It is an icy morning, and Marcel freezes. The year is almost up, and it is going out in the grip of a frost that has chilled the whole city. Marcel, dressed in his hospital rags and felt slippers for shoes, shakes with the cold. He is grateful when the heavy doors to the carriage are slid shut and the train begins to make its way.
Marcel knows the timetable. He has read it, long ago, and assuming it has not changed, then this train leaves Paris, Gare de Lyon at 7.43 and will pull into Dijon around lunchtime. There will be a change of engine and personnel and then the train will make its way to Lyon, Avignon and Marseille, where in all likelihood they will change trains again for the short journey to Toulon, arriving late in the evening. At least it will be warmer in the south, Marcel thinks, wondering if what the doctor said is really true, that they mean to kill him before the journey is done. He blinks in the darkness of the carriage, looking at his guards. He does not like the way they do not look at him, do not even acknowledge his existence. Are they truly going to kill him?
The train lurches and rolls as it makes its way forward and the whistle blows from time to time. After half an hour of this, there is a noticeable change, and the engine picks up speed.
They have reached the edge of the city.
There are only two stops on the journey, Marcel knows: Montereau and Auxerre. Two hours pass, though Marcel cannot keep accurate track of the time, before the first stop is made. He eyes the guards. Still they do not look at him.
He calls out to them; he feels suddenly frantic that if he can only make them speak to him, they cannot possibly kill him.
They ignore him, and now Marcel feels truly afraid. The men have their backs half turned to him, they huddle against the walls of the carriage, in silence, rocking with the motion of the train as it lurches into life again.
At Auxerre, an hour later, the pattern is repeated, and though Marcel calls out again, they still ignore him, letting his shouts disturb anyone on the platform outside the windowless carriage.
The train halts for only a few minutes, and then haltingly staggers into motion once more. Marcel peers through the darkness at the men who are going to kill him and is about to cry out when one of them turns and looks at him.
The man says nothing, and Marcel cannot read his face, no more than he can read any face. What does it mean, this look? What does it signify? Marcel has absolutely no idea.
The man stands, and Marcel scrabbles away as far as the chain around his feet will let him, but before another moment has passed Marcel sees that the man is merely stretching his legs, walking round in the small area that is even more confined than the space in which he is held.
As the train picks up speed again, the man sits down and mutters something to his companion, who does not answer. During the whole journey, Marcel realises, this second man has said not one word.
So they move on, and Marcel stares and stares. As another indeterminate space of time passes, he begins to notice that one of the men, the one who has occasionally muttered some comment or other, keeps checking his watch. He does it once, he does it again, very soon after, and then he checks it almost continually, or so it seems to Marcel, as if he is judging a moment. Marcel realises that that moment is the arrival of the train in Dijon.
It is then that Marcel’s fate is determined.
He cannot understand why, as the man who has been checking his watch slowly stands up, and as he pulls out his revolver, and as he lifts it to shoot Marcel dead, the second guard, standing behind him, brings the butt of his gun down on his head.
The first man falls to the floor, clutching his bleeding head, and his attacker kneels and lets three more blows fall on him with the revolver, until the body is at last motionless.
It makes no sense to Marcel, no sense at all.
The man now fishes in the dead guard’s pocket, and pulls out a bunch of keys, opening first the door to the cage, and then the shackles around Marcel’s feet.
He speaks. ‘You must help. There is little time.’
His voice is thick with Russian tones, and still none of it makes sense to Marcel, but he remembers the words from the dictionary that Morel gave him, months ago now. The attacker speaks French, clearly, but Marcel decides to speak to him in his own language.
‘You are Russian?’ he says.
The man is surprised, but he does not stop moving.
In Russian, he replies, ‘We do not have long. The train will be in the station soon. Help me.’
‘Help you?’ asks Marcel, but then he sees that the Russian is taking off the other guard’s clothes.
‘Get undressed,’ says the Russian. ‘Help me swap clothes.’
Marcel does as he is told. He strips naked and dresses in the other man’s clothes. As they begin to pull the hospital garments on to the dead man, Marcel realises he is not actually dead.
‘He’s alive,’ he whispers in Russian.
‘You want me to kill him?’ asks the Russian.
‘No. No!’ says Marcel. ‘I thought you had killed him.’
The train’s whistle blows.
‘Station,’ says the Russian, and then, hurriedly, he explains what they will say when the doors are opened and the next set of guards replace them. They lock the man’s ankles in the shackles, and he lolls against the floor as the train glides to a stop.
As the doors are opened from the outside, Marcel does as he is told. He speaks because the Russian has a noticeable accent when he says any more than a word. Marcel tells the new guards what he was told to say: that the prisoner tricked them, feigning illness, that he tried to escape, but they overpowered him again. He reminds the guards that Després is a convicted murderer, but that he has spent months in the asylum for lunatics in Paris. He may be delusional; he will try to claim that he is someone else, and that he has been tricked. They are to ignore this, and not to speak to him at all, or interact with him in any way, save to get him to Toulon and on to the prison ship.
