The Snakes

by Sadie Jones

  ‘Not now,’ said Dan automatically.

  The waiter left, immediately, and Dan, despite the circumstances, and everything he should have been thinking about, couldn’t help but feel a thrill of pride, and that he too belonged.

  Sitting now, Griff put his head in his hands. Bea knelt on the floor.

  ‘What makes you my confessor?’ he rasped. ‘You. This nobody.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Bea.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ said Griff. He opened his eyes. ‘It’s all my fault.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  ‘Please – stay here tonight.’ He pulled her hands up towards his face. ‘Don’t go back to that place. Stay here.’

  She took her hands away. ‘We’ll stay until you go up to bed.’

  ‘Stay. I’ll pay.’

  She smiled. ‘We can’t.’

  ‘Can’t or won’t?’ said Griff. His eyes gleamed.

  ‘Won’t.’

  Dan leaned forward. ‘If he really wants –’

  ‘No,’ said Bea, and meant it.

  Griff looked at her coldly. ‘St Bea,’ he said.

  ‘Bea?’ said Dan.

  ‘No,’ said Bea, without looking at him.

  Dan, ignored and overruled, sat back.

  Griff stood up and looked down at his daughter on her knees. ‘Whatever. If you change your mind, tell the guy on the desk. I’m sure they can find you something. I’ll put you in a taxi. I may as well have my walk now.’

  They got into their cab, and he waved them away. Bea turned to see him heading off across the lawn, his long shadow thrown back, up the floodlit facade, fifty feet high.

  ‘We’ll pay him back,’ said Bea.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘The cab.’

  She was staring at the blurred shapes passing the window, eyes flicking in and out of focus. Shock, he thought, there should be more than one word for it. Like all those words for snow in whatever language it was. Hard, ice-like shock. Soft, muffling shock. Brittle, breakable shock. His mind wandered as they turned off the fast road. He was not in shock. Hauled in by the gendarmes and now here he was, after a nice steak dinner, fine. Once, years before, a police van pulled up in front of him on Consort Road. He had been on his way to meet Troy, at the Bussey. They dragged him off the pavement, into the van, and then a cell. He was fourteen at the time. It terrified him so badly he’d cried in front of them, not knowing how far it would go, or what they suspected him of, if anything, and because his mother wouldn’t know where he was. His life might have been far from the cliché Griff imagined, but he had every reason to fear the police. And yet, he’d spent half the day in a high-security barracks in the whitest town in the world and not really been bothered. It hadn’t touched him. He began to wonder at it, and then realised; it was because he had known Griff was there.

  ‘My father never believed in Alex,’ said Bea. ‘He didn’t help him. Now he’s in so much pain.’

  Dan tried to care for Alex’s memory, or that Griff had failed him.

  ‘So is your mum. Maybe you could be a bit nicer to her.’

  She sat up suddenly, so suddenly the driver swerved, checking his mirror.

  ‘It’s not your family,’ she said furiously. ‘I’m not interested in being nice to her.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He repressed his outrage at being spoken to like that.

  She sat back. ‘No. I’m sorry.’

  They drove up to the hotel, the weeds and stones of the driveway looked very sharp in the headlights. She paid the cab with money Griff had pressed into her hand, and they let themselves in.

  ‘Home sweet home,’ said Dan. The air did smell sweet, and damp.

  ‘We left the back doors open,’ she said, feeling the night breeze flowing through the hotel like a river. ‘I thought we closed them.’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ said Dan. ‘I’ll lock up, you go to bed.’

  She went. Some of the doors off the dark corridor were open. She walked into their room, and switched on her bedside lamp.

  They lay waiting for sleep. An owl hooted, somewhere in the mass of trees. There was a distant, answering call. Above them, the atticspace was still.

  ‘Owls eat snakes, don’t they?’ said Dan.

  ‘Think so. Mice, definitely.’

  ‘You need to sleep,’ he said. ‘I’ll count you down.’

  She settled into the crook of his arm.

  ‘A hundred,’ he whispered. ‘Ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven … ninety-six …’

  He lost the count at sixty, and stopped.

