Ghosts from the Past

by Sally Spedding

  Keep quiet, Aimée, for Christ’s sake, …

  I listened to the rest with an overturning heart, as other names including those of the helicopter pilot, Eduard Gallas, Sion Evans, Lieutenant Raoul Paranza and Capitaine Didier Rousson replaced hers.

  “…and so far, despite Eduard Gallas and Sion Evans having contacted the police, the name of whoever gave orders to both helicopter crew members taking young Mathieu Deschamps to Paris, to divert to a field near Bellac, is still unknown…”

  Gallas and Evans had already banked my payments. But not so my main player.

  Damnation.

  Something foul was beginning to sneak up my throat. So, my lover and the Welshman had grown white feathers. Giant white feathers. And still the news rolled on, ending with a warning to the public not to apprehend either myself or my niece if we were seen. We might be armed. Unpredictable…

  That last word was sloppy. Covering too many sins.

  *

  I couldn’t become complacent but nevertheless had to remind myself how Poitiers’ Chef d’Escadron, Philippe Aubouchon had eyed my breasts during the furore surrounding Sophie Kassel’s disappearance. Hadn’t he stood rather too close for my liking while we’d read her school reports and other useful documents in my study? Asked me out for a drink?

  But should I have trusted him? Perhaps not a senior gendarme just four months away from professional oblivion. Ends needed tying. He had a reputation to keep, and what he did or didn’t tell the media, wouldn’t be for me to know. It was surely just a matter of time till his name came up in lights.

  My newly-ruptured bruise that I’d tried anaesthetizing with compacted snow, was stinging like a snake bite. Bone deep, it seemed as I entered the unprepossessing village of Mignonville and passed the Gallas abattoir. Destination of choice for the beautiful Vervain. Its collection of rusted, corrugated steel blocks stood in their own flat, grassless space surrounded by poplars shivering in the breeze. But where were any transporters? Any signs of life? Or death?

  I slowed down to see if my betrayer’s Jeep was tucked away somewhere, but no. All was empty. Deserted. Even the giant-sized sign over the locked-up entrance, was missing several letters.

  ET JUL S GALL S VIAN E DU POITO C AREN ES.

  Normally I’d have called in to give Eduard a quick blow-job in the carcass store, but not today. Not ever and, unless I was careful, all my team would become a pack of ‘bétes noires’ until the end of my days.

  *

  AUCENTRELLE and a snail’s pace speed limit and endless signs depicting the useless elderly crossing the road. A pretty enough place on a good day, with the retirement home’s asymmetrical white walls glistening like some futuristic Frank Lloyd Wright creation - except that for all its inmates, there was no future. Particularly for one…

  *

  I was familiar with its layout, menus, timetables and carers’ shifts. I knew that at this time of day, the night staff would be tearing off their smeared overalls, scrubbing their hands and winging it back to their own beds, while the next tranche - all female - would take their time. Spin out their walk from the cycle bays or car park; go back to check something, gaze at the sky. I’d seen them at it but couldn’t judge them. Who’d want to work there unless like Aimée, they were desperate?

  As for myself, I’d entered that Mignonville abattoir each morning with a spring in my step and not just because the pay was good or because of the sex in Gallas’s office afterwards, but it was the closest I’d come in life to understanding the workings of God.

  By administering death.

  *

  I realised now that girl who’d let me spend last night at her flea-ridden flat over a fishing tackle shop in Saint-Antonin had been another mistake. My research into her background had let me down. The same for the Welsh couple picked on Gallas’s recommendation. More reason to shore up my defences. Starting here. Maman’s last home.

  Its odour never changed. Decomposition sweetened by fabric conditioner from the laundry room where the hum of its industrial-sized washing machines filled my ears. I reