A Good Death

by A Good Death (retail) (epub)

  He climbed down again. The hook now hung vertical, still swivelling a little under its own impetus. Theo stood beneath it. The hook was on a level with his eyebrows; he noted that the major must have been about his own height. Even though he knew it was there, and it was not propelled towards him at speed, his eye did not pick it up immediately. He put his hand up to hold it and tap it against his forehead.

  ‘The children,’ he said. ‘You said the children’s clothes were covered in blood.’

  Ariane stepped forward tentatively. ‘The children?’

  ‘You found him here at two in the morning and you ran back to the house. How did the children come into it?’

  ‘About the children. I didn’t tell you because … I don’t know why …’ She halted, began again. ‘Everything else I can account for. I may not like what happened, what I did myself or what others did, but I understood what was going on. Yet this I can’t explain.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I told you, I found him lying here. When I realised what had happened, I just ran. I didn’t stop until I was in the house. But when I reached my room, I began to consider what I should do.’

  * * *

  It was some time after she had reached her room that her heart ceased to pound sufficiently for her to think straight and take decisions. She was sure that her first impulse was correct. She must not find him; that must be for someone else. For a while she thought of trying to move his body away from Bonnemort, but only a little reflection showed that it could not be done before the morning, even with Florence’s help. And the lieutenant and his men might return at any time, searching for him. It must look, rather, as if he had been killed somewhere else and then brought back here, as if the killing was nothing to do with Bonnemort. It was only then that the question came to her of who really had killed him, but she dismissed it as irrelevant to the immediate problem.

  No one would find him in the winepress. No one normally went there for days on end; that was why he had chosen it for their meetings in the first place. She wished that she could just leave him there, and forget about him, but she knew that if the soldiers came back and instituted a proper search, they would discover his body in half an hour. So he had to be put somewhere more obvious, where Florence or Micheline would find him at first light.

  After an hour, when she had calmed down and steeled herself, she made up her mind to go back to the winepress. She intended to pull the body out onto the path perhaps, or, it she could manage it, to haul it up towards the courtyard and leave it there where she knew that Florence would see it as soon as she emerged to feed the animals. She changed into trousers and went out again into the starlit darkness.

  She reached the head of the path and for the second time that evening her heart almost stopped with fright. Below her on the path she saw two troll-like figures bent double over what appeared to be a sack on the ground. They jumped up when they heard her and she and the children faced each other in horror and astonishment, the body of the major lying between them. He was naked, his ankles tied together. They had been dragging him up the path by his feet.

  None of them spoke; words were unnecessary. It was as if they all knew what had happened and what had to be done. She ran down to join them, taking hold of his ankles. They stepped back and took his shoulders, one of them at each side. They dragged him up the path together. At the top of the slope she stopped as it dawned on her that she had no idea where they were going with the corpse. The children dropped their burden and she lowered the feet to the ground.

  As she raised her eyes, she realised that his head was hanging in a strange, lopsided manner. There was a slash in his throat and the children, dressed in the summer frocks they had been wearing the previous day; were drenched in blood. Suzie’s dress was soaking, clinging to her body; Sabine’s was spattered to the hem which was bordered with blood and coated with dust. Ariane was by then beyond feeling horror, beyond exclamations and questions. Still without words, the children abandoned the body where they had dropped it and pointed down the path. She followed them to the winepress and gasped when she saw the blood. She started to draw water, jerking the lever of the pump with a desperate urgency. The children, without being told, set to swilling the floor, pushing the bloody water out of the door, just as they had done at the end of the pig-killing. It was as if it had been rehearsed.

  They found his clothes, sodden with blood, piled in a corner near the door. His false hand, wooden with a leather socket, had become detached from his arm and they swept it up, bouncing in front of the broom, as they cleaned the floor.

  Ariane’s only desire was to cleanse and purify. She had no plan to deal with returning, vengeful Germans beyond her initial idea when they had roared into the yard two months earlier: to get the children out of the way with Micheline and Florence, and to remain herself with the aunts. When the winepress was sluiced and scoured, she called the girls and they climbed back to the house, walking past the body of the major, ignoring it.

  Ariane carried his clothes and false hand to the boiler in the farmyard. Crouching down she struck a match and fed the flame with the kindling that was kept nearby. The children stood in front of her in the greyish light of the pre-dawn, in their blood-drenched dresses. Their limbs and hair and faces were spattered with red. Frantically, she seized Suzie, turning her round, unbuttoning her dress, dragging it off her. She pulled her over to the farmyard pump and forced her to bend down so that the cold water ran over the back of her head and neck.

  ‘Wash, wash,’ she said. They were, she realised, the first words she had spoken. ‘Sabine, come here. You must wash yourselves clean.’

  The door of Micheline’s cottage opened and Florence and her mother came out. Ariane made no attempt at explanation.

  ‘Micheline,’ she said. ‘Will you take the girls and wash them and their hair. Florence, I’ll need you to give me a hand.’ She kneeled down and stuffed the dresses, one after the other, into the fire under the boiler, pulling off her own blouse to join them.

