The Nighthawk

by Sally Spedding

  I noticed the wind-torn À Vendre labels stuck to the windscreens of their 4X4 stock. Of the five vehicles on show, only one had been reserved. I moved on towards the main breeze-block building set back from the road, past a short line of petrol and diesel pumps that led to air and water supplies next to a broken-down car wash. A sleepy hairball of a dog lay along the counter behind which, a middle-aged woman was leafing through a crumpled ledger.

  “Joel Dutroux,” I said, having given my own name.” I believe his VW Golf was valeted here earlier this afternoon. Is that so? It is important.”

  As that name clearly wasn’t important to her, I showed my old police ID and recklessly claimed to be helping out with a serious inquiry. Without further ado, she found the carbon copy of his bill and passed it to me.

  “Did you attend to him yourself?” I asked.

  She nodded. “But our son Marc does the car cleaning as he’s the best. We like

  to keep our customers happy.”

  “Is he here?”

  “Gone to Prades. Picking up new cars.”

  Damn.

  “He complained afterwards how fussy this client had been. How the boot was priority and had to be vacuumed and wiped three times...”

  “Was it filthy?”

  “Not at all. Why Marc was cross.”

  “How many times has the vacuum been used since?”

  She didn’t need to check.

  “None.”

  “May I take a look at its bag?”

  “He might have emptied it. Usually does before the weekend. I’ll find out.”

  The dog raised his head for a moment, then went back to sleep. Seconds later, the woman beckoned me through a beaded curtain into a vast hangar where several cars and vans hovered over their inspection pits. Pop music and the din of tools filled the greasy air.

  “Voilà,” she said, indicating an open metal drum. “In there.”

  The plastic bin liner inside it was full. No way could I disembowel the whole thing on my own, and to involve someone else was too risky. However, working on the principal that the latest muck might still be settled near the top, and finding no trace of ice or meltwater, I picked out the next most promising remains. A ball of clingfilm. Crusty patches of what could have been dried blood, and lastly, some torn magazine cover which matched up to make the title SANCTUM. It didn’t mean anything to me. Why should it? Being all about God.

  “Who else has had a recent valeting?” I queried once we were back in the shop. “Paul Suzman by any chance, with a silver Mercedes?”

  Silence.

  “Can’t say, I’m afraid. And don’t you go pushing it, Monsieur. They’re trouble.”

  “Who, exactly? Please. I’ll keep it confidential.”

  “You’d better. For our sakes. Nine o’clock last night it was. Last job before we closed. Fussy about his boot as well. One of our most regular customers.”

  *

  Having reached Dansac on an eerily empty road, I parked on a gravel plot next to a tractor, a rusting Renault van and the Pharmacy, whose illuminated green cross glowed intermittently in the wind. After my experience with the gunshot that morning, I kept glancing upwards to the high, scrubby land on either side of the village. With my cagoule hood up, giving me some anonymity, I began exploring the alleyways leading off the main street. Here, bicycle wheels had left their impressions in the damp dirt; there, footprints, some old, some new. Small enterprises long abandoned - a quincaillerie from the fifties advertising mincers and wringers, a florist whose plastic, funerary flowers pressed against the dirty window glass, bleached of colour. More than anything, this moribund drabness seemed to sum up Dansac’s atmosphere.

  I moved on past a mechanic’s yard with nothing going on. A defunct patisserie where two old posters lay curled up, almost illegible on a bed of dead flies and the odd fake croissant. With my nose pressed to the glass, I tried to read both messages, and in the end, fixed my binoculars on the nearest one.

  Saturday October 10th 1942

  Grand Fête des Vendages

  Café des Étoiles

  Saint-Antoine de Bayrou.

  Venez nombreux!

  It wasn’t the wind making me shiver, but the past’s cold breath touching my skin. I’d have been nine years’ old at the time, eight hundred miles away in a cold, crowded house with Carol, my maternal grandparents and a clutch of maiden aunts with false teeth.

