One Green Bottle

by Curtis Bausse

  It wasn’t just Franck, though. It was the whole world. There were times when he walked through the streets of Orange and he wanted them to be empty of life altogether. He wished he had a phial he could drop on the pavement and it would release a deadly virus that would spread all over the planet. Then he’d be able to start again and make everything better.

  But although he fantasised about making the whole world pure, in reality he had to start with Magali Rousseau.

  ***

  David was parked a couple of hundred yards from the private detective’s house. He wasn’t in any hurry. He had no particular plans. Eventually she would emerge and then he might follow her, start to get an idea of her routine.

  Or he might walk round the outside of the house and make a note of the doors and windows, which way they faced, how well shut they were.

  He’d sent her a book from which he’d removed a single page. He’d done it very carefully, using a ruler and a razor blade and a piece of cardboard inserted behind the page to make sure he didn’t cut through more than one. You probably wouldn’t notice unless you were actually reading that particular chapter. Or unless you were a detective who knew what to look for.

  Either way, she was bound to wonder why she was getting a book she hadn’t ordered. But he didn’t think she’d realise it was simply a variation. The rules were evolving. Or perhaps there weren’t any rules any more. It was just that before he killed her, he wanted to play with her a bit.

  She hadn’t answered his email. He’d sent her a message asking her to evaluate her purchase. He wondered if she’d realised who was behind it. She had no other clues than the name Madame Book and a message that could be traced to a young woman who’d been visiting the Popes’ Palace in Avignon. A nice young woman who’d listened to David’s explanations and gladly lent him her phone when he said his needed recharging.

  If she was smart, though, Rousseau would cotton on, and she’d look through the book till she saw that it was damaged. And she’d know that far from hunting him, she was the one being hunted.

  She hadn’t complained, but not answering his email was very impolite.

  He’d sent a second email that morning from an Internet café in Marseilles, before driving out to Sentabour in a little white Citroën borrowed from a friend. The house was easy to find. He’d already looked on Google Earth and noted with satisfaction that it was set a small distance away from the road. Not as isolated as he would have liked but not in a housing estate either. In the half-hour he’d been waiting he’d not seen more than a dozen people walk by.

  There was a detail that intrigued him. Driving past the house, he’d seen a plaque, partly obscured by vegetation, on the pillar by the entrance. He parked and went to look at it. Magali Rousseau, apparently, was not a detective at all but a psychotherapist.

  Had he got the wrong Rousseau? It was definitely the address he’d been given by Perle’s mother. Perhaps she’d made a mistake herself, looked up the wrong name in her list.

  In a sense it was of no importance. This was just the preliminary footwork after all. But it bothered him all the same to be going after someone he hadn’t the slightest reason to resent.

  Fifty minutes into his vigil he saw the front door open and a man came out. He got a fleeting glimpse of a woman behind. Then the man slammed the door and strode down the path.

  After a moment’s hesitation, David got out of the car and followed. He noticed that the man’s movements were erratic. His fingers were twitching and occasionally he would beat the air as if swatting away a fly. Several times he stopped and stood with hands on hips, staring at the ground. The first time he did it, David thought there must be something that had caught the man’s attention but when he came to the spot himself he saw nothing. After a while he concluded that the man was not Magali Rousseau’s husband but her patient.

  The man came to a bench. He sat, arms folded, his head bent forward like someone asleep. David drew level, pretending to look at the shops over the road as he trod on the man’s foot. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, reaching out an arm in appeasement.

  The man snarled. It started as a snarl of fury before fading away to a mutter. ‘Are you all right?’ said David.

  The man glanced up at him, said nothing, and looked back at the ground. He was playing with a piece of string.

  ‘Hey! I’m speaking to you,’ said David. ‘I trod on your foot. I apologised.’

  The man considered this for a moment. ‘It’s not you. It’s nothing to do with you.’

  ‘It’s her?’ David sat on the bench next to him. ‘Something that happened with the therapist?’

  The man turned to look at him, surprised. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Just guessing.’ David gave him a reassuring smile. ‘I was thinking I might call on her myself. Could she help me, do you think?’

  In an odd sort of way, he meant it. He’d tell her about a story he’d read at school about two brothers, Pierre and Jean, by Maupassant. Jean inherits a fortune from an old family friend while Pierre gets nothing, and eventually Pierre discovers that the family friend was Jean’s father. David was nothing like Jean but he became convinced that in some eerie way the story foretold his own situation. It made sense. Why was his father always criticising him? Because he wasn’t his father. David ended up confronting his mother but she laughed it off and told him not to be silly.

  ‘She doesn’t care,’ said the man. ‘She just pretends to. She fixes appointments, doesn’t keep them. Too busy.’

  He dropped the piece of string. David picked it up and held it out to him, but he’d already taken another piece from his pocket.

