The Guardian of Lies Read online

  ‘André Caussade,’ I said. ‘I need to know is he . . . ?’

  Alive? Is he? Is he alive? I couldn’t say it.

  She tucked her arm under mine to give me support and set off down the corridor at an urgent pace.

  *

  The figure in the grey metal hospital bed looked dead. He didn’t need me. He needed a miracle.

  Who is this person lying so still on the bed, he does not look like my brother? Face bruised, features blackened, swollen and distorted. Nose smashed. Swaddled in bandages. The metal-cage contraption over his legs scared me. It was hidden under blankets but my heart churned in my chest each time I looked at the small mountain it created.

  ‘André,’ I called softly. ‘Can you hear me?’

  No response. Not a flicker from his sandy eyelashes. I hadn’t kept him safe.

  The hospital ward was not unpleasant, long, white, bloodless and busy, but it brought bile to my throat because under the lingering crisp aroma of disinfectant, it smelled the way our barns smelled the year our bulls got the fever. Of meat going bad while still on the hoof.

  ‘André, stay with me,’ I whispered to him.

  I clutched his hand in mine and sat at his bedside all that day and all night, wrapped in my grey hospital gown. I watched shadows touch his face where his left cheekbone and eye socket were broken, while a needlepoint of moonlight threaded its way through one of the tall windows and turned his skin to pewter. I wanted to wrap my arms around him and nurse him back to health the way I’d done with so many puppies and kittens or injured calves and foals since I was old enough to hold a bottle for them.

  I laid my head on his hand, my own limbs trembling. I thought about the massive steel bumper grinding against my brother’s poor bones. Somewhere behind those blinding headlights had sat a driver, foot stamping on the accelerator.

  *

  ‘Eloïse.’

  It was barely a whisper. Did I imagine it? My head shot up. I had dozed off. A nurse had drifted silently to the bedside to check on my brother earlier and had pronounced, ‘No change. His condition is still critical.’

  A ruptured spleen. Broken bones. A smashed sternum. Internal bleeding. His life on a thread. Yet his amber eyes were staring at me. Thin slits, bloodshot and battered. But open.

  ‘André,’ I tried to whisper, but it came out as a moan.

  It was light now. I could hear the rattle of a breakfast trolley, as well as early-morning coughs and the protests of old bedsprings. I leaned close.

  ‘You’re safe here. The doctors are—’

  ‘No.’

  His lip split open and a trail of scarlet trickled along his chin. It glistened on his morning stubble.

  ‘I won’t leave your side,’ I promised. ‘I’ll make sure you’re safe.’

  ‘I know.’ His fingers tightened on mine. ‘Thank you, Eloï . . .’ A spasm of pain shook him.

  ‘Don’t speak,’ I begged.

  Our eyes held and I knew what he needed. He didn’t have to tell me.

  ‘Who shall I contact?’ I asked.

  His eyes slid painfully to one side to indicate the tiny bedside cabinet. I pulled open the drawer. Inside lay his black leather wallet and his watch. I lifted up both because I knew he needed to leave no trace of himself. I’d been an attentive pupil. I tucked them under my hospital dressing gown.

  ‘A telephone number?’ I asked.

  He closed his eyes. After a full three minutes, during which I watched the pulse in his throat flicker, he murmured a number. A Paris number. I nodded and committed it to memory.

  ‘And you?’ His narrow gaze skimmed my face. ‘You don’t look good.’ I had a rich assortment of cuts and bruises, my cheek swathed in a bandage and a plaster cast on my arm.

  I smiled at him. ‘A damn sight better than you.’

  His breath was making a noise like a bird, high-pitched and unbearable. I kissed his swollen cheek.

  ‘I’m sorry, André.’ Tears fell from my cheeks to his. ‘I am so sorry that I turned the wrong way.’

  ‘No,’ he whispered.

  ‘I’ll make the call.’

  ‘Be quick.’

  I stood up. The walls shifted around me but then stayed where they were meant to be.

  ‘Eloïse.’