  The second poster which, judging by its condition, seemed to date from the same era, was too bleached and torn for me to decipher much, except the words,

  Prieures pour les ȃmes morts...Église Saint-Luc...

  Immediately I was curious. Who were these dead souls? Why no specific names? And

  when I noticed the reflection of an elderly woman, dressed like Madame Pastado

  appearing in a doorway opposite, I crossed the dirt track lined by small, two-storey houses, to ask where this church might be.

  “Just outside Villedieu.” She seemed nervous as if waiting for someone else to arrive, repeatedly patting wind-blown strands of grey hair behind her ears. “Its priest retired some years ago and never been replaced.” Her ringless, bony fingers also worried at the string of red rosary beads around the neckline of her black, woollen dress.

  “So where do people round here go to pray?”

  “Saint-Jean le Martyr. The young priest there’s very popular, so I’ve heard.” She then pointed to the sky, now black and blue like a spreading bruise. “But I pray alone to my God up there. I don’t need to show myself off like some...”

  Just then, a flash of silver passed along the main road at the end of the alleyway. A saloon, definitely, and its male driver’s face too far away for me to recognise, turned to stare.

  A Mercedes C class, maybe?

  “I should introduce myself. Roger Carpenter, an amateur historian from Bristol, researching this area’s past. Forgive me asking, but did you live here during the Vichy years?”

  She glanced left and right then at me.

  “For un Anglais, your French is excellent. Come in. I’ve not had much company for a while.” She the way along a cold, tiled passageway into a dingy kitchen/living area where she clearly spent her days. A pale grey curtain covered its one window behind the sink, and overhead, a fly strip clogged with last summer’s bluebottles. To my left, a small, wood fire gave off an acrid smell, while on the old-fashioned TV, Charles Aznavour was being interviewed.

  She turned down the sound, perched a small saucepan of water on an iron rack over the fire and unhooked two unmatching mugs from the mantlepiece.

  “Why not live in a big town?” I suggested, still waiting for her answer.

  “I have too many memories here.”

  She pointed to one of three old chairs arranged around a wax cloth-covered table.

  I wanted her memories, so I sat down. Time to come clean.

  “I confess, I’m actually John Lyon. A retired Detective Inspector from Nottingham, England, rootling around on my way to Perpignan.”

  A sharp, little look.

  “Not Roger Carpenter then?”

  “I’m sorry I misled you.”

  “I expect you had your reasons.”

  “Being a a stranger here, it’s hard to know whom to trust.”

  “My feelings exactly. And of course, you have a better justice system than ours. Time we got rid of Public Prosecutors and examining magistrates. They have too much power.”

  She bent over the bubbling water, added a teaspoonful of coffee grounds to each of the mugs and brought them over to the table.

  “But as for police here in Dansac, we never see any. Not since we were overrun by them all those years ago. Collaborators without exception.” She pulled out the chair next to mine and by gripping on to the table edge, lowered herself into it.

  The coffee tasted as bitter as her words.

  “But if we so much as whispered to anyone outside the village about what was going on…” she mimed a gun at her head. “Ban
g.”

  Although the room felt warmer than outside, an eerie chill snaked inside my clothes.

  “We lost many good people that way, and the scars remain, even now.” She sipped her coffee. “Nothing’s changed, Monsieur. But there’s a history here that won’t appear in any books or tourist guides. Oh no. Not while certain people still breathe.”

  Her sad, hazel eyes rested on mine.

  “The reason I’ll die in this house.”

  She wiped a tear away with her sleeve before standing up and reaching for a little marquetry box on the mantlepiece.

  “Sounds grim.”

  “It was, so don’t you stay any longer in this Godforsaken place...”

  Still anonymous, she unlocked the box with a tiny key from inside her skirt pocket, and brought out a small, square black and white photograph - like those our grandmother had taken of me and Carol as kids.

