Питер Мэй - I'll Keep You Safe

Staff at the hotel were extremely agitated when she got back. A manager was called from an office somewhere behind reception, and with a Heepian ringing of hands and profuse apologies explained that the police had searched her room. The hotel had been obliged to grant them access, since they had arrived with a warrant issued by a juge d’instruction . If Niamh wished a change of room, they would be only too happy to upgrade her. But all that Niamh wanted was for them all to go away, to leave her alone to retreat to the final space she had shared with Ruairidh. To have his things around her, to touch them and smell them and believe, if only for a moment, that he was still there, a presence among all the traces he had left behind him.

Whoever searched the room had left a mess behind, the contents of both suitcases tipped out on the bed, drawers and wardrobe emptied. They had even rifled through the laundry. The hotel must have provided a master key to let them into the safe, and they had left it lying open. For a moment Niamh thought they had taken her iPad, then remembered she had left it on the bed after showing Ruairidh the email. She looked around the room and spotted it lying now on the dressing table.

She crossed to the window and looked down into the courtyard where she had last seen him sitting on his own at a table. Before Irina arrived. The beer he had left there was long gone.

Wearily she began repacking both their suitcases, trying not to think. She was meticulous in folding and refolding everything, like someone suffering OCD. Anything to fill the emptiness of the room, the meaningless nature of time that she no longer knew how to spend.

It was only as she closed the lid of her suitcase that she spotted Ruairidh’s briefcase leaning against the bedside table at his side of the bed. When she picked it up she saw that both straps had been unclasped. So they had been through that as well.

She sat on the bed and opened it, sifting through papers and folders, until she came across his diary tucked into one of the sleeves. For some reason he always preferred to mark up his appointments in an old-fashioned hardback diary, while she had long since gone electronic, entering everything on her iPad or phone.

She flipped through the pages until she came across his entries for the four days they were spending in Paris. There were three ‘RDV with I.V.’s on days and at times he had told her he had meetings with buyers or agents. I.V. — Irina Vetrov. She felt an enormous weight of anger and disappointment press down on her. Somewhere deep inside, she had still been harbouring the hope that somehow she had got it all wrong. That well wisher was just some malicious friend or colleague or customer who for some reason wished her ill. But here was the proof. And, anyway, hadn’t he met Irina downstairs, and got into the car with her last night, when he’d told Niamh he was going to YSL?

Which is when she noticed an entry for the following Thursday. September 28th. Their tenth wedding anniversary. It was a reservation for two at Alain Passard’s three-star Michelin restaurant, Arpège, opposite the Musée Rodin in Paris’s 7th arrondissement. Niamh remembered their Italian agent telling them he had eaten there, and insisting that they must try it. But you had to book weeks, sometimes months, in advance. Had Ruairidh been planning to take Irina there? But why would he choose their wedding anniversary to do it?

She flipped to the back of the diary, where a couple of pieces of flimsy white card stuck out from the top of it. They were air tickets. One in Ruairidh’s name, one in Niamh’s. Flights with Flybe from Stornoway, via Inverness and Manchester, to Paris. The outward flight was on the 27th, the return on the 29th. With trembling fingers Niamh unfolded a sheet of paper wrapped around them. It was a printout of an email from the Crowne Plaza confirming reservations for Ruairidh and Niamh on the 27th and 28th.

It wasn’t Irina he had been planning to take to Arpège, it was Niamh. She let the diary and the tickets and the printout fall on to the bed. Why would he bother with such an elaborate surprise for their tenth wedding anniversary if he was having an affair with Irina Vetrov? None of it made sense. She buried her face in her hands and felt her head ache. A deep, hollowing ache born of grief and confusion.

Then she threw her head back and shouted at the ceiling, ‘For God’s sake, Ruairidh, what were you doing!?’ The silence that followed said more eloquently than any words, that he would never be able to tell her.

She turned and lifted the shirt he had worn during the day yesterday. A soft cotton in his favourite pale green. And she held it to her face, breathing deeply. It smelled of him. Of his deodorant, and aftershave. But more than that, of the subtle, distinctive essence of the man himself, secreted through his skin in the oils that were unique to him.

It felt like she was inhaling him. And as she lowered the shirt from her face, she cried for the first time. Tears torn from her reluctance to accept that he really was gone, and the knowledge that nothing could bring him back.

Sobs ripped themselves from her throat and chest, until both they and her tears had exhausted themselves. She sat for a long time then, coming only very slowly to the realization that she had to think ahead. That there were things to be done. People to be told. Her parents. She closed her eyes and breathed out deeply. Ruairidh’s parents. But she knew she couldn’t bring herself to speak to them right now. She took her phone from her bag and opened her Contacts app. She needed someone to share this with. Ruairidh’s brother, Donald. She looked at the time. Nearly 6 a.m. An hour earlier in Aberdeen. But it didn’t matter. He needed to know.

The alarm crashed into her dreams like the cacophonous chorus of a Peking Opera. Sylvie Braque opened her eyes only to shut them again, immediately blinded. Early-morning sunlight poured through her bedroom window, splashing gold all across her tortured duvet, illuminating the layers of dust long settled on almost every surface.

She fumbled for her phone on the bedside table to silence the noise, then lay on her back breathing rapidly. In her dream someone was chasing her in the dark. Someone she couldn’t see. Someone so close she could feel their breath on her neck.

She squinted to her right and lifted the phone to check the time. It was just after 10 a.m. Little more than two hours since she had finally got to bed. But she had very little time. She forced herself to swing her legs over the side of the bed, and brushed the hair and the sleep from her eyes. As she rose to make her way into the hall she caught sight of herself in the mirror and shuddered. A favourite baggy cotton nightgown hung to below her knees. She had several of them. Passion-killers, her ex had called them. Most of the lacy lingerie he had insisted on buying her for birthdays and anniversaries still languishing in the bottom drawer of the dresser. She had never felt comfortable dressing up for sex.

Her hair was a tangle, and the make-up she had so carefully applied to her eyes the previous evening was smudged black around the shadows beneath them. Only a thin, broken line of lipstick remained, clinging stubbornly to her lower lip.

In the hall she passed the open door to the twins’ room. They still shared a bed, and Braque posted a mental note to make it up before she left to collect them. She had been ignoring it for six days now. Toys and drawing books, and crayons and dollies lay about the floor where the girls had left them, taking only their favourite soft toys to their father’s apartment. Sunlight fell in strips between the blinds, tracing distorted lines of yellow across the chaos.