The Snakes

by Sadie Jones

  Dufour’s telephone rang. He held up his hand for silence, and Dan immediately stopped talking.

  17

  As Griff opened the door to his suite, Bea heard music. Arun was seated at a grand piano on the far side of the room, tinkling out some Chopin, with an ease that made it sound like a cocktail lounge. He stopped playing as she came in. The room was as chilled and sealed as a fridge. Her mother, in black, lay on a velvet sofa, facing the windows, with her laptop at her side.

  ‘Don’t stop,’ she said to Arun, then she saw Bea.

  ‘Hi, Arun,’ said Bea. ‘Dan is still at the police station.’

  He got up from the piano, crossed the room, and kissed her cheek. ‘You’re not to worry.’

  ‘What’s she talking about?’ said Liv.

  ‘Dan. He’s being questioned again,’ said Griff.

  ‘Why?’ said Liv. ‘What’s he done?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Bea, thinking how stupid her mother was, and how slow.

  ‘Well, why is he there? What can we do?’ said Liv, half rising.

  ‘It’s all right, calm down, it’s fine,’ said Bea.

  Her mother swung her legs over the side of the chaise and put her feet on the floor, her hand groping for her water glass. ‘I’m trying to help,’ she slurred. ‘You don’t need any help, obviously. You’re fine.’

  ‘I’m going outside,’ said Bea.

  Arun followed her to the door. ‘I’m expecting to hear back from a number of people, at any moment,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to worry about, truly.’

  ‘I’ll be downstairs.’

  ‘Try to be kind to your mother,’ he whispered. ‘She’s so fragile.’

  Bea thought how innocent he was, this shark from the same cold waters as her father.

  ‘Arun!’ Her father summoned him from the bedroom.

  ‘Coming –’

  He smiled and went. He must make over a million pounds a year, he had a family, and yet he tiptoed around her father like a lackey. Bea stepped out and began to pull the door to. She was almost out of earshot when her mother spoke.

  ‘Bea. Come here.’

  Bea considered closing the door and leaving her, but she couldn’t do it. She went back inside. Arun and Griff were in the bedroom, and the doors were closed. Her mother held her hand out, and shuffled along the chaise. Reluctantly, Bea crossed the room, and sat with her.

  ‘Look,’ said Liv. ‘What I found.’

  She picked up her laptop, clumsily, and touched the trackpad. Photos came up from the tool bar like a genie from a bottle. There was Alex’s face. Bea braced herself. It looked like life. It felt to her like life. The backlit screen was as bright as Liv could make it. She began to swipe. Alex’s different faces from different times looked out, uncurated, blurred and clear, caught in movement, unknowing, or smiling, careful sometimes, and deliberately cheerful, and at other times caught in secret, contemplative. She kept expecting to see his car, hanging in the still morning air, or his autopsy, that she had to keep not picturing. Her mother, weeping, sagged, and leaned her torso against Bea’s breast and ribs, flicking through the pictures, her finger tap-tapping through the photographs, sometimes so fast it was as if he were transforming from child to adult, and back to child. From teenager in black, to tall and tanned on his gap year, to a small, round-faced boy, then twenty-five, then five, then thirty. She thought of someone harming him. She saw his face split open. Liv stared and flicked through the pictures, murmuring words and little moans, indistinguishable cries and laughs.

  ‘Here. Look. And. See? Ah. See?’

  Bea, with one arm around her mother, jammed her other hand over her own mouth. The pain came back, forks stabbing at her temples. She wouldn’t have been surprised if blood had trickled down her face.

  ‘Liv,’ she said, ‘put that down for a second, I need to talk to you.’

  She took the laptop from her mother, and moved so that she could see her face.

  ‘The police told us something,’ she said. ‘Not very much, but you need to be prepared.’

  Liv closed her eyes.

  ‘Are you ready?’

  Liv didn’t speak. Bea was holding her shoulders, partly to be kind and partly to make sure she didn’t slump or fall.

  ‘Alex was murdered,’ said Bea. ‘They don’t know who, or why, that’s all they said.’

  Liv didn’t react.

  ‘They’re saying that, now, for sure. Do you understand?’ said Bea.