  “Take a look. She was from Port-Leucate. Only fourteen years, two months and six days. Her parents were interned up at Gurs, beyond the Canigou. Ice cold in winter. A hot-house in summer.”

  The teenage girl with a head of dark curls stared back at me. Those slightly hooded eyes full of innocence. Of life. The initials SB on the reverse.

  “Jewish?” I handed it back.

  She nodded. “I couldn’t save her. Not even the young man who’d assisted at the Église St. Luc and became Father Léon Diderot there. How do we live with that?”

  “What does SB stand for?”

  “I’m sorry, Monsieur Lyon, I have to respect what privacy her family - if any - may till have...”

  She returned the souvenir to its box, claspingit protectively as if that was all she could now do, while wind and rain rattled the window, jostling its curtain.

  “Save her from what?”

  “Another time, perhaps. Just to see her face again is too much.”

  “I understand.” But I wanted much more. I tried another lead and repeated what the Pastados had said about L’Enfer de Dansac.

  She tutted. “That pair should watch their mouths. When they moved into Mas Camps, operations had ended. They’d not risked their lives here.”

  “Operations?”

  “I’ve already said too much, Monsieur.”

  Damn.

  “And the Dutch family before them?”

  A small smile stretched her dry lips. “You have been busy.”

  The bare light bulb flickered ominously overhead. For a moment her hand tightened around that precious box. Her smile gone.

  “Greed was their sin. Money and more money. Like the Belgians, come to milk our land. Folk got jealous. Happens when times get hard. But then,” she shrugged. “With both their sons spared conscription, or even forced to join the SS, it wasn’t surprising.”

  “Would they have been aware of these so-called operations?”

  “I can’t say. People became shadows, shadows became people...”

  “And was there ever a train service here?”

  That mouth tightened, making the dark creases above her top lip even more obvious.

  “You mean, for the public?”

  Who else?

  “Anyone.”

  “Only the feldspar works’ track, going north-east to Padaillac.”

  A place I’d never heard of, but clearly must look up. I was about to steer her back to S B’s story when I heard a noise coming from the front door area. I left my seat and crept along the hallway towards a growing cloud of smoke. The inner doormat, wet with petrol, was already alight and flames were licking the papered walls.

  “Stay back!” I yelled to her, beating the fire with my heavy cagoule until those hungry flames subsided. I opened the door and threw the blackened mat into the street, beyond fresh tyre tracks just inches away.

  *

  “You saved my life, Monsieur,” the stranger wheezed while sealing up the inside of her letterbox with parcel tape. “But eyes are everywhere. And enemies.”

  “If you don’t report this, I will.”

  Her grip seemed to cut through to my wrist bone.

  “No. I beg you. That will make everything worse. Let them think they’ve scared us off.”

  “Them?” I took a punt. “The Suzmans, by any chance?”

  “Never.”

  As she watched me follow the dirt track to the main road, it occurred to me I might not see her again. But why no names? Not even that girl in the photograph?

  *

  I ran back, just as her door was closing.

  “Madame, does the name Herman Oudekerk mean anything? Belgian? Short, blond...”

  Her grey hair had unravelled in the wind.

  “Should it?”

  . “A friend’s worried he didn’t show up in Saint-Antoine last night for a meal.”

  Like those of the Pastados, old eyes can be ambiguous.

  “Does he drive a small, green car?”

  “Yes.” The present tense was best, in case.

  “He called here about a month ago. Very persistent, so I’m afraid he left empty-handed.”

  “Persistent about what?”

  “Dansac. The same as you.”

  Chapter 18. Karen.

  “Your new friend’s back,” said Martine, activating my double gates to allow John Lyon through. “Been long enough.” Her tone of voice, her sharp movements, told me the extra care duties were making her resentful. Just as his questioning, even of Joel, until I’d explained it was to help us all. With just under one month to solve my mystery, a replacement for Herman wouldn’t be fair to any new nurse.

  “I’ll double your pay,” I announced. “Back-dated to yesterday.”

