I'll Keep You Safe

Chapter Four

Niamh wondered where she would find the strength to carry on without Ruairidh. We were one person really, old man Faulkner had said of himself and his beloved Isabella. And in so many ways that had also been true of Niamh and Ruairidh.

Lieutenant Braque spoke for the first time, softly, without accusation or insinuation. But she was watching her, Niamh thought, very carefully. ‘In the Place de la République you said that Irina Vetrov and your husband were lovers.’ Niamh did not feel this merited a response. It was a statement, not a question. That came next. ‘How did you know that?’

Niamh dropped her eyes to gaze again at her hands, fingers twisting and interlocking now, an outward expression of her inner turmoil. ‘He... we...’ she began, not really knowing how to say this. ‘Things had not been right between us recently.’

‘In what way?’ Braque again.

Niamh lifted one shoulder a little and shook her head. ‘It’s hard to explain. You are the way you are with someone, then something changes. I can’t give you specifics. Except that to me, he was behaving oddly. He’d started making excuses, leaving me behind when he went to meetings. At first I didn’t think anything of it, then...’ Her voice tailed away and there was a long silence.

‘And?’ Braque prompted her.

‘There was the email.’ She was still looking at her hands and felt rather than saw her inquisitors exchange glances.

‘What email?’ Martinez this time.

‘I got an email from... I don’t know who from. A well wisher.’ And she thought how ironic that was. No one who sent you an email like that wished you anything but harm. ‘It said Ruairidh and Irina were having an affair.’ She raised her head to meet their eyes. ‘And that I should ask him about it.’

‘And did you?’ Braque’s gaze was unwavering.

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘Tonight. Just before he left for a meeting at YSL.’

‘YSL?’ Martinez frowned.

‘Yves Saint Laurent. But he didn’t have a meeting there. He had a rendezvous with Irina Vetrov. I saw them together in the courtyard from my hotel room. When I went down to the lobby her car was just pulling away from the door of the hotel.’

Martinez said, ‘And you chased them across the square.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

Niamh wondered how she could tell them what she could hardly even explain to herself. ‘I don’t know, I... I thought that if I let them go, it would be an end to my marriage. No going back. I thought... I don’t know what I thought.’ She looked at them as if they might provide her with illumination. ‘That maybe if I could intercept the car, somehow I could stop that from happening.’ She shook her head hopelessly. ‘Stupid.’ And she saw scepticism in their eyes. How could you make sense of the irrational?

Martinez reached an open palm across the table towards her. ‘Do you have your phone there?’

Niamh looked at the open hand, then at the opaqueness of the man’s eyes. For some reason she felt defensive. ‘What do you want my phone for?’

‘I’m assuming the email will be in it?’

‘Yes,’ Niamh conceded reluctantly.

‘Then I’d like to see it.’

She reached down to lift her bag from the floor, rummaging through it until she found her iPhone and slid it across the table.

‘I’ll need your pin to unlock it.’

Now this felt invasive. Bruised and hurting, physically and mentally, it was just one more violation. But she was in no position to refuse. ‘Four-five-nine-five.’

He lifted the phone and tapped in her code, then went straight to her mailer. ‘How is it titled, the email?’

‘Something you should know.’ And Niamh wished she could simply erase that something from her mind, as if she thought that could bring Ruairidh back. She watched as Martinez found the email and read it. He was impassive as he handed it to Braque. She read it, too, then her eyes flickered briefly towards Niamh before glancing at Martinez.

He took the phone from her and turned it off, slipping it into his pocket. He made a note of the pin. Niamh wanted to object. But the objection never got past her lips. He said, ‘We have people who will want to take a look at this. You’ll get it back when they’re finished.’ He hesitated. ‘Unless we retain it for evidence.’

‘Evidence of what?’

‘Against you.’ His voice was level, and his eyes watched her through clouds of obfuscation.

For the first time two further emotions squeezed their way past her grief.

Fear. And confusion.

‘Me?’ she said. She looked at Braque, as if in the policewoman who had taken her from the hands of armed officers in the Place de la République and brought her here, she might find a friend.

But Braque was implacable. She said, ‘If this is not an act of terrorism, Madame Macfarlane, which seems less and less likely...’ She glanced at Martinez. Then back to Niamh. ‘It will become a murder investigation. Given that the occupants of the vehicle were Irina Vetrov and your husband, whom you believed to be having an affair, given that it was almost a week since you received the email alerting you to that fact, and given that you fought with him just before he left...’ She paused. ‘We would have to regard you as a prime suspect.’

The corridor stretched into darkness. A fire door at the far end was barely visible. The strip light on the ceiling, above the half-dozen chairs pushed against the wall where Niamh sat, flickered and hummed intermittently. At the near end stood a door with a window in it, barred on the far side, and Niamh could see the shadow of someone standing guard beyond it.

It was cold, and she was glad of her tweed jacket. Still, she folded her arms for warmth. It was over two hours since they had left her sitting here. At first she had glanced at her watch with a manic frequency, before finally giving up. Time never passed more slowly than when it was being watched. And now her whole focus was on keeping her mind free of all thought and emotion. How could anyone possibly think she had killed Ruairidh?

She concentrated on listening to the sounds that gradually invaded her consciousness, seeping from the walls, through doors and ceilings. Distant voices. The warble of a telephone. The chatter of a printer. All punctuated by long periods of total silence broken only by the hum of the strip light.

When the near door swung open, its hinges sounded inordinately loud and Niamh was startled. A uniformed officer in shirtsleeves approached and held out her phone. She glanced up at him before taking it. And as he turned away she said, ‘Does this mean I am no longer a suspect?’ But either he didn’t know, or wasn’t saying, or didn’t speak English. Without a word he pushed open the door and was swallowed by the building beyond it.

Niamh examined her phone, switching it on and checking her mailer. ‘Something you should know’ was still there in her in-box. She noticed that the battery was almost exhausted, and was sure that it had been around 80 per cent when Martinez took it. She had recharged it on the stand at Première Vision late that afternoon. What, she wondered, had they been doing with it? The home screen looked exactly the same as it always did. But she noticed with something of a shock that the time was now 2.17 am. Had she really been here all these hours? She double-checked with her watch. Ruairidh had been dead for more than five hours. Forty-two years snuffed out in a moment. And time, the healer, just kept moving on, until one day he would be just a distant recollection, residing only in the memories of those who had known him. And when they were gone, too, what traces would any of them have left on this earth? What point would there have been to these lives they deemed so precious? She closed her eyes to let the moment pass, then slipped the phone back into her bag.

Yet more time drifted by. How much of it she didn’t even want to know. There was a comfort to be found in this state of limbo, requiring no thought, no decision, no action. She would have liked, there and then, simply to close her eyes and never need to open them again.

Then the sound of the hinges on the door once more brought her head around. Another uniformed officer held it wide for a tall man wearing a dark suit and white shirt open at the collar. A man somewhere in his forties, Niamh thought. Black hair thinning a little, unshaven, sallow skin pale from lack of sun. And yet he had a certain style about him. In the cut of his suit, and in his carefully plucked eyebrows and manicured nails. The police officer nodded towards the row of seats where Niamh sat and retreated once more, closing the door behind him. The man glanced at Niamh, unsure whether to acknowledge her or not, then sat down in a seat at the end of the row. He clasped his hands between his thighs and leaned forward on his forearms.

They sat in silence for a long time then, Niamh listening to his breathing. A distraction from the hum of the light overhead. She felt his discomfort, and although she stared straight ahead at the wall, was aware of his head turning several times in her direction. Finally he cleared his throat and said something in French that she didn’t catch. She turned awkwardly and said, ‘I’m sorry, my French isn’t very good.’

He looked at her a little more closely and nodded. This time he spoke in a softly accented English that Niamh took to be Russian, or at least Eastern European. ‘Are you here in connection with the explosion in the square?’

‘Yes.’

A long pause. ‘You are a witness?’

‘My husband was killed in the blast.’

He seemed startled and sat upright. ‘He was in the car?’

‘Yes.’

Another long pause. ‘Did you know Irina?’

Her mouth seemed very dry then, and bitter words came with a bad taste. ‘My husband did.’

He appeared oblivious to the implication implicit in her tone. He said, ‘Irina is my sister.’ Then corrected himself. ‘Was my sister.’

Niamh looked at him afresh, and this time saw him very differently. The whites of very black eyes were bloodshot, and he might well have been crying. Whatever Irina’s sins, they were not his. Like her he had lost someone close and was probably still in shock. For the first time she felt pity for someone other than herself and gave voice to it. ‘I’m sorry.’

He nodded again and returned to his previous position, leaning forward on his thighs, hands clasped between them as if in prayer. Suddenly he said, still staring at the floor, ‘You never imagine your little sister will go before you. You always think you will be there to protect her.’ There was a crack in his voice as he added, ‘I should have been there to protect her.’

And Niamh wondered if it should have been her job to protect Ruairidh. Death, it seemed, was always accompanied by guilt. Irina’s brother turned to stretch an arm across the space between them, a hand offered in empathy. ‘Dimitri,’ he said.

Niamh took it and felt how cold it was. ‘Niamh.’

Then they returned to their respective positions, several seats apart, and silence fell between them again. But it only lasted a few moments. And it was Dimitri who broke it. ‘Apparently they think it was Georgy who did it.’

Niamh sat bolt upright. ‘Georgy? Who’s Georgy?’

‘Irina’s husband. He is from the Caucasus.’ As if that explained everything.

‘Why would he kill his own wife?’

Dimitri turned to look at her, and she saw in his eyes the hatred he harboured for his brother-in-law. ‘Georgy is a brute of a man. I never knew what she saw in him. But he was like an addiction. The more he was bad for her the more she wanted him. And to him? Irina was his possession. He owned her. I have never known a man so jealous. God help her if she ever tried to leave him, or anyone tried to take her from him.’ He hesitated before adding awkwardly, ‘It seems he might have thought she was having an affair with the man in the car.’

Niamh’s carefully contrived calm was suddenly flooded with emotions that very nearly overpowered her. Anger, hate, sorrow, revenge. ‘Is he in custody? Do they have him?’

Dimitri shook his head. ‘He’s gone missing since the explosion. The police are very anxious to find him.’