The Lying Down Room (Serge Morel 1)

by Anna Jaquiery

  Morel hadn’t been that different himself, back then. And he was impressed by the younger man’s professionalism.

  ‘Don’t worry. I will.’

  After sending Jean and Marco to interview the other tenants in the building, Morel took Lila with him and instructed one of the two women who had been sitting in the hallway for the past half hour to follow him to the ground floor.

  ‘Sorry to keep you waiting. Would you mind coming downstairs with us? We’ll use your living room, if that isn’t too much trouble,’ Morel told the concierge.

  ‘Not at all,’ she said, clearly flustered. ‘If you could just give me a tiny minute to make sure the place isn’t a complete mess.’

  Once they reached the ground floor, she trotted ahead of them to her apartment while they followed at a slower pace. Through the half-open door they heard a bout of furious whispering before she reappeared.

  ‘Please come in.’

  The room they found themselves in was fussy and feminine. Morel guessed that the concierge, who’d introduced herself as Rose Jardin, was solely responsible for the interior decoration. It certainly seemed to have little to do with the man who sat as well he could on the pale leather sofa, between two rows of symmetrically arranged heart-shaped cushions. He wore a pair of blue overalls over a short-sleeved shirt and hardly looked away from the TV screen when they entered the room.

  ‘Georges,’ she hissed at him and turned to Morel with an apologetic smile. ‘My husband has been working on the pipes all morning. We’ve had some plumbing issues. Sorry. Would you care to sit down?’

  ‘Thank you. Commandant Serge Morel.’ He extended a hand to Rose’s husband.

  Reluctantly, the man turned the television off and turned to the two officers. ‘Georges Jardin. So she’s dead, is she? Madame Dufour?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Murdered.’

  ‘We’re investigating what happened,’ Morel said while Lila fidgeted on the sofa, trying to make a space where she could sit comfortably. In the end she picked up two of the cushions and shoved them aside. Morel noticed how the concierge flinched. He saw that Lila had noticed too.

  ‘We hope you won’t mind if we ask a few questions.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Though I’m not sure how we can help,’ the husband said.

  ‘You might not be much help,’ the concierge said. Then, turning to Morel, ‘Georges wouldn’t notice if someone took an axe to me right in front of his nose. But happily, I’m more observant. No one gets past me in this building.’

  ‘Did Isabelle Dufour have many visitors?’

  ‘No. The only people I ever saw were her son Jacques – and even that very rarely – and her daughter-in-law and grandchildren. Mostly her daughter-in-law came with just the younger of her two children.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How often did her son visit?’

  ‘In the eight years I’ve been here I’ve probably seen him four times. That’s how rarely he comes. The last time was just last week, in fact. He stayed for about an hour. He probably had lunch with his mother. It was around midday.’

  ‘Did he visit with his wife and children?’

  Rose shook her head.

  ‘No. Always alone. The wife came separately. About once a month, I saw her and the little boy. They usually spend some time in the afternoons.’

  ‘What about the cleaning lady? How often does she come?’

  ‘Maria? She cleans at Madame Dufour’s three times a week. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Always comes in at 8 a.m. and leaves at 12 p.m.’

  ‘We’ve been told there might have been a couple of people, a man and a boy, distributing religious pamphlets.’

  ‘I’ve never seen anyone like that.’

  ‘Yet Isabelle Dufour filed a complaint with the police about them.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘A week or so ago.’

  Rose looked put out.

  ‘Well, I never saw anyone like that.’ She looked at Morel. ‘I wish she had mentioned it. After all, I am responsible for this building.’

  ‘Yes, well, I’m sure she didn’t want to trouble you.’

  The entire time Rose’s husband hadn’t said a word. Now Morel turned to him.

  ‘Monsieur Jardin, did you ever see any visitors that fit that description?’

  ‘No.’ He hesitated and looked at his wife. ‘But we aren’t always aware of who comes and goes. There are times when Rose and I are having our lunch. And often we like to take a quick nap in the afternoons.’ He blushed then, and Morel forced himself not to smile.

