“I think it needs to be done.”
“But, now . . . with everything else that’s going on? I’m sorry but I really think—” I was dumbfounded by her insensitivity.
“No,” said Sabine. “It might be to do with what’s been found and why the police are at your house. You’re not letting yourself understand what I’m telling you.”
A pause.
“Dominic knows,” said Sabine. “And I’m doing my best to help you.”
It was the way she said it, the curious emphasis that made it clear she intended more meaning than was explicit. That was the crossing of the line, the tacit acknowledgment that we both knew something was wrong.
I inserted the flash drive into my laptop and downloaded the files.
Most were dated October 2008. That squared with what Sabine told me, that Rachel gave it to her for safekeeping at the end of that month. As I worked my way through the list, one title sprang out: LUMIÈRES—MISSING GIRL.
I clicked it open with trembling hands.
It’s 8 A.M. The dust and gravel village square at Lumières howls and seems exposed now the bus has left.
On the autoroute north from Marseille the overhead warning signs were flashing, ever more bossily: AVERTISSEMENT: VENT VIOLENT. WARNING: STRONG WIND.
“Soyez prudent,” warns the woman in the bakery where I buy myself breakfast. Outside trees are bending and loose leaves ride on air down the sloping street. The wind is getting higher.
I have every intention of being careful, not only when I am out in the mistral, but when I’m asking the questions I have come to ask in the places I have come to find.
For this is where the girl set off, the last time she went home.
Her face is on the poster in the bakery window. Another is on a plane tree where the bus pulled in, though how long it will be before some powerful gust pulls it free is anyone’s guess. It is already tattered.
Missing for more than a month now.
Lumières is not even a proper village. It is a kind of anteroom to the much larger Goult just up the hill.
The girl’s name is Marine Gavet. She is a student, nineteen years old. This is her family home, where she grew up with an engineer father and a mother who is a part-time secretary. In the picture on the posters she is smiling and pretty, but sensible and serious-looking as well. Her face has become familiar throughout this northwestern corner of Provence, gazing out from posters tacked up in cafés and shops and on lampposts, trees, bus stops.
She had been visiting a boyfriend, though she had reportedly ended the relationship the day before her disappearance. It had ended badly. So badly that the young man, Christophe LeBrun, became the prime suspect despite his protestations of innocence and fury at the waste of police time when they could have been finding her.
The last confirmed sighting of Marine Gavet was at the bus stop in the square, boarding the bus for Apt, about sixteen kilometers east along the N100, the main route between Avignon and Forcalquier. Christophe had last seen her at 11.30 P.M. the previous night when she walked out of a party in Bonnieux. Other guests saw and heard the argument, and gave statements to the effect that he remained at the party, drinking steadily for a further two hours.
She was due back at university for the start of her second year ten days ago. She was popular and hardworking. Not the sort of girl to take off without telling her family and friends.
Hope is still strong, of course, that she will not be found dead, as so many are in such circumstances. What is the best outcome when this happens? Before it happens to you, it’s tempting to think that perhaps it is better not to know, and to go on in the hope she is alive and happy in the new life that has overwritten the one she was supposed to live. But according to the family, what they are seeking, every day, is certainty and closure.
Not far from Lumières, on the road to Avignon, is the castle at Lacoste that once belonged to the Marquis de Sade. Already notorious when the Marquis arrived to claim it, it was the scene of the rape, torture, and murder of three hundred members of the heretical sect of the Vaudois. From his prison cell in later years, the Marquis made it the setting for the literary flowering of his own notoriety in Justine and One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom. These days, it is owned by the veteran designer Pierre Cardin and is the centerpiece of a summer music festival.
That does not mean that a dark underbelly no longer exists in this glorious countryside. Of course it does, no less than in other places of beauty.
In Avignon, high summer has gone, and with it the troupes of festival players, the gilded steam-driven fairground ride and the bunting flags, the music and indulgence in the warm evening air. Soon the plane trees lining the boulevards will point gnarled witches’ fingers up into the blackness above the city.
Homeless North Africans are already huddled in dark doorways, shivering like the litter that stirs in the wind, features flattened by sodium lighting from the windows of Galeries Lafayette. The shop dummies, too, are harbingers of winter, blank-faced in their jackets trimmed with fake fur.
Marine had a week to go before she was meant to be traveling to Avignon, with a ticket booked to Lyon, heading back to university. That should have been her route.
Instead she was seen—for the last time by a witness who was prepared to come forward and give a statement—climbing into a bus bound east, not west.
According to the police, the last person officially to see her was Mme. Christiane Rascas, the baker’s wife who has just sold me my croissant and warned me about the wind.
“Soyez vraiment prudente,” she tells me again when I tell her I intend to walk up to Goult. “Be really careful.”
I’m not sure whether it is just the wind she means.