Marcel and the Russian leave the station. Marcel still does not understand what has just happened, but the Russian seems reluctant to say much. He himself knows little about what he was asked to do. Working with the Police Municipale, he replaced an officer at the last moment, and though he had no idea why, did what he was told to do by his superiors. Of the deal that occurred the night before in an alleyway in Clichy, he knows nothing, and thus Marcel will never know how Cavard found he was facing up to three Okhrana men, not agents of Delorme’s.
There, in that alley, the deal was struck. Though Cavard knows that it may have been these same Okhrana men who helped Delorme, as Pontalis, to carry out his sting operation, they never intended for anyone actually to be killed. And one of their own was killed too. So, having eventually learned who Paul Pontalis became, they want Delorme taken down.
They were willing to help protect Cavard and his family. In return he offers to take that one single photo of his and distribute it throughout the police and to the press.
He does so. Within the week a scandal has erupted that sees Delorme resign from office before Christmas even arrives.
In the alley that night, for his help and silence, Cavard asks for something in return: to make one thing right. He cannot intervene in the legal process surrounding Marcel, not without too many awkward questions being asked, but the Okhrana are as ruthless and resourceful as any of Delorme’s cronies. Perhaps they can find a way out for Marcel . . . ?
The Russian tells Marcel to leave town on foot immediately, and become someone else. Marcel Després is on a train bound for the prison hulk in Toulon harbour, and it will be a long while before that mistake is uncovered and corrected, if at all. As it turns out, ‘Marcel’ dies upon the journey to the south from loss of blood due to his untended head wound.
Marcel himself, the real Marcel, has begun to change. On the surface, he remains the aimless wanderer through life, unable to recognise the same face twice, unable to lie, unable to forget a single thing that ever enters his head. But there are perhaps two
things that have been added to him.
The first is a sense of guilt. He alone knows that he truly wanted to kill Ondine that night, and that it matters little how much she provoked him and how much she tricked him into the act. He could have walked out of that room; instead, he picked up the gun and fired it five times into her. This guilt cannot be ignored; the horror of it eats at Marcel continually, even as he traipses across France without purpose or direction. Yet he starts to face it.
The second is more subtle, and yet ultimately more powerful. As the new world dawns, the one that Boissenot was so scared of, it’s apparent that the world has not ended. It simply goes on as it did before, with some people gone and others surviving. Marcel is a man with a remarkable mind. He survives. He soon spends the tidy sum of cash he found in the policeman’s wallet, but by then he has managed to get a job waiting tables in a café in an obscure little village. He makes the patron happy for a while, because Marcel makes a good waiter. He never forgets an order, and though sometimes he is a little cold to the regulars, as if he’s never seen them before, he gets the right thing to the right table every time, and he does it with humility.
From time to time he thinks about an oilskin packet underneath the floorboards of his old studio, and wonders if it is still there, and how he could get it back if so, and in his mind he counts the notes. Then he leaves it be. In his mind he closes the door to the apartment, and in his mind he walks down the stairs and heads into the Cour du Commerce. From time to time too he revisits Dr Morel, and the many conversations they had together. Being able to recall the exact content of any dialogue he’s ever engaged in, Marcel replays various discussions that the two of them had in the nearly six months they spent in each other’s lives.
There is, however, one conversation in particular that comes back to him often. The conversation took place on one of the visits the doctor made while Marcel was back in the station house of the 6th, waiting to be dispatched to Toulon or the afterlife. It is this conversation that starts the evolution of the second way in which Marcel is changing. On this particular occasion, Morel had not bothered asking how Marcel was, for that was plain to see, and the future was very bleak. Morel was in thoughtful mood, and he only said a little, but it’s something that Marcel has been pondering a lot as he waits on tables.
It’s this.
‘Do you know, Marcel . . .’ the doctor said. ‘You have taught me something. Through you, I have come to see that there is no such thing as truth. That all we ever really know is perception. I have been scared by that thought, but now I am not. It frees us from having to struggle towards this notion of truth, as if it were some god to be worshipped. I am grateful for that; it is something you have given me, and now I wish to give you something in return.
‘Do you know what memory is for? Have you, with your exceptional abilities, ever stopped to wonder what memory is for? Perhaps not. Most people, if you ask them, will tell you that memory is about the past – it is, after all, about remembering things that have happened. But that is not what memory is for. The ability to recall past events is a mere by-product of what memory does for us. It was given to us, by God, or nature, in order that we might be able to negotiate the future. It was given to us in order that we may learn, understand and build upon our previous achievements. That we might create language and civilisations. These are the things that animals cannot do, because their memory is not developed, as ours is, to be able to project the future. That is what memory is about: the future, not the past. The future. Think about that.’
Marcel does. The winter starts to pass, and as it does, Marcel dimly thinks about the future, and as he does so he becomes aware of this second way he has changed. One day, as the sun rises, he wakes up, and believes he knows what it is for sure. There is only one way to find out.