  ‘That’s bad. I don’t want someone who does that. But she must be all right if she’s busy. A lot of people coming and going, are there?’

  ‘No. Never seen anyone else.’ The man pulled back his lips in a curious grimace. ‘She’s busy looking for murderers.’

  David drew in his breath. ‘Someone else told me that too. So it’s right? She’s a detective?’

  ‘Always off somewhere or other. Helping the cops. Takes precedence, doesn’t it, a murder?’

  ‘She’s quite an expert then, is she? Any idea where she goes? Where she’s been?’

  ‘Oh, she doesn’t tell me. All over, I’d say. There was one near Royan, she told me that. Others too, I don’t doubt.’

  David jumped involuntarily at the name of Royan. A wave of fear spread out from somewhere deep inside him. But mixed with the fear was a surge of excitement: the game was changing, the danger reaching new levels. Rousseau and Maestro, each one stalking the other. And there could only be one winner.

  ‘Well, I don’t know if this woman can help me if her real job is detective. Mine are the sort of problems only a very committed therapist could deal with.’ David smiled slowly to himself. ‘Look, why don’t I take you for a coffee?’

  ***

  A couple of hours later, he was parked a short distance away from where Magali Rousseau’s son, Luc, lived with his wife, Sophie. Luc was some sort of IT expert, Sophie was a sculptress. One of her creations was outside the Sentabour post office. After saying goodbye to Paul Daveney, David went to look at it. The sculpture was of a young boy and girl, facing each other with their arms outstretched, their fingertips holding a globe.

  Paul had told him that Sophie visited her mother-in-law regularly. They talked about art, because Rousseau was not just a therapist and a detective, she painted pictures too. And she worked part-time in the supermarket and had a friend, Antoine Pessini, her lover in fact, or at least the man she went walking with.

  That was all very interesting. But Paul didn’t know the answer to the question that, more than any other, kept pounding through David’s mind. What did she find out in Royan?

  Somehow she must have made a link between Enzo Perle and the Terrals. But how? And had she also connected him to the others?

  Therapist, artist, supermarket cashier – it wasn’t at all the idea he had of a normal private
detective. But all the same, he began to form an image of Magali Rousseau as a woman of formidable intelligence who was slowly and methodically tracking him down.

  According to Paul, there used to be two plaques by her gate, therapist and detective, but she’d taken the detective one down. There was only one explanation for that: she had no need to advertise her services. The police called her whenever they needed the experience of someone who knows, better than anyone else, what goes on in the mind of a serial killer.

  But if that was the case, why had Perle’s mother said the police had already found the culprit?

  All these questions swirled around till David began to get a headache. And none of them found an answer.

  He took out his phone and after briefly looking at the latest photos of Marion and Elodie, he checked his emails. Rousseau had offered to send the book back. She didn’t mention the missing page.

  He concentrated on watching the young couple’s house. After a while the front door opened and they walked towards their car. As they reached it, an unmistakable gesture occurred: Sophie took Luc’s hand and placed it on her belly.

  David was reminded of his surprise when he’d seen that Lucie Terral was pregnant. He remembered how, before he killed her, he had hesitated for a fraction of a second as the image of Elodie as a baby flashed before his eyes. But the opportunity to get three in one go was not to be passed up.

  And now it seemed that the opportunity was being given to him again.

  The young couple formed such a pretty pair that they might have been posing for a photograph. And neither of them noticed David raise his telephone to take one.

  He waited for them to get in the car and drive off. Then he set his own car in motion and headed in the opposite direction.

  ***

  At ten the next morning David was at his observation post outside Rousseau’s house. The Citroën was parked on an adjoining road, further away than the previous day but still affording him a decent view of the house.

  Shortly before eleven, the postman rode up on his moped, delved into his bag and pushed a couple of envelopes into Rousseau’s letterbox.

  Half an hour later, Rousseau came out and opened the box. She glanced at the envelopes and then unfolded the paper which David had put in her box the evening before.

  She froze. She stared at the picture for a while, then looked all around her, hurriedly, worriedly, as if she knew that someone was watching her.

  David raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes. It was the first time he had seen the detective’s face. He had imagined someone sterner. To look at her, you would never guess that behind the soft, pretty face lay a mind so deadly and determined.

  He was barely able to suppress a giggle. For all the determination, that face was now showing signs of panic.

  Rousseau scuttled back into the house and shut the door.

  David sighed with satisfaction. He didn’t yet know how the end game would play out but so far he was on top. She didn’t know who he was but she was desperate to find out. Desperate to pry into every tiny detail of his life. And that was not to be tolerated.

  It wasn’t long before she came out again, this time wearing a jacket against the cold. She walked at a brisk pace towards the centre of the town, passing within a few yards of David’s car. As she drew level, he looked down at the SatNav in his lap. But he needn’t even have taken that precaution – she looked to neither right nor left but walked with the steady resolve of someone fired by anger.