  But he couldn’t resist looking at Rose Jardin. Her face had turned bright red and she was staring carefully at the ground.

  ‘Well, thank you for all your help,’ Morel said, standing up. ‘Now if you don’t mind I’ll call Maria in. If there is a room where we could speak to her . . .’

  ‘Of course,’ Rose Jardin said. ‘You can use this room. My husband and I will leave you to it.’ She still wouldn’t meet Morel’s eye.

  Morel stepped out of the flat and gave Jean a call. ‘Can you get the cleaning lady to come down now?’ he asked.

  Morel and Lila waited for Maria in the lobby.

  ‘I bet Georges is in for a telling-off,’ Morel said.

  ‘I don’t know about that. I think she’ll be too busy rearranging the cushions,’ Lila said. ‘Did you see her face when I moved a couple of them? I wonder if she uses a ruler or if she relies on instinct?’

  The interview with the cleaning lady revealed very little.

  ‘It was horrible, to see her like that,’ Maria said. She was clearly distressed about Dufour’s death.

  ‘Any idea who could have done this?’ he asked.

  She shivered.‘I have no idea. A monster! It must be someone who is crazy.’

  ‘What sort of employer was Madame Dufour?’ he asked.

  ‘Very good.’ Maria shook her head.‘I have a son, Alfonso, and Madame Dufour always remembers his birthday. She always gives him something special.’ She seemed to realize she was using the wrong tense and paused, unsure of what to say next.

  ‘She was thoughtful,’ Lila prompted her. ‘Sounds like she was fond of you.’

  ‘I was fond of her, too,’ Maria said, and she started crying all over again. ‘She helped us with the plane tickets when we went home to Portugal every summer. This year we went back for four weeks. I brought her a gift.’

  ‘Did anyone visit her?’ Lila asked.

  Maria wiped the tears from her face. ‘Her daughter-in-law and grandson. Once or twice I saw Madame Dufour’s son.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘No. She sometimes met a friend for lunch but they never came here.’

  Morel showed Maria the pamphlets he’d placed in a sealed bag.

  ‘Do you know anything about these?’

  Maria shook her head. ‘No. They have been lying on Madame Dufour’s bedside table for a little while, maybe the past week or so. I don’t move anything, except to clean underneath, of course.’

  ‘Was she a religious woman?’

  ‘I don’t think so. But we never talked about it.’

  ‘How would you describe her, generally?’

  Maria thought. ‘I think she was a nice lady who was quite lonely. She was usually alone.’

  ‘Did that make her unhappy?’

  Maria looked at them with troubled eyes. ‘I don’t know. She was a very quiet person. We talked mostly about practical things. What cleaning products she needed, whether we should think about replacing the shower curtain, that sort of thing.’

  ‘But you worked for her for sixteen years,’ Lila said.‘Surely you had some idea of the sort of person she was?’

  Maria shook her head. ‘I don’t know what sort of person she was. We weren’t friends. I cleaned her house and she was kind to me. But she wasn’t looking for someone to talk to.’

  It was well past 2 p.m. when Morel and the
three members of his team left the apartment and headed back to Quai des Orfèvres. They stopped on the way for takeaway sandwiches and coffees.

  While he and Jean waited in the car for Marco and Lila to return with the food, Morel thought about Isabelle Dufour’s painted face and the clothes she’d been dressed in. A strange, ritualistic murder. There was no doubt that someone had taken their time with her. There had been nothing impulsive about it.

  He wondered what sort of person they were looking for.

  TWO

  Morel balanced his weight carefully on the swivel chair and turned to face his visitor. Six months he’d been waiting for a new seat. This one concertinaed and slumped without warning, leaving him at times with his knees up to his chest. Looking at his visitor, Morel hoped the chair would behave itself, just this once.

  Through the open window directly behind him, he could hear the morning traffic in the distance, commuters making their sluggish way along the quays. Drivers slammed their horns to let off steam.