  ‘He feels so far away tonight,’ she said in the darkness, but there was silence. ‘Even more far away than dead.’

  She lay awake, listening to the owls. She thought of the tiny mice in the imagined safety of the grass, snatched up by beaks bigger than themselves. How alien the air must be, after the solid ground. It must feel like death, even before death came.

  15

  The next day began quietly. Bea, who had been awake with the sunrise every day since Alex died, slept late. She didn’t stir when Dan got up and tiptoed out of the room. He took his clothes, and his laptop, and washed in the bathroom across the corridor, so as not to disturb her. She needed her sleep. Then, down in the hall, he opened up the computer and googled Alex Adamson, Death. He wanted to save her from being surprised again. No, not just that. Now that he knew it was in the papers, he felt compelled to look. He wanted to see how other people saw his wife’s family, and if there were any pictures of Bea. The other papers had all got hold of what the Mail had started, but there was nothing new. The same pictures rehashed the same story, verbatim. But, in the sidebar, old articles about Griff. Dan felt a pornographic shame, clicking through to find the things she’d never told him. He had googled her when they met. He didn’t feel bad about that. This was different. He hadn’t dug before. He’d checked her out, seen a little bit about Griff, and moved on. Now, hunched over his laptop, in the hall because it was nearest to the router, he delved. Before he’d known Bea well, he had more respect for her privacy. Now her past felt like it was his to plunder, her father’s anyway. He saw Griff’s other companies, besides Hemisphere, reports of bankruptcies declared and forgotten, and new companies, and a defunct petition against him. He even saw a picture of the private jet. He read the articles, quickly, skimming, listening out for Bea, like he was going through her things behind her back. He hadn’t checked so carefully before. He’d seen her father was a businessman, he hadn’t looked that far. He had fallen in love with her before he knew about all the money she resolutely would not take. She had stood out, the first time he laid eyes on her, at the Bussey. She wasn’t beautiful. He had often wondered exactly what it was that made her shine to him. He assumed it was her soul, that was what he had always believed, that just like in the movies, love had put a spotlight on her. Now it occurred to him that perhaps it was her money that gave her presence in a room, even in its absence. The idea scared him. He realized he had always felt proud of picking her out, as if he had seen a more important beauty. He was glad he hadn’t known. It shouldn’t make a difference. He told himself it didn’t make a difference. As Bea always said, it was her father’s money, not hers. They had agreed. It was ironic that the starter money, the guilt money that got them their mortgage on the flat, was from his dad. He’d never thought to question it. She didn’t judge him for taking money from his absent, married, lying father, arguably just as dirty as the money from hers, but she wouldn’t touch a penny of Griff’s riches. Nothing. There was just one picture of Bea that he could see, in Getty Images, with a diagonal stamp across it to keep the copyright. It was a photograph from someone’s millennium garden party. Property developer Griff Adamson, and wife, Olivia, with their three children, Edward (18), Alexander (16) and Beatrice (9). Griff had one arm around the shoulders of his eldest, Ed, and his other around Liv’s waist. She was wearing something Grecian-looking, with long, boho hair. She looked like a perfume commercial. Alex w
as between Liv and Bea, and holding Bea’s hand. Bea was grinning, broadly, like a school photo, her legs planted, sturdily, and Alex was looking off to one side, with his eyes half closed, so you couldn’t tell anything about him, except that he was uncomfortable, awkward in himself. Of the five of them, he looked like the marked one, it seemed obvious. Or did he just look tragic, now the worst had happened? It felt strange to see Bea as a child. There was something sick about it. Partly because she wasn’t a pretty child. He didn’t know if it would have been sicker if she’d been pretty, and thought maybe it would. But he felt bad for her. She just looked plain, and dumpy, and much too keen and cheerful for the surroundings, like she was consciously making the best of it. He didn’t know why it made him feel so bad, her sunniness, her cheer. He heard her footsteps on the stairs, and slammed the laptop shut.

  ‘Morning,’ she said, as she came down.

  She didn’t notice how guilty he looked, or the slamming of the computer. She wasn’t the kind of girl to notice. She was not suspicious of him.

