He banished her image with a sweep of his fingers on the trackpad, and brought up a one-way e-ticket on the TGV to Paris. ‘You’re going to have to go and see Anne-Laure on your own. Take the car. I’m going to Paris.’
Dominique was disappointed. She didn’t want to be separated from him. ‘What will you do there?’
‘I need to confirm that Lambert’s girlfriend — fag hag, whatever... I need to know that she really was Sally Linol.’
Dominique said, ‘Even if she was, Enzo. What does it mean?’
He closed the lid of his laptop abruptly. ‘I don’t know.’ He stood up, frustrated and angry with himself. ‘I really don’t. But it must mean something. It has to. It’s the only chink of light in all this darkness.’ He turned towards her, letting his hands fall helplessly to his sides. ‘What else can I do?’
She slipped her arms around him and pressed the side of her face to his chest. ‘Where there’s light there’s hope.’ And she looked up at him. ‘When’s your train?’
‘In an hour.’
‘Then let’s get breakfast. You need to fuel up for the day ahead.’
The Café du Levant, opposite the Gare Saint-Jean, owed its origins to the Arabic countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, with an extravagant facade of coloured mosaic beneath a domed representation of a rising sun. The brasserie below, more prosaically, offered choucroute and oysters. And this early, Enzo and Dominique found themselves the only customers.
Staff were still cleaning up from the night before, and a bleary-eyed girl brought them coffee and croissants. The place was poorly lit, mirrors and brass rails and red velvet soaking up the light from globed chandeliers. Somehow it reflected Enzo’s mood, and he toyed with his croissant rather than eating it, sipping only desultorily at his coffee.
Dominique watched him in silence, feeling his pain but not knowing how to assuage it.
Eventually he raised his eyes to hers and said, ‘I have no idea if I am doing the right thing, Dominique. And Sophie’s life depends on me doing the right thing.’
‘Whatever we are doing,’ Dominique said, ‘right or wrong, is better than doing nothing. Think how much worse that would feel.’ She put her hands over his on the table. ‘What these people are scared of is that you’re going to find something that will be a danger to them, whatever that might be. But if you can find that thing they’re scared of, then at least you’ll have some kind of bargaining power. And the only way we’re going to find it is by looking.’
She sat back and drained the coffee from her cup.
‘I’ll see you off on the train. And when I’ve spoken to Anne-Laure I’ll drive to Paris and meet you there. You’re not alone, Enzo. We’ll do this together.’
He looked at her and had to fight to stop tears springing to his eyes. Instead, he stood up and lifted her to her feet and put his arms around her, enveloping her almost completely. They stood, swaying a little together, turning gently from side to side. And he whispered, ‘I love you, Dominique.’
He felt her stiffen at his words, then relax again and hold him even more tightly. And he realised that the only reason he had said it was that he meant it. That it was what he felt. Words that had come spontaneously in a moment of need, from his heart, from his very soul. And he wished that everything else would just fade away, leaving him this moment with her. A moment he could never have imagined all those years ago when Pascale was taken from him.
He heard her whisper back, ‘I love you, too, my darling man.’
Chapter thirty-four
Sophie had been through many phases. At first her overwhelming emotion had been fear. And then she had felt sorry for herself. But it was impossible to maintain such high-octane emotions for an extended period, and gradually, through despair and hopelessness, she had descended into an almost catatonic state of nothingness. She was completely numb.
She had lost count now of how many days and nights they had kept her here. Hours were endless. Light and dark came and went, but only on the outside. In this room, her cell as she had come to think of it, there was only electric light. The one constant in her life.
No sunshine reached into the room. For across a narrow lane a brick building rose high enough above her to block any view of the sky. The window stood at head height, but was barred on the inside. An iron frame hinged at one side, padlocked at the other. Beyond filthy glass, most of what might be visible on the other side of it was obscured. By standing on tiptoe she had been able to look down into the narrow, potholed asphalt lane that ran between the buildings twenty feet below. Reflections in the puddles of the sky above were her only view of freedom.
Initially she had been anxious to learn as much as she could about where she was. She drank in every available glimpse of the place they were holding her when they took her downstairs to the toilet. A filthy hole in the floor with raised footings, cracked porcelain and the smell of broken sewers rising up from below. But at least here there was paper and soap.
Her impression of the place when she first arrived, blinded by her hood, had proved amazingly accurate. A pitched glass and asbestos roof, supported on a rusted iron superstructure, was broken in a dozen places and let in the rain to lie in pools and puddles across a vast, empty expanse of concrete floor. Huge sliding metal doors closed off the outside world, and she was being held in what had once been offices, reached by a metal stairway leading to a grilled landing.
The men seemed to come in shifts. Two at a time. And spent their days and nights in an office with a window that looked out over the empty factory beneath them. They played cards and smoked, and drank beer, and watched television. Sometimes, from her cell, she could hear them laughing. They were always hooded when they brought her food and led her to the toilet. And she took encouragement from that. If the intention was to kill her, why would they care if she saw their faces?
Her cell itself must once have been some kind of lockfast room for storing valuable goods. The door was a heavy reinforced steel, with dead bolts that went into the floor and ceiling.
They had brought in a camp bed and sleeping bag on her first night, and when she wasn’t lying in it, she sat on the floor with her back to the window wall, or paced the cell, back and forth, conscious that it was important to exercise, and to keep oxygen flowing to her brain.
Now, as the door opened, she got to her feet. The hunger gnawing in her belly told her it was time to eat. The tallest of her captors, for she had got to know them by their height and their voices, pushed open the door and slid her tray into the room with the tip of his boot. This was the one who had threatened her when she first arrived. The one she most feared. Not just for the hurt he might inflict, but for other things, perhaps worse, that he had hinted might await her if she didn’t behave.
She stood looking at him, waiting for him to go. But he remained, returning her stare, and although all that she could see were his eyes, she could have sworn he was smiling. The tray sat on the floor between them, but she wouldn’t eat until he had gone. And still they stood, facing each other across the room, until an old, familiar emotion came bubbling back to the surface. Fear. For this was new. This was a departure. This was not good.
‘What?’ she said eventually. Almost shouting it at him.