He looked younger than Patrice, and to River’s eyes an ordinary boy; his features a little blank; a canvas waiting to be scribbled on. Was he five years old? He might have been about that: River couldn’t tell. But Natasha’s tone had shifted, mentioning Yves’s name. There was the same note of distaste as when she’d spoken of Frank. Distaste, unless it was fear.
But who would be frightened of a five-year-old, wondered River? And then remembered: five-year-olds grow up.
“You don’t like this one,” he said.
“I do not know him.”
“But you know him enough not to like him.”
She was quiet for a while, then said, “Sometimes you see him at the market, in the café. He looks at people like they are a different species.”
“In what way?”
“Like they are insects, or worse. Lower than insects.”
Growing up at Les Arbres, surrounded by men. River wondered what the boys had been taught.
He said, “What did they live on, do you know?”
“Money?”
“Yes.”
“I do not know. Some of the villagers call them hippies at first, but even then it was late for hippies. And besides, they do not have guitars or take drugs, and there are not enough girls. So I think they have made their money somewhere and decide this is where they want to live, that is all. Somewhere remote, but not impossible. Somewhere . . . their own.”
“Did the children go to school?”
“No. Jean, he is a teacher, or he has qualifications. It is enough. They are educated at Les Arbres.”
“Which has now burned down.”
“Yes.” Natasha leaned forward. “And that is why you are here, yes?”
“No. I didn’t know that had happened. I didn’t know about Les Arbres at all before today.”
And I don’t know much more now, he thought. Or understand, anyway. But still, he had a grinding feeling in his stomach, as if he had ingested more knowledge than he was yet aware of, and it was trying to claw its way out.
Either that, or his hunger was becoming violent.
“Thank you,” he said at last. “Thank you for speaking to me.”
“You don’t know where they are,” she said.
“No.”
“But you are going to find out.”
“I’m going to try,” he said.
“If you find my son,” she said, “you will tell me, yes? You will tell me where he is?”
River lied to her, as sincerely as he knew how.
Limping through the rain again, he made his way to the centre of the village and found a bank, with a cash-machine embedded in its wall. As he fed his credit card into its slot, he had the sensation of reappearing on the map; an awareness that he could now be tracked. His brief holiday among the dead was over. When emerging from the underworld, he vaguely recalled, it was best not to look over your shoulder; you could lose everything you thought you’d recovered. Even so, he took a moment to glance at the photograph he’d stolen from sad Natasha: her son, Patrice, and the other boy, Yves, their teacher, Jean, and the man Frank, who stared out from the celluloid as if already regretting the moment of contact it would produce, years later, here in the rain; the house that was the photo’s backdrop a sodden ruin, and his own son a corpse in another country.
He had time to buy a bread roll, packed with cheese, before the bus arrived. And then he was on his way to Poitiers, thence to Paris, and from there London: a journey he mostly slept through, though his dreams were of constant movement, and always with something swelling behind him; ready to pounce, ready to smother, ready to wash him away.
Back in the Park, on the hub, unfamiliarity had reimposed itself. Claude Whelan had been starting to feel he was settling in, but the conversation on the bus had thrust him back into the cold. He was the stranger again, the interloper, and no title he bore—First Desk, Chief Exec, God Albloodymighty—could bring him within the embrace of this chamber. And the glass wall of his office mocked the moment more.
Though it was always possible he was just feeling sorry for himself.
Diana had had coffee and sandwiches brought: a peace offering, Whelan thought, though again he might be overdramatising. It was, after all, lunchtime. She had been running him through the logistics of the cold body protocol. How it had been mothballed once the wardrobe department was wound up, and how—like everything else to do with the Civil Service—this had not meant that the stalled product was consigned to the furnace; simply that it had been packaged, sealed, labelled, stored.
“We’ve had problems with storage space,” she said.
“So I heard.”
