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‘So, we can deduce, monsieur, that your wallet was stolen between these two points.’ Clément Cloutier pointed to the screen and awaited Ronan’s response.
Claire wriggled in her seat. She wondered whether the hard chairs were deliberately chosen to make interviewees uncomfortable. She wondered, also, how long this would go on. It seemed so unlikely that the police would actually investigate a stolen wallet, but young Clément was certainly earning full marks for effort.
‘I’m almost certain,’ said Ronan, ‘that it was stolen from my pocket while we were having our photograph taken outside the shop.’
Clément Cloutier sat up in his chair and looked from Ronan to Claire and back again.
‘I have it,’ said Claire. She pulled her camera out of her bag, slipped out the memory card and handed it across the desk.
Clément Cloutier stood too quickly, knocking over his chair.
‘Je reviens tout de suite,’ he said, as he strode to the door, forgetting, in his hurry, to speak English.
* * *
‘That was remarkably thorough,’ said Claire, when he was gone, but Ronan wasn’t listening. He was taking the two fully punched loyalty cards from the plastic evidence bag and replacing them in the empty slots of his wallet. The last thing in the bag was a photograph. She took it from his hand.
‘That’s what you came for, isn’t it?’
‘What? No. Well, you know .?.?.’
It was a photograph of Ronan, sitting in a chair, with fairy lights glowing on a Christmas tree behind his left shoulder. It wasn’t immediately obvious that the shot was taken in a hospital ward, but Claire knew it must have been. Because he wasn’t looking at the camera; he was looking down at the swaddled baby in his arms. Mabel.
‘I don’t have this one,’ she said, through the sudden lump blocking her throat.
‘I know.’
Some of her memories from those two days in hospital were vivid, but more were a blur. She’d been drunk with grief, living out of step with reality. They’d been moved into a private room off the main ward where the blinds were pulled down and clocks meant nothing. There hadn’t been any Christmas lights in that room.
‘Tell me,’ she said, then heard the note of anger in her voice and pulled it back. ‘Tell me.’
‘Ah, Claire—’ He stopped.
‘Please,’ she said. She waited.
His voice, when he spoke, was barely audible. ‘Do you remember how you didn’t want to be in any of the photographs?’
She nodded. It was true. She couldn’t bear to pose for a photographer with her dead child in her arms. Watching the woman snap away at Mabel in her crib had been enough to make her brain burn with pain. She’d hated every second that anyone intruded into the time they had in that room. It was little enough they were getting, and unspeakably precious.
‘Well, the thing is Ididwant a photo with her,’ said Ronan. ‘But I wasn’t going to say it right there in the ward, when you had refused so .?.?.’ He searched for the word.
‘Absolutely,’ she said.
‘Well, yes.’ He seemed to lose his train of thought. She could tell that he was back there, in that room, feeling the heavy ache of it.
‘And then?’
Ronan drew in a raw, shallow breath. ‘Afterwards, after the photographer had left, and you were asleep, that nurse came in – the one you called Sergeant Major.’
‘Bridget.’
‘Yes, Bridget. She asked if we’d got all the photos we wanted, so I told her. I told her what I wanted. And she brought us, me and Mabel, into her office, and she took that photograph with her own camera. I suppose it belonged to the hospital. Anyway, she took it, and she sent it to me about a month later – a printed copy, old school like.’
Claire looked at the picture again. Neither of their faces was visible. Ronan’s head was bowed, and his hair had flopped low over his eyes, and Mabel was tilted towards him so that only the top of her head and the tip of her ear could be seen. But some sort of energy was captured in the space between them.Love, she thought.What remains.
‘Sergeant Major has a good eye,’ she said, holding the photo out to him. ‘That’s a very beautiful picture.’
‘I know.’ Ronan nodded. He took it and slipped it into the back of his wallet. He sniffed and blinked away his tears. ‘I was gutted when I thought it was gone.’