Chapter 8
He had traveled from Sault to Coustellet, and then on down the valley, calling at all the hill villages until he reached us. He had walked and taken rides on farm carts all around the area, and once he had delivered a secondhand bicycle from Roussillon to Saint-Saturnin at the request of the buyer, which proved useful for everyone, as he had work waiting at the other end. Now, if only he could get word out somehow that he was reliable and available for transport deliveries, that would suit him very well as an itinerant worker, he said wistfully.
He was a nice-looking boy—young man, rather. An air of innocence and idealism made him seem younger than he was. That was what drew us to him. Dark hair; eyes that glistened like black olives in oil and held our gaze reassuringly as we spoke; arms muscled like tree branches, testament to the drive with which he worked; a gentle manner. We couldn’t have dreamed up such a paragon.
When he had finished patching the roof, taking some trouble to match the old tiles from the stacks in the undercroft, he insisted on holding the ladder while I climbed up over the edge to check his work. “There are some who would do a botched job thinking that two women would never know,” he said.
The work was done well, I was relieved to report to Maman. “The tiles he’s replaced are on firmly—I prodded them hard with a stick—and you can’t even tell where the hole used to be!”
André smiled. “What else can I do for you? If you let me stay here tonight, there’ll be no charge for the first job tomorrow.”
He joined us at the kitchen table for a chickpea stew and a little cheese, and ate with relish what we could offer. I had the feeling he hadn’t eaten much except for what he had foraged from the hedges and orchards for many days. In return for supper, he stacked a good pile of logs in the wood store.
That night he slept in the old Poidevin cottage. We made him up a bed in the room where Arielle and I used to share secrets.
For the next few weeks, we developed a routine. When he had finished one job, André always asked what his next would be. “We can’t pay you much, but we can offer you a little food and wine, and somewhere to sleep,” Maman would say.
“I accept your terms,” he’d reply.
It was unsaid, but we knew he was very grateful.
/> There was nobility about him. To me, as I came to know him, André was like one of those universal figures of Provençal folklore: the shepherd, the farmer and his hired hands, the priest, the mayor, the knife-grinder, the miller, the troubadour, the baker. He was hewn from the long history of the struggle to survive in isolated homesteads, across the barren hills and plateaus, in the perched upland villages.
Chapter 9
Marine Gavet was the first girl to go missing. Why had Rachel chosen to write about her? I would have to go down to Apt and check at the Internet café, but I was sure that at the time Rachel was writing this, none of the other girls had yet disappeared.
I stared blankly at my laptop screen. This was Rachel’s second article about a person who was absent, missing. First, there was the interview with Francis Tully, in which he justified his nonappearance at his own prestigious retrospective exhibition; the visual tricks he played with in his work. Or was I straining to find connections where none existed?
The other files on the flash drive were all titled LINCEL. I only looked briefly to check, but they concerned Marthe Lincel, her work as a perfumer and her blindness.
Marine Gavet. Francis Tully. Marthe Lincel. There was no connection, unless I thought of Rachel herself, who seemed to have vanished into the ether. Disappearance in the abstract. Different kinds of disappearance. Various kinds of silence.
Rachel herself. Was this a theme; was it coincidence—or a prefiguring of her own situation?
I had no idea.
I would have liked to relay all this to Dom, to show him her research, but how could I? Doing so would have meant admitting I had been fretting about Rachel and talking about her with Sabine. Even though the atmosphere seemed calm on the surface these days, he could still be distant and quick to anger. The waiting while the police completed their work was unbearable. We both felt it. But Dom seemed determined we should suffer it separately.
It was that distance between us that unsettled me. No matter how I tried to tell myself I was overreacting, I could not shake off the sense that Dom had not been completely honest with me.
When I did go into the music room with two mugs of coffee, he gave me an odd look before he spoke.
“Was that you, earlier?”
“Me what?”
“Singing.”
“No.”
A pause.
“What kind of singing?”
“Just . . . nothing. Forget it.”
It might have been the trees, I suggested. Perhaps it was.
But he had already cut me off, waved me away, and I was adrift from him again. I went outside and listened closely, but heard nothing.
That afternoon, Severan announced that forensic analysis of the bones confirmed they were the remains of a woman aged around fifty.
“And you still cannot tell me who she was, the woman I saw hanging around the site?” he asked.
I could not.
It was hard to tell whether he believed me.
Chapter 10
One evening, as I sat sewing, a thin strain of flute music drifted into my consciousness. Haunting, melancholic notes on the air, floating up from the lower terraces like the accompaniment to some forest god of the ancient world. The musician was André.
That night, it began; as the notes insinuated themselves into my senses, so did my thoughts of him. I began to be more and more aware of his handsome face, his strong arms. Innocent as I was, I felt scorched by the warmth of his flesh in the merest brush of our fingers as I handed him a glass of water, or a cup of hot chicory, or passed him a plate.
I realized after a while that I always knew where he was on the land, no matter whether that was in the woods above, bringing down stones for a wall in our brute of a tin wheelbarrow, or filling the cracks in the plaster that appeared like old enemies at the end of each dry season.
