“Yeah?”
“I’m going to put something on my Facebook account.”
“Oh Jesus, Zac!”
“It’s the easiest way.”
He leaned forward and pulled the laptop round so that the screen faced her. He watched her face as she read.
“There will be no going back after this.”
“I know.”
“Can’t you examine your options without going public?”
He shook his head.
“I don’t think I am going to know what my options are, or how I feel, until I stop hiding. Only then will I know what I can live with – or live without.”
“Have you told your family?”
He nodded. Abbie said nothing but he sensed a hurt that he hadn’t considered before, and he wished that perhaps he had spoken to her first.
“It was my father that I had to confront before anyone else. Does that make sense?”
“I suppose so.”
“I have to do this, Abbie”
“In that case,” she said leaning forward, her finger hovering over the button. She looked at him and he nodded.
“You are sure?”
“Yes.”
He couldn’t watch.
“Done,” she said quietly.
“Together,” he said.
“Together.”
“He knows I killed Patrice, Raymond.”
Zac paused as he tucked the sheets into the bottom of the bed and looked up to the pillows.
“What?”
“I tell you, he knows everything. He came here to my bed. He is no fool, Charpentier.”
Zac sat on the edge of the bed and looked at Marianne.
“You?”
“Yes, he knows about me. About both of us.”
“You were the femme blonde?”
“What are you talking about? We may have burned the wig, but Charpentier knows you were the blonde woman. Believe me.”
“What happened that night, the night Patrice died?”
“You were there!”
“Yes, but I wonder if my memory is the same as yours?”
“I have already been through this with Charpentier,” said Marianne peevishly.
“Tell me.”
“I watched you. I watched you from down below in the street. I saw you from the alley, the light in the window, the two of you…” Marianne’s voice trailed away.
“And then….”
She looked up at him with hostility. “And then you closed the shutters. You shut me out and I had to imagine it… you with him.”
Zac felt an intense stillness wash over him as he listened. Marianne’s confusion between him and Raymond had often disturbed him, but at least this time he would get the truth about what had happened. The night Patrice Moreau died.
“You must have been angry,” he said.
“I went into the bar. I thought perhaps the two of you would come down to the bar. But you did not. I waited.”
“I am sorry.”
“Yes, well…” said Marianne. “Sorry.”
“Too late,” said Zac.
Marianne fixed her glittering eyes to the floor.
“I waited and I waited. I knew. I knew what was happening with the two of you.”
“And you met Jasmine in the lane.”
“Cow,” muttered Marianne.
“What did she say?”
“That I should come with her because you were not coming home to me.”
“How did you feel?”
“You know how I felt,” snapped Marianne. “Furious. I felt furious.”
“Yes, I suppose you did.”
“Murderous.”
Zac looked up at the pastel walls of the ward and swallowed. He clenched his teeth together.
“As if you could be replaced by Jasmine,” she continued. And what did she know of you and me, Raymond? What did anyone know? We were good, weren’t we? When it was just us. Just you and me with nobody interfering.”
Marianne’s voice held a strange kind of pleading. Zac looked at her and nodded impotently.
“He should never have said it,” she continued.
“Who?”
“Patrice. What he said.”
“What did he say?”
Marianne sighed.
“Why are you being stupid tonight? Why are you pretending?”
“My memory,” said Zac, “it is failing me tonight.”
“You know that I am not violent, usually.”
“No…”
“But to insult me that way, to say that a woman like me could never keep a man like you… who did he think he was? And coming after Jasmine’s stupidity, well…”
“Yes,” said Zac helplessly.
“He thought he was going to topple us. He would never have done that, would he Raymond?”
Marianne’s white hair sat like an electrocuted halo round her head, making her eyes seem darker than ever.
“No.”
“And that table…”
“What table?”
“What table! Your intimate little dinner à deux. The flickering candles and crystal glasses, the posy of pink freesias, the noisette of lamb and duchesse potatoes and whole baby carrots in that white tureen and…”
“My God, Marianne!”
Marianne narrowed her eyes.
“My God what?”
“Your memory is extraordinary.”
“You think I could forget? I could draw that room, every inch of it.”
“What happened then?”
“You know what happened.”
“We need to get our stories straight for Charpentier. Every detail.”
Marianne’s eyes darted wildly.
“Yes. Yes, he will come back. He said so.”
“So Patrice and R… Patrice and I were having dinner.”
Marianne made a little explosion of irritation against the pillow.
“You were satisfying an altogether different appetite!”
“And you…”
“The carving knife… the noisette of lamb.”
“You picked up the knife?”
“I don’t remember picking it up but I remember it in my hand. The soft handle of it, the crumbs of lamb on the blade that mixed with his blood… Do you know the strange thing? I never told you this. The effort of pulling the knife out was much greater than putting it in.”
Zac stood up unsteadily.
“Where are you going?”
