“Which cop do you mean?”
“Rousson.” He almost spat out the word.
*
Without his help, I negotiated the top of the slippery gate, still thinking too much. Especially of the serial killer, François Heulme’s case that had taken fifteen years to solve. How in Nottingham, to give ourselves a boost, we’d often compared our crime-solving stats with those of other French cities. Us using just the one senior detective to investigate serial killings in different locations, seemed to have paid off. Also, cold cases could, after ten years, be re-opened.
Why was I thinking serial killings?
“Let’s go,” I said, landing neatly, despite my dodgy ankle. “And you can tell me what exactly what it is you’ve seen.”
*
We trudged abreast through the snowy veil that if anything, had become even more dense. With each step, we scanned our surroundings, but it was as if nature was playing tricks on us. There was no sign nor sound of anything other than us disturbing what lay underfoot. Kassel’s boot prints a perfect match with what I’d stored on Aubouchon’s camera.
“Laure Deschamps?” I pressed him. “She hung around your place after the horse was shot. Did she stay on?”
“Not that I know of.”
I didn’t quite believe him, and as Laure hadn’t given anything away under pressure, let it go. “She and her aunt are missing again,” I said instead. “Things are getting grim.” And then, because I’d not time to check on something she’d told me in that café, added, “have you heard of the Rue des Maçons in Poitiers?”
“Why?”
“Just interested, that’s all.”
“It’s not really a street. More a cul de sac, bulldozed for a new École Maternelle and a boutique hotel…”
“Recently?”
“If you call ten years ago recent.”
The man beside me suddenly stopped. Searched my face with moist, black eyes. “Monsieur Lyon, never mind the Rue des Maçons, there’s something I’ve wanted to say ever since Laure’s horse…”
“Her father’s horse,” I corrected him gently. “Please go on.”
“When Elisabeth shot him in the eye and his heart, I saw how her niece smiled.”
You weren’t the only one…
43. Laure.
Tuesday 15th March. 2.15 p.m.
Darling Maman often said I’d always been too honest for my own good and for this wicked, cynical world. But that had been before ‘le cataclysme’ as she and Mamie Jourdain had called it. For which I’d nearly paid with my life.
My life. Or rather, ma vie en merde…
Only made bearable with a razor’s touch and the power I knew I possessed.
In those lightweight magazines which those of my age and sex are supposed to find relevant, there’s never any mention of this alternative power. It’s not about using wealth or influence in high places. This variety is more like a precious seam of coal waiting to be mined. Black, dense, stubbornly clinging to its rocky host.
And all I’d had to do, after so long, was wait with the correct tools.
*
Funnily, the afternoon’s bitter cold didn’t seem to touch me. Excitement now my insulation - my extra layer missing for too long. Except for that early December night in 1977 when Danny Lennox had caught me unawares in the tack room while I’d been cleaning the saddlery. A job that gave me my weekly ‘argent de poche.’
My second period had finished two weeks before, and like the first, had affected the stallions in ways Papa had never seen. They’d become difficult to handle - rearing and bucking in the yard, so I was banned from their stables until I was ‘clean’ again.
That night, I’d felt tired, unable to concentrate for long on bringing a perfect shine to the expensive leather and the various steel bits and stirrups. Helping to keep up his good record for having the best turned-out horse in the racetracks’ paddocks.
“I’ve seen how you look at me, Laure,” Danny’s disembodied voice had said. “Didn’t you realise what that does to a man?”
Before I could deny it or turn around, he was close behind, his hand stroking my hair which in those days was long, thick and blonde. Like Maman, still my idol. Then he touched my cheek, before turning me round to face him. His mouth and tongue ready for mine. His sweat and aftershave filling my nostrils as the other hand undid the metal button at the top of my denims and slid straight down inside my pants…
Yes, us girls discussed sex at school and Sophie especially was keen to tell me, and the rest of us wondered what she, being a year younger, was up to. But did she ever say? No. But I do know now…
How naïve I’d been.
