I'll Keep You Safe

Chapter Two

It seemed she had been sitting here for hours. And yet time itself had become somehow timeless. It might have been only minutes. But her memory of the time which had passed stretched back further than that.

The room was entirely naked. The floor was tiled, a dirty beige. The walls had been painted a pale yellow at some indeterminate point in the past, but had lost almost all colour now, scored and scratched and scrawled on by the endless procession of cops and criminals who had conducted their business here. A wooden-topped table was supported on tubular legs, scarred and stained by the years. Her folding wooden chair was hard and unforgiving. Two empty chairs stood opposite.

High up on the wall facing the door, a barred slit of a window opened on to the night lights of the city, almost lost in the fluorescent glare of the strip light on the ceiling. On the wall beyond the empty chairs, a wooden-framed window was blacked out, offering her only a mocking reflection of herself in its darkness. Someone, she was sure, was watching her from the other side of it.

Strangely she felt nothing, as if some narcotic drug had numbed her body and robbed her of her senses. She had expected to cry. But the tears wouldn’t come.

She gazed at her hands folded on the table in front of her. Hands that had touched him, stroked him, loved him. Hands he had held in his. And now they seemed lost, useless, dissociated.

She was almost startled when the door opened. A man of around fifty, with dyed black hair and a grey weary face, walked briskly into the room carrying a brown briefcase. He wore jeans that were a little too tight for him. His white shirt, tucked in at the waist, stretched across an oddly protuberant belly on an otherwise skinny body. The woman from the square followed him in. She had dispensed with the shawl, and her open-necked blouse revealed a hint of modest cleavage. Her pearl necklace, pencil skirt and high heels seemed distinctly inappropriate, as if she were on a romantic night out with a lover, instead of entering a police interview room. Niamh saw now that she was probably only a year or two younger than herself, soft shiny hair tumbling around a face that was unlikely to turn heads, but was not unattractive.

They sat in the two seats opposite Niamh, and the man dropped a modest folder on to the table in front of him. But he didn’t open it. He reached down and from his briefcase took out a small digital recorder which he placed beside it. A red light began winking when he pressed a button on one side.

Niamh smelled cigarettes off his clothes, and on the stale air that he drew from his lungs and breathed across the table at her. She jumped focus to the faded Défense de Fumer sticker on the wall behind him, then back to the orange nicotine stains on his fingers. As some kind of deflection from dwelling even for one moment on the events of earlier that night, she wondered if they made him stand and smoke outside in the cold and the rain these days. Long gone, the smoke-filled interview rooms of old.

Then awareness that he was speaking invaded her consciousness. ‘This is Lieutenant Sylvie Braque,’ he said. ‘Of the Police Judiciaire. Brigade Criminelle.’ His English was heavily accented. Niamh’s eyes strayed momentarily towards Braque then back again to the smoker. ‘I am Commandant Frédéric Martinez, of the SDAT.’ He paused. ‘You know what that is?’

She shook her head.

‘Sous-direction anti-terroriste. The Anti-Terrorism Sub-Directorate. Also of the Police Judiciaire.’

For the first time, Niamh was shaken out of her torpor. ‘Terrorism? You think this was a terrorist attack?’

‘France is still on high alert, Madame, after recent events. Any such incident is regarded as a possible attentat.’ He paused to draw breath, and Niamh wondered if he wished it were smoke he was sucking into his lungs. ‘However, there are several reasons why we are looking at other causes. Not least because the bomb blast was directed upwards, deliberately aimed at inflicting maximum damage to the occupants of the car.’

Niamh clenched her teeth to stop her jaw from trembling. Did he not understand that he was talking about her Ruairidh?

He appeared oblivious. ‘A terrorist bomb would have been designed for maximum carnage, sending shrapnel in every direction. In which case you would not have been sitting here tonight. Miraculously collateral damage has been minimal. No one else was killed.’ He opened his folder now, and scanned the few pages it contained. ‘We have established that the vehicle did indeed belong to Irina Vetrov, and we have several witnesses who saw both her and your husband getting into it and driving off. What we don’t know is why someone put a bomb under it.’ He raised his eyes towards Niamh, and the question was there in their opaque milky brown.

Niamh found her voice with difficulty. ‘I have no idea.’

He nodded and took out a pen. ‘Let’s get one or two details for the record, shall we? Your husband’s name was...’ He hesitated. ‘Roo... Roooai...’

‘It would be easier for you just to say Rory,’ Niamh said. ‘It’s a Scots Gaelic name. That’s the English pronunciation.’ How often had they been forced to trot out the same explanation over the years. For them both. ‘And in case you’re wondering, my name is pronounced Neave.’ She spelled out both names.

Martinez gave up trying to follow her and scribbled down their phonetic representations. Then, ‘Macfarlane,’ he said carefully. She nodded. ‘And what were you and... Rory... doing here in Paris?’

‘We were attending Première Vision at the Parc des Expositions.’

He frowned. ‘Which is what?’

‘It’s the world’s biggest international fabric fair, Commandant,’ she said wearily. This all seemed so prosaic. Irrelevant. Ruairidh was dead. ‘Top fashion designers and clothing manufacturers from around the world come to Paris twice a year to buy the fabrics that will appear on the catwalks and in the stores the following season.’

‘And why were you there?’

Niamh closed her eyes and tried to summon the will to find answers to the smoker’s questions. It was hard to think beyond the grief. ‘Ruairidh and I were not just life partners. We were business partners. A small weaving enterprise in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland called Ranish Tweed.’

‘Like Harris Tweed?’

Niamh never ceased to be amazed by how many people had heard of Harris Tweed around the world. A fabric created by a handful of weavers in their own homes on a tiny archipelago off the extreme north-west of Europe. From somewhere she found the palest of smiles. ‘Like Harris Tweed. But different.’