  ‘Hush now.’ The effort of speaking was killing him.

  ‘Be careful.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Go to the Hôtel d’Emilie. On the Île Saint-Louis. Make the call . . . from their . . . lobby.’

  I didn’t ask why. If he had asked me to make the call from the moon, I’d have done it.

  *

  ‘May I help you, mademoiselle?’

  ‘Thank you. I need to make a telephone call.’

  The hotel manager blocking my path was as elegant and as attractive as the foyer we were standing in. The façade of Hôtel d’Emilie may be classic eighteenth century, decorated with stone mascarons and ornate ironwork outside, but the interior was all 1953 pale wood panelling and seats in primary colours. Money had been invested in this place.

  The manager regarded me with concerned eyes, taking in the sodden dressing on my face, the disintegrating slippers on my feet and the stolen nurse’s woollen cape I was clinging to. He did not turn me away, so perhaps I was not the first to wind up on his doorstep in this state. He gestured to the two telephone booths at the back of the foyer, but his gaze stayed on me.

  ‘Are you all right, mademoiselle? Can I get you . . . ?’ He paused, wondering which to pick of all the things I so obviously needed. ‘A drink?’ he offered.

  ‘Non, merci.’

  I hurried to the telephone booths, as fast as my battered knee would allow.

  *

  I dialled the number.

  It rang and was picked up immediately. A wave of relief hit me, and I pictured someone at the other end hunched over the phone all day, waiting for voices in distress.

  ‘Who is it?’ a man’s voice demanded.

  ‘I have a package.’

  ‘What is the label on the package?’

  ‘Caussade.’

  Silence. Other than the thudding of my heart, I could hear nothing.

  ‘Don’t hang up,’ I said.

  ‘I’m here.’ The voice was smooth. Deliberately calming. ‘Where is the package?’

  I hesitated. ‘Who am I talking to?’

  ‘My name is Victor. Where is the package? You were told to ring this number, so trust us.’

  I had no choice. ‘At the Hôpital de Sainte Marie-Thérèse.’

  ‘Listen carefully, mademoiselle. I am going to confer with someone. Stay on the line. I will be back shortly.’

  I counted the seconds.

  Six and a half minutes passed according to the star-shaped clock on the foyer wall. I spent it leaning my back against the booth for support, willing André’s broken chest to keep rising and falling.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘I’m here,’ I said.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘A friend.’

  He gave a soft snort. ‘The sister?’

  How the hell did he know that? I looked around me quickly but I could see no one taking any interest in me. I made no comment.

  The voice continued calmly. ‘Remain where you are.’

  ‘What are you planning to do? He is in danger and needs—’

  The line went dead.

  My finger shook as I dialled the number again. And again. And again.

  No answer. I stood there. Like a fool. Minute after minute ticked past before I realised the quiet voice was not going to ring me back. Nor was he coming to get me. Remain where you are, he said. Not to keep me safe. To keep me out of the way.

  I pulled the hood of the cape tight over my head and forced my legs to start running for the door.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Who?’

  I leaned over the old man in the hospital bed, so he would see me clearly, see what lay in my eyes. He was all
bones and thin wisps of hair. ‘The patient who was in the next bed,’ I said. ‘He has gone.’

  ‘Yes, they took him.’

  ‘Who took him? Nurses?’

  ‘Two orderlies. In white coats.’

  ‘How? In a wheelchair?’

  ‘No, my dear, on a trolley.’

  ‘What did the orderlies look like?’

  The thin bones shrugged under the sheet. ‘Ordinary men, brown hair, ordinary nose, mouth and eyes. Nothing to remember.’ His papery face creased into a smile.

  ‘Did they speak?’

  ‘To the man in the bed, yes.’

  ‘Did they speak in French?’

  ‘Yes. But in low voices. My old ears aren’t as good as they used to be. Shouldn’t you be in bed, young lady? You look worse than I feel.’

