Not knowing the details, I didn’t have any real comment on that. But, “I wouldn’t say Alistair’s difficult, really. He’s just very focused. That’s not a bad thing, for a researcher.”
“No.” I felt Luc’s sideways glance. “No, it isn’t.”
We drove for a moment in silence, until something struck me.
“Why Wednesdays?” I asked.
“Pardon?”
“Why do you work from home Wednesdays?”
He paused as though having to search back in our conversation to find the stray comment he’d made that had led to my question. “Oh. Noah still has Wednesday afternoons off, so it’s necessary.”
I had a vague and distant memory of my childhood friend and neighbor, Ricky, when he’d moved across from France, complaining that in Britain he was made to go to school on Wednesdays, so I gathered it was normal here for schoolchildren to have a midweek holiday. But Luc was talking as though Noah lived with him all week, not just at every other weekend, and that seemed to me less normal. It was probably rude just to ask, I knew, but curiosity outweighed my manners. “So, where does your son live? With you, or Denise?”
“We share custody. Alternate weeks. We switch over on Mondays. It’s becoming more common in France, this arrangement,” he said. “It’s better for Noah, I think. And for us. You don’t have children?”
“No.” I’d have found it much easier winning my battle to not watch his legs if they hadn’t been constantly working the clutch and the gas pedals as he changed gears, but I managed to pull my gaze up in time to catch his small shrug.
“They take work, they keep you busy.” Once again he briefly looked in my direction, this time with a smile, and added, “Noah more than most. You’ll likely have him underfoot when he discovers what you’re doing. He’ll think code breaking is cool—he’ll want to help you.”
I returned the smile to be polite, and looked away. I didn’t dislike children, but I wasn’t all that keen on being “helped” by one. And when it came to something like the breaking of a cipher, there was no real help a nine-year-old could give me.
Or at least, that’s what I thought on Wednesday afternoon. By Thursday night, on New Year’s Eve, I’d learned that I was wrong.
Chapter 11
The day began with rain, which by the early afternoon had lost its steady patter and become a dismal mist that clouded everything outdoors in gray and now and then was spattered on the windows by the fitful wind.
Inside, the house was quiet.
With Denise not back from Chinon yet, my breakfast with Claudine had been as simple as our meal the night before, with us both managing to serve ourselves from what she’d left behind for us to eat and clearing up the table when we’d finished. Claudine had gone out somewhere just after that and I had taken full advantage of the solitude to start my work, refusing to be beaten by the challenge of that single line:
…when I replied I had no head for ciphers she assured me any person could devise one using anything to hand, whereon she crafted one upon the spot…
Because if Mistress Harrison—or whatever her name had been—could craft a cipher on the spot, then I could do the same thing in reverse. Or so I’d told myself. My confidence had waned and I was feeling now the rumbling of faint hunger in my stomach that reminded me I hadn’t stopped for lunchtime, but I stoically ignored it and bent closer to the fresh page in my notebook where I copied out more numbers from the cipher in the diary into tidy penciled rows and searched for patterns.
I’d completely bored Diablo, who had draped himself across his box of files by the window, turned his head away and closed his eyes disdainfully, the twitching of his tail the only sign he wasn’t actually asleep. That, and the swivel of an ear, as though he’d heard something beyond the range of my own senses.
I was in the middle of re-ordering a row of numbers when I heard it, too: a faint repeating simple tune, like something from a synthesizer. Gradually it gained in volume, growing nearer. On his box, Diablo shifted, opening his eyes to watchful slits. The music stopped abruptly on a click, as though whatever had been playing it had been snapped shut, and from the entry hall outside my workroom I could hear the lightly purposeful approach of footsteps on the tiles.
The door, which I had left ajar so that the cat could come and go, swung inward as a boy came in, his whole attention on the cat. “Diablo!” he said, stretching out his arms, and to my great surprise the tomcat rose and arched and leaped straight into them, allowing himself to be made a fuss of in a way that I’d have thought he’d find undignified. I must have made a sound, because the boy turned then and noticed me. An adult faced with that sort of surprise might well have dropped the cat; the boy held on more tightly to it as he said, “Bonjour, madam,” recovering his manners. Speaking carefully in English he continued, “I am sorry to derange you. I look for… I was looking for Diablo.” Shifting the cat to one side, he came forward and held out his hand. “I am pleasured to meet you,” he said. “I am Noah.”
Of course he was. Noah Sabran had his mother’s black hair and his father’s blue eyes. He seemed small for a nine-year-old, but he looked healthy and filled with the energy most boys contained at that age. He came right to the side of my desk for the handshake.
Returning it, I told him, “It’s ‘disturb.’ To be ‘deranged’ in English doesn’t mean the same thing that it does in French. In modern English, anyway. So you’d say: ‘I am sorry to disturb you.’”