  She led Florence to the path where the body lay and heard her catch her breath.

  ‘So they got him in the end,’ she said. ‘Serve the bugger right. What are we going to do with him?’

  Ariane explained that she wanted to give the impression, in case the Germans returned, that he had not been killed at Bonnemort.

  ‘Surely,’ said Florence, ‘we could take him in the pony cart to the forest and dump him somewhere. It could take them weeks to find him.’

  ‘But we haven’t time.’ The sun was already rising. The eastern sky was turning from grey to pink, streaked with the clearest sea-green. ‘They could be back at any minute. We must make it look as if he was brought here from somewhere else.’

  ‘We’ll need the barrow,’ said Florence. Between them they hoisted him like a sack of grain in the wheelbarrow and carried him as far as the centre of the courtyard, which seemed as good a place as any to put him. They looked at him for a moment or two and Florence said, ‘Well turn him over. It’s more decent. The ladies’ll be awake very soon.’

  They left him face down and untied his ankles. Ariane had lost any capacity to deal with the future, but Florence had now taken charge.

  ‘If he’d been left here,’ she said, ‘we’d just have found him. So I would phone the village and speak to the Gendarmerie. That’s what I’ll do.’

  * * *

  They were sitting on a ledge of rock on the path outside the winepress. ‘We, that is Micheline and Florence and I and the children, have never spoken about it since.’

  ‘You all knew what had happened, so there was no need to speak?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what did you all assume?’

  ‘Micheline and Florence probably believe that I killed him, but they’ll never say anything.’

  ‘And what do you think?’

  ‘I think the children did it.’

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Suzie opened the doors of the winepress a
nd watched a narrow blade of light slice across the darkness of the floor in front of her. She left the doors ajar and slipped inside, standing for a moment to allow her eyes to adjust to the chiaroscuro. So much had happened here that she expected to sense her own lingering fear or hear an echo of Lou Moussou’s screams, but she felt nothing. It was just a rocky space, empty of the past. She crouched on the edge of the loft gazing down at the ridged floor. The pulley rope was for some reason hanging free, dangling from the centre of the roof. She loosened it so that it was long enough for her to reach, then descended to retrieve the end, holding onto it as she climbed back to her hiding place. Without pausing to take aim, she threw it with all her strength at the open doorway.

  * * *

  After she and Sabine had seen the major and Madame Ariane rooted in one another there, the momentum of Sabine’s fury against her stepmother had become unstoppable. They established, over a week’s observation, that the winepress was the fixed rendezvous, although the day and the time varied. Sabine’s imagination quickly adapted their own experiences to the needs of her plan. The hook that had skimmed Suzie’s head was to be the weapon. They would adjust its length to the precise height necessary to hit Madame Ariane. As at the time of the mushroom episode, the details occupied Sabine obsessively. Calculations filled her school notebooks. If Madame Ariane were one metre seventy-five tall and if twelve centimetres were allowed for her hair and the top of her head, that meant that the hook of the pulley had to hang one metre sixty-three above the ground. Further calculations were made in an effort to establish at what point in its upward swing the hook would be at a point two metres inside the door. The variables became too complex and Sabine returned to simplicity: Madame Ariane’s height and the length of the rope. She stood on a box with a tape measure, while Suzie played out the rope so that the drop was exactly what was required. When the rope was securely wound round its pegs and anchored at that length, Sabine climbed up to the loft and practised throwing the hook with all her force, hearing the satisfying smack of the metal against the wooden doors opposite them. Suzie was commanded to walk into the winepress in order to estimate the timing of the launch of the rope. Finally, Sabine investigated the slaughtering equipment that was stacked against the wall waiting for the next pig-killing. She unrolled a sleeve of fabric that lay on top of the slaughter bench.

  ‘What’s that?’ Suzie asked fearfully, knowing the answer.

  ‘Knives.’

  ‘Knives?’

  ‘Yes. Just hitting her with the hook may not be enough. We shall have to stab her too.’

  ‘Sabine, no, no, no.’

  ‘Suzie, yes, yes, yes.’ Sabine advanced on her, laughing, waving a knife in each hand.

  Suzie submitted to the planning and practising with a fatalistic acquiescence. She had thwarted Sabine’s intention last time; something would happen this time too. She would see a way to protect Madame Ariane and herself. For several days after the plan was ready, it seemed that there would simply be no opportunity to put it into action. They twice waited in the winepress, but no one came.

  They might have missed that last night, too. The major and the Germans were not at Bonnemort in the evening, had not been there for two days, and the girls had gone to bed at the normal time, in spite of the excitement of the shooting that they had heard in the early evening. Sabine had detected Madame Ariane’s absence from her bedroom.

  ‘She’s not coming to bed,’ she reported. ‘She’s in her sitting room, walking up and down in the dark. She’s going to meet him tonight.’

  She made Suzie get up and dress. They arranged pillows in their bed to give the appearance, at a cursory glance in the dark, that they were asleep, and slipped down the stairs and into the farmyard. They climbed down into the winepress through the funnel and waited.