  ‘You slept ages,’ he said. ‘That’s good. Feel better?’

  They had some breakfast then Dan cut the grass and Bea read a book. Stopping, to clear wet, stuck-on grass from the blunt blades, he looked at her while she was reading, unaware of him. She was on her stomach with her knees bent, and her feet crossed at the ankle. The camisole top she had on was not a new one, he couldn’t remember when it had been new. One stringy strap had fallen from her shoulder, he could see the side of her breast, full, squashed against her arm. The skirt was almost white, but had been pink, a sort of cotton gathered mid-length thing she wore every summer. She had another like it, he thought. At least one. Her feet were bare. Her hair had a scruffed-up tangled part at the back, where she hadn’t bothered brushing it. She had not put on her bra. He thought of her mother’s studied chic, the skinny cropped jeans and shirts and simple skirts, which didn’t need visible labels to advertise their pedigree. Dan didn’t think Liv probably wore the same thing more than five times. Bea’s clothes were like family to her, she was nonsensically loyal to them. Everything Liv wore screamed money. Every look she gave or word she spoke, every silence, said Look at me. Bea’s clothes said as little as was possible to say. Her walk, and manner, the way she spoke, all of it, modestly, quietly assembled, apparently diffident, shouted from the rooftops that she did not care. They were flip sides of the same coin, Liv and Bea, they were both disingenuous. And Bea did care. He knew she did. She looked up.

  ‘Why haven’t we heard anything?’ she asked. ‘Have you checked your phone?’

  ‘Yes, nothing. Try not to think about it.’

  ‘Why were you staring at me?’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ said Dan. ‘I was just thinking you look gorgeous.’

  She shrugged him off as if it made her grumpy to be told it, like she always did at compliments, and went back to her book.

  She earned all right in her job. She could have bought some new things. He started up the mower. He felt ashamed. He hadn’t meant to think that. The dirty engine spat and roared. It wasn’t loud enough to block the image of the oil-painting grounds of the Chateau L’Orée from his mind, or the feeling he’d had, standing with Griff on the terrace, like he owned it, or the headlines – millionaire, billionaire, mogul, playboy – it was only stubbornness, and phoney, that made Bea wear old clothes.

  He paid penance for his thoughts by making lunch with the things in the fridge she had worried would go off. They lay side by side with their plates on the newly cut grass, playing music through Alex’s portable speaker and looking at pictures of their lives in London and YouTube, falling through the rabbit hole of connections; cover versions, spinoffs, spoofs. There was nobody there to see them, lying together in the garden, just the tall trees all around and the empty hotel. They even made love, for the first time since it happened. They made love on the grass, as if nobody had recently died, and there was no crisis, and held one another afterwards, resting in the sunshine.

  ‘You’ll burn,’ he said.

  ‘So will you.’

  They roly-polied together into the shade.

  ‘Mind the snakes don’t come,’ she said.

  Their phones shuddered warnings and alerts. Griff would like to see them at the Chateau L’Orée des Vignes later that afternoon.

  ‘Oh God!’ shouted Bea in distraction, stretching her arms up to the sky. ‘I don’t want to go there again!’

  He pinned her down and kissed her. ‘More luxury. Poor you.’

  They heard banging.

  ‘What the hell?’ he said.

  Banging again. A fist on the door.

  ‘I didn’t hear the bell,’ said Dan.

  ‘Nor me –’

  As they scrambled up, before they had time to go inside, a uniformed gendarme appeared round the corner. He walked straight over the flower bed in his army boots, like an apparition, as if it weren’t a flower bed, just earth. They stared at him marching towards them, gun and taser heavily hanging from his belt, with his navy-blue peaked cap pulled down. The banging started again, on the front door.

  ‘They’re back here!’ the gendarme shouted over his shoulder.

  Bea and Dan were dazed; fumbling and scared in their bare feet, clothes in a mess.

  ‘What do you want?’ said Bea.

  He stood, boots planted wide, staring at them, at a loss.

  ‘I need to go and open the door,’ said Bea.

