the night.

Niamh ran out into the middle of the street, past a classic revolving Morris column, with its domed top, advertising a rerun of Le Fusible at the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens. Several armed police officers turned to look at her, suddenly alert. But she didn’t even see them. The brake lights of the Mercedes glowed red as it stopped at the lights beyond the workmen’s trucks, and the left indicator began to flash. Niamh glanced across the square, beyond the thirty-foot statue of Marianne picked out by symbolic red, white and blue spots, and thought that if she ran a diagonal across the slabs, she could reach the far end of the square in time to cut the car off before it was gone for good. If only the lights would stay red long enough.

She ran past the graffiti-covered red containers that lined the nearside of the pavement, sprinting beyond Marianne and the steps that led down to the Métro République. Off to her left she was only vaguely aware of the diners who sat out at green metal tables at the Café Fluctuat Nec Mergitur. Destroyed by fire early in 2015, it had been reopened, and renamed with the motto of Paris following the terrorist attacks later that same year. Tossed by the waves but never sunk. It was about to be tossed once more.

Niamh saw the lights change to green and the Mercedes start to turn left across the flow of traffic. And then she was blinded. A searing, burning light that obliterated all else, just a fraction of a second before the shockwave from the blast knocked her off her feet. As she hit the ground, sight returned. She saw glass flying from the broken windows of the Fluctuat Nec Mergitur, tables and chairs spinning away across the square. As she rolled over, the Mercedes was still in the air. Later she would remember it as being ten feet or more off the ground. But in fact it was probably no more than eighteen or twenty inches. Flaming debris showered down across the Place de la République as the car slammed back on to the road, a ball of flame.

While her sight had returned, her hearing had not. The tinnitus was deafening. Then somewhere beyond it she heard a voice screaming. It was some moments before she realized it was her own. She pulled herself to her knees but did not have the strength to stand up, supporting herself on her arms and transfixed by the blazing vehicle on the road. Somewhere in her peripheral vision, beyond awareness, she saw dark figures running in the night. Long, flickering shadows cast by the light of the burning car.

Screams still tore themselves from her throat. Repeated, hysterical bursts of them. Before she understood that it was his name she was shrieking at the night. She felt hands grasp her arms on either side, men in uniform and dark body armour lifting her to her feet. One of them was shouting at her. His lips were moving, but she couldn’t hear him. And then a woman moved into her field of vision. A woman with long dark hair cascading over shoulders draped in silk, a shawl wrapped around her above a pencil skirt and high heels. She flashed a wallet from her bag at the men who held Niamh. With the blaze behind her, Niamh couldn’t see the woman’s face. And yet somehow her voice cut through everything else. A commanding voice edged with concern.

Niamh felt tears burning tracks down her cheeks and stopped screaming to draw breath. Although she could now hear the words, she couldn’t understand them. She shook her head hopelessly. Then suddenly there was clarity. The woman was speaking English.

‘You are English?’

She almost certainly only wanted to know that Niamh understood her. But Niamh had never been able to think of herself that way. ‘Scottish,’ she said, her voice was hoarse already. Then she thought what an absurd distinction it was in a moment like this.

‘You were running towards the car.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Ruairidh...’ Just saying his name caused her throat to close and fresh tears to scald her face. She took a moment to find her breath again. ‘My husband.’

‘Your husband was in the car?’

Niamh nodded vigorously. ‘And Irina.’

‘Irina?’

‘Vetrov. The fashion designer.’ She found light now in the woman’s eyes. ‘They’re dead, aren’t they?’

The woman nodded.

Niamh broke down again. Sobs contracting in her chest, almost completely blocking the flow of air to her lungs. The woman put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. ‘Why were you running towards the car?’ It was a refrain that would repeat itself often in the hours to come.

‘They were...’ In her shock and confusion she searched hopelessly for the right word. ‘Lovers.’ She sucked in air between sobs. ‘All this time and I never knew it.’ She searched the light in the eyes that gazed at her, looking for... what? Sympathy? Reason? ‘Now I’ll never be able to ask him why.’