  Liv began to moan, and then to wail; as she raised her voice Griff came out of the bedroom.

  ‘I told her,’ said Bea.

  Liv pulled away, and knelt on the ground, wailing and crying. Bea, unmoved, watched her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, pain stabbing her temples.

  ‘Liv. You should rest,’ said Griff.

  Her mother grabbed the laptop and started to look at the pictures again. Griff touched Bea’s shoulder, a two-finger tap, like a signal. Bea got her mother up from the floor. ‘Take her in there,’ said Griff.

  Liv went with her to the bedroom, hanging on to the laptop, but when they got to the bed she let it slide from her hands. She sobbed against Bea’s breast, and the laptop fell on its side, half closed, Alex’s face illuminating the keyboard. Her tears soaked and spread on Bea’s T-shirt. Bea’s head hurt so much her eyes were burning.

  ‘Try to sleep,’ she said.

  She covered her with her pashmina, which was lying on the bed, then straightened the laptop, and put away the pictures, so Alex’s face, discarded, wouldn’t stare at nothing. She put the laptop on a table as she left the room.

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ said Liv.

  Nothing was enough. Not if they all bled out for her. Griff was standing where Bea had left him, by the sofa, bleak and old and powerless. They looked at one another, but there was nothing to say.

  Bea left the suite, and went downstairs, across the terrace, and, from there, down the steps into the garden. She needed nothingness to clear her mind. She could still feel her mother’s body. Chateau L’Orée des Vignes was the perfect place for nothingness. Fingerposts directed her to la piscine, in curly writing. Past an avenue of box hedges, brown with blight, across a rose garden and an arboretum, was a large circular swimming pool set into an unnatural-looking lawn. About forty white plastic sunloungers were ranked around the pool. It was like a waiting room between worlds. She would sit and wait for Dan to be released, and try not to think. Two waiters, carrying trays, crossed paths. A pair of middle-aged women, very darkly tanned, looked up as Bea approached; one said something to the other and they looked down at their magazines again.

  ‘Madame?’

  The waiter looked Algerian or Moroccan. Bea ordered an iced coffee and put it on her father’s bill without a second thought. She pulled a bed into the shade, and sat down.

  Across the pool, a French family had put three sunbeds together, like a camp, and the mother was blowing up bright green frog armbands on the skinny arms of her tiny, naked daughter, a baby, of one or two years old. Bea watched how the woman moved. The sun came out in flashes. The tanning women bent their legs like slalom skiers, and their sunflower faces tracked the light. Bea tucked her skirt around her. She felt insubstantial, her headache had gone. She was hollowed out. These moments without thinking were like holidays. With lonely happiness, she watched the ladies sunbathing, and the French family putting on their suncream. The mother of the small naked girl, finished blowing up the armbands and patted her.

  ‘Bon.’

  The tiny child, released, euphoric, ran straight towards the swimming pool.

  ‘Arrête!’ the mother shouted, but the naked baby laughed.

  Quick as a leaping fish, she was off the edge, as if she thought she could run across the water, instead, of course, she dropped, and disappeared. Mouth open, she went under, then bobbed, and down again, and out of sight. The mother was on her feet before Bea had time to even sit up. Fully clothed, she jumped in. There was splashing, constern
ation from all around, and, a moment later, she carried her baby out, wading through the shallows and up the steps, with the child screaming in her arms. Less than five seconds had passed. The father, laughing now, reached for his phone to take a picture, as the mother carried her daughter back, clothes sticking, water pouring from her like a sea creature. She started laughing along with her husband, but the little girl screamed and screamed. The tanning women, disturbed again, raised their heads and stared.

  ‘There there,’ soothed the mother. ‘Chouchou –’

  She covered the angry baby with kisses, and wrapped her in a striped towel, pulling her arm out to dry it, and buried her face in the wishbone groove at the back of her daughter’s soft neck, and kissed her.

