Louisa Young - Tree of Pearls

Then Harry came to put Lily to bed. ‘I was thinking I’d like to have her for weekends sometimes,’ he said, ‘but actually I’d rather be with both of you.’

‘You’ll be wanting parental responsibility, anyway,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I will. Better write to the court. When we get back the new birth certificate.’

New birth certificate.

I didn’t tell him.

That night I lay in bed thinking of the tiny Egyptian inside me, and I dreamt of a painting I’d seen in one of the tombs outside Cairo, where the occupant – Ptah Hotep – is portrayed with a tiny adult-proportioned daughter, just tall enough to reach his knee, holding on to his calf with one outstretched hand and striding along with him, between his knees, as he strides that Egyptian tomb-carving stride. If I remember rightly he was the Pharoah’s Official Keeper of Secrets, and hairdresser. Or maybe that was Ti. Anyway, plus ça change.

*

On Monday Preston Oliver rang during breakfast: well, while Lily was letting her porridge get cold and I was wondering why I didn’t feel like drinking coffee.

‘Can you make it down here for 9.45?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said, on principle.

‘Try,’ he suggested.

‘I’m not available,’ I said.

‘Make yourself available,’ he said. ‘Seventh floor. They’ll tell you at reception.’

So I rang Zeinab and took Lily round there to play with Hassan and Omar, school having broken up, and climbed on a number 94 from the Green, changed at Oxford Circus and read the paper all the way in self-defence against Christmas shopping and rucksacks and loden coats and swinging cameras and Selfridges bags and all the rest of the battery of the tourist in London. And got off at Westminster, and ambled down Victoria Street, and approached our national centre of law enforcement at about five to ten. I was glad to be late. It made me feel free.

I’d never been inside before. It just looks like an office. Computer screens everywhere. Could have been a newspaper office, or an insurance office, or anything. Noticeboards, big rooms divided into little ones by unconvincing screens. Photocopiers. Someone had put up some half-arsed paper-chains. I hate offices more than almost anything. My sweat smells different in office buildings. I come over all metallic.

Oliver’s office was not big, not small. I know people set store by this stuff. Status and so on. But I wouldn’t know where to begin. He had a window, though, so he can’t be that lowdown. And a desk of his own.

‘Glad you could make it,’ he said.

‘Yes, well,’ I replied.

He looked at me.

‘Coffee?’

Visions of Nescafe floated up on the smell of central heating. ‘No thanks,’ I said. I haven’t been sick at all, I realized. Aren’t you meant to be sick? Maybe I wasn’t pregnant. I was going to the doctor that afternoon.

‘Harry will be joining us in a moment,’ he said, ‘but before he does I want to talk to you.’

I grunted.

‘You’re going to have to help us, Angeline.’

Bollocks I am, I thought. And just gazed at him, as a cow might. A nice fat pretty cow called Bluebell.

‘You’re a freelance, aren’t you? Consultations and what-have-you? I’m hiring you.’

Oh yes? I almost laughed.

‘I’ll give it to you straight. We have to find him. And we can’t. The Egyptians have lost him. And there’s no point us sending anyone there, unless they know something more than we do at present. And you have been volunteered.’

I blinked. Slowly. As if I had very long, very heavy lashes. Hard to lift up again.

‘You can pick up where he left off in Cairo. You know the city, you know people who knew him as du Berry, you know where he went when he was there, you speak Arabic. And you won’t be going for long …’

‘I won’t be going at all,’ I said.

‘Yes you will,’ he replied. Very straight, very sure of himself.

‘No I won’t.’ What I should have said when Ben Cooper first lured me into Eddie’s orbit in the first place. No.

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’ I said.

‘Because it is your civic duty.’

I didn’t laugh. Funnily enough if there had been one reason why I might have gone, that would have been it. Because I do have this honourable brave and public-minded streak. But no.

‘It is not my civic duty to put myself in the line of a maniac who has threatened me, attacked me, kidnapped me, tried to rape me, pretended to kidnap my daughter. It is my civic duty to go nowhere near him.’

‘You won’t be going anywhere near him,’ he said. ‘That’s the whole point. He’s not there. All you will be doing is looking for footsteps. Then when you find some, you come home. No harm done.’

‘I don’t think you have a clue what you’re suggesting,’ I said. ‘I have no training for this, not a clue how to do it, I don’t want to do it, it would be dangerous – it’s a completely stupid idea. Dangerously stupid.’

‘What is?’ said Harry’s voice behind me. Cold. I hadn’t heard him come in.

‘Sending me to Cairo to find out where Eddie’s gone,’ I said.

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