Sally came in with the bottle uncorked and set it down with two glasses on the long, stained coffee table in front of the settee. She sat down beside Bannerman and followed his eyes to the painting. ‘Brueghel,’ she said. ‘So gentle by comparison with the horrors and madness of his later work.’
Bannerman wondered if the choice of painting reflected anything in Slater. It was a curious painting for such a man. Perhaps it had come with the flat. He dragged his eyes away from it and turned his head to watch Sally pour the wine. It was a white wine, the bottle misted that way that makes it so irresistible. The glasses misted too when the wine was poured into them. Sally raised her glass to her lips. ‘It hardly seems right to toast to anything,’ she said and took a sip. Bannerman lifted his glass and took a mouthful. It was dry and a little fruity and tasted good, cool over the hotness of his throat which still hurt where the blood vessel had burst. Sally put her glass down and without looking at him, asked, ‘What happened to your face?’ He told her and she turned in amazement. ‘You mean there was someone in here waiting for you?’
‘Not waiting for me. He was after something in the safe. I disturbed him. I suppose he got what he was looking for, but he was clearly under the impression that the house was empty.’ He hesitated. ‘Let me ask you something. You normally came to the house on Sundays. Why did you not come yesterday?’
She looked at him curiously, a hint of uncertainty, suspicion, in her green eyes. ‘You don’t think I...’
‘I don’t think anything. I’d just like to know.’
‘If you must know I had a meeting with a professor of English from a very exclusive languages college in Rome. There’s a post available and I have applied for it. It’s a full-time job and it pays well.’ There was a hint of hostility in her voice. ‘Usually I took Tania out on Sunday mornings. To Mass. They were Catholics, you know. I’m not, but I took her anyway. She seemed to get something out of it.’
Bannerman nodded. ‘And that’s why whoever it was that clobbered me thought that the house would be empty.’
She picked up her glass and half emptied it. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I thought that maybe you thought I...’ She stopped. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘No.’ He leaned forward and re-filled both their glasses, a slight, sharp intake of breath as the pain returned to his outstretched arm.
‘Why,’ she said suddenly, ‘should anyone want to kill him?’
Bannerman passed her her glass. ‘Because Slater was blackmailing Robert Gryffe. Because someone else felt threatened and decided the best way out was to kill them both. When he had killed them he came here to get whatever it was that gave Slater a hold over Gryffe.’ If he said it often enough he might believe it. He took in her look of incredulity.
‘But how can you possibly know that?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t. But it fits with everything we know.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘It’s easier to believe than what you’re going to read in tomorrow’s evening papers.’
She frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘The Minister for the Interior is going to make a statement tomorrow morning announcing that the police are satisfied that Slater and Gryffe shot each other during some private quarrel. The case is already closed.’
She said nothing, raising her glass slowly to her lips and sipping at it several times. She got up and walked to the window, and stood tracing patterns with her finger on the fine condensation. Outside the snow still fell, brushing the glass, lining the ledge. ‘A cover-up?’ Her voice was quiet and the words were almost lost.
‘Something like that,’ Bannerman said. He replaced his glass on the table and went to the window and stood behind her, his hands resting lightly on her shoulders.
‘But why?’ he heard her ask.
He sighed. ‘Who knows. There are several possibilities. I don’t know. But I mean to find out.’
She turned then to face him, her eyes turned up to meet his. ‘It’s so unfair.’
‘Nothing in life is fair,’ Bannerman said and she was stung by the bitterness in his voice. ‘Right now there are thousands of children with distended stomachs, arms and legs thin and brittle like twigs, staring, hopeless eyes. They have days, some of them maybe only hours, to live, because they have not eaten for weeks. There is no food for them. Only disease and despair. And we sit sipping our wine and warming our anger because two men have died and someone didn’t want us to know why. Is that fair?
‘A little girl was born with something wrong in her head. She lost her mother when she was five and she saw her father shot to death yesterday. Maybe she’d like to tell us how it was. Maybe she’d like to say, “I loved my Daddy.” But she can’t, because the thing that is wrong in her head won’t let her. Do you care? Do I care? Does anybody care? That doesn’t really seem very fair either, does it? You can’t go through life expecting it to treat you fairly.
‘God, if he exists, either had an off-day when he put this lot together — the world, humanity — or else He’s playing some ethereal chess game where we’re all expendable in the greater plan of things, whether we think it’s fair or not. You can talk about right and wrong, and even that is different for every individual... but nothing is fair.’
She listened in silence. There was bitterness in him, but not venom. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ she said. ‘And, God knows, I should know. But wouldn’t it be sad if we all thought the way you do?’
Bannerman looked at her thoughtfully. ‘Was it a man?’ he said.
‘Isn’t it always?’ She turned away.
‘No, not always.’ He turned her back to face him and cupped his hands either side of her face, tilting her head upwards. ‘It needn’t be,’ he said. And he bent to kiss her. She responded, soft lips, the smell of wine on her breath. She pulled her head away and pressed it into his shoulder.
‘It’s hard,’ she said, ‘not knowing if you can ever really trust anyone again.’
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
She shook her head. ‘No.’ And she pushed away from him, turning again to the window.
He stood for a moment, then crossed to the coffee table and retrieved his glass. ‘I’d like to see the child,’ he said and drank what was left of his wine.
‘I’ll take you. Tomorrow?’
‘Evening. If it’s possible.’
She nodded. ‘Okay.’
‘You’ll be going to the funeral?’
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow afternoon, two thirty at the Cimetière de Bruxelles.’
‘Oh, I didn’t know. Yes, I’ll be there.’ She paused. ‘Why do you want to see her? Professional or personal reasons?’
He looked up sharply. ‘I don’t know. A bit of both, maybe.’ Why indeed? he thought. He knew there was very little chance of getting more out of the child than the police had already done. And it was only then that he realised she had been flitting around the edge of his consciousness all day, a small, clumsy, barefoot child whose cold hands had touched his face in the darkness. Then he remembered something else. He said, ‘The other night, when I came back, drunk. Did I... Did we...? I remember some of it, but not that.’
She smiled at his unusual bashfulness. ‘No,’ she said. ‘We didn’t.’ She hesitated, then, ‘I could stay tonight.’
‘No, I’ll take you home.’ He said it a little too quickly and it hurt her, and he realised too late his mistake.
‘Fine.’
‘Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean...’
‘You don’t have to apologise.’
There was an awkward silence, then Bannerman asked, ‘You want some more wine?’