The Traitor's Story (16 page)

Chapter Twenty

Finn had wondered a few times about Hailey’s journey across Europe, and now he had an idea what it had been like. She’d probably slept the whole way because, just as she’d slept in the taxi to Arlanda, so she did on the plane. It was a flight that was occasionally bumpy, but no sooner had they taken off than she fell asleep and didn’t wake until just before they touched down.

He thought she might fall asleep in the taxi, too, particularly as it took longer than usual in the late-afternoon traffic. But she didn’t, seeming excited, asking about Mathieu: where he lived (a big apartment), which
arrondissement
(Finn wasn’t sure, but it was nice), did he have kids (two boys, eight and six), what were their names (Pablo and Henri).

As they got there, one of the neighbors was just coming out of the street door, but Finn let it go and buzzed up to the apartment. Mathieu answered.

“Hi, Mathieu, it’s Finn.”

There was a pause, lasting a few seconds, and then the line died and the door opened. Finn pushed it, and stood aside for Hailey to walk in first. She looked at him in mock alarm at the frostiness of the reception.

Finn smiled. “If it comes to the worst, we’ll book into a hotel.”

Now she looked genuinely alarmed. “You don’t think it’ll come to that?”

It was touching, after all that had happened, that she was still enough of a teenager to be disturbed by the possibility of social embarrassment.

“No.”

He could have qualified his response—he was certain they’d take Hailey in for the night, but wasn’t so sure of his own welcome.

When they reached the apartment, he pressed the buzzer and was immediately left in no doubt. The door flew open, Adrienne in full fury.

Her eyes fixed on him, and in little more than a whisper, but one that only served to reinforce her rage, she said, “What the hell do you think—” Then she saw Hailey. Her face swam with confusion, which softened it again, her mouth almost forming a smile as she said, “Hailey?”

Finn looked at Hailey, realizing that Adrienne’s questioning voice might well have been based on uncertainty, because the girl standing before her now, with her gamine blonde hair and student clothes, was not the girl she’d seen a week or so ago.

“Hi, Adrienne,” said Hailey, sounding a little apologetic.

“But I don’t understand . . .” Adrienne stepped forward, kissed her on both cheeks, and hugged her.

She stepped back again then, as if remembering the more important matter of blocking the doorway.

Before she could speak, Finn said, “We’re on our way back from Sweden, but there was a problem with the flights. I was hoping Mathieu might put Hailey up for the night. I can check into a hotel.”

She looked full of hostility and suspicion, and he was struggling to understand how things had become so poisoned between them. He thought back to his departure for Béziers, to his last phone conversation with her, unable to detect anything within them that might have predicted this.

“What are you talking about? You’ve been in Sweden? Both of you?”

“It’s my fault,” said Hailey. They both turned to look at her, but she looked back only at Adrienne. “I did something stupid, Adrienne. I ran away, to Uppsala, to stay with a boy I met online. Mom and Dad didn’t know where I’d gone. Finn tracked me down and came and got me.”

He could have hugged her himself, because he could see exactly what she was doing. Even if Hailey hadn’t known it before—and he hadn’t thought to ask her how much she’d known about the precise reasons for Adrienne’s departure—it was clear from Adrienne’s body language and the way she’d spoken that she wasn’t in a forgiving mood. Yet everything in Hailey’s little admission—the tone, the words used—had been designed to weaken Adrienne’s resolve, to cast Finn in a different light. It was no less fraudulent than he’d been himself, but he was grateful all the same for the effort.

“You ran away? But why would you do that?” Adrienne put her
hand to her mouth and said, “Of all the times for me not to be there.”

“Finn was there,” said Hailey, pushing home her message.

Reluctantly, Adrienne looked at him, as if still suspecting some
sleight of hand on his part, and said, “You should come in. For now.”

Finn nodded, and moved aside so Hailey could go in ahead of him.

As they stepped into the hall and Adrienne closed the door behind them, Mathieu came in from the kitchen and looked at Finn with that odd parental expression of his, as if welcoming back a prodigal son for a second time.

“Hello, Mathieu.”

“Finn.”

