One Green Bottle

by Curtis Bausse

  He also bought and sold on his own account. He knew when a profit could be made, and there were certain categories of items, such as coins or books or postcards, on which he was now an expert. He was hardly making a fortune, but between the two of them, they had more than enough to get by.

  Franck was his right-hand man. Not that bright but did what he was told. David had saved him from a certain life of prison.

  Compared to what he’d known in Beauvais, or the years as a petty criminal in Marseilles, David now had a life. A circle of friends, a job he could talk about, a wife who’d set up her own business, a daughter he adored.

  His problem was that he needed to feel calm. Not just a lack of pressure. Not relaxed or unhurried or undisturbed. Calm. Connected to the deep, infinite calm of which the universe was made.

  And for that, he needed to kill.

  ***

  The first time it happened was an accident. He sold a clock to a certain Denis Treboulay, who lived in the Périgord, an hour or so from Toulouse. The clock was nineteenth-century, its round face wedged into a delicate porcelain stand about eight centimetres high. He sold it for sixty-five euros, which he thought was cheap, given the craftsmanship of the hands and the fine enamel colours of the stand.

  Denis Treboulay complained. At that point David had been selling products for almost eighteen months and this was his first complaint. He took great care in his business, not just in the packaging and the speed with which he sent out the goods, but also in the descriptions he gave. Any slight blemish or crack was mentioned. He didn’t want anyone to think they’d been ripped off. Quick, meticulous and honest. He had to be. If you let your standards slip, you put your whole business at risk. Until Treboulay complained, he had 100 per cent positive feedback.

  Was it dishonest to omit to mention that the clock didn’t actually work? He hadn’t tried to give the impression that it did. You wouldn’t expect something that old, with such a fine, sophisticated mechanism, to be ticking as it did the day it was made. Not unless you were Denis Treboulay, that is.

  Misleading descriptions and lies! Avoid this seller at all costs!

  If you slashed a painting with a razor blade, you couldn’t do more damage than Treboulay did to David’s feelings. And the score. Zero. Round as a noose, with Treboulay pulling it taut. And David found it difficult to breathe.

  He had an appointment in Montauban. A collector interested in an eighteenth-century map of Asia Minor. He wasn’t prepared to buy it over the Internet. He wanted to see it. Deal or no deal, he offered to pay the expenses.

  It was only the following morning, with the map successfully sold, that David realised he wasn’t that far from Treboulay. He’d thought at first he might call on his brother, Cyril, who wasn’t that far away either. But Cyril, as always, would only manage to make him feel inferior. Only natural, really – what does a brilliant engineer with Airbus have to say to a small-time dealer on eBay?

  He had no plan other than to ask Treboulay why he’d been so unfair, get him to admit he’d overstepped the mark. These things happen, perhaps when you’ve had a glass too many, and something you at first found mildly irritating gets blown up out of proportion.

  Treboulay lived in a solid, well-kept manor that exuded wealth and tradition, one of those places that seemed unaffected by the passing of time. As he approached it up a tree-lined drive, David felt he was going back two centuries into the past.

  Treboulay himself was less well-kept than his house, opening the door in a jacket that was frayed at the elbows, but David saw straightaway that this was not a man accustomed to compromise.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I’m David Sollen. Solleno. I sold you the clock on eBay.’

  Treboulay took a moment to register. Then the eyes narrowed and he said again, ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I was passing by. If you have a minute, I thought we could talk it over.’

  ‘What’s there to talk about?’ demanded Treboulay. But then he turned and shuffled down the corridor. ‘I’ll show you what a clock is.’

  He led David into a drawing room filled with enough antiques to stock an entire shop. He opened a glass-fronted cabinet and took out two clocks similar to the one that David had sold. Except they were both, if anything, even more finely made. And both were gently ticking.

  He let David hold one for a few seconds before taking it back. ‘Second Empire, from Besançon. Pieces of art, these are. In perfect working order. I wind them up on a Sunday and at the end of the week they’re less than a minute out.’ He returned the clocks to the cabinet. ‘What you sold me was a piece of crap.’

  David knew that the clock he’d just been holding could fetch up to eight hundred euros, maybe more. ‘I sold you my clock for sixty-five euros.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You thought I was just some ignorant eBay trader who was flogging off a family treasure for peanuts. You were the one who was trying to rip me off.’

  Treboulay turned to him, a sneer of contempt curling his lip. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. You have no right to be in this business at all.’

  ‘I know what’s fair and what isn’t.’ David could hear the tremble of anger in his own voice, the fury that was close to breaking out. ‘I want an apology.’

  Treboulay drew his head back, eyes wide in astonishment. Then he let out a disdainful puff, waved a hand dismissively and muttered, ‘Get out.’ As if his visitor was a bothersome little boy, not even worth getting angry about.

  David pushed him. Not that hard, but enough for him to stumble backwards, trip over the coffee table and fall. The back of his head came down upon an iron firedog in the hearth. He lay still.

