Christopher Brookmyre (41 page)

'I'd like to add a little something to your itinerary today, if that's all right with you.'

'Sure, what?'

'Dinner. Marie-Patrice's finest. Shouldn't be all work and no play, should it?'

'No.'

He'd started a little, and it was tempting to watch his consternation fully develop, but Jane opted to clarify her position.

'No, it shouldn't,' she said. 'That would be lovely.'

She managed to keep the grin off her face until he turned his back and walked away. At that moment, her thoughts were not of mutual courtesy, and she had convinced herself that his couldn't have been either. She still wasn't sure why she wanted him to like her, but she knew it felt good when he indicated that he did. Perhaps it was because it provided further independent evidence that she wasn't quite the frumpy old hag she recently feared she'd turned into.

Alexis had provided the first of it when they'd squeezed in a hit-andrun clothes-shopping trip the previous evening at an enormous two-storey supermarket-cum-department store. While Jane wandered around, unsure where to find anything and trying to remember how European sizes corresponded with those back home, Alexis was swiftly picking up garments and slinging them over her arm. At first Jane assumed Alexis was buying them for herself, until she got Jane to hold a shirt against her chest for size. She was about to state her objections, but held her tongue. Out of her normal environment, out of her normal self, she was able to step away and hear how truly tedious her protests would sound. Insistent frumpery, she could suddenly see, was a self-indulgence. The girl wasn't choosing anything inappropriate and nor was she making any statement: she was just grabbing a few things by way of suggestion because they didn't have long before the place closed. What took Jane a revelatory moment to absorb was that Alexis was choosing clothes for the woman she was looking at, and that woman was a lot younger than the one Jane had got used to picturing. The following morning she had caught her reflection in the gym as she swung kicks at the hanging bag, barefoot in her loose khaki fatigues. What struck her most was not the sight of what she was doing - her agility, the power with which she was delivering her blows, the sweat running obliviously off her face on to fatigues already dark with it in places - but how natural she looked.
This
was her, and it didn't look wrong. However, the closer it came to dinnertime, the more her old self threatened an ambush from behind the full-length antique mirror. She stood there in just her bathrobe, surveying her sartorial options for the evening, her old self insisting nothing she wore could disguise who she really was. That's why she was having second thoughts. Monster, brute, killer, no matter, when Bett looked at her in that dining room, she wanted him to see someone who belonged there. She wanted him to see her as an equal, and if she couldn't make that happen, then she didn't want to be there at all.

She walked to the door and slowly opened it an inch to see who was outside. It was Rebekah.

'Brought you these,' she announced, holding up a pair of hair straighteners.

'I'm not exactly a beautician - too much of a tomboy all my life - but I thought I could lend you moral support.'

'Could you ever,' Jane said, welcoming her inside with a smile. Lex had called it a day and was heading for her car when curiosity got the better of her and she decided to head out via the kitchen. Whatever magic spell had turned Bett into a human being was unlikely to last, so she wanted another glimpse of its effects before the enchantment wore off. She stuck her head around the door, ostensibly to say goodbye, though she knew this would have been utterly transparent given that neither of them had ever sought the other out for such a salutation before. In truth, she was still half-expecting to have that head bitten off, spell or no spell, but instead Bett beckoned her inside and began showing her the intended menu. Marie-Patrice was conspicuous by her absence, but this was because she had been dispatched on shopping duties with the kind of budget Bett normally only spent on ordnance.

'What do you think?' he asked.

'I think you should be careful not to overwhelm her,' Lex replied, casting an eye over the list of extravagant dishes he had planned.

'That's what Marie-Patrice said, too.'

'But you overruled her.'

'Well, yes. Armand was right. The woman deserves a bit of the good life.'

'Yeah, but if you overdo it, it could be intimidating, like you're trying to show her you're lord of the manor when you should be trying to make her feel at home, right?'

'Er, right,' he said, trying to disguise the fact that he had just been called on his true intention. The poor bastard. He really was a beginner at this normal-human-relations thing.

