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“Coward,” I teased him. But he just laughed, and winked, and ducked like lightning through the back door as the returning tour party from Fontevraud descended upon the Hotel de France in a blur of sound and motion.
***
The transatlantic line hummed thick with static, and it seemed an age before my father picked the phone up at his end. It was suppertime in Uruguay, and I’d obviously caught him in mid-meal. His voice at first was hard to understand.
“Mmwamph,” he said, when I apologized for calling at this hour, and “Barrrumph-ba” was his comment after that. He cleared his throat, and coughed. “You’re still in France, then, are you?”
“Yes.”
“Still on your own?”
“Yes. Actually, that’s why I called…” I twined the phone cord round my fingers, then in a rush of explanation told him what I’d found.
“The King John coin? You’re sure of that?”
I nodded, not caring that he couldn’t see the gesture. “I’ve got it right here, in my room. And I don’t think he’d have left it anywhere unless he meant to leave it, only that doesn’t make much sense, does it?” I sighed, plucking at the coverlet of my bed. “Honestly, Daddy, I don’t know what else I can do.”
“Well, it sounds as though you’ve handled things quite sensibly.”
“I thought I might just ring Aunt Jane—”
“Good Heavens, no!” My father’s voice came booming down the line, emphatic. “No point getting her upset for nothing—and it may well be for nothing, knowing Harry. No, I think you’d better leave it all with me. I’ve still got friends you know, in Paris. I’ll ask some questions, stir around, see whether they can track him down. All right?”
Which meant, I thought, he’d likely make some notes, then forget all about it before tomorrow morning. I smiled. “All right.”
“Just leave it all with me,” he said again, in charge now, reassuring. “And Emily?”
“Yes, Daddy?”
“Don’t let it worry you too much, either, will you? Comes sailing clean through any crisis, does Harry. No point in losing sleep over him.”
That, at least, seemed sound advice. I repeated it to myself that night as I lay restless underneath the covers of my bed, my dry eyes fixed upon the mottled shadows dancing on my ceiling. No point in losing sleep, I thought firmly, but it didn’t help.
Close by, the bell tolled one o’clock, a solemn sound above the chuckling fountain. Through the open window swept a sudden breath of cold night air, and the shadows on my ceiling stilled their motion as the street lamps were extinguished. All the shadows, that is, except one.
It might have been the moon, passing high among the clouds outside, that made the dim reflection on my wall, and what I heard I blamed on my imagination, or the wind. “Follow,” said the shadow, as it slipped across my bed. “Follow…”
A sudden breath of chill air blew my window open wider, and the curtains flapped and fluttered like a wild tormented ghost. My heart leaped, frightened, to my throat, but I forced it back again. Fool, I called myself, as I rose and hugged my blanket round me. There’s nothing there.
But just to make absolutely certain of that, I leaned across the window sill and looked down at the sleeping square.
The black-and-white cat moved stealthily between the rustling acacias, from shadow into light and back again, carefully avoiding the spray of the glittering fountain. On soundless feet, the cat traversed the empty square and crossed to sniff the planter set beside the hotel door. My gaze followed, and fell and with a startled jolt I saw that I was not the only one awake and watching the cat.
Neil Grantham’s hair looked white in moonlight. Ruffled by the night breeze, it was the only thing that moved. His hands lay still upon the railing of the narrow balcony, and beneath the leather jacket his shoulders were immobile, carved of stone. He didn’t seem to breathe.
And then his head began to turn and I drew quickly back, away from the window, and the curtains drifted past me on a sigh that was not mine.
Chapter 19
I rose and…
Found a still place.
The cat came to me early next morning. How it found me I’ll never know; I’d walked some distance from the hotel to the hushed and peaceful Promenade, where the plane trees grew tall and regal by the river’s edge. But the black-and-white cat came to me nonetheless, and curled itself wearily into my lap with a wide indulgent yawn.
He’d had a hard night, from the looks of it.
He looked, in fact, much like I felt: tired and rumpled and out of sorts. I always felt like that when I hadn’t slept well. It was an inherited curse, insomnia. My granddad had it, and my father, and they’d kindly passed it on to me, so that from time to time I found myself counting sheep into quadruple digits, while I tried to will my aching brain to stop its restless thinking. It didn’t happen often any more, but when it did it always brought me to a place like this, a quiet place where I could watch the sunrise. Things seemed less important, somehow, once the sun was up.