*
It was then that the overhead light had come on to show the She-Devil in all her jealous glory. Without a word, she’d grabbed a bridle from the nearest hook and slashed it across his face, bringing blood in three places. But did he cry out? Not a whisper as I, with my jodhpurs and pants still on the floor around my feet, reached for a whip. The rigid, resin variety with a knot at the end, used on the very laziest horses.
“No, don’t!” Danny yelled, but was I listening? She was ready to punish him a second time, but I’d got in first.
Slam…
You could hear the crack of her cheek bone as her scream became agonised moaning. Gilles Dugard, soon on the scene, led her and Danny outside into the rain while I’d struggled back into my clothes. No longer the the innocent, twelve-year-old Laure.Deschamps.
And that was the price I’d paid for ‘le cataclysme.’
*
To be honest, as Cerys would say, I’d never warmed to Mathieu from the day Maman showed him to me in my newly-decorated bedroom with a late sun still yellowing its walls. He resembled an alien who’d landed from another universe into our fucked-up lives. But she seemed to love him, which only partly let me off the hook.
Perhaps my neglect was why he’d become so obsessed with space ships which can carry you far, far away. Why he was useless at school. Unlike me, trying hard to please the unpleasable - especially Mamie, who’d often call me a ‘salope’ - and failing.
He’d become…
Why the pluperfect tense? you might ask. Because I still had Elisabeth’s phone, and reception was good here, on open ground before the trees. All the stupid planting that Papie Jacques did to leave his mark. Just like his own father.
I was ready. Knew the number I needed off by heart. Punched it in with gusto and held my breath.
“Oui?”
Her.
“Where are you?”
“Close and getting closer.”
I whipped round. Les Tourels a blur behind the tumbling snow. Where in Hell’s name was she hiding? Her and her wound. Her scarred heart…
“And where’s Mathieu?” I challenged, aware that my latest, stupid cut on my hand was leaking blood on to my woollen glove.
“Special surprise,” she gloated. “You’ve always liked them, since you were twelve, in fact.”
Mad cow. Was her memory so bad? Had she forgotten so much?
“Why shoot my Papa like that? How bloody cruel.”
“You tell me.”
Those three little words clung on as I kept walking into the gloomy copse of fir and hazels where a lump of compacted snow suddenly landed on my head from above, and a hidden root made me lose my balance. I really wasn’t alone, and once on my feet again, began to jog deeper into the fir colony, where not quite so much snow had settled. I recognised the thin path that took me into its most secret, most useful part…
I sniffed.
Poison…
Shit…
But I had to be here. To wait my time. To face my Maman’s killer. My Papa’s maimer…
*
I looked around. There was no-one else except us. I was the tomboy grandkid all over again, using the biggest firs’ stumpy, jutting branches for footholds as I climbed upwards, pricked from all sides, but at least hidden. From my perch, I had a bird’s eye view of her on
her knees, her sheepskin coat tight over the curve of her back, hauling up that unbelievably heavy, iron lid and staring into the space below it.
The space holding the key to the rest of my fucked-up life.
Hang on.
Was that screaming coming from inside that round darkness? Or birds? I’ve already told you I wasn’t a believer, but right then I prayed so hard for my second guess to be the right one.
Isn’t it odd how just a fragment of sound or an image can bring the past spooling back with its own relentless momentum? That scream took me back to April 1978, my second time at Lagarderie after Maman had found me in Mathieu’s nursery, trying to stuff cotton wool into his open mouth. Her shriek bringing her sister pounding up the stairs - the cracks in her grey, facial mud-pack widening as she’d pinned me against the nursery wall while Maman reached into his throat, pulling out the sodden, red-stained strands. OK, so he’d choked and brought up a little blood. But to me, on that spring morning, while getting ready for a school trip to an art gallery in the city, he’d suddenly become like one of those giant Megalithic dolmens at Karnac. Blocking out my light and the rest of my life.