  David thought he was shamming. He prodded him and shook him, confident he would react. Then with a rush of horror, he realised Treboulay was dead.

  Most people, he had read, lose their self-control in a time of crisis: they flap or become hysterical or freeze up and do nothing. But a small minority click into analytical mode, rapidly run through the different options and choose the best course of action. On one level, yes, there was fear and panic and anguish. But none of these feelings managed to prevent David from remaining very calm as he quietly left the house, got into his car and drove away.

  Just as he emerged on to the road, a woman coming the other way turned up the drive towards the house. Within a matter of minutes, she would discover the body and call the police.

  What sort of description would she give? A young man in a grey Peugeot. All over France, young men in grey Peugeots took to the roads every day. What if she’d noted his number, though?

  And even if she hadn’t, the man he’d sold the map to had seen the car. When the police announced they were looking for a grey Peugeot, he was bound to make the connection.

  David considered turning back and confessing. When they came to arrest him, the fact that he’d tried to escape would only make matters worse. But he kept on driving, and when he got on to the motorway, it was a point of no return.

  He found it difficult at first to control his emotions. He’d be happily talking to Marion when for no obvious reason, the memory of what he’d done came back to him with a violence that was frightening. But Marion didn’t notice, or perhaps she thought he was simply a little preoccupied by his business. Then he read that the police were appealing for witnesses who had seen a blue car, possibly a Ford, and it made him laugh out loud.

  He developed a strong affection for the grey, unassuming Peugeot that had done so much to protect him. A proper little cloak of invisibility.

  But it wasn’t for another couple of months that he started to fantasise about killing someone again.

  ***

  Dorothy Fourlin was of course a very different proposition from Treboulay. Killing a man in the heat of an argument was one thing, planning a murder months in advance quite another.

  All the same, though, when you come to think of it, they both only got what they deserved. Because one thing Da
vid hated was being criticised. And pleasant as Dorothy Fourlin seemed to be, she called him a sicko.

  He couldn’t let her get away with that.

  It took him a long time, though, to reach that point. At first, when the killing of Treboulay began to take on new forms, no longer a memory of what had actually happened but a scenario, embellished with variations, of what might happen again, he tried to expel it from his mind. But then he thought it was probably normal, a phase you had to go through after a traumatic event. So he let the fantasy grow, telling himself that as long as it stayed in his mind, it was harmless, and eventually it would lose its appeal and fade away. But that didn’t happen: far from fading, it became ever richer and clearer, till finally, implacably, it crossed some ill-defined line and became a plan of action.

  It was never too late to turn back, of course. It wasn’t because he’d gone from imagining to planning that he would murder someone for real. But he began to carry out the plans all the same, and the thrill he got from that was something he’d never before experienced in his life.

  He bought a new laptop and set up an email account. In the garage, part of a job lot acquired from a dealer in Valence, was a collection of audio books, which he split into batches of ten and put up for sale on Ventastica. One of the books being The Hobbit, he adopted the pseudonym Bilbo. The name and address he supplied to Ventastica were false, as was the telephone number, which belonged to no one. Anyone wanting to buy the books – a bargain at five euros a set – could only communicate by email. He used the computer for no other purpose and only in places where free public Wi-Fi was available.

  To the buyers he suggested that they slip a five-euro note into an envelope and send it to him after receiving the box of CDs. On Google Earth he zoomed in on their addresses. Apart from Dorothy Fourlin, who lived in a secluded mansion in the village of Tranac in Brittany, another possible candidate, he thought, was a woman in Gif-sur-Yvette, a suburb to the south of Paris. He wrote to both, saying he was currently away but would send them the books as soon as he got back.

  He told Marion he was going to see a dealer in Lille. Lying to her was strange, but once he was on the train, the unpleasantness of it faded. He had, after all, been lying to her by omission ever since killing Treboulay. He realised now that he was two different people: the real David Sollen, the loving husband and father, had made a space in which an alien presence was starting to feel at home.

  He could still get rid of it. He could go to Marion and tell her the truth and she would forgive him. Manslaughter. It could happen to anyone. He knew she loved him enough to understand that. And even as he alighted in Gif-sur-Yvette, he said to himself that he still hadn’t crossed the point where to ask for her forgiveness would be impossible.

  The street where the woman lived was quiet enough. But he was surprised when a girl came out of the house with a baby in a pushchair and another young child in tow. He followed them to a nearby park, where he struck up a conversation. The girl, from the Netherlands, was friendly and pretty, and if David hadn’t been married himself, he might have tried to get to know her better. But having learnt that she was a live-in au pair, he chatted a few minutes more before wishing her a pleasant stay and moving on.

  If anything, Fourlin’s house was even more imposing than Treboulay’s, though somewhat closer to the road. Her husband, he’d read, was a Senator, which suited David fine. He took no interest in politics but he knew that Senators were paid a fortune for doing nothing, so it wasn’t as if a Senator’s wife would be any loss to the world.

