‘I’ll pass,’ Callanach said. ‘So you’re settling in then?’ he managed, remembering his manners and the need to make small talk.
‘Oh yeah, been at it all day. And I’m having a flat-warming party next Saturday. I can introduce you to my friends. You free?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Callanach said, deciding to be at work whether he was needed or not. ‘I’m pretty much always on call. Never know what’s going to come up. Sounds like fun though.’
‘Oh, but I’ve told them all about you,’ Bunny said, piling more sausages in a beefy tomato sauce onto Callanach’s plate, and telling him every detail of her best friends’ lives as they made their way through dinner. ‘God, I nearly forgot. Some woman was at your door earlier. I did wonder what was going on, as she didn’t knock or anything, just stood there like she was trying to figure something out. She jumped a mile when I put my head out.’
Callanach’s stomach tensed. He put down his fork. If Astrid had reappeared he’d have to move. There was no way he could face being constantly followed again.
‘Did you catch her name?’ Callanach asked Bunny.
‘She didn’t really say much. Muttered something about how it wasn’t important. She’d see you tomorrow.’
‘Can you describe her?’ Callanach asked.
‘Sure, average height, longish brown curly hair. Grey eyes. Size eight to ten. I was wondering if it was your girlfriend.’
‘I don’t have a girlfriend,’ Callanach said, regretting the admission as soon as he’d made it.
‘I’m single, too,’ Bunny said, holding out her glass to be chinked. ‘That’s good. We can keep each other company.’
‘I should find out who that was at my door,’ Callanach said, already sure it was Ava and wondering what had prompted the visit. ‘But thank you for dinner, although you shouldn’t have worried about me.’
‘Oh, it’s no bother. We should make it a regular thing.’
‘I’m out a lot,’ he said. ‘Regular doesn’t work for me. I’ll bump into you occasionally though.’ Bunny’s face dropped and Callanach felt clumsy. He could have been kinder about it, not that kindness was necessarily the best way to put women off.
Back in his flat, he checked his mobile for messages. There was nothing. If Ava had been calling round about an urgent police matter she’d have left a text or voicemail. He glanced at his watch. Presumably she’d be at dinner with her parents and Joe Edgar by now. Still, Callanach thought, if she’d come looking for him it must have been important. He kicked off his shoes and dialled her number.
Her mobile rang only twice before she answered. He could hear conversation in the background, and a distant high-pitched voice making their disapproval of the fact that she was taking the call obvious to everyone.
‘Turner,’ Ava said. ‘Hold on please.’ A door closed and footsteps echoed on wood.
‘Ava, it’s Luc,’ Callanach said. ‘Is everything okay?’
‘Everything’s fine,’ she was terse. ‘Has something happened I need to know about?’
‘No,’ Callanach felt like he was treading through mud. ‘I just …’
‘Oh, right, the girl told you I’d been round,’ Ava said. ‘It was nothing. Just wanted to have a word with you about …’ she paused momentarily, ‘the Chief. I’m worried about him. Nothing that can’t wait until I next see you.’
‘Was that it?’ Callanach asked. ‘Sorry, I went to The Meadows to walk the scene again.’
‘No need to explain, and I apologise if I made things awkward with your neighbour. She told me she was waiting for you to get home for dinner.’
Callanach rolled his head backwards from one shoulder to the other.
‘She just moved in. I think she’s lonely. I really don’t …’
‘Well, I’m at my parents as you could probably hear, so I can’t chat. Catch you soon.’ Ava hung up. Callanach threw his phone onto the sofa and poured himself a more palatable glass of wine.
‘Fuck,’ he said, stripping off his suit and going to shower, running the water as hot as he could bear and climbing in with his glass still in hand, held just out of the stream.
He should have been able to walk away from work and relax. He wound back the clock inside his head and replayed memories of easier days in Lyon. He’d lived in an apartment he’d loved, with a terrace overlooking the park near Interpol’s headquarters. There had been girlfriends. Not that he’d flitted from one to another, but always someone to share a good meal, to hop in a car for a weekend away, to travel to the coast and waterski or sail. And there had been sex. Not like his early twenties when the fever to sleep with women had, at times, consumed him. When he’d used his model looks and intellect to charm and then entice any woman he’d wanted. Easy sex, without the emotional noose that tightened when he thought about it now. Astrid Borde and her false accusation of rape had finished him, both as an Interpol agent and as a man.
He turned his face up into the steaming spray of water and slid a hand down to his penis, willing it hard, trying to remember the last time he’d been with a woman. He conjured images of days and nights he’d spent intent on nothing but physical pleasure – sex on sand dunes, in planes, on boats, in hotels across the world. But now there was nothing. It was as if the muscle he’d once taken so much for granted had simply ceased to exist, leaving a useless flopping length of pitiful flesh to taunt him.
Then there was a flash of another face in his mind, a woman he’d tried not to think about. With it came the jolt of a feeling he’d all but given up on, his muscles performing no more than a spasm in his hand, a quickening inside before it evaporated.
Callanach grabbed the handle of the shower door, squeezing the metal as if he could crush it, growling aloud with the effort of trying to drag the life back into himself. But it had gone. That fleeting hope that he could be normal again.
‘Merde!’ he shouted, smashing a fist into the shower glass, getting nothing in return except bruised knuckles and a dull thud. ‘Je suis pathétique.’ He reverted to French as he always did when he lost control, although the message was the same in any language. He was pathetic. But his muscles had flared into life, if only for a second. It was proof, as if he’d needed it, that there was no physical damage. ‘Enough,’ he said, snatching a towel and throwing it over his shoulders.
As he walked through his bedroom, he paused to stare in the mirror. He was still in good shape, rarely going more than two days without punishing himself at the gym, naturally eating cleanly, always aghast at the piles of chips, pastry and white bread that seemed to flow through the doors of the station. He hated to feel bloated and heavy. His mother had lectured him about diet from before he could talk back. Fruit, vegetables and protein. Everything else was just excess. She’d long since stopped lecturing him. Had not communicated with him at all since his brief spell of incarceration before he’d been bailed pending trial. He got his olive skin from her, and his dark hair. No matter how long he lived in Scotland, his skin was never going to pale enough for him to pass as a native. It was as if his father’s Scottish genes had passed him by.