'And is this the wine you've chosen?' she asked, indicating the bottle sitting in pride of place in the centre of the kitchen table.

'Yes,' he said, smiling eagerly. 'Margaux, 1982. It's the last of three I got as a gift from the French minister for--'

'Then don't waste it,' Rebekah told him.

'What?'

'Save it for someone who'll appreciate it. Put it back and open some Ruby Cabernet.'

'It's
Shiraz
Cabernet. Ruby Cabernet is marketing-speak nonsense, and anyway, I'm not going to serve Mrs Fleming some inferior plonk. What would that say about my hospitality?'

'Mrs Fleming doesn't drink wine very much. She's only getting started, though she is getting to like it. She won't like your Margaux. She will like some Ruby Cabernet. There's some nice Australian--'

'
Australian
?' he asked, appalled.

'Australian. Like I said, she's new to it. If you want her to enjoy herself, give her a bottle that will make her think wine is great, not a bottle intended to make her think
you're
great. You copy, sir?'

Bett sighed. This was all very confusing for him.

'I think so,' he said. 'Will I have to drink the same stuff?'

'Only if you don't want to look like an asshole.'

'Copy that,' he said, a glowering rumble in his voice telling her this was probably a good time to cut and run.

Bett was waiting for her in the drawing room, where they'd first met those long few days ago. He smiled a little stiffly by way of welcome, standing by that window he was so fond of gazing from. He had that incredible selfconfidence when there was a multitude to be ordered and addressed, but he seemed less assured now that it was just the two of them, and markedly less so than their first one-on-one, when there was the demarcation of roles between them: the man of shadow and the woman he had mysteriously summoned. That said, he still had a presence that filled the room, and it had to be borne in mind that a less assured Bett still presented a more commanding countenance than the majority of the male population at their most cocksure. She stood just inside the doorway and they both sized each other up for a wordless few moments. She was looking at him a while before noticing that he hadn't gone to the same pains and stresses as she with regard to dressing for the occasion. The reason it took a few seconds was that her immediate impression was simply that he looked good, he looked right, with issues of code or formality only factoring into her assessment as an afterthought. He wore a crisp pair of pale green chino pants and a sandy polo shirt. Jane had opted for a peach dress that Alexis had picked out at the supermarket. It was a light and airy garment, and the feel of it against her newly-shaven legs, without tights, made her think of holidays.

Given the grandeur of her surroundings, she'd had uncomfortable visions of Bett fronting up in a DJ and making her feel like a taffeta-deficient poor relation. However, when she saw him, she felt precisely that anticipated anxiety of being underdressed, despite the relaxed informality of his chosen attire. There was something intimidatingly formidable about his appearance that would have had that effect no matter what she'd been wearing. The short sleeves of his polo shirt hugged taut muscle, an unflinching sturdiness about him that made her picture someone hitting him with a crowbar and the crowbar bending, like in the cartoons.

'Hello,' she managed nervously, once they'd been smiling awkwardly at each other for one nanosecond longer than she could possibly tolerate.

'Good evening,' he replied. 'Can I get you a drink?'

He stepped across to a table by the wall, which bore eight or nine bottles of spirits and some glasses. She stared at them, wondering how bad it would sound to admit she wasn't very well versed in the whole aperitifs thing, or the whole drinking alcohol thing in general.

'Gin and tonic, perhaps?' he suggested.

'Yes, please,' Jane assented, simply to disguise the fact that she didn't have a clue.

'Tanqueray, Bombay Sapphire?'

She looked at the bottles and opted for the blue one. The stuff she'd tried once before had been from a green bottle, so maybe the blue stuff didn't taste like bleach.

Bett poured two and handed her a glass.

'Your health,' he said, subtly tilting his glass.

'Which is . . . strangely as good as I can remember, though I'm left wondering whether that's in spite or because of everything else in my world falling down about my ears.'

'It's times like these that show you what you're really made of. In your case, sterner stuff than you perhaps suspected.'