  Longingly, Bea watched them, entranced. She wrapped her arms around herself. She imagined making love with Dan and the feeling of life beginning. She knew her friends’ stories of motherhood. They talked as if the thing was mundane, awful even, and moaned about sleeplessness and boredom, but they were keeping heroes’ secrets. They were mothers. They had crossed into a place of mortal danger and beauty. They knew they had, they just didn’t want to boast. When she was a mother, and Dan was a father, how happy they would be. They would give so much love it was terrifying. The French mother across the pool had ordered something from the waiter. She’d saved a life, now she was having a sandwich. The two waiters were setting up a trestle table for afternoon tea, taking great care with the corners of the cloth, but a wind had come up, and whatever they did, the cloth kept blowing, and showing the scarred wood underneath. Bea’s phone buzzed. Griff.

  You can get Dan now.

  She jumped up and left, apologising to the waiter, and nearly tripping on the steps, then on a sprinkler sticking out of the grass.

  Arun was waiting by a long black Mercedes limousine, with Chateau L’Orée des Vignes written in gold on the side. When he saw her, he opened the door and she scrambled into the back seat. The engine was already running.

  ‘Jolly good,’ he said.

  Dan’s legs were shaking as he was escorted out of the gendarmerie. He couldn’t remember anything that had been asked of him, or a word of what he’d answered, it was a blank. He crossed the drill square courtyard, flanked by Dufour and Luis, and saw Arun through the glass, beyond the metal detector, with the desk sergeant. He stopped himself from waving enthusiastically. Even from a distance, behind reflecting toughened glass, Arun looked immaculate and very rich-looking.

  ‘This way,’ said Dufour. ‘OK, good.’

  He saw Dan through into the security lobby, and then he and Luis went back out across the courtyard again. The soldier on the desk released the second door, and Dan went through it, to the public side, the civilian side. Safety.

  ‘There you are,’ said Arun. He was wearing a perfectly cut lightweight navy-blue suit, pale pink shirt and a silk tie. Even his glasses looked shiny, and his head, as if he’d just polished himself. He held out his hand to shake Dan’s, and his cuffs slipped a perfect inch and showed his large watch. They shook hands.

  ‘I’m so sorry you’ve been inconvenienced. I’ve been trying to have a chat with the sergeant here, but my French is not all it should be. He took some convincing I’m not from Syria.’

  Dan mumbled something, feeling dazed. Two other soldiers, hanging around behind the desk were talking about them, and staring. Arun placed a thick, sealed white envelope on the desk, addressed in ink to Capitaine Christophe Vincent. He said something in French to the soldier on the desk, then opened the door for Dan. When they reached the gate he stood aside again, to let him through first.

  ‘Ghastly,’ he said.

  Dan smiled for the first time. Ghastly. They passed the last of the soldiers, and they were on the pavement.

  ‘Have you noticed’, said Arun, ‘how even these days, one can’t afford to dress down?’

  By one he meant people of colour. Dan had on a pair of old shorts and a T-shirt, and he hadn’t shaved. ‘Where’s your car?’ he said.

  ‘Just round the corner.’

  ‘They’ve got a CCTV image of Alex with someone,’ said Dan. ‘It could be anyone, but the cops in there wanted it to be me.’

  ‘Where was it taken?’

  ‘I dunno, a gas station somewhere.’

  Arun shook his head. ‘Alex was reckless. He was a trusting, tragic character in many ways.’

  Dan didn’t care about that. ‘Yeah, but why are they so interested in me?’

  ‘Don’t concern yourself. Their behaviour towards you is a combination of what we might call their house style and a certain endemic racism. In any case, they’ll certainly hesitate before bothering you again.’

  Even in Griff’s absence, Dan felt the sedative power of his wealth.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’

  At the little roundabout they crossed the road.

  ‘There we are,’ said Arun.

  Dan saw a black Mercedes with shaded windows waiting by the kerb.

  ‘We thought it best not to park too close,’ smiled Arun. ‘It looks rather Russian mafia, don’t you think? Very ostentatious.’

  The back door opened and Bea clambered out. She threw herself at him and hugged him.

  ‘Oh my God. Are you OK?’

  ‘Just about.’

  They all got into the limousine, Arun in the front.

  ‘Bonjour,’ said the driver, smiling.

  ‘Hey,’ said Dan.

  The car pulled away. Bea, subdued by his reaction to her, sat back into the corner.