In the absence of Pierre, it was not long before Maman began to treat André as an adopted son. She gave him her lovely smiles and washed his shirts and trousers, and patched them, taking great care to match the fabric, even asking our neighbors if they had scraps that were more appropriate than ours.
He took a shower in the alley, which made me feel strange, just thinking of him without his clothes.
In the dull glow of the oil lamps on the dinner table outside, I watched surreptitiously as the shadows contoured his smooth skin, the way he drank his wine, held his fork, the movements of his mouth. The textures and tastes of the food on our plates, the flicker of a candle in a jar to catch the insects, the rustle of the vine above, the splash of water poured into a thick glass and transformed into amber as it caught the light: all seemed larger, fuller, more worthy of attention than before.
One evening, he caught me looking, and smiled.
The next, he caught my hand as Maman turned away with the dishes and I noticed his shirt was torn, from a thorn perhaps. I must have been unable to look into his eyes, too shy.
His hand was large and warm, and overwhelmed mine. I could hardly believe that what I felt, the pressure on my palm and fingers, was really happening.
“You have a tear in your shirt.”
The words were out before I knew it. They hung, stupidly, over us, over his warm touch.
But he laughed lightly, easily. “Would you mend it for me?”
So, not much later, after Maman had turned in for an early night, I collected a needle and thread. Back at the table, I drew the oil lamp closer, so I would be able to see my stitches, and André slipped his shirt off.
“No one can see us,” he said.
Tracing the line of my face with his fingers, he drew me toward him. We paused, exchanging warm breath. I knew what he wanted, and I was scared. But this time, I wanted it, too.
From the first touch of his lips on mine, the warmth and softness of him, I was changed. For the first time in my life, I loved the darkness. I embraced the black, as we kissed, and I lost myself in the smell and the taste and the feel of him.
Chapter 11
Outside the kitchen door was an odd clicking noise, irregular. At first, I dismissed it as one of the strange little rodents in the roof, but the sound was insistent. After a while, I got up and went out. At my feet was a sweet-faced black kitten chasing a walnut.
“Where do you come from?”
The kitten paused, looking into space, then flopped over onto its side and pushed the nut around with its back feet.
When it was still there an hour later, I put down a saucer of milk, but it didn’t drink any.
Beyond the courtyard, the pool site still swarmed. Despite the announcement, there seemed no letup in the frenzied activity down there, with cars arriving regularly. Some brought journalists, who barged their way into the main house to ask their questions. I let Dom tell them, in his most terrible French, that we couldn’t help them, that they should ask the police.
We just wanted this to be over. For the builders to fill all the holes in the walls and give the place a renewed solidity, to finish the pool. We wanted to plant our garden and light our candles and play our music and be left alone.
People did disappear.
That was what was absorbing me, as we waited. Dom retreated more and more often into his own thoughts as well as his music. Perhaps the problem for both of us was that our dreamy preoccupations had left us badly prepared for the real world.
People did stop working, or rather, they stopped what they were doing before, for all sorts of reasons. Why, hadn’t I done exactly that myself? People left failed marriages every day. Had Rachel simply met someone else, and Dom’s pride was still too wounded to admit it? How I wished it might be that simple.
Rachel’s piece on the flash drive about Marine Gavet seemed unfinished. I came back to that notion again and again. Had it ever appeared in finished form in a newspaper, and if so, when?
I needed to know.
It occurred to me that the library in Apt might have Internet access. I was about to go looking for Severan, to let him know I
was driving into town, when his heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs. He stood in the open doorway, filling the space, head nearly touching the lintel.
“Where is M. Ross?”
“Dom . . . he’s in the music room, I think.”
“I just looked there.”
“I’ll go and find him.”
“Stay here. Don’t you go anywhere.” It was a command.
He went off again, shouting for one of his officers.
I sat down, feeling sick to my stomach. I should have left sooner. Not for the first time, I cursed our isolation.
Dom was sullen as he preceded Severan into the kitchen, giving me only the quickest of glances.
Severan waited until we were both standing in front of him. “We have now found the remains of a second body. It was a few meters away from the first. I can tell you it is the body of another woman.”
Chapter 12
It was an old-fashioned lantern, with a frame of wrought iron that held four glass panes, and a lovely curlicue on the top, and another that held the catch to open it to light the candle. The kind of lantern that had been used for a hundred years, perhaps by a night watchman dangling it by its loop on a hook at the end of a pole.
André was still lodging in the old Poidevin cottage, and said he found it in a cellar there. Wherever it came from, the lantern became our signal: I want you. I’m waiting for you. You are not alone in the dark.
Of course, a secret code was hardly necessary. Maman must have known what was going on; most likely, she was actively encouraging us. But it was the romantic gesture that we found so appealing. He would take it from a stony shelf behind the lilac in the courtyard, and place it, lighted, on the path. Then, playing the game, I would slip in through the dark alleyway when the coast was clear.
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