Cecile, as if responding to the sound of Finn’s voice, also came out of the kitchen, but she saw Hailey first and Adrienne introduced them, Cecile becoming excitable, all three of them jabbering away in French. Finn spoke a little French, but not enough to keep up when they were talking fast and over the top of each other.

Pablo and Henri came tearing in from some other part of the apartment, jumping excitedly at Finn, asking to be picked up, though they were both getting too big for that now. For some reason, at Christmas they’d insisted on pronouncing his name like the French “
fin
,” but fortunately, and somewhat ironically, they’d forgotten about that and reverted to saying it properly, speaking slowly in French to him and mixing in bits of English.

After struggling to hold them aloft for a few seconds, he put them down and said, “Boys, this is our friend from Lausanne. She’s called Hailey, she speaks French.”

They noticed her for the first time, and as young as they were, became instantly magnetized by her, grabbing her by the hands, dragging her away to look at their bedrooms, still speaking slowly even though there was no need with her.

The chatter ebbed away, and the four adults were left standing there. For the first time, Finn noticed the smell of food coming from the kitchen. They were good cooks.

Mathieu said, “I overheard a little. The boys have their own rooms now, since the new year, but the guest room has two beds, so Hailey can stay with Adrienne. If you don’t mind the couch, Finn.”

Finn looked at Adrienne. “Do you mind me staying on the couch?”

“It’s not my apartment.”

He nodded and turned back to Mathieu, saying, “It’d be good for Hailey to be with other people tonight. I’ll come back and get her in the morning.”

He picked up his bag, but Adrienne, once again searching for that sleight of hand, said, “No, absolutely not, you don’t get to be so reasonable. Stay on the couch.” She said something in French, rapid and outside of his vocabulary, and marched into the kitchen.

Cecile gave Finn a surprisingly sympathetic smile, making him wonder all the more what Adrienne had just said or called him, then followed her in.

Mathieu said, “Go on through, Finn, and I’ll bring you some wine.”

“Thanks.”

Mathieu followed the women into the kitchen and Finn took his bag through, dropping it behind the sofa that would be his bed for the night. He sat down then, listening to the distant musical chatter of the boys as they vied with each other for Hailey’s attention.

From the kitchen, he could hear only the gentle percussion of food being prepared. Nothing was being said out there as far as he could tell. Then he caught a little movement in his peripheral vision, and Adrienne walked in carrying a glass of wine.

She handed the glass to him and then sat on the sofa opposite. Her face looked as if his very presence was an assault to her. He thought back to what Jonas had told him, about her tears, her complaints of his absence, and he could see it all in her face now, how much he’d hurt her without even knowing it, and he was afraid that he would never be able to fix it.

“I can stay in a hotel if you want me to. It’s not about being reasonable, it’s about not making anyone uncomfortable, and about not being uncomfortable myself.”

She shook her head, saying, “I’m sure we can all manage to get on for one night, at least.”

“I honestly thought we’d been getting on okay anyway.”

Even as he said it, he realized it was a mistake, not so much because it clearly wasn’t true, but because it seemed the biggest part of the problem had been his apparent ignorance of it.

She said only, “We’re not doing this now.”

“Okay. Thanks for the wine, by the way.” He sipped at it.

“Please explain to me what happened.” His spirits lifted for a moment, thinking she’d had a change of heart, but then she said, “Why did Hailey leave home? She didn’t have an argument with Ethan and Debbie?”

He put the glass on the coffee table in front of him, shaking his head, then listened briefly to check that Hailey was still busily engaged with the boys.

“It’s a mess. Essentially, she met a guy online, a student at Uppsala University. She claimed she was a student in Geneva, and they developed some sort of virtual relationship. Then Hailey and Jonas, her friend, hacked into Gibson’s computer or something . . .”

“Who is Gibson?”

“The guy who lived below us.”

“Cycling guy?”

“That’s the one. Anyway, they hacked his network. Gibson duly obliged by asking Debbie if Hailey had accidentally hacked it. Then Hailey claimed someone had followed her and that someone had broken into her room. Next thing, she disappears, leaving a note implying it wasn’t safe for her to stay. But it was all a ploy—she wasn’t being followed, she’d secretly bought new clothes to change her image, had her hair cut the day she was leaving.”