  “Thanks, but...”

  “No buts. Now just go and see if Monsieur Lyon can arrive without Joel throwing his weight around. If he does, tell me.”

  *

  In that quiet, empty moment after she’d gone, I heard my heart beat the same way as when I’d seen those strangers at Mas Camps, combing our land at night.

  Moeder.

  I pulled out the battered bundle of letters she’d written to me, salvaged from her poky Rotterdam home after her death. All tied by an orange ribbon. I picked the last one, its date clear, but not her writing veering from line to line on the torn page of one of my school exercise books. To my shame, I’d never read any of them. For too long, my half-life had taken over. In fact, I’d forgotten they existed. 122, Mistenlaan. Rotterdam 8th June 1984 6a.m.

  Dearest Liesbet,

  I couldn’t sleep at all last night and had to get up to write to you. Not a dream, but something else., where I was looking down a wide, river valley just like near Mas Camps. The reeds were whispering all our names - Maurits, Eva, Joop, Christian and you, Liesbet, the last, but first when it mattered to you.

  The reeds brushed against the ancient fig trees and other overgrown lives along that river bank. Your father was ordering the boys in for the night, in Dutch of course..This will be my last letter to you. To share what I’ve kept to myself too long.

  It was the train, dear Liesbet. Two carriages with no windows, crawling west from Dansac. At dead of night I saw it, heard its wheels that seemed almost to be singing. 3 a.m. as I remember. Worse were young, human cries carried on the Tramontane. Cries I will never forget. Maurits and I argued fiercely over it. He insisted the track had been closed since 1935 when the feldspar works built another through into the next valley. A more direct route north. Maurits said once France was liberated, it would be torn up and used for scrap or upgraded for tourists going south….

  Here, her strange words became smaller, closer together, and I was just about to return the folded page to the others when my door opened.

  “You’re crying,” said Martine, not missing a trick. “Here’s a tissue.”

  John Lyon followed her in.

  “Interesting afternoon,” he said and, like a typical man, eyeing not my grief, but my shabby pile of letters.

  “Certain pieces of the puzzle are almost in place, but it’s dangero
us ground.”

  He was windblown, which suited him, also smelling of wood smoke. His cagoule’s sleeves stained and torn; the cuffs singed. I passed him Moeder’s letter, while Martine, now on double pay, organised my bed for later with a more Herman-like attention to detail.

  “There’s no railway now. No nothing,” he said, havng read it. How odd he’d not appeared to notice the unmotherly little barb at the end of the first paragraph.

  …but first when it mattered to you.

  “Martine and I were both near the river there.”

  “Maybe your mother was hallucinating?” The stand-in nurse interrupted, then seemed to regret it. Especially on seeing my face.

  “And I dreamt up all that mysterious activity in our vineyards before and after the disappearances? I don’t think so.”

  She turned her back on me, and John Lyon sighed in frustration. I was tempted to throw in the towel right then and there, before he handed me back the letter. Soot on his wrist.

  “I met this old girl in Dansac,” he announced. “Someone tried setting fire to her house while I was there. God knows why.”

  “And you saved her life?” Martine quipped. He ignored her. The worst thing anyone could do. I was curious.

  “Her name?”

  “She never said.”

  “Does she know yours?”

  Silence, meaning yes. He wasn’t being careful enough. When would he learn?

  “Wolves in sheep’s clothing,” Martine muttered, pushing my bed until it was flush against the wall. He pretended not to hear her.

  “She mentioned a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl with the initials SB whom she’d been unable to save. Of certain ‘operations,’ that had been in place. Deportations I guessed. A word she couldn’t say, nor give that girl’s identity. I’ve read up a bit on Rivesaltes and Gurs and I’ll do more digging. Just like Herman.”

  “Herman?”

  My pulse juddered.

  “He’d spoken to her as well. Perhaps found out too much. Told someone he shouldn’t have. Who knows?”