  ‘What did they ask you?’ she said.

  He didn’t answer. He couldn’t remember. She looked awkward in the big rich car, and the sight of her was complicated. He thought of Dufour, probing him, and how he had defended her, and felt the need to punish her. He remembered her expression as he was taken away, so calm, implacable. He knew he blamed her but his reasons were obscure, even to himself.

  ‘Did you call Griff?’ he said. ‘When they took me in?’

  ‘Of course I did.’

  The air conditioning made the black leather interior cold and crisp. She had goose pimples on her arms. He leaned back in the deep seat and shut his eyes.

  ‘Why did you tell them I wasn’t in bed with you, the night Alex died? Why?’ he said quietly. He opened his eyes and looked at her without turning his head. ‘Huh?’

  ‘I didn’t, did I? I was telling them everything. Every minute. I didn’t mean you weren’t there.’

  ‘OK, never mind.’

  ‘What were they like? How did they treat you?’

  He shrugged and looked away. They left the city. Blunted by present comforts, the last two hours blurred. He thought of Karen Koch, and smiled. He took Bea’s hand. He felt her relief. He squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back.

  ‘What have you been doing, anyway?’ he said.

  ‘I was at the chateau, with my parents.’

  She looked exhausted.

  ‘Sorry, Arun,’ he said, ‘d’you think you could ask the guy to turn the air con down? Or off? My wife’s got this weird idea we should save the planet or something.’

  He leaned across her, and rolled down her window, and kissed her on his way back. She smiled.

  ‘What else happened?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, you know, just the usual shit that happens down the gendarmerie,’ he said. ‘Not much.’

  The open windows brought the smell of warm grass, into the car. Arun twisted round to speak to them over his reading glasses.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘what would you like to do?’

  ‘What time is it?’ Dan took out his phone, disorientated.

  ‘Griff would love you to come back to the chateau. Yes?’

  ‘Yeah, why not?’ said Dan.

  ‘Righty-ho,’ said Arun.

  ‘Why?’ said Bea.

  ‘To debrief your dad, and thank him,’ said Dan.

  ‘He didn’t do anything.’

  ‘How do you know?’
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  ‘They weren’t going to keep you in there,’ said Bea.

  ‘I’m happy you’re so chilled about it.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘They were writing in notebooks, Bea – with pencils. It was scary. No wonder Griff records all his meetings.’

  ‘But it’s impossible. It’s ridiculous.’

  ‘You weren’t there.’

  ‘It must have been horrible,’ she said.

  ‘Luckily, your dad isn’t just sitting around while some Frenchman decides the only black man in the village is a drug-dealing murderer. He has contacts.’

  ‘It doesn’t make him God.’

  ‘Your car is up at the chateau, isn’t it?’ interjected Arun. ‘And there’s something Griff needs to hear about.’

  ‘What is it?’ Bea asked.

  ‘I’ll tell you when we get there,’ said Dan.

  ‘Dan. Tell me now.’

  He didn’t want to. ‘They’ve got a CCTV picture,’ he said gently. ‘A photograph of Alex at a petrol station somewhere, with a guy.’

  ‘What guy?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know. And it wasn’t clear at all. It could have been anyone.’

  She stared at him. Her eyes looked particularly clear when she heard things that hurt her, he noticed. He had seen it enough times recently to have learned the look; clear, a little wider, very steady.

  ‘Is that it?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK.’ She turned away from him, absorbing the information. ‘They’re calling it murder now,’ she said. ‘Officially.’

  They were out of the city, on the dual carriageway now, and the air beat like helicopter blades through the open windows.

  ‘Do you mind?’ said Arun, and both back windows rolled slowly up. ‘So what’s the decision?’

  Dan didn’t want to be back at Paligny, just the two of them. He needed Griff’s context, and his reaction. He needed his company.

  ‘I should be the one to tell him about the CCTV,’ he said.

  ‘The chateau it is, then,’ said Arun. He took out his handkerchief and dabbed his forehead.

  ‘Sorry, Arun,’ said Bea, ‘do put on the air conditioning, if you like, I don’t want everyone being miserable. It’s fine.’