“Nowhere. Nowhere.”
He walked to the table at the foot of the bed and poured a glass of water. It was so warm in here. His hand shook as he poured some into the glass. He needed to get out of here.
“Do you want some Marianne?”
She did not answer and he turned his head to view her. She was watching him in that detached way again. She was crazy, he thought suddenly. Crazy. Something had happened here… the fall…. who could ever know now when she was telling the truth?”
“Do you want some?”
She shook her head.
“You cannot trick me.”
“I am not trying to trick you!”
“You must not drink it. I warn you. That nurse… she is working with Charpentier.”
“I see.”
“Don’t drink it, Raymond.”
Zac put the glass down.
“No.”
He watched Marianne for a moment. Her eyelids were drooping. He took a step and her eyes shot open.
“Are you going?”
“In a moment.”
“Don’t leave me. Charpentier will come back.”
“Not tonight.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s late.”
“Is it?”
“Look at the darkness outside the window.”
“I don’t want to see him.”
“He won’t come.”
“What are we going to tell him?”
It was useless, thought Zac. She was lost in her own version of reality and
all he could do now was humour her.
“I’ll think of something,” he said.
For the first time, a glimmer of a smile crossed Marianne’s face and her eyes closed again.
“Yes, of course you will. You will think of something,” she murmured.
The effort required to pull a knife out is greater than to plunge it in, Zac thought nauseously, watching her drift into sleep. A river of blood ran like a torrent in his head. He did not know if it was Patrice’s blood or Maurice’s. He only knew he needed out of here.
He tiptoed to the door. It squeaked as he opened it and he paused, but Marianne did not stir. He closed it quietly behind him and leant against it. The truth, he thought. Was she telling the truth?
CHAPTER THIRTY
Rae and Marianne
RAE
The flat seems full of ghosts, thinks Rae, as she watches the curtains waft gently in the breeze of the open window. She can still hear the faint squeak of Marianne’s wheelchair, the scent of the lavender Zac had used to mask the unmistakeable odour of old age and illness. But it is the force of her presence that lingers most strongly, the sense that she fills every room and every corner. Rae misses her. Not for any reasons of guilt, she realises with a sense of wonder. For her, for Marianne.
What a marvellous thought that is. Marianne’s body is wrecked and yet she endures; whatever it was that had touched Raymond’s spirit all those years ago touches Rae still. She is in there, in a potent, distilled form: the essence of Marianne. For years he thought they were bound only by guilt and fear and recrimination but perhaps it had not been that way at all.
Marianne knew how to love, Rae thought wistfully, looking down into the street. It was the most important lesson Rae had learned after she left. She had disappeared in that taxi in the rain with the yearning of another life and a love that was beyond her fingertips.
She had never managed to grasp it and maybe that was because it was not beyond her at all, but behind her. She had left it behind when she left Marianne. A love that surpassed gender.
She looked down into the street. Maybe Marianne had been right all those years ago. There was no place for her to truly fit. She had lost much to learn it.
A police car turns into the end of the road. Rae watches carelessly as it crawls slowly past the dry cleaner, past the drug store, down towards the pâtisserie. Inching now, it halts at the striped awning, and a figure in the passenger seat looks up towards the window where she stands. The driver bumps the car up on a tiny end of pavement so that one wheel is half on and half off the edge. Both driver and passenger emerge casually, one in uniform, the other a slight man in a neat suit and polished shoes. The one in uniform says something that Rae cannot catch through the open window and throws a packet of mints to the other. The recipient grins. Rae shifts position, peering down to see what they might be interested in down below but she cannot see.
A knock at the door. Crisp. Confident. Rata-tat-tat. She opens it.
“Emile Pascal,” says a man holding out ID. “Police.”
She does not say come in, but stands back to let them pass, a sudden dryness in her throat. Emile Pascal. The years roll back. So often she has imagined this, but the reality is not what she had guessed. Perhaps, she thinks, leading the way into the sitting room, it is not what it seems. She is conscious of her heels on the wooden floor. They seem thunderous in comparison to the silence inside her head.
There is a glance between the two men as she invites them to sit down. She knows that look. Pascal is slight but there is something aggressively masculine about him. She knows what men think. There is respect in their voices, but contempt in their eyes. She is used to that. The voice lies. She believes their eyes, always the eyes.
This is a cold case review, she hears. They are here to discuss the murder of Patrice Moreau. Pascal’s voice, thin and nasal, informs her that he was one of two investigating officers at the time, but his colleague is now retired. Still, it would be nice to clear the matter up.
Rae nods.
Can she confirm that she knew Moreau?
“Yes,” says Rae, her voice giving out treacherously. She clears her throat. “Yes,” she says clearly.
There is new evidence, says Pascal. Alain Moreau has suggested an identity for “la femme blonde”. Pascal speaks softly enough, but his grey blue eyes are hard as pebbles. Rae has heard of la femme blonde?
