by James Brydon
“Not really. I know that Anne-Lise and Mathilde were close, at least in a certain way; but they were never equals. I’m sure Anne-Lise didn’t talk to Mathilde about all kinds of things because she wouldn’t have understood them. Mathilde is a funny girl. Very unstable. She could have gone much further in school but she dropped out a while ago. There was always a kind of perverseness about her: a refusal to conform, or a need to disappoint others’ expectations. The Blanchards were at their wits’ end with her. When she was at school, she was summoned to see the proviseur more than once for cruel or inappropriate behavior. She even had run-ins with the police on several occasions.”
“What drew Anne-Lise to her? What made those two close?”
“That, I could not possibly say. I can only repeat that it baffled me. Perhaps Anne-Lise was attracted by someone so different from her, someone dark and troubled. It may have seemed romantic to her.”
“I need to find Kurmakin and see if he can give me any more details about the abortion. Do you know where I can find him?”
“I have no idea. But perhaps Lafourgue can help you. Surveillance and spying are two of the rare arts he has probably mastered.”
My remaining questions to Erwann draw only blanks. Like Mathilde, he cannot think of anything peculiar which happened during Anne-Lise’s final weeks and he has no knowledge of where she was the night she died. He shakes his head when I ask him if he knows someone nicknamed “the spider,” and when I leave he reaches out and puts a hand on my shoulder.
“When did you say the hearing is? Friday? My thoughts will be with you then.”
I leave him sitting on the worn bench at the back of that room which he has tried for so many years to make vibrate with learning. He stares out blankly into space, perhaps seeing in the ghostly theater of his memories Anne-Lise’s blond hair burnished by the light flooding in through the window. Perhaps he can see her slim white fingers clutching a pen as she feeds off his voice, and perhaps he feels as if the unfolding of identical days has suddenly ceased and the world hums with her curiosity and grace as she sits before him. When the image fades, he will see only an empty room darkening in the falling dusk.
* * *
There is no one left in the school corridors. My footfalls echo in the silence. On the ceiling, the paintwork cracks and flakes away, exposing the plaster beneath. On the walls, wooden panels bear engravings commemorating the achievements of long-departed students.
Grand Prix des Sciences Humaines
Blondet, Roger 1933
Boulanger, Claude 1934
Legrandin, Antoine 1935
Prix Albert Fénélon pour les Mathématiques
Caillot, Sarah 1943
Riffaut, Albert 1944
Kerbac, Julien 1945
Legendre, Edouard 1946
My feet have stopped still. The silence crowds in on me. There is a tiny click in my head. I see once again two dull eyes, stubble-roughened cheeks, hair shaken this way and that, skin smudged with dirt. Lafourgue’s case file. The drifter. The small-town ne’er-do-well whose desperation led him to expose himself to a peasant girl. The addled vagrant too dull-witted to have carried out such an ornate crime.
Julien Kerbac.
The best mathematician in the region’s best school. My eyes rake the walls. What else can they tell me about a suspect I stupidly and carelessly ignored? Different names and prizes run past my gaze—classical translation, philosophy, historical learning—until something holds my attention and I can feel my heart lurch against my ribs.
Prix André Chartier pour les Sciences
Naturelles et la Dissection
Chapuisat, Jean 1943
Sabreur, Agnès 1944
Kerbac, Julien 1945
The light from the dim bulb swims in garish streaks in front of my eyes. My feet thump against the wooden floor as I hasten for the exit. Outside, it is dark. The nocturnal chill floods my lungs and jolts me into a state of alertness. It is too late by now to find Lafourgue and have him track down Kerbac and Kurmakin. Perhaps Lafourgue was right all along. I have been trying to reconstruct Anne-Lise’s existence, convinced that the crime would flow out of who she was. Perhaps there was no real connection to her and the killer was just a dangerous drifter with a complex, tortured mind and memories of the dissection of animal corpses. Perhaps I was so quick to discount the possibility of him being a suspect simply because I needed to immerse myself in the long, patient work of salvaging the past. I needed to forget al-Mazra’a. Had that made me blind? Was I so desperate to lose myself in someone else’s past that I could no longer look clearly at the events within it?