  It was almost midday when he got there, having stayed overnight in Rennes, where he hired a car. As he approached the house, he saw a woman and a man talking outside. The man was standing by a pick-up. Trotting about the yard were two Labradors. David pulled up, surveyed the scene for a couple of minutes and turned round. Dogs could be an even greater obstacle than an au pair with two young children.

  He went into Tranac to eat. He had finished his sandwich and gone to the bar to pay when the pick-up driver came in. David ordered a coffee. He waited for the man to start eating before going over to his table. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but I think I spotted you up at the Fourlins’ house just now.’

  The man looked up, surprised. He nodded. ‘I help with their garden. Why?’

  ‘I’m doing some research for a little book I’m writing. Ghost stories,’ he added with a self-deprecating chuckle. ‘I was told that house was haunted but maybe I got the wrong one.’

  The man laughed. ‘Not as far as I know,’ he said.

  ‘Do you mind if I sit?’ said David.

  ***

  The act itself was unpleasant. When, a few months after calling him a sicko, Dorothy Fourlin sat in an armchair, cooing with pleasure at the replacement set of audio books, and David went round to the back of the chair, slipped the wire round her neck and pulled, he felt a shudder of distaste. It was at least brief, though, his own part restricted to a single jerk of the arm, as sharp and hard as the tug on a lawnmower cord.

  Fourlin herself took rather longer to die. Her breath came in hisses and gurgles and her eyes, staring up at him, were wide and intense and surprised. Then her head slumped to one side and her breathing stopped and perhaps it was only useless messages that her brain continued to send, causing her fingers to twitch, and a couple of times – he could swear he heard it – her vocal cords to vibrate. Two little moans, of contentment really, like someone nodding off to sleep.

  But already by then, David was just an observer, his physical involvement barely remembered as, with a mixture of fascination and awe, he watched the Englishwoman die.

  This was new territory for him. From here on, everything would be different. He’d wanted to know if he could do it, and now he had the answer. As he stood there gazing at the body, his sense of achievement became a rush of elation and for a moment he had to grip the armchair to steady himself.

  He closed his eyes. He was standing in a beam of light, an actor moved to tears as he acknowledged a standing ovation, the rapturous applause of a host of angels dancing all around.

  Eyes still closed, he raised his head and in the beam of light, he felt the warmth of God bathe his face.

  How long did it last? He had no idea. When he looked at his watch, he saw that only a moment had passed, but it felt as if he’d visited eternity.

  He hadn’t expected euphoria. On the contrary, he’d assumed he would have to battle with guilt and disgust. Yes, he’d been giddy with excitement during the months leading up to it, rehearsing it all in his mind, but that was because it was still nothing more than a plan. He hadn’t projected much beyond that because he found it too hard to imagine, but once it was actually done, and that brief tug had turned him into a murderer, he supposed it would be like stepping into a nightmare.

  But what he had done in fact was prove to himself that he had what it takes – the sheer guts that set him apart, made him superior, brought him in touch with something close to the very heart of creation. Because giving a life is easy. Perhaps not all men could – thanks to Marion – father a child as sweet and pretty as Elodie, but thousands of lives were created every minute. Taking a life away though – who had the might to do that?

  With a slight grimace of squeamishness, David carefully removed the wire from the woman’s neck and put it into a plastic bag which he slipped into his pocket. He stepped round the chair to face the chimney. He put another log on the fire and watched as a blaze of sparks rose up. Without raising their heads, the two dozing Labradors wagged their tails in unison. David found the gentle thud of their tails on the carpet a very comforting sound.

  He took a quick look round the lavishly furnished house. Up in the bedroom, he found a couple of antique brooches, one with jade, the other with rubies, and a pair of silver candlesticks. He tipped them into a nylon bag which he stuffed into his rucksack. On his way downstairs, next to a vase in an alcove, he spotted some Chinese figurines which, if he wasn’t mistaken, would fetch a
tidy sum. They went into the rucksack too.

  Then he stepped out of the house into the chill of the mid-October evening. By the dim interior light of the car he’d hired in Nantes, he changed into a new set of clothes. A few minutes later he was out on the road, having disappeared from Dorothy Fourlin’s house as silently and invisibly as he’d arrived.

  It was bad of course, he was well aware of that. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have a conscience or couldn’t grasp the concept of right and wrong. What he had done was deeply, dreadfully wicked, and somewhere inside he did indeed detect the guilt and disgust he’d expected. But they thrashed about ineffectually, like insects drowning in a puddle, unable to compete with the exultation of going where no one else dares.

  After he’d driven for an hour or so, and before getting on the N12, he drove up a side road and removed the tape from the number plates. He put the crumpled tape with the clothes, then stood by the car gazing up at the sky. It was a cloudless, starry night and he drank the cold air till he was cleansed and innocent.