“Of course.”
“We have reason to believe that the blonde woman is you.”
Rae says nothing.
“Can you confirm that?” asks Pascal. His companion stays silent, but Rae feels him watching her. She fixes her eyes on a vase on a shelf, yellow and pink tulips, stems twisting curiously with the first breath of decay.
“Madame…?” says Pascal. The word is heavier than it should be. Rae hears the trill of sarcasm in his intonation. Madame. What is there to say? What use is denial? The petals have begun to open and when that happens there is no going back. Before long, they will be floating downwards, exposing the core of the bloom.
“Yes,” she says finally. “La femme blonde was me. Patrice and I were lovers.”
“Did you kill Patrice Moreau?”
Rae looked at him and shook her head.
“I loved him,” she says.
“Madame, I am going to ask you that question again. Did you murder Patrice Moreau?”
“Monsieur, you have asked the question twice. My answer is the same twice. I did not.”
“Then who did?”
The images flash through Rae’s mind. A distraught Marianne, the crash of crockery, light glinting off steel, blood and gravy and tears and trembling. And Marianne now, a pathetic heap of uncontrolled limbs and impulses. It is not possible to bring this to her door. It is time to love, as Marianne loved. In any case, Rae has always known deep down that she carried a heavy burden of responsibility whether she held the knife or not. To be careless with another’s emotions… perhaps that, too, was a crime.
“Who did, Madame?”
“I do not know.”
Pascal stood. In the ensuing jumble of words he spoke about her arrest on the suspicion of murder, Rae heard little. However long it had taken, coming back to Saint Estelle had, after all, been her downfall. She sat suddenly, her knees buckling beneath her, overcome suddenly by a weight that had been thirty years in the making.
MARIANNE
I see you, Raymond. I see you by my bed; in the shadows by the window as the moonlight falls soft and silvery when my eyes close in sleep; in the breaking of the red stained dawn when they open again. You flit in and out, a constant presence, a reassurance, a source of meaning.
I do not have long. I have heard Shona say as much, in that stupid, hoarse, stage-whisper. A day or two, she says to you, adding that pneumonia is the friend of the old. Stupid platitudes. I will last a month just to prove her wrong. Then dissolve, dissolve into the evening dew, glistening on the petals of the rhododendrons in the garden, evaporating into nothing in the heat of the morning sun. And if I am wrong? If something remains… well, I will haunt the stupid cow.
But not you. I will not haunt you. I will blow round you softly, like a warm summer breeze, soothing you until you join me. You will hear me whispering your name when the wind whips the dry autumn leaves; taste me in the tang of crashing waves when they pound against the rocks and spray fine, salt tears on your cheeks and lips. I will run with those tears.
I regret the things that lie between us. I regret Patrice. The heat of the moment, the purple cloud of jealousy that exploded into toxic, jewelled atoms around me, filling everything. Is it the strongest emotion of all jealousy? Stronger even than love? Why do people say jealousy is yellow? Yellow is too clean a colour. In my mind it is purple: deep, solid, opaque, staining everything it spills onto. Purple blood.
But there is one thing I do not regret. For all the violence and the pain and the trauma, I knew love in all its extremes. I lived, I loved, I felt. My love was complete in the way a
full, bright moon is complete, a solitaire in the darkness. It was like a field of crops where the excess withers and rots amid groaning abundance. It overflowed like a river bursting its banks in the high spring tide, flooding everything within its reach. But Raymond, I felt, didn’t I? I loved? It was not a half love, a crescent moon, a neat yield, a trim river flowing primly within its own confines.
What else is there? What else is life for but to experience that full connection finally being made, the heat and light exploding inside you, and in the ensuing brightness reaching out to another human being and saying this is me, this is everything. Take me, own me, heal me as I am. I loved you as you were, Raymond. You can never say that I did not. But I did not heal you. The more unconditionally I offered myself to you, the more conditional your acceptance became. But that is life. That is risk. That is love. The lover and the loved. The giver and the receiver.
I do not feel that it is over. It is true that I must go and you must stay. You have freedom and I do not. But what existed between us was done and cannot be undone. It remains in the history of the world, the dictionary of events. The energy of it remains in the atmosphere for eternity. When it is time to go, when the star finally shoots into oblivion in the night sky, the end computer finally crashes, the shutdown will be full of flashing disparate memories of life. The heat, the haze, the smoky nightclub blues; the scent of almond croissant, the curl of lilac ribbon… and you. Always you.
COPYRIGHT
Published in Paperback Original in 2016 in the UK by Old Street Publishing Ltd
This ebook edition first published in 2016
by Old Street Publishing Ltd
8 Hurlingham Business Park, Sulivan Road, London SW6 3DU
All rights reserved
© Catherine Deveney
The right of Chris England to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
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