On the quiet roads back from Saint-Malo, as the car sways gently around the bends and the moon burns with a pale glow above, and then later, lying perfectly awake on the sofa at home staring out into the night, I keep seeing those same dull eyes, the skin spattered with mud, and the gaping mouth. I count the hours until sunrise, when I can go out into the countryside and walk through the fields and paths paralyzed by winter, and I can roam the shadowlands where Kerbac lives and track him down and bring whatever secrets he may be hiding into the light.
Day Five
In the slow emergence of a Breton dawn, I float in the endless star-studded nights of al-Mazra’a. In Algeria, fitful bursts of sleep seemed like wakefulness, so vivid were the images they conjured. The long hours of consciousness between were gray, exhausting, eternal.
Today I wake up choking. Amira’s blood runs toward me in sluggish heaves but I don’t move. I watch it flow gently until it bathes my knees. Its warmth is Amira’s only caress. My skin crawls but still I don’t get up.
Slowly, the pieces of the present start to flood back, filling my memory and calming my gasping lungs. The light filtering through the shutters is dismal. The nighttime cold has pinched and cracked my skin. I couldn’t bring myself to light the fire. All the little gestures by which existence becomes routine, or even comfortable, seem wrong. The ice of the Breton winter has seeped through the windows and through the cracks in the walls and the wood and it has crept into my blood and my bones.
Kerbac. I remember. His hollow eyes were somewhere in the depths of my dreams.
The car shudders into life, trying to shake off the chill. The windshield is scarred with lines of frost. The tires slip and scrape on roads frozen like metal.
Lafourgue is seated at the counter of A l’abri des flots. His thick, restless fingers tap at a glass of the alcohol he seems to live on. He stares at a newspaper. The bulk of his body and bullish head appear concentrated in the fixity of his eyes. He motions me to sit down.
“Drink?”
“Coffee.”
“Well, what can I do for you?”
“Two things. Firstly, I need to find Julien Kerbac. Where is he likely to be? I’ll need to pick him up.”
“Kerbac.” Lafourgue swills the name around his mouth. “On the road from Sainte-Élisabeth to Mal-à-venir, a couple of kilometers out, left-hand side, there’s a disused barn. In the winter he usually bunks down there. Careful, though. He’s wild. I’ll send someone to go with you if you want.”
“No thanks. Also, I need to talk to Sasha Kurmakin. No one seems to have any idea where he is but I suppose you’d be able to track him down. Can you?”
Lafourgue’s eyes contract even farther, his pupils two tiny pinpricks glowing blackly in his skull. “I guess I can. But not before tomorrow. Will that do?” He reaches for his drink and swallows it. “Sure you don’t want one? Okay. Have it your way. What about the case? Any progress in finding the killer? I don’t suppose there’s a lot left for you to go on now. Evidence perishes. People forget. The real information has long since vanished, if it was ever there. All you’ve got are the twisted memories, the obsessions, and the lies of the people who knew Anne-Lise.”
I tell him about the abortion, the poem used to encode the doctor’s name, the books Erwann gave Anne-Lise, and about Kerbac’s past.
He nods in appreciation. “There mi
ght be more,” he says. “The dossier that you saw doesn’t contain all the information relevant to the case. It’s just the official documentation, in case anybody’s ever sniffing around, checking up on what we do. You know what officials are like. Always trying to pretend that you can do this job by following due procedure and believing in the Déclaration des droits de l’homme. But what you’ve seen isn’t the real investigation. I guess I don’t need to tell you that. You fought the Algerians over there, so you know what real police work is. Anyway, go and hunt Kerbac down and squeeze whatever you can out of him. When you come back, I’ll dig out the real notes for you. You won’t be able to use anything in them in a courtroom and I can’t let you take them away, but you can read through them at my house if you want.”
