Питер Мэй - I'll Keep You Safe

Ruairidh stood up when he saw her coming and kissed her on both cheeks. They exchanged a few earnest words and Niamh wished she could lip-read. Then they turned and walked out together into the bar, leaving his beer undrunk.

Niamh felt a sense of hopelessness wash over her. And then desperation. If she let him go now, let him walk out of the hotel with Irina Vetrov, she feared she would be letting him walk out of her life. For ever.

An impulse led her to snatch her Ranish Tweed jacket from the back of a chair, and her bag, and almost run across the room to the door. She was still pulling on the jacket as she hurried down the hall, turning right past tall arched windows that looked down on to the courtyard. She pressed the call button for the lift several times and was considering running down the stairs when suddenly it arrived. By the time she got to the lobby, Ruairidh and Irina had left the hotel. Through glass doors that gave on to the square, Niamh saw them getting into Irina’s car, a white A-Class Mercedes, its hazard lights flashing.

Niamh sprinted through the lobby, pausing breathlessly to let two sets of sliding doors open, before running out on to the pavement, assailed by a thousand city smells and sounds carried on cooling night breezes. The Mercedes was already accelerating away, past the lines of police vehicles, towards the traffic lights at the far end of the Place.

A classical-looking building on the block beyond the Crowne Plaza was clad in scaffolding, and simmered darkly behind mesh screening. Workmen’s trucks and a couple of skips lined up along the pavement in front of it, abandoned for the night.

Niamh ran out into the middle of the street, past a classic revolving Morris column, with its domed top, advertising a rerun of Le Fusible at the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens. Several armed police officers turned to look at her, suddenly alert. But she didn’t even see them. The brake lights of the Mercedes glowed red as it stopped at the lights beyond the workmen’s trucks, and the left indicator began to flash. Niamh glanced across the square, beyond the thirty-foot statue of Marianne picked out by symbolic red, white and blue spots, and thought that if she ran a diagonal across the slabs, she could reach the far end of the square in time to cut the car off before it was gone for good. If only the lights would stay red long enough.

She ran past the graffiti-covered red containers that lined the nearside of the pavement, sprinting beyond Marianne and the steps that led down to the Métro République. Off to her left she was only vaguely aware of the diners who sat out at green metal tables at the Café Fluctuat Nec Mergitur. Destroyed by fire early in 2015, it had been reopened, and renamed with the motto of Paris following the terrorist attacks later that same year. Tossed by the waves but never sunk. It was about to be tossed once more.

Niamh saw the lights change to green and the Mercedes start to turn left across the flow of traffic. And then she was blinded. A searing, burning light that obliterated all else, just a fraction of a second before the shockwave from the blast knocked her off her feet. As she hit the ground, sight returned. She saw glass flying from the broken windows of the Fluctuat Nec Mergitur, tables and chairs spinning away across the square. As she rolled over, the Mercedes was still in the air. Later she would remember it as being ten feet or more off the ground. But in fact it was probably no more than eighteen or twenty inches. Flaming debris showered down across the Place de la République as the car slammed back on to the road, a ball of flame.

While her sight had returned, her hearing had not. The tinnitus was deafening. Then somewhere beyond it she heard a voice screaming. It was some moments before she realized it was her own. She pulled herself to her knees but did not have the strength to stand up, supporting herself on her arms and transfixed by the blazing vehicle on the road. Somewhere in her peripheral vision, beyond awareness, she saw dark figures running in the night. Long, flickering shadows cast by the light of the burning car.

Screams still tore themselves from her throat. Repeated, hysterical bursts of them. Before she understood that it was his name she was shrieking at the night. She felt hands grasp her arms on either side, men in uniform and dark body armour lifting her to her feet. One of them was shouting at her. His lips were moving, but she couldn’t hear him. And then a woman moved into her field of vision. A woman with long dark hair cascading over shoulders draped in silk, a shawl wrapped around her above a pencil skirt and high heels. She flashed a wallet from her bag at the men who held Niamh. With the blaze behind her, Niamh couldn’t see the woman’s face. And yet somehow her voice cut through everything else. A commanding voice edged with concern.

Niamh felt tears burning tracks down her cheeks and stopped screaming to draw breath. Although she could now hear the words, she couldn’t understand them. She shook her head hopelessly. Then suddenly there was clarity. The woman was speaking English.

‘You are English?’

She almost certainly only wanted to know that Niamh understood her. But Niamh had never been able to think of herself that way. ‘Scottish,’ she said, her voice was hoarse already. Then she thought what an absurd distinction it was in a moment like this.

‘You were running towards the car.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Ruairidh...’ Just saying his name caused her throat to close and fresh tears to scald her face. She took a moment to find her breath again. ‘My husband.’

‘Your husband was in the car?’

Niamh nodded vigorously. ‘And Irina.’

‘Irina?’

‘Vetrov. The fashion designer.’ She found light now in the woman’s eyes. ‘They’re dead, aren’t they?’

The woman nodded.

Niamh broke down again. Sobs contracting in her chest, almost completely blocking the flow of air to her lungs. The woman put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. ‘Why were you running towards the car?’ It was a refrain that would repeat itself often in the hours to come.

‘They were...’ In her shock and confusion she searched hopelessly for the right word. ‘Lovers.’ She sucked in air between sobs. ‘All this time and I never knew it.’ She searched the light in the eyes that gazed at her, looking for... what? Sympathy? Reason? ‘Now I’ll never be able to ask him why.’

It seemed she had been sitting here for hours. And yet time itself had become somehow timeless. It might have been only minutes. But her memory of the time which had passed stretched back further than that.

The room was entirely naked. The floor was tiled, a dirty beige. The walls had been painted a pale yellow at some indeterminate point in the past, but had lost almost all colour now, scored and scratched and scrawled on by the endless procession of cops and criminals who had conducted their business here. A wooden-topped table was supported on tubular legs, scarred and stained by the years. Her folding wooden chair was hard and unforgiving. Two empty chairs stood opposite.

High up on the wall facing the door, a barred slit of a window opened on to the night lights of the city, almost lost in the fluorescent glare of the strip light on the ceiling. On the wall beyond the empty chairs, a wooden-framed window was blacked out, offering her only a mocking reflection of herself in its darkness. Someone, she was sure, was watching her from the other side of it.

Strangely she felt nothing, as if some narcotic drug had numbed her body and robbed her of her senses. She had expected to cry. But the tears wouldn’t come.

She gazed at her hands folded on the table in front of her. Hands that had touched him, stroked him, loved him. Hands he had held in his. And now they seemed lost, useless, dissociated.