Yes, a boulder. Good word. And all the while, Papa hadn’t noticed a thing. But why would he? Mathieu was his son, with Maman playing her part as his mother.
“Go and finish dressing for school.” She’d said to me, muffling his yells against those full breasts that she had, in the early months, used to feed him. “He’ll be alright. And when you when you get home, you can help give him his supper.”
Silence followed, save for my ‘boulder’ sniffling, which is when I’d totally lost it. The window had been waiting, glass and all. That hadn’t mattered as I’d faced the garden below. Daffodils in bloom, their warm piss smell disgusting. A slab of dewy sunshine blinding me. My bones cracking like gunshot.
44. Elisabeth.
Tuesday 16th March. 2.35p.m.
Where on God’s earth had my malevolent fellow-traveller - our family’s very own Demon - got to after her second, taunting call? One minute I’d seen her tall, skinny shape in front of me, swinging my Maman’s canvas holdall against her leg. The next, nothing.
I’d not eaten either, since Aubouchon’s little offerings sent down to the cell. Two grilled escargots on a piece of toast followed by half a braised pear with a glacé cherry almost erotically placed in its centre. As gratefully received as that Smith&Wesson and the lethal little Browning GP he’d given me two weeks ago in return for a furtive hand job in his three-car garage. So, it was hardly surprising that with hunger came double vision while driving back here to Les Tourels from the Home. Aimée’s few bits in the fridge wouldn’t have fed an ant, so where could I have stopped for say, a cooked chicken without being noticed?
To my alarm, several Deschamps and Jourdain family photographs that must have been taken from Les Saules Pleureurs, were already in national and international newspapers. Outside the Maison de la Presse in Aucentrelle and Soulebec’s little dive of a Tabac, headlines about nets closing and hunters hunting, blazed forth.
Damn them all.
It had been tricky enough making my way here from where I’d stowed the Citroën out of sight in an old byre near Les Tourel’s northern boundary. We’d always called it ‘No Man’s Land,’ but easy enough to negotiate the brittle fencing that I’d planned to replace during the coming months.
With each purposeful step, I’d become Dante Alighieri himself, re-incarnated, striving to reach his Beatrix, purifying his soul by endeavour and truth. As for my truth, it lay in that pale, cream square of folded paper snug between my breasts.
*
The lid to the secret tunnel seemed even heavier than before and took longer for my arms to recover from lifting it. What lay beneath too, seemed less distinct, making it hard to gauge the black water’s level, and who or what might still be down there. Only a fading, high-pitched scream suggested my recent input might not be alone. He knew exactly where to go to be safe, and I’d warned that there, he’d be deliberately out of earshot. A hidden map in Papa’s study had shown a small section leading from the main tunnel and partially blocked off. Where the present water level would be less than in the main part. I hoped he’d had the wit to follow my precise instructions.
I called out to him, relieved not to hear any reply. That proved for the first time in his short life, he’d been sensible. As for that other noise, no time to work out its origins because all at once, came the creak and snap of a nearby branch. Of men whispering.
Had I imagined all that, or was I losing my mind?
With a big effort, I shut the lid and was about to stand up when someone yelled out, “stop right there!”
A man. Anglais. That cripple again? It seemed so, plus a dead weight in the small of my back.
“Your tracks led here from the gate,” he went on. “Quite distinctive from the rest. And smaller ones too, so thank you for that.”
“What are you saying?”
“How your co-workers Eduard Gallas and Sion Evans have been very helpful. In fact, Gallas told me your mother said she’d seen you and Mathieu coming this way not so long ago.”
The cunning piece of work…
“So where is he now?”
“You’re hurting me.”
The mess of snow appeared in ugly close-up. Black earth showing through, like my bruise.
“We also found your mother’s car and the bike she must have taken from her retirement home. More helpful tracks too. Both leading onto the property from the road. So, where’s she?”
“We?”
“Never mind that. Just answer my questions.”
“No idea. I swear on my Saviour’s heart. Now let me get up.”