  I conjured up a smile and stuck it on my face. ‘I’m okay, thanks. Did the man in the bed go willingly?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  Air rushed out of me with relief. I stepped over to the empty bed and I placed my hand on the pillow, where my brother’s damaged head had lain, seeking even a trace of him, the faintest echo. I had made an unforgivable mistake. I had turned right instead of left. And now he was paying for it. I laid my head on the pillow and waited.

  *

  When they came I was seated on a chair at the old man’s bedside, reading to him from Le Monde newspaper. An article about our latest victory in the Indochina War in Vietnam. News of a victory always went down well, especially when the government was in a frantic tail-spin.

  I saw the doors to the ward swing open and the suits enter. Two of them. They looked as out of place as elephants in a birdcage. Big, broad, hard-muscled men who walked in, chest-first, as if they owned the place. The old man took one look at them and closed his eyes. They approached the vacant bed, muttered something to each other and turned to inspect me, taking in my hospital gown, my plaster and the wound dressing on my face.

  ‘Where is the man who was in this bed?’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He was already gone when I arrived. Try asking the nurses.’

  ‘The old man? Did he see anything?’

  ‘He’s been asleep.’

  The suit studied me for a long moment and I felt a thin trickle of dread that he would associate my damaged face with a car crash. I rose to my feet. He towered over me as I committed each feature of his square face to memory. Grey eyes, cold as stone. Large nose, black spiky hair and spiky eyebrows in a dead-straight line that met in the middle.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked. ‘His family?’

  ‘Keep your nose out of my business, bitch.’

  The pulse in my temple under the dressing was pounding like a jackhammer.

  The other suit frowned and muttered, ‘Draw the curtain.’

  He was thinner, with the eyes of a man who liked to give orders. Dark trim moustache. Efficient and precise in his movements. A deep cleft in his chin.

  They drew the privacy curtains around the bed with a dismissive flick of the wrist and I heard them rummaging behind it. The bed had already been stripped and I counted to twenty in my head, then reached out and grabbed a handful of curtain. I yanked it open. One suit had the empty drawer of the cabinet dangling from his fist, the other had propped the mattress up on its edge and was examining the underside of it. Like vultures picking at bones. If it was André’s wallet they were searching for, it was not there.

  ‘If he comes back,’ I said helpfully, ‘who shall I say was looking for him?’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘That’s not polite, monsieur.’

  ‘Neither is this,’ said the suit with stone eyes.

  He came close to me and hooked his thick fingers into the bulky dressing on my face. I very nearly jerked my head away but I could see how much he wanted to rip off the white gauze, so I stood still.

  ‘How did you get this?’ He grinned at me.

  ‘I was in a fire.’

  ‘Shall I take a look?’

  I gripped his hand and he didn’t shake me off.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Piquet,’ the moustache suit snapped. ‘Enough of this shit.’

  That was it. They walked out without another word, thumping the doors so hard that they continued to swing on their hinges long after the suits had gone. My knees buckled on me and I slumped into a chair, my cheek on fire. My anger was stretched taut and my need to find my brother gnawed at me, but I allowed myself a small ripple of pleasure. I had discovered three things in the last hour.

  First, the men sent to kill my brother were French, not Russian. Though that didn’t mean they were not in the pay of Soviet masters.

  Second, the people I’d phoned who had taken André had acted fast and efficiently and he went with them willingly. I just hoped they were as fast and efficient with medical treatment.

  Third, I had a name: Piquet.

  It was a start.

  *

  Hospital bathrooms are the worst of places. Their tiled walls have absorbed so much pain and have seen the private tears of so many diseased patients that the room feels weighted with sadness.

  This one was green with a white border at waist height and the taps were old-fashioned heavy ones that were stiff to turn. But I locked the door and washed my hands in the basin for far too long, soaping each finger over and over, taking care not to wet my plaster, delaying the moment when I had to look in the mirror. I rinsed them. Dried them. And raised my eyes.

  The face wasn’t mine. I blinked, expecting it to change, but it didn’t, so I lifted a finger and touched the glass as though there might be another person hiding behind it. All I found was a flat distorted version of myself, but I knew it must be me because of the eyes. They were dark oak-brown. My father’s eyes. But where was the happiness that lived inside them?