As I sit behind the wheel of the car, I have the impression that Lafourgue’s tar-black pupils are still trained on me from inside. Something glittered in their depths when he spoke of the real investigation. I can feel the coffee jolt and kick in my veins. I start the engine and pull out into the quiet street. Tiredness falls away. Concentration takes over. My head buzzes and the caffeine vibrates in my heart as I turn away from Sainte-Élisabeth, pass the fields of dead grass, and head out toward the tiny, crabbed spire of the church at Mal-à-venir.
* * *
Cold has turned the trees to iron. On the horizon, their jagged silhouettes claw at the livid sky. Rains have scored channels into the mud of the fields, then the freeze has come to petrify them. How can Kerbac live among this? On the dead, waterlogged earth and under the wind tearing at his skin?
I pull the car in next to an old stone grange, exactly where Lafourgue said it would be. Whatever door was once there is long gone and the entrance gapes blackly. Underfoot, it is all mud and ice. My feet slip, then sink into the decaying ground. I listen for any noise that Kerbac might be making inside but there is only the howl of the wind and, beneath it, the weird stillness of winter—life shutting down, hibernating—and, in the distance, the hiss of the sea.
I can make nothing out amid the darkness as I peer inside. The feeble light at the entrance soon dissolves into the blackness. I call out from the door: “M. Kerbac, my name is le Garrec. I’m—I was—with the police. I’d like to talk to you about Anne-Lise Aurigny.”
No answer. Only the faint reverberation of my voice and the whisper of the wind in the eaves. I walk farther in. I can no longer see my feet, but only hear the sucking sound where the mud pulls them in. The darkness seems to swell around me. I try again to listen for breathing or movement but there is only a kind of phenomenal stillness. I keep walking, still speaking softly, and as I approach the northwestern corner of the grange, it seems to me that I can hear wheezing in the dark. I stop and listen, unsure whether it is just my racing pulse and the waves of my own blood battering my ears. I hold my breath. I listen again and I am sure there is something crouching in the darkness, breathing quietly, waiting.
One more step.
There is a rush of air and the shadows leap in front of me. Something rock-hard crushes my cheekbone. The blackness tilts and wheels. White lights burst and flame in front of my retinas. I fall to the ground and lie cradled in the rotting earth. Silhouetted against the gray rectangle of the entrance, blurry in the haze of my failing sight, a shape flickers and vanishes into the light.
Kerbac.
I heave myself upright. Something burns the flesh on the right side of my head. Like a drill boring into the bone. The entrance to the grange lurches sickeningly as I try to focus on it. Lights explode and twinkle where I stare. I try to walk toward the door but it drifts to my left. Then I am kneeling down in the mud. I am drinking the fetid odor of the sodden ground. It clogs my nostrils and my throat. There is another searing burst of white heat before my eyes.
Then the darkness is absolute.
Something jolts in my brain and I gasp for air. This time, I manage to raise myself and reach the door. Across the fields, I can just glimpse the dim outline of Kerbac limping, shuffling, scurrying through the dead stalks of wheat, heading down toward the cliffs. I might be able to cut him off on the coast road.
Slumping into the car, I blink desperately at the road in front of me, willing it to remain still. It swims and whirls. The road and trees are one undifferentiated blur. They shimmer slowly, as if they are floating underwater. I feel like I’m drowning. The whole world around me is liquid. An unbearable pressure is crushing my head and roaring and rolling in my ears.
I drive slowly, trying to ignore the trembling, drowned road my eyes actually see and to just hold my arms straight. The crack of branches or hedgerows against the side of the car tells me I am about to plow into the fields, and I jerk the wheel back in the opposite direction.
By the time I reach the corniche my vision is clearing. The contours of things loom shockingly against the ashy air. Only my head still throbs, great heaves of pain building and bursting behind my eyes. I scan the heather to the south, forcing my eyes to focus on the line of trees where the fields end. Suddenly, about three hundred meters away, I see Kerbac’s tattered silhouette burst through the trees and stagger into the heather. He can’t move fast. His left leg drags heavily, as if half-paralyzed. With each pace he lurches unsteadily back onto his right foot. His hair is a tangle of filth and branches and his canvas trousers are ripped. He clutches at his threadbare jacket, trying to claw out of its remnants what little warmth he can.