“I hope you’re not perjuring yourself, Mademoiselle,” said another male voice – this time definitely French - Norman French - accompanied by the click of a trigger. That weight on my back getting heavier. I tried to turnbut couldn’t.
Merde.
Another click, Yet I had nothing to hide. Everything I’d done since Friday morning, had been under severe duress. I was the victim and telling myself this gave me the strength to roll sideways a little and see Robert Kassel and his rifle towering over me. The Anglais behind him, spruced up in new clothes, peering down. Their hair and shoulders sprinkled with snow.
“Get your filthy boot off my coat,” I told the failed farmer. “Now. Or I’ll have you for assault.”
Kassel grabbed my right arm and pulled me on to my knees, then my feet. “I’ve a question too. Where’s my daughter? Stand up and come clean, hein? Is she in that sewer?” he pointed down at its lid. “Sick pervert. You, a respectable Head teacher?”
I wobbled. Held on to him. His significant nose full of snot. His eyes - well…
Sophie must have looked into them every time he…
Keep to the truth. Keep to the truth… I had to remind myself I was still Dante Alighieri. Still with hope…
“What’s happened to Mathieu?” chimed the Anglais, eyeing my cheek wound before kneeling where I’d been and, with the same difficulty hauling back that weighty lid. He peered into the blackness beyond, until that smell oozing out made him withdraw. “You must have come here for a reason. Why?”
Silence.
“Perhaps you’d prefer to tell the Chef d’Escadron who’ll be arriving with an armed unit any minute.”
A tremor passed through me at that name. Kassel’s grip on my upper arm reaching bone.
“I am impressed,” I managed to say. “Especially with Philippe.”
The Anglais didn’t like that familiarity. He’d obviously ingratiated himself with the most two-faced flic on this planet. He leant forwards again to shout Mathieu’s name into the watery stench, straining to hear any response.
“Any luck? Kassel as tense as an old bull seeing the knife. But his caring act wasn’t fooling me.
The cripple looked up.
“No. So, I suggest that you, Elisabeth Jourdain or Jeanne Tisseyre, whoever you ar
e, come clean.” He then re-focussed on the tunnel, yelling for Mathieu, Sophie and my Maman, louder and for longer without result.
“I’m already clean, Monsieur,” I said in my most headmistress-like voice. “And becoming cleaner with each breath I take. Ask my lovely niece why I’m here. That’s best…”
“She’s also been helpful,” Kaassel butted in. “Don’t forget, she knew Sophie well. In fact, my daughter confided in her before you took her under your wing, as they say.”
A trick. Don’t listen. Remember the truth?
Having let go of me, the black-caped man was fiddling with his rifle in a way that made me nevous. The shiny barrel turned not my way, but upwards…
I’d never felt comfortable seeing grown men cry, and usually blamed their mothers. My own too, for different reasons. But this was very different. Time, therefore, to light the the blue touch paper. Gently at first.
“You’d been a rather strange father to her, hadn’t you, Monsieur Kassel?” I began. “In fact, very strange indeed. That’s all I’m prepared to say right now, but you should know that I’ve hidden a full, handwritten account from Sophie herself in my…”
“Enough!” he cried. “Enough! Tesez-vous!”
Suddenly that black, flapping cape was on the move; giant-sized boots throwing up earth and snow as he flung himself further into the plantation until, after a few silent seconds, came the almost comic ‘pop’ of his rifle.
*
Instead of going after him, the cripple was still bent over that hole when a sizeable section of branch hit my shoulder. I glanced up expecting to see startled wood pigeons or such like. But no. First came those familiar, soiled trainers. Next, twig-like legs in torn jeans and a waxed coat pulled upwards by her fall, covering the rest except for my mother’s canvas hold-all…
Non…
A fiery panic seemed to scorch my brain.
What else had I expected?
More snow, falling thick and fast before the ex-flic from Nottingham who must have straightened up while I’d been distracted, held me in a head lock while my enemy, my destroyer, descended. Pure death in her flecked, focused eyes.
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