Perfect Death: The gripping new crime book you won’t be able to put down!. Helen Fields

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       Chapter Seven

      Callanach threw his keys down and went into the kitchen, reaching instinctively for a coffee pot and fighting his desire to open the bottle of single malt he’d had in the cupboard for months. He wasn’t usually much of a spirits drinker but if ever there was cause to change that, he was entitled now.

      His mother, Véronique, was sitting on the couch, coat buttoned to the chin, handbag on her lap with both hands gripping the handle as if it might fly away. Callanach stared at her silhouette against the picture window of his apartment in Albany Street, just a couple of minutes’ walk from the busy restaurants and bars of York Place, not that he went out much. He’d spent fifteen months making the apartment his own since beginning work with Police Scotland in Edinburgh. In all, it had been two years since his suspension from Interpol when a colleague had made the rape allegation that had stopped his career in its tracks. A few friends had stood by him, fewer colleagues, but what had hurt most was being abandoned by his mother. Even so, he still loved her. That was why he couldn’t let her back into his life. It was hard enough getting over the pain she’d caused him the first time. He couldn’t risk going through it all again.

      He stirred the coffee, wondering if his mother still took milk in hers. She was painfully thin, that was the first thing he’d noticed. The last time he’d seen her had been in Lyon. He’d been on bail with severe restrictions on where he could go and who he could see. She’d turned up at his door with an overnight bag and a speech about how it would all turn out all right, how the allegations would vanish into thin air. Her prediction had been wrong. Even now, his world was still askew. His mother had stayed with him for two weeks, each day more tense than the one before as they’d waited for the French prosecutor to see sense, to realise it was all a vicious lie, borne of a woman’s obsession with him.

      His mother had withdrawn from him, in person at first, growing quieter each day, the hope draining from her almost visibly, then she’d left and he’d heard nothing more from her. Even when Astrid Borde had decided against attending court to give evidence and a not guilty verdict had been entered, his mother still had not contacted him. It was as if he was dead to her. Callanach had grieved for the loss of her from his life. Now here she was, a ghostly, diminished version of the woman he remembered, barely able to meet his eyes, even her voice a whisper of the confident, laughing person in his memories.

      ‘Milk? Sugar?’ Callanach asked her in French, translating back to English in his head as if he’d never lived in France at all.

      ‘Neither, thank you,’ his mother responded politely.

      He carried two mugs into the lounge and put them on the coffee table between them, choosing the chair opposite her, keeping a barrier between them. He took his phone from his pocket and left it on the arm of the chair. He’d left Ava to brief the squad but had agreed to meet her at the city mortuary at 10pm. That gave him just one hour, not that he was concerned. Whatever his mother had to tell him after all this time could be said in the space of sixty minutes. It wasn’t as if anything would change now.

      ‘I like your apartment,’ she said, sipping her coffee, holding the mug as if it were an anchor. Callanach didn’t respond. Back at the police station he’d walked down the stairs from his office to reception in a daze, convinced there had been a case of mistaken identity or that it was some stupid prank by his team who had no idea what minefield they were treading in. But there she had been. Dressed in black, her dark hair still long but streaked with grey. She had been a beauty in her youth, but now dense shadows hung under her eyes, and her mouth was turned down as if pegged to her chin. She had stared at her shoes as she’d greeted him.

      ‘Luc,’ she’d said. ‘Can we talk?’

      ‘All right, Véronique,’ he’d replied, holding the door to the street open for her, knowing he had to get her out of the station. She had no place in his new life. He didn’t want the memory of her in his office, and he couldn’t bring himself to address her as mother. She was not that any more, that had been made quite clear to him through her desertion. He had walked her to his car and they’d driven through the dwindling rush hour without sharing a word. Now here she was and he had no idea what to say to her, and no sense of what she could possibly want from him.

      ‘Are you staying in Edinburgh?’ he asked, glancing out of the window.

      ‘At the Radisson,’ she said. ‘I’ve booked in for a week.’

      ‘Are СКАЧАТЬ