I pull up level with him, stop the car, and begin to walk across the gorse toward him. He still hasn’t seen me. He is looking over his shoulder, expecting his pursuer to come from the trees behind him, not from the sea. I move as quickly and as quietly as possible. Kerbac twists his head and darts anxious glances over his shoulder. Wild, Lafourgue said. But here he resembles the prey, not the hunter. I can see the bones jutting and bulging in his face. His skin is stretched tight, as if it’s only just able to conceal his skeleton. His whole head resembles a skull: eyes bulging, cheekbones and chin almost piercing the frail skin.
When I am no more than twenty meters from him, he turns and sees me approaching. His mouth hangs open. He whirls around, disoriented for a second, then hurries back toward the trees. His bad leg jerks and twists beneath him. It takes me only a few seconds to catch him. As I draw level, he seems to give up. His body goes slack and he falls onto the winter heather. He lies there facedown, a wounded animal gasping for air and waiting to be hurt. His eyes and mouth are buried in the icy dirt. Beneath the rags of his jacket, his flanks heave and contract.
“M. Kerbac? M. Kerbac? I’m le Garrec. I just want to talk to you. Why don’t you get up? We can go and sit in my car where it’s warm . . .”
I keep on talking to him gently for some time, trying to get him to loosen his grip on the petrified heather twigs. Finally he turns to look at me. Tangles of inflamed capillaries writhe in his eyes. He kneels down. He crouches.
Eventually we walk to the car. He sits in the front, gazing blankly out into the distance and the mist. His jaw hangs loose. Almost mechanically, his fingers rub against each other as if trying to keep warm. I examine my face in the rearview mirror. A large bruise has come up purple across the cheekbone. The skin is swollen and distended, pulling my features into an uneven grimace. In two days, when I come to the hearing, I will face the magistrate with this stain, this deformity, upon me. The thought makes me smile. As my lips move, a jolt of pain darts through my head. Looking at the welt—the tiny tears in the skin, the swollen ridge beneath the bruise—I would say that Kerbac hit me with a metal bar. Al-Mazra’a taught me a great deal about the architecture of scar tissue.
“M. Kerbac, I want to talk to you about the death of Anne-Lise Aurigny. Do you remember? She was killed back in February. Capitaine Lafourgue questioned you at the time.”
The unsettling calm that has washed over Kerbac evaporates as soon as I mention Lafourgue’s name. His eyes lurch and roll. His hands scrabble for the door handle and for freedom. I have to hold him down and, for a moment, I breathe
in the odor of stale air and rotting earth that clings to him. His strength is already waning. The tendons in his arms and neck go slack once more. He sits still. His face turns numb and expressionless, as if he has immediately forgotten the fury that pulsed through his body just moments ago.
“M. Kerbac, do you remember Lafourgue questioning you about the murder of Anne-Lise? What did he ask you? Can you recall any of what you told him?”
“They said I did it. Said I killed . . . her . . . killed her . . .” His jaw moves slowly and uncomfortably, as if he has not spoken to anyone for so long that his muscles have forgotten how to form words. “They said I hurt her.”
“Did you know Anne-Lise? Perhaps you saw her around sometimes? She was quite striking. She was the sort of girl you would remember. The sort of girl you could get attached to, even if you only saw her once, and from a long way off.”
“Of course I . . . knew her.” He speaks so softly that his voice sounds distant. “We were . . . very close . . . I would . . . never hurt her . . . though . . . whatever they say . . .”
“How were you close to Anne-Lise?” Something isn’t right. I can feel the back of my neck prickling.
“We spent . . . a lot of time . . . together.” He leans on the last word. Rolls it around in his mouth to see how it tastes. “We shared a lot . . . of interests and ideas . . . She was . . . everything to me . . . Why would I . . . hurt her?”
Nothing in Kerbac’s face has changed. It is the same blank mask as before but there is something in the eyes, a sort of frantic attempt to focus, which is unsettling me.
“How did you meet her? . . . M. Kerbac, listen to me. How did you meet Anne-Lise?”
“We were in the same class.” As he talks, his tongue seems to loosen. He recovers the power of speech.
