Authors: Sam Baker
Gil’s voice was sharp. He sounded like someone else. And though the air was warmer than it had been in days, Helen shivered involuntarily.
Do you even know what a team is …?
‘Here are the facts,’ Gil said, his tone was so formal Helen almost expected him to produce his notebook and read her Miranda rights.
‘One: there’s a body.
‘Two: it’s not Art. There’s no doubt. I have a theory about who it is, but, for now, we’re talking facts.
‘Three: someone is looking for you. That’s also a fact. It should be the police. It will be soon. But right now I’m pretty sure it isn’t.’
‘Go on,’ Helen said.
‘If you know where Art is, then tell me. If you tell me where he is, I can find him before he finds you. Unless, of course …’ Gil paused. ‘You’re in this together.’
Until now Helen hadn’t taken her eyes off the horizon, the Dales beginning to fill up with tourists brought out of their beds by a break in the bad weather. Turning to look at Gil to see if he was serious, she saw only suspicion.
How could he think that, after everything she’d told him? The idea of her and Art as some kind of journalistic Bonnie & Clyde made her want to vomit.
‘Helen,’ Gil repeated. ‘Do you know where he is?’
‘I swear I don’t, Gil. I only wish I did.’
She didn’t know which was worse. The disappointment in his eyes or the disbelief on his face. Closing her own eyes, Helen swallowed, images from last night’s nightmares imprinting themselves on her eyelids.
‘You have a theory about the body?’
‘It’s just a theory.’
‘But you think you’re right?’
Gil nodded. ‘Yes, I think I’m right.’
‘Then tell me,’ Helen said. ‘It can’t make things worse than they already are. In return I’ll tell you what I started to remember last night. I was going to call you after my run. Once I thought you were up.’ The look Gil gave her hurt. He wanted to believe her, it said. He just wasn’t sure he could. ‘Please?’ she said.
‘OK. Tell me about Carl.’
Helen stopped pulling at the grass. ‘What has this got to do with Carl?’
‘You mentioned him the other night. You were talking about Syria.’
‘He’s a friend. German photographer. East German, originally. Don’t go getting ideas – he’s gay,’ she added, before Gil could say anything. ‘Very gay. More’s the pity.’ Helen looked briefly troubled, then shook her head. ‘Why are you asking?’
‘I think it’s Carl’s body.’
‘Carl Ackerman?’ Helen reeled, hands clutching the ground as if she could slip off. ‘My Carl? You think he’s dead?’
Gil’s voice softened. ‘Like I said, conjecture. Your turn.’
She sat in silence on the wet grass, lost inside herself as she remembered Carl Ackerman, one of the sweetest men she’d known. Drunk, often. Promiscuous, unquestionably. More talented than he thought in an industry filled with people less talented than they believed. ‘I don’t know where to start now.’
‘Begin with what you remembered last night. We can talk about Carl later, if you can remember anything.’ He wasn’t being sarcastic. At least, Helen didn’t think he was.
‘Since Iraq I’ve had blanks in my short-term memory. My mind’s way of dealing with horrors, according to Caroline. Things I’ve seen. Things I’ve … experienced. It’s fairly normal, apparently. But they tend to be brief. The night of the fire … The way whole days were blank never quite made sense. Ever since I started talking to you, the fog’s been lifting. Remember I told you I thought I saw a body?’
Gil nodded.
‘Last night I had a full-on migraine flashback. Only when I came to, it wasn’t a migraine. No cold hands. No strange lights. Simply flashback.’ She looked at him, as if noticing something. ‘No cigarettes?’
‘Ran out.’ Gil shrugged. ‘Figured I might as well go cold turkey. It probably won’t last. Go on.’
‘I don’t know how accurate this is. I never do. But I’ll tell you what I remember if you promise me one thing.’ She paused, waiting for Gil to make eye contact before she went on. ‘Whatever you think of me. Whether you believe me or don’t believe me, believe this: if Art is alive, I’m in danger. So, if you do decide to tell someone where I am, make it the police. Because if he sees a piece about me in a paper and finds me first, he’ll kill me.’
‘That’s emotional blackmail,’ Gil said.
Helen shrugged. ‘Maybe. It’s also true.’
She told him what she could of the fire. All the fragments she’d remembered put together as coherently as she could manage. The smoke, the flames, the fear. The lag between what she knew she had to do and what she could manage. She ended with the body, curled away from her, in the corner. Naked, except for his jeans.