  As they crouched together in the darkness, Sabine holding the looped-back rope, nursing the heavy hook in her hand, Suzie suddenly knew what she had to do. If she shortened the rope, it would hang too high. When Sabine launched her lethal pendulum, it would pass harmlessly over Madame Ariane’s head, just as it had missed hers. She inched herself over to where the rope was secured, and with infinite care began to pull in the slack sufficiently to twist it one more time around the pegs.

  ‘She always comes first,’ Sabine whispered, ‘so the instant the door opens, I’ll do it. You must take the knife,’ she instructed Suzie. ‘You must hide down there behind the bench.’

  Without protest, Suzie slithered down the ladder. She was feeling sick and her hands trembled as she unrolled the cloth with its pockets full of knives and chose one of medium length, with a slender blade. She crouched down behind the slaughter bench and silence settled around her. She was suddenly at peace. While she held the knife Sabine would not have it and Madame Ariane would come to no harm. She felt comforted in the way that, at the last moment, these ideas had come to her. It made her feel that God, some God, the Jewish one that Opa used to visit in the synagogue with his prayer shawl on, or Madame Ariane’s invisible Protestant God, or Sabine’s Catholic infant, with his mother and his dove and his admiring saints, was watching over them, saving them all, Madame Ariane and Sabine and her.

  She had the odd sensation that she had left her body and she, Rahel, was above the physical Suzie, watching over her. She felt no surge of fear when she heard the tug at the door and when the tall figure stepped inside, she recognised it at once, almost as if she had been expecting him.

  He had made three strides into the winepress when Sabine, in the gods, launched her missile, and the hook, too high to have touched Madame Ariane, hit him squarely in the middle of his forehead and toppled him like a toy soldier.

  Rahel maintained her watch. Neither she nor Sabine stirred, frozen by the shock of their success. The doors opened again. Rahel realised that in all their planning they had entirely discounted the other half of the couple. If they had hit Madame Ariane, the major would have been there immediately afterwards. They had in fact struck the major and Madame Ariane had arrived. She heard a movement in the loft, as though Sabine was startled by Madame Ariane’s appearance, as if she had not understood whom she had hit. The noise was abruptly stilled.

  Madame Ariane fell on her knees by the major’s head and a long ululating sob came out of her, like wind in trees. She passed one hand over his face, her fingertips pulling down his eyelids. She remained there, her head bowed, for several minutes. The all-seeing, hovering Rahel saw her reach out and pick up one of his hands and kiss it, without wondering why. Then Madame Ariane ran away.

  Sabine scrambled down the ladder.

  ‘It’s the major. We’ve killed the major.’ There was no doubt in their minds that he was dead. Madame Ariane had confirmed it for them.

  Suzie crawled out from her hiding place. The light from the stars was bright enough to see him clearly. The hook had hit him in the centre of his forehead and he had fallen straight back, his jaw sticking up, exposing his neck to the full. It was a warm night and he wore no shirt. His skin gleamed faintly in the moonlight, as if he had been sweating. Sabine walked around the major, her fist in her mouth. It was hard for Rahel to determine whether she was disappointed because it wasn’t Madame Ariane lying there, or worried at the thought of reprisals.

  Then Rahel saw Suzie standing opposite Sabine, with the body lying between them. The knife was in her hand, the knife with which she would not have struck the unconscious Madame Ariane. She was not making a mistake; she knew who lay there; and with one neat backhand stroke, like Monsieur Jouanel, she drew the blade down the side of the major’s neck. Sabine’s shriek coincided with the spray of blood that leaped from the slashed throat. Suzie stepped neatly aside, allowing the fountain to gush onto the rocky floor. Her dress was splashed nonetheless, as was Sabine’s, for, with some memory of her task at the pig-killing, Sabine ran over to the shelves, seized one of the enamel pans from the wall and shoved it below the major’s neck as his life gushed away.

  * * *

 
Suzie slithered down from the loft and stood under the hook, waiting for its swinging to slow to a halt. She could not make all the calculations that they had made last time, but she could tell by eye that it hung too low now. He was a smaller man than the major, about the same height as Madame Ariane. She would have to go and take in the rope by at least one turn. She climbed up the ladder again, like a dog, hands and feet pattering on the steps. She shortened the rope, descended once again to collect the hook and carried it back up to the loft with her. She installed herself in Sabine’s position, in line with the door, and made two practice throws. It was, she discovered, harder than it seemed. It was more a question of letting it drop, so that the weight did the work. After two more journeys up and down the ladder to retrieve the hook, she decided against any further trials. Fate would decide it, as it had before.

  She had said nothing to Sabine of what she planned. They had never mentioned the major’s death, even to one another, a silence reinforced by that of Micheline, Florence and Madame Ariane. She wondered whether Sabine would approve of what she was going to do, or whether she would resist, as she herself had tried to resist Sabine’s attack on Madame Ariane. But this was different, she told herself. Madame Ariane had been innocent, she had known it instinctively, but Monsieur Vernhes was guilty and the guilty should be punished.