  When people are angry, though, they make mistakes. How was she ever going to catch him if she got angry? He waited for her to disappear from view and got out of the car. She was going to be angrier still when she got back.

  He walked towards the house, one hand in his pocket, the other steadying a linen shoulder bag. He was wearing a baseball cap, gloves and a pair of size forty-five trainers. He walked slowly, head bent forward, eyes fixed on the ground in front of him. Invisible.

  Only when he reached the house did he raise his eyes, seeing all around him now without being seen himself.

  The front door was visible from the road so he went round the back. There was another entrance with a dustbin, a cat’s dish and a couple of flowerpots beside it. He tried the handle but the door was locked. He looked under a flowerpot on the off-chance he’d find the key but there was none. No matter – there to his right was a garden shed, hidden from view of the neighbouring house by a hedge. The perfect spot.

  He reached into the bag and withdrew the two spray paint cans he had bought in Marseilles, one black, one red. It took him less than a minute to complete the job he had come for.

  In the evening he would be back in Orange, where he’d lie low for a while, waiting to see what happened. If Rousseau was as clever as he suspected, she’d soon figure everything out. And then? The police would come knocking at his door when he was at home with Marion and Elodie.

  That was his only way out now – to be caught. It was what he dreaded and what he wanted and it kept him awake at night, trying to think of something else, a time when his life was simple. But he couldn’t stop imagining the horror in Marion’s eyes, the bewilderment and devastation in Elodie’s. And nor could he avoid the suffocation that came with it.

  But there wasn’t any way that Rousseau could be that smart. The only clue he’d left each time was his intricate, indecipherable signature, a damaged item bought months before on the Internet. Was she clever enough to have stumbled on to that? Impossible.

  He put the spray cans back in his bag and stood admiring his work: LUC in big black letters and a red cross drawn over the name.

  Going after Rousseau, planting the seeds of panic in her mind, took him back to that first, dizzy excitement when he set out to kill Fourlin. The sublime extra twist of announcing his intention beforehand resurrected a thrill he’d thought was gone for ever. Except this time, it carried with it a lacerating shard of desperation.

  He was about to walk back to the car when he heard a twig snap on the path. He dipped behind the shed, almost tripping over a spade propped against the wall, and peered round the corner. A man was approaching the back entrance. He stooped to retrieve a key from beneath the cat’s dish, opened the door and went inside.

  He hadn’t spotted the paint on the door of the shed but he would if he looked through the kitchen window. David had just a few seconds to escape without being seen.

  Looking back later, he wasn’t able to say whether he made a conscious choice or whether it was merely a result of indecision. It came more or less to the same thing: there shouldn’t have been a need to decide, the urgency of the situation forbade it. The mere fact that he hesitated meant that he had another agenda.

  Who was this man? Not another patient if she trusted him with the key. The lover? He looked a bit old but he could be. Or else another detective. Round for one of his regular reviews of the case.

  He saw the man come out again and put some biscuits in the cat’s dish. The lover, he concluded.

  Curiosity. That was why he had lingered, nothing more. When the man went back inside, he’d make the dash to the car. He hadn’t come to murder anyone, simply to scare the shit out of Magali Rousseau.

  But at that point the man looked up and saw the graffiti. David’s hand reached for the spade. He had no choice.

  ***

  ‘David?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Of course.’ He met Marion’s gaze. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Just that you seem... preoccupied recently.’

  ‘Oh, a bit, yes, I suppose. There are a couple of deals I’d like to pull off. Still waiting for an answer.’ He managed to smile at her briefly before looking away. He’d been thinking about the day when he’d have to kill her.

  It was easier with Elodie. She could read his moods better than Marion but her mind was still too innocent to imagine what could be wrong. ‘Why are you sad?’ she’d say, or she’d tell him off for not paying atte
ntion when they played. And he could say something like he’d stubbed his toe or spilled ketchup on a shirt and she’d believe him.

  He was disappointed to discover, on reading La Provence, that Rousseau wasn’t a wizard after all, but some deluded bitch who’d got the idea she could beat him at his own game. He’d been looking forward to taking on someone smart. Training to be a detective. He put down the paper and gazed at the ceiling. Training! The very idea had him shaking his head in pity.

  If he’d known that, he wouldn’t have gone to such care to remove the page from the book. Why, he could have ripped out a whole chapter and she probably wouldn’t have noticed.

  He was back in Orange now, a couple of weeks after Pessini, and no one had come knocking at his door, no wailing sirens had come to put an end to his misery. He remembered his very first fantasies of killing; now he began to play others in his mind: instead of clobbering Pessini with the spade, he’d calmly stepped forward, hands in the air, and said, ‘It’s me.’