‘Art …?’
‘I thought so. Even though I knew Art and I had split up, that I shouldn’t have been there, that he was meant to be away, I just assumed … Gil, I swear I have no recollection of going to that flat. It was weeks since I’d left him. Weeks since I’d last seen him. But I must have gone there. He must have come back and we must have had a fight. A bad fight, even by our standards.’
‘But it wasn’t him, was it?’
‘It doesn’t look like it, no. Shall I go on?’
Gil nodded.
‘The fog in my brain was thicker than the smoke blinding my vision. But I remember – in my dream I remembered – wondering, as I crawled towards the door, what if he was still alive? If he was, I should drag him with me.
‘I glanced behind me and as I did, flames erupted, singeing the rug and scorching my heels. It was him, or me, Gil. For the first time in five years, I chose me.’
‘And then?’
‘I woke up on the sofa in the upstairs drawing room. It was about three in the morning, I’d only been out about half an hour, and I was gagging and choking, and I swear I could smell burning. I couldn’t get to sleep again after that.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘Flashes, glimmers. Fragments as I dozed.’
‘And you believe your … flashes and fragments?’
‘I’ve learned to. It always happens like this. My memory will come back eventually.’ Helen sounded sad. ‘It always does.’
‘So tell me … the fragments.’
‘I grabbed my camera bag from the entrance hall, and a trench coat. Art’s, it turned out. Don’t worry, I ditched it as soon as I could.’
‘Your camera bag was there?’
‘Always. I never go anywhere without my camera bag. That was the first lesson my picture editor taught me. If you want to play with the big boys, behave like the big boys. Always be ready to go at a moment’s notice. I even used to go down to the Monoprix to buy my baguette with a bag full of Leicas, a Nikon D4 and a Canon 5D, plus five thousand dollars – still just about universal currency – in a battered wallet in the inside pocket, next to my passport with its collection of visas for places most people in their right minds don’t go.’
‘Obsessive,’ Gil muttered.
‘I’ve been called worse.’ Helen managed a smile. ‘Then I was stumbling down the stairs, great, sweeping seventeenth-century things that swirled up the centre of the building. I was pulling on clothes as I went, so that by the time I reached the courtyard I could pass for dressed. I don’t know what I was thinking, if anything. But I remember a weird chemical calmness that kept me moving even though I didn’t know where I was going. Where
do
you go when you think you’ve just killed your husband? Your ex-husband. Your technically not yet ex-husband.
‘The flats were almost empty. It’s one of those blocks where rich people stay during the week. Art and I were often the only ones there at weekends. Plus it was the last weekend of August and you know what Paris is like in August …’
Gil shook his head.
‘A desert. Thank God. Because it meant all the flats around ours were empty. If they hadn’t been …’ Helen shuddered. ‘There’d be more than one body.’ She paused. ‘Maybe not. Maybe if the building hadn’t been empty the fire wouldn’t have been able to get out of control the way it did. Maybe there wouldn’t have been a body at all.
‘I had no shoes on and I remember the feel of the cobbles in the courtyard under my feet. The courtyard door thick, heavy and painfully slow, I remember waiting, anxiety eating at me, for it to creak closed. It would never be rushed and I knew I had to wait, make sure no one followed me in or out.
‘Although that memory could be from another time. It was always the same, that door.’
‘You’re sure nobody saw you?’
‘As sure as I can be. It wasn’t yet dawn and the colonnades were deserted. Not even stragglers from the clubs that fill the basements of the Marais …’
‘CCTV?’
Helen laughed. ‘This is Paris we’re talking about.’
‘So?’
‘Do you know how many CCTV cameras there are in France? Twenty thousand tops. And most of those in Marseilles, which is where the immigrants come in. In the UK, there are what? Five million?’
Seemingly satisfied, Gil nodded. Helen went on.
‘After that it’s blank. I know I must have returned to the flat where I was sleeping – it belonged to a friend of a friend – to collect my things.’
‘How do you know that?’
Helen shrugged. ‘I’ve got my things.
‘And I know I called Tom.’
Gil suddenly looked alert. ‘You remember that?’
His voice was tense, he looked … Jealous? No, Helen shook the thought away; he was just annoyed at the thought she might have told someone something she hadn’t told him. ‘No, remember, I told you my sister said—’
‘Why do you think you called him?’
‘I’ve been wondering about that … subconsciously I must have felt I could trust him. Apparently, I woke him at five a.m.’
Gil looked quizzical. ‘What’s the number?’
Helen reeled it off without thinking.
‘That’s Tom’s number?’
‘No, his parents’. He just happened to be there.’
Gil was silent for a while. ‘He must have been some boyfriend if you can call him at five in the morning nearly twenty years after dumping him.’
Helen smiled. ‘He was.’
Something flickered on Gil’s face. ‘How did you get out of Paris without the border force recording your passport?’
‘I didn’t. Hélène Graham did. I had her wallet in my camera bag. Press card, driving licence, passport. The consul gave it to me … I’d been meaning to send it on. We didn’t look that different, at a glance. I just said I’d dyed my hair and they let me through without a second glance.
‘I’d forgotten about her wallet,’ Helen said suddenly. ‘Do you think I should send it on to her parents,’ she looked at Gil, ‘or is it too late?’
‘Are you asking me as a parent or a journalist?’
‘A parent, I guess.’
‘In that case, I’d say it’s never too late.’
‘I sold my cameras,’ Helen told him. ‘To a second-hand dealer north of Oxford Street that I found on the Internet. He couldn’t believe his luck.’
‘And you remember all this?’ Gil asked.
Helen shook her head. ‘Just barely. Like I said. Fragments, glimmers, flashbacks glued together with logic and a fair amount of conjecture.’
‘That won’t stand up in court if it comes to it.’
Leaning over, Helen rested her hand briefly on his elbow.
For a moment neither of them spoke, but Gil didn’t shrug her hand away.
‘And Art?’ he said eventually breaking the silence. ‘Where was he, if the body isn’t his?’
Helen took a deep breath. ‘If you’d asked me that twenty minutes ago, I’d have said he was dead. Now?’ She shuddered and looked out across the Dales, as if scanning the clusters of people, sheep and crows stretched out below them.
‘Now, he could be anywhere.’
‘What are you going to do now?’ Gil asked as Helen unlatched the lychgate and he followed her into Wildfell’s gardens.
‘I’m not planning to run out on you, if that’s what you’re afraid of?’
‘It’s not …’ Gil started, then stopped.
That was precisely what it was.
‘Where would I go?’ Helen said. ‘I can’t go to my sister’s or my mother’s – it wouldn’t be fair on them. I could leave the country, I suppose, on Hélène Graham’s passport. Perhaps I will eventually. But for now, I guess here is as safe as anywhere.’
The words hung unspoken between them.
Not very.
A stranger was looking for her, Art was missing presumed alive and her only ally was a journalist who couldn’t decide whether to believe her. Helen almost laughed. She knew the feeling.
She handed Gil her key and he unlocked the back door, locking it again behind them.
‘What about the man who was asking around after you yesterday?’ he said. ‘The journalist. Assuming he was a journalist?’
Helen sighed. ‘If he’s a journalist, let him come.’
Gil looked put out.
‘If he’s a journalist, you can call the police, like you promised.’
It didn’t seem to appease him.
Gil paused. ‘And Art?’
Helen looked at him, saw her own concern reflected back in his eyes.
If Art was out there, there was no point running.
‘What I still don’t understand is where Carl fits in,’ Gil said as Helen made more tea and tipped the last of the milk into Ghost’s saucer in the hope of luring him back. While he waited, Gil patted himself down in a futile search for a stray cigarette.
She sank down at the table and pushed a mug towards him.
‘No biscuits, I’m afraid. No nothing.’ She couldn’t remember the last time she’d even been hungry. The hollowness was comforting.
Helen felt strangely calm. Calmer than she had for days. The fear was exhausting, but the possibility of Carl’s death had drained every last bit of emotion. If Carl was dead and Art was alive, the world was as she’d always suspected; there was no justice.
‘That’s what I’m trying to work out. I know I texted him the morning after I left Syria, apologising for not saying goodbye. I didn’t say why, just that I’d tell him next time he passed through Paris. There’s probably a record of that in a central phone log somewhere, if you want to check.’
‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Gil said, not without a trace of irony.
‘We arranged to meet for supper,’ Helen told him. ‘At a bar in Bastille one Saturday night a few weeks later.’
‘
The
Saturday night?’