  It was already warm. He wished he’d worn a short-sleeved shirt. He wished he could have a cigarette, but Perrin had caught him once puffing away and blowing the smoke out his window. All of a sudden Morel was fifteen again, trying to hide his humiliation while his father delivered a lecture on the debilitating effect of nicotine on the brain.

  He would rather not give Perrin another opportunity to dress him down. Still, he would have killed for a smoke. The day had not started well. His father had thrown a tantrum at the breakfast table after finding butter in the strawberry jam. Morel had ended up shouting, then apologizing. I’m a forty-four-year-old man, fighting with my father about the way I like to do things, he thought.

  ‘Commandant?’

  Morel suddenly realized he’d turned away from his visitor and was gazing without seeing at the pattern of leaves against a cobalt sky and the outline of a boat carrying sightseers along the Seine. Another world to the one he’d walked into this morning. Arriving at the inner courtyard of the Judicial Police Headquarters at eight he’d found a team from narcotics pulling a car apart following a tip-off from one of their informants about a sizeable heroin stash.

  Morel turned to his visitor and managed to look contrite.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  The woman sitting across from him couldn’t have been much more than five feet tall but she radiated an intensity that Morel found unsettling. She was the third and last of the women whose testimonies Morel’s team were hearing. Three women who, like Dufour, had called their local police stations to complain of two visitors handing out religious material.

  ‘Doesn’t that seem strange to you?’ Morel had asked Lila. ‘All four of them, reporting something so innocuous?’

  ‘Unless our evangelists visited others. For whatever reason, these four found it unsettling enough to call. Others might have had the knock on their door but didn’t think anything of it.’

  She had a point. Still, Morel couldn’t figure out why these women had bothered to complain at all, except for the fact that they were elderly and perhaps easily scared.

  His visitor certainly didn’t look like the fearful type. But he remembered Isabelle Dufour’s body lying prone under the sheets. He was not giving this woman the attention she deserved, he realized.

  ‘So where were we?’ he said, feeling abashed.

  The old lady shifted in her chair. Her eyes darted across the room as though the walls were made of rubber. She was humming the tune again. He was sure he knew it, but it evaded him no matter how often she did this. How long exactly had the two of them been at it? He didn’t dare look at his watch, not with her sharp eyes observing him.

  That tune. What was it exactly? Morel’s father would know. Of course he would. At the thought of his father, Morel’s mind began to wander again. He forced himself to focus. Maybe if it wasn’t so hot, he told himself. It didn’t help that the windows opened only so far and that there was no ventilation. No air-con unit, no fan.

  He tugged at his collar. This Wednesday heralded the first heatwave of the year. Belatedly, considering it was the fourth week of August. Half the city’s indigenous population had long since left town, heading south for the congested beaches or for holidays in the country. Morel would have liked to be among them. Right now he’d be grateful for a square foot of sand on the beach in Antibes, to sit among the lobster-coloured people and gaze at the sea.

  ‘Like this, you see,’ his visitor said, and she started up again. Morel found himself straining forward again, as though the problem were to do with volume rather than her inability to carry a tune.

  ‘An English piece, perhaps? I seem to remember—’

  The old woman shook her head vigorously. She seemed offended.

  ‘English! Never trust the English,’ she said. Her voice rang like a rusty old bicycle bell.

  He ignored the comment, much as he’d ignored her comments at the start of their encounter. He had been making small talk to put her at ease and telling her how much Paris had changed since he was a child, to which she’d replied that it was all due to the Arabs. It was they, Morel learned, who had introduced cockroaches to the capital due to their lack of hygiene. Morel could have told her that French history was riddled with unhygienic practices – all authentically local. For centuries this had been a country awash with lice, bedbugs, fleas. But he held his tongue.

  ‘Anyway, it wasn’t just the tune, it was something about his face,’ she continued. Morel leaned closer so that the chair tilted dangerously.

  ‘What about it?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, he had all the airs and graces,’ the woman said. ‘But.’

  You could tell she liked to choose how she told a story. She wouldn’t be rushed.