  It wasn’t just the bruises or the cuts and nicks and the swollen side of my jaw that robbed me of me. It was also the huge white dressing that covered my face from my temple to my chin, and that was what I was here to make right. I needed to see me. To know I was still there.

  With care I picked at the adhesive strips one by one, sliding my nail under the sticky tape. I winced but that made it worse, so I sped up and with just two left to go, I tore it off.

  It was bad. I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t. But not as bad as I’d feared. A neat sickle-shaped scar ran from in front of my ear to my chin, red and angry and swollen with spidery stitches criss-crossing it, and blackened with dried blood at the top. I looked in the mirror and managed a very small smile.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  The girl in the mirror mouthed it back at me; her eyes looked frightened.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ I said, brushing my hair back from my face.

  She flicked hers back too, long dense dark waves that needed a wash to rid it of blood. Her face was a different shape from mine. Mine was slender-cheeked with clear skin and a straight strong nose, too strong for my face. But hers was lumpy with an odd shape to her lips and terrible skin.

  I leaned over the washbasin, pushing my face very close to hers. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll take care of you.’

  Two tears started to roll down her cheeks.

  *

  I waited.

  I waited day and night. Week after week. I waited through March and April while the clouds of lacy cherry blossom burst into life in the Jardin des Plantes and while the pavement cafés where I lived in Montparnasse teemed with lovers from morning to night. I waited for some word from André. I was not good at waiting but he had taught me persistence and I wore out my finger dialling the telephone number he’d given me to ring from Hôtel d’Emilie. Never any answer. Then one day the line went dead and it was like losing him all over again.

  I worked hard at trying to trace the vehicle that had transported him from the hospital, but it seemed to have vanished into thin air. A green split-screen Citroën H van had hung around briefly that day, I learned. But that was all. A dead end.

  A
nd do you know how many Piquets there are in the Paris telephone directory? Enough to keep me walking the city streets day after day till my arm had almost healed, but none of them possessed the stone eyes of the one I sought. Each morning I stood at the window of my fifth-floor room at dawn, a dull ache pulsing in my head. I gazed out across the neat grey roofs of Paris, to the spiny wrought-iron lattice work of the Eiffel Tower, and imagined André doing the same. He had never been a sleeper. Always restless. Always on the move. Dawn had always been the time when we used to throw ourselves on the sturdy white backs of our Camargue horses and race them through the marshes, their glamorous manes flying, shimmering in that first light. The gaudy flamingos dipping their long matchstick legs in the languid lagoons.

  I leaned my forehead on the cold pane of the window.

  Why? André, why haven’t you contacted me? So many possible answers. Is your battered body too damaged to put pen to paper? Or are you still too angry with me? Disowning your sister? Leaving her unforgiven for the mistake she made. Or have you forgotten me? Is that it?

  But always hovering in the shadow was the big question, the one I turned my gaze away from. The one that drove hot pokers through me at night.

  Are you dead?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I went back to work in May when my arm had finally healed. I had rent to pay. The city slid eagerly into summer, embracing the delights of longer lazy days, each breath warm and fragrant, while a colourful riot of scarlets and golds burst into bloom in the parks. So full of life it made me ache inside.

  Still no word.

  Even when, on the 1 August, the city emptied as Parisians trekked south for their summer exodus, I didn’t leave. I stayed. Each evening I trailed through bars he’d taken me to and along the quayside promenades because I was convinced, absolutely convinced that I would find him.

  I didn’t know then how easy it is to fool oneself.

  One of the things that André had taught me was how to pick a lock, a brotherly gift to me. How to use a set of fine points, to feel for the pressure, fingers as precise and delicate as a surgeon’s. He’d shown me the way to do it and I admit I enjoyed it. I relished each challenge to be conquered, whether it was a curtained lever lock or a simple cylinder one. So I was disappointed on the evening that I worked on a brass lock and found it too easy.