Una releases me, and we trail into the kitchen. Their eyes immediately zero in on my dead laptop and the scattered notes and reports on the kitchen table.
“I am allowed to take a holiday,” I tell Una.
“Or are you working from home?” Pierre raises an eyebrow.
“This is nothing,” I lie.
“It doesn’t look like nothing.” Pierre tilts his head to try and read one of the loose papers, but I snatch it up.
Una leans against the worktop. “Of course you’re allowed to take a holiday. We just thought it a bit suspicious with what happened on Monday, and then when I couldn’t reach you all day yesterday, I started to worry.”
“I appreciate your concern, guys, but I’m fine. Just thought it would be a good week to take some time off and not be around the headlines for a bit.”
“See, I told you.” Pierre flashes Una a frustrated look.
The pair regard me with uncertainty before Una speaks. “There was something else.”
Pierre rolls his eyes. “It’s fine. She is fine. We should just leave.”
“What is it?” I ask.
“It’s nothing.” Pierre stares at me as if trying to convey that this really is nothing, but Una will not be deterred.
“It might be nothing. Or it might be something.” She folds her arms.
“Does it require a chair and coffee?” I ask, already pulling out the chairs, then head over to the kettle.
They sit as I busy myself with maid duties.
“I told you we should have just shown up with a Costa and checked in on her,” Pierre whispers to Una.
“I am here, you know. I can hear you,” I say with my back to them both.
“Pierre doesn’t agree with me on the importance of telling you what we know,” Una says.
“I just don’t think now is the time. It can wait,” he argues.
“Sometimes, I question your character as a reporter, Pierre. Remind me again why you became a journalist?” Una says, that infernal tongue of hers unleashing again, but Pierre is used to her by now.
“Very funny,” he says, batting her comment away with his hand.
“I’m serious. You don’t have your tail in the air when there’s a whiff of a story,” she pushes.
“This isn’t a story. This is our friend and her life,” Pierre points out.
With an unintentional thud, I set their coffees on the table and join them.
“Okay, what’s the story?” I ask, glad of the distraction from my own affairs.
Pierre eyes Una as if giving her one more chance to back out of telling me whatever it is they’ve come all this way to say, but she ignores him.
“Yesterday, Dupin and I went to interview some of the witnesses who were at the casino when your brother was shot,” Una says carefully, as if her words are landing on the thin layer of a frozen lake.
“Okay.” I wonder where she’s going with this and why they were talking to old witnesses after Valdemar’s release and not before.
“We spoke to Sergeant Psyche, the first officer on the scene,” Una replies, clearly testing the ice, watching for a tiny crack. “He’s very old now, retired for some years.”
She’s stalling, which makes me nervous. She’d been so eager to get here, to speak to me, dragging Pierre against his will, but now that the words are forming, she seems to be having doubts.
