Notorious Read Online Free Page B

are swollen starfish.
    I step closer still. Her entire face is bandaged, apart from gaps for her eyes and her parted lips. Her eyes are closed, lashes in a dark half-moon over purplish bruises. There is a low funnel of escaping air, like the sea turning over. Her nose must be so swollen that she is breathing through her mouth. There is a twig of some kind – lavender – pinned to the pillow above her right temple.
    Closer. A light breeze strokes my cheek and a shutter rattles. At any moment she will look at me. Her face will change, contort. My career could be over in a few words. There will be a trial, a secret military court, no hope of escape. Prison. This is what I must focus on: everything I had worked for, gone. All the sacrifices. The loneliness.
    After so many months, I can reach out and touch her. I don’t understand why she still has her eyes closed.
    I take a deep breath. ‘Madame, I need to question you about Sicily.’ I sound tentative. ‘I must question you about your husband.’
    Now. Now she would turn and look at me. I wonder what to do if she is angry enough to spill details in front of witnesses.
    I know what Mitch would say.
    The Administrator and the nun stare at me.
    ‘Madame . . . ’
    ‘She can’t hear you,’ says Laforche. ‘She’s unconscious.’
    ‘She’s faking,’ I say immediately.
    Sister Antony holds the book before her – it is the Bible – and stands, her head bowed. She is tall and, with her back to the window, her face is an oval of darkness.
    ‘How do you know?’ Her voice is flat, clamping the faint accent. I visualise my files. We had focused on Laforche; there was only sketchy information on the rest of the staff and only hearsay details on Sister Antony: her arrival in Casablanca in 1959, the years of drug-taking, the break-down after the German boyfriend left, the volunteer work at the Catholic Mission, the disastrous interference with the young Arab girl, the withdrawal to the desert in ’78. I had searched her last home in Casablanca but her constant changing of names during the drug years made Mitch impatient. He stopped me investigating further; her life before Abu N’af was not relevant, he said.
    I dismiss the files and point at the figure in the bed. ‘I know this woman,’ I say, trying to sound disinterested; a man married only to his job.
    ‘How do you know this is her?’ says the Sister. Again that flattening of the explosive consonants. Of the old Central European accent.
    I look at the nun blankly. Her only adornment is a wooden cross strung on what looks like a long plait of camel’s hair around her neck. A slender gold crucifix has been nailed into the wood. The stem of the cross is rubbed down.
    Laforche says, ‘Sister Antony has spent the most time with – what do you call her?’
    The nun dips her head. ‘Madeleine, Monsieur.’
    ‘Monsieur Devlin thinks he knows who she is.’
    There is a gleam of light as the Sister lifts her head but she is silent.
    ‘You undressed her, washed her?’ I say. ‘You found no documents?’
    A slight hesitation. Sister Antony shakes her head.
    ‘And she has been unconscious all this time?’
    Another hesitation. A nod.
    I take out the diary with its pale scorched cover and its torn and burnt pages. I watch the nun carefully as I untie the red ribbon and select a less-singed page.
    ‘Do you recognise the writing? Has she written anything like that?’
    ‘No.’
    A shutter rattles in the pause that follows.
    ‘I must question her. You know your government authorised this,’ I say to Laforche.
    ‘The same way you authorised me? I’m sure,’ he says. ‘But as you must oberve, she is not fit.’
    I wave a hand. ‘I have something to wake her up.’
    ‘No.’ The nun’s voice is harsh, like dried twigs.
    A curl of dark hair cups the woman’s ear, rising and falling with her steady breath. But I know she is awake. Watching me.
    I want to look for the scars I know are on her inner arm but bandages