  ‘He stays here,’ said the gendarme, pointing at Dan.

  ‘He said “stay here”,’ Bea told Dan, her voice shaking.

  ‘Why?’ said Dan, but he froze.

  ‘I’m going to open the door,’ she said in English, then French, holding out her hands to pacify the gendarme.

  She ran through the hotel and opened the door to two men, in dark blue bomber jackets and army trousers, with bright white stripes and Gendarmerie written on their chests. She didn’t recognise either of them.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she said. She saw a white van and a squad car parked behind them. ‘What’s he doing?’ She pointed at the back garden.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said one of the men. ‘We didn’t mean to scare you.’ He held out a badge. ‘TIC.’

  The second one set off, round the corner of the hotel.

  ‘I’ll sort out Girard,’ he said.

  ‘It’s OK, I come in?’ said the first. ‘We speak English?’

  Bea didn’t want to lose sight of the other man, when Dan was on his own, and the uniformed cop had a gun. She went towards the back door.

  ‘Wait, please,’ said the man behind her.

  ‘I need to translate,’ said Bea. She heard his boots on the floor behind her, and the nylon rustle of his clothes, and his hand landed on her arm.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ she said.

  ‘Wait, please.’

  She reached the back door, but it was locked. She turned to go through the sitting room, but he was in her way.

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘It’s OK.’

  She stood there in her cotton skirt, damp from sex with Dan, hair messy, and the imprint of grass on her elbows, loose blades of grass on her feet. He faced her down calmly.

  ‘My name is Officer Lecuyer,’ he said.

  She could hear men’s voices in the garden. She was trapped.

  ‘We are here to search in your brother’s room, and my –’ his English dried up. ‘My friend wants Monsieur Durrant, to ask him questions.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Capitaine Vincent is here soon. It’s OK.’

  The voices in the garden died away, then she saw Dan, accompanied by the two other men, walking past the front window. She read the words Gendarmerie Identification Criminelle on the back of the second man’s bomber jacket. She wanted to shout Dan’s name, but stopped herself.

  ‘Can I speak to him, please?’ she said quietly.

  Lecuyer stepped aside in a very gentlemanly way, as if he hadn’t been intimidating her. Perhaps he hadn’t. She had los
t her bearings. She didn’t know what was normal or if she was safe. She didn’t know how scared to be. She went to the front door and opened it. Dan was about to get into the squad car, with the two gendarmes, in a hurry, at his side.

  ‘Call Griff,’ he said.

  One of them opened the back door for him, and gestured. It wasn’t as if he was cuffed or being forced. Perhaps she was overreacting.

  ‘They just want to ask him one or two things,’ said the second TIC man, coming close to her. He was young and overweight and his smooth face was shining with sweat.

  ‘Call Griff,’ said Dan again.

  ‘What do they want to know?’ she said to the TIC man.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He wiped his clammy face with the flat of his hand and hitched up his elasticated dark blue uniform trousers, which were baggy, and silly looking. ‘Nice place,’ he said, looking up at the hotel.

  ‘Hey.’ The gendarme tapped his watch. ‘In the car,’ he said to Dan.

  Dan got in.

  ‘Bea,’ he said. ‘Fucking call him.’

  The gendarme tensed at the word fucking, understood by anybody.

  ‘No trouble, OK?’

  ‘Don’t give them any trouble,’ she repeated then, realising it sounded as if it came from her, ‘He said not –’ but the car door slammed shut.

  He looked at her through the glass. She smiled, so he wouldn’t think she was scared.

  The two gendarmes got into the car, and drove him away. He twisted round to look through the back window and then the car disappeared around the corner onto the road.

  She was alone with the other two officers. Their van, with Gendarmerie Identification Criminelle printed on the side was parked next to the rented Golf.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Lecuyer said to her.

  They all walked inside together.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘This is, how do you say? Just the beginning.’

  ‘Do you have authorisation?’ said Bea, fumbling for reason.

  ‘Oh. Yes. Wait,’ said Lecuyer.

  He ran to the van and she and the other one waited, not speaking, until he came back. He held out a clipboard and some sheets of printed paper.