He takes a train ride, using the small savings he has managed to make waiting tables. Then he walks. He walks through the night. When he arrives at the road at the top of the village, the sun is starting to beat down upon the vines, which are wet with dew. Frost clings to the ground in patches though he knows it will be a hot day very soon.
He walks down to the village, taking a short cut through the sloping rows, marvelling at the tiny green pinheads that will be worth wine and gold by the time the summer is done, and as he walks, he is suddenly aware of someone walking in the row next to him.
He looks down and sees a pair of feet, bare and muddy, and the hem of white skirts flicking as she walks. At the end of the row, they step out and meet.
They stand at the edge of the vineyards, at the edge of the village, and neither of them speaks, she because she is so stunned that she has no idea what to say, and he because, although he thinks it is her, he wants to be sure before he speaks.
Eventually, he smiles.
‘Hello, Marcel,’ she says. ‘I thought it was you.’
It must be her. ‘Hello, Ginette.’
He looks at her feet, but he knows he has already commented on that, years ago, when they were both seventeen. Instead he says something else.
‘I went to the city for a while.’
Ginette laughs. ‘I know,’ she says, and smiles. ‘I know you did. And what was it like?’
Marcel thinks about it. ‘I didn’t like it.’
‘Have you come home then?’
Marcel looks at Ginette’s hands. What he felt has been added to him suddenly rushes up out of nowhere, almost making him gasp. It has taken him for ever to understand, but here, as they relive a scene from their young lives, Marcel finally understands what was trying to swim to him during his time in the cell in the 6th station house. That Ginette wanted to love him, yes, but more than that: that she was ready and willing to love him for who he is, the way he is, with all his strangenesses. Yet it is too late now. Marcel looks at her hands, and sees a wedding band on her finger.
She sees him looking and shifts on her feet awkwardly.
‘You got married?’ says Marcel, and he makes himself smile.
Ginette nods.
‘So did I,’ says Marcel, then quickly adds, ‘but I’m alone again. She . . . died.’
Ginette puts a hand on Marcel’s arm. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says, and then he sees she is smiling. He knows that is strange, that it is not something that people smile about.
‘I’m sorry,’ says Ginette. ‘It’s not that . . . It’s just that life is so strange. Don’t you think? Marcel, I got married, but my husband died too. Two years ago now. Two years . . .’
She stops. She’s still touching Marcel’s arm.
He puts his hand on hers as she says, ‘Don’t you think life is strange, Marcel? Don’t you think so?’
And he tells her that yes, he agrees, life is strange.
Also by Marcus Sedgwick
A Love Like Blood
‘Stylish, thrilling and fast.’ Sunday Mirror
If life has taught me one thing, it is this: that the worst monsters are entirely human.
It began in a hole in the ground, in Paris, in the days after the liberation. What I saw there I saw only for the time it takes a match to burn down, and yet it decided the rest of my life.
I tried to forget it at first, to ignore it, but I could not. It came back to me; he came back to me. He hurt people I loved... And so I took the first step on a journey from which there would be no return; a path that led me to fear, to hatred and to revenge – but, above all else, to blood.
Keep reading for an extract from A Love Like Blood
Sextantio, Italy
1968
Dogs are barking in the night.
He’s somewhere in the broken village on the hilltop opposite me. I can just make out the line of the rooftops against the dark sky.
The air is hot and I am tired, but that’s not why I’m waiting. Nor am I waiting to mark any moment of reflection either. Not even to honour Marian.
I’ve chased him for over twenty years, and across countless miles, and though often I was running, there ha
ve been many times when I could do nothing but sit and wait. Now I am only desperate for it to be finished.
I am acutely aware of every minute detail of the moment. The grime on my face and neck, the smell of the still-warm grass around me, the throb I still get sometimes from my ruined hand, the weight of the knife in my right pocket.
Many times, over the years, I was lost, alone, unsure how to proceed, not knowing where to turn next, but now I know, and I’m waiting for one thing only: for the right moment, so I can do what I’m going to do, unseen.
Despite my concentration on the few lights in the village, on the sounds around me, on what I will do, I cannot help but remember some of the journey.
This story begins a long time ago; twenty years ago at least; maybe more somehow, I see that now. Yet in another, fuller, sense, my story begins centuries, millennia ago, for this is a story that must go back to the moment when blood flowed from some ancestor of ours; hot, bright and red.
For me, however, it began in August of 1944, in Paris.
Still the dogs are barking.
One is near me, somewhere on the hillside, shut in a farmyard, but across the valley in the dark town a dozen or more answer it, barking till they’re sore, till they choke and splutter, and then start again. It ought to be disturbing, but it isn’t. Nothing can break my concentration now, nothing can spoil my waiting, destroy my patience.
I wonder what they’re barking at. At each other? Each being driven by the other into ever more frenetic howls and rages. I hear no voices, no shouts, no one seems to try to shut them up, and so they go on.
They bark frantically, not even in anger, but in wild desperation it seems, on and on, through the night.
ONE
Paris
August, 1944
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