  ‘But,’ she continued, pausing for effect – ‘what sort of well-mannered man comes knocking on a stranger’s door at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, handing out business cards? Calling me sister and telling me Jesus is coming. Sister!’ she repeated, with a disgusted air. ‘I told him, I’m not your sister. I’m old enough to be your mother, though, and if the poor woman is still alive I hope to God she doesn’t know how her son is disgracing himself, intruding on people in their homes.’

  Now Elisabeth Guillou was waving a pamphlet at him. It was the same one Morel had found in Isabelle Dufour’s bedroom.

  ‘Can you describe them to me? The ones who knocked on your door and gave you that pamphlet?’ he asked.

  His visitor sighed, as though it pained her to have to explain herself.

  ‘The man was quite ordinary. Pleasant enough, though he didn’t fool me for a second. He was dragging a boy around with him, no doubt to prevent doors being slammed in his face. The boy was mute. Literally. A shameful character,’ she said.

  She glared at Morel, but there was a hint of pleasure in the old prune’s eyes. Something merry and unkind. She leaned forward.

  ‘You know, I was raised as a Christian. We used to recite the Lord’s Prayer twice a day, before breakfast and after dinner. My father would watch me and my sister to make sure we were saying the words, not just pretending. I always knew, well before I could read and write, that it was a load of rubbish.’

  She laughed as though something excessively droll had just occurred to her.

  ‘You know, it delights me to think of all those people living their lives with the conviction they’ll be going somewhere special for eternity once they die. And where are they now? Decomposing, gone, buried underground, reduced to ashes. Just think! How wonderful, how utterly priceless!’

  Morel laughed with her. It could do no harm, and might in fact jog her memory further. ‘Is there anything else, Madame Guillou?’

  She began whistling again, loudly, startling him. Her thin lips clenched into a tune, a better rendition this time, which Morel found overwhelmingly familiar once he got over his initial surprise. He rolled his chair forward. Thankfully, it didn’t collapse.

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the tune.�
�

  ‘The one the man was humming? Who came to your house?’

  ‘Yes, it is. Do you recognize it?’

  ‘Indeed, Madame, indeed I do.’

  They looked at each other, beaming.

  ‘Well, you’ve been an immense help, Madame Guillou. I thank you, once again, for taking the trouble to come in.’

  ‘Are you a believer, Commandant?’ she asked. She was standing up, adjusting the strap of her handbag on her shoulder and holding on tight, as though she expected someone to snatch it from her.

  ‘Of sorts, Madame, of sorts. But not the peddling kind, if you know what I mean.’

  Not so certain now, she hesitated. ‘Yes, yes. Will that be all?’

  ‘Yes indeed. And I thank you for taking the time to come in. You’ve been a great help.’

  ‘My pleasure.’ All briskness and efficiency now. ‘Nice to meet you too.’ She looked him up and down, as though she might say something more. But then thought better of it.

  He walked her to the top of the stairs, thinking to accompany her to the ground floor, but she waved him away as though guessing his intention.

  ‘I’m perfectly capable of seeing myself out,’ she said.

  They shook hands as though they’d just conducted a successful business transaction.

  ‘Goodbye, then.’

  Morel returned to his desk, triumphant. Who would have thought he would recognize the tune? That it would in fact turn out to be one he had grown up with? One his father listened to so often that to Morel it became synonymous with long Sunday afternoons, when, as a child, he waited for something, anything, to happen to relieve the tedium? As he sat down and swivelled the chair to face his computer, he hummed the melody. ‘In Paradisum’, from Fauré’s Requiem. In the end, the old lady had rendered it perfectly.

  The morning wore on, sticky and warm. Nothing was resolved. The heat seemed to get on people’s nerves, in and outside the building. Phones were ringing off the hook. In the sixteenth, a man clobbered his wife with a 300-euro lamp she’d just brought home from a boutique on Avenue Molière. Thirty-five years of marriage, and now this lamp he hated, which he took as a personal affront. A homeless man had thrown himself in the Seine naked, to cool down, he said. No one cared to pull him out of the water and so he floated on his back for half an hour, singing, until the police arrived.