'I'll drink to that,' she said, and tried not to wince as she raised the glass to her lips. She took a decent mouthful, having learned from wine that you taste nothing but bitterness if you only take an apprehensive sip. She smiled in mild surprise. It tasted quite refreshing, and barely like bleach at all. She wondered whether it was the circumstances, her surroundings or the quality of the drink that made the difference, but, given that it was easily twenty years since her last go at the stuff, it was fairly possible her palate had matured a little.

Bett invited her to take a seat opposite him, having positioned two armchairs either side of his favoured window. They traded small talk as they drank, mainly about her training, and avoiding the subject of why she was undertaking it. It was safe, neutral stuff: common ground, in fact the only common ground they had, given that she knew next to nothing about him. Jane was already starting to worry how they would fill the gaps between courses when Marie-Patrice appeared at the door to summon them to dinner. Bett walked behind her, carrying her drink, while Marie-Patrice led the way, holding the door open for them when she reached the dining room. Jane gaped. The table could comfortably have seated twenty, but only two places were set, down at the far end, at ninety degrees to one another. The conversation position, she remembered Michelle explaining it, as opposed to the more confrontational aspect of sitting face to face.

The ceiling hung sufficiently high above for her to imagine clouds obscuring the elaborate cornicing on a rainy day. Around her the walls towered to meet it, replete with coverings that looked luxuriant and expensive enough for Derry Irvine to have blanched at spending other people's money on. Jane found herself concentrating on the two carved chairs and the place settings, trying to zone out their wider surroundings, as they were giving her something she imagined was akin to stage fright. She would come in here again, alone, in the morning and have a look around, then she could merge the decor details into her memory of the meal.

Bett poured them each a glass of wine and some water from a pitcher as Marie-Patrice brought their starter. It was, she explained, brik: a deep-fried egg in the lightest filo pastry, stuffed with spinach, and accompanied by some tiny merguez sausages.

The churning sensation in Jane's stomach, which she had assumed to be trepidation, revealed itself to be hunger as soon as she got a noseful of the aroma. A sense of etiquette restrained her from just scarfing the lot in between exquisite mouthfuls of velvety wine, while discussion of the dish's constituent ingredients and their coalescent deliciousness further eased the pace. It was followed by a spicy and aromatic lamb tagine served with couscous: rough chunks of meat and root vegetables bobbing in a large casserole from which Marie-Patrice ladled the portions, steaming, to their plates.

'This is Marie-Patrice's speciality,' Bett informed Jane almost conspiratorially once the cook had left the room. 'Family recipe. Her mother is from Tunisia. Do you like it?'

'It's wonderful,' Jane enthused.

'Isn't it. Though I have to confess it wasn't my first choice for the menu. I had planned something a little more . . . a lot more elaborate, but I was advised by young Ms Richardson that it might seem somewhat grandiose.'

'I'd still have eaten it, I'm sure.'

'How's the wine?'

Jane swallowed the sip she'd been savouring.

'Habit forming.'

'She was right about that, too.'

'Handy girl to have around, in any number of ways.'

'Indispensable, is the word I'd use.'

'And for her to end up in your service,' Jane remarked. 'More serendipity, would you say?'

'Only if we discount the notion, which I don't, that you make your own luck. But of all the luck I've made, finding Alexis has been among the best of it.'

'And did all of your company arrive by such, what was your word,
crepuscu-
lar
routes?'

'She told you how she came to be here?'

'Yes.'

'That's quite a confidence so soon. Bodes well for your ability to elicit more vital information.'

'Well, this one didn't require any subterfuge. I've developed the impression there's a lot of people around here missing their mother.'

Bett nodded sagely, staring into his plate.

'Somboon's the only one who's still a little shy of me, but he's getting there.'

'Somboon's naturally shy of everyone, at first,' Bett said. 'If he starts wittering away, it's not necessarily because he's decided he's comfortable with you; it's usually just a more nervous manifestation of his shyness.'

'I noticed. He'll get past that too.'

'Perhaps. But the last thing he's going to talk to you about is how he got here.'