“She looks so much older all of a sudden.”

Finn nodded, accepting the point. “Jonas and I tracked her down to Uppsala. I went to the boyfriend’s house early this morning, and here we are.”

“Boyfriend? You mean she was sleeping with this guy?” He looked at her as if to ask if he needed to answer that question, then she said, “How old was he?”

“I’m not sure—nineteen, twenty—but remember, he was completely convinced by her story. I felt sorry for the guy.”

“That’s a very male response.”

“Yeah, I didn’t feel sorry for him because he’s a guy. I felt sorry for him because he’s the one who was deceived.” The sentence hung there heavily, bearing too much meaning, particularly for Finn.

Adrienne stared at him, her gaze piercing, and deceit was apparently on her mind, too, because she said, “What’s going on, Finn? It’s not like you to help, even to be involved. I can’t even understand why they would ask you to help.”

“Yeah, well, that was your fault. The police weren’t interested, figuring correctly that Hailey was just a runaway, and because you’ve apparently told them on many occasions that you think I’m a spy, they came to me.”

She looked momentarily embarrassed, but she regrouped and said, “And you found her, so they did the right thing. But why . . . why did you get involved?”

The truth was, he couldn’t quite remember. The business with Gibson had made his involvement imperative, but he’d committed himself well before that. Had it been the mystery alone, or the opportunity to cast himself in a different light for Adrienne? Or perhaps, at some subconscious level, he’d spotted his chance to rediscover the person he’d once been.

“I don’t know. I got back and Grasset told me you’d gone.” She grimaced, acknowledging that he shouldn’t have found out like that. “Just as well he did tell me, because there was no note.”

“But I did leave a note, on your desk.”

His mind reeled. Had they been into the apartment while he was away? And if they had, why had they been so unprofessional as to take the note with them?

He recovered his composure quickly. “I don’t understand. Maybe I knocked it onto the floor when I put my laptop case down—I didn’t see it, and I’ve hardly been in the study since.” He waited a second and said, “What did it say?”

She shook her head, reminding him what she’d already said, that they weren’t doing this now.

“So you got back to the empty apartment . . .”

“I called you twice, left a message.” Another frown. “And within ten minutes, Debbie was at the door and told me about Hailey being missing. I didn’t want to help at first—all that business about me being a spy.”

“I’m surprised you helped at all, because . . . you don’t really care about other people very much, not unless they’ve been dead for a very long time.”

“That’s true. Or at least, it has been true. And even when I
decided to help, I think it was more the challenge than anything else.
I don’t know Ethan and Debbie, not really, and I don’t know Hailey.”

“Do you know me?”

“I thought we weren’t doing this now?”

“True.”

“Jesus, Adrienne. I don’t know what your reasons for leaving were, but if it’s something to do with me being cold and out of reach then you’d be wrong to read too much into this business. I helped to find Hailey, now I’m taking her home and then I intend to get back to my book.” Again, he was lying through omission, not wanting to tell her that there was one other piece of business to be dealt with first. “I’d like you to come back, to see if we can sort this out, but that’s your choice.”

“It’s not that simple. I need some time to think.”

“Take as long as you need.”

She’d been softening toward him for the last few minutes, even her retaliatory responses laced with a slight smile, but he knew immediately from her expression that his last comment had been the wrong one. He wasn’t sure why, or what she wanted him to say, but her face visibly hardened again, and it was worse because he could see the fragility and sadness beneath that anger.

He was saved from any further deterioration by Mathieu, who appeared in the doorway and said, “Would you like to eat?”

Dinner was lively and chaotic, conducted in a mixture of English and French, sometimes within single sentences, and with little in the atmosphere to suggest that two of the diners were in a disintegrating relationship and that another had recently run away from home.

The boys were probably the saviors in that regard. They’d always
been excitable around Finn, certainly more than he merited, but they were doubly so with Hailey. A couple of times Cecile tried to calm them down, but in the end everyone rolled with their good humor.