Page 58 of The Last Postcard

It was a lie: my tie was perfect. It was an excuse, a reason to come close.

‘Here.’ He pulled at the knot of the tie, to loosen the fabric. My heart was thundering and I knew he would see the pulse in my neck, feel my quickened breath on his skin. He smiled.

‘The red suits you,’ he murmured, hands still on my collar. ‘Though I think you would look better in green.’

I couldn’t move, I couldn’t even swallow. In any other moment, that comment might have been a coincidence. Not then. He knew that I had been in his rooms, he knew what I found there …

‘Where did you get those clothes?’ Lady Bailey asked, her voice breaking the taut silence between us.

Langham stepped away. ‘From a tailor, in the medina, madame,’ I managed to say.

‘And how did you pay for it?’

There was no pretence of politeness in her voice. She was suspicious.

Time to play my dangerous hand: ‘Monsieur Langham was kind enough to pay for a new suit.’ I glanced towards him. ‘He said I should look more gentlemanly.’

Langham just watched me, with that half-smile, and didn’t say a word.

‘Go and fetch another glass,’ Lady Bailey snapped. ‘And ice. What you’ve brought is half melted already.’

I nodded and made my escape, staring at the paving stones so as not to see Langham’s face. I should’ve gone straight to the kitchen, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. My whole body was trembling. Instead, I ducked beneath the fig tree’s old branches and leaned my head against the trunk, trying to breathe, trying to slap out the heat that was threatening to burn me up.

The secrets we both held, they were like electric currents, charging us full of potential. What would happen if one of us was revealed? I squeezed my eyes tight. I had to be more careful.

‘What are you doing?’

Lady Bailey’s voice broke the quiet, and my eyes flew open. But she wasn’t talking to me. Her voice was coming from the terrace. I stayed perfectly still, out of sight, listening.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Langham’s tone was light.

‘You know exactly what I mean.’ I heard the sound of Pernod being poured. When she spoke again, her voice was soft, almost pleading. ‘We know nothing about the boy, Arthur. How do you know someone didn’t send him here?’

‘Oh Hilde.’

‘And why not? For all we know someone picked him up in Gibraltar after the accident. And how did he even get to Tangiers? Don’t you think it’s odd?’

Silence. My heart felt as though it was trying to punch through the brassiere. Hilde was nearer the truth than I liked. Finally, Langham spoke.

‘I left del Potro some money in Gibraltar. Along with the hat.’

‘You did? Why on earth?’

The silence stretched. Ten seconds, twenty.

‘I can’t stop you,’ Hilde murmured. ‘But please, Arthur, be careful. He isn’t who he says he is, I know it.’

Tangier

July 1978

Outside the Interpress building the day felt lazy; an after-school, honey-slow heat that was at odds with the fluttering in Sam’s stomach. As he walked, he imagined Norton descending into the basement, pulling out files full of old newspapers, turning their thin, yellowed pages to find …

Norton would probably find nothing; he had to be prepared for that. Still, even the vague possibility of seeing Langham’s name in fifty-year-old print made his fingers itch.

For the first time in days, his hands were empty. He’d left the writing case in his bedroom and the suitcase was safely lodged behind the reception desk at Interpress. Without it, he felt unanchored, like a piece of litter that might be whirled away on an air current at any moment.

There were a couple of hours to kill before he met Norton again. In the Grand Socco, the streets were filling up with people returning from early afternoon prayers, with boys standing on plastic crates, yelling out their stashes of contraband – sunglasses, radios, batteries, lipstick – with kids in the white uniforms of the French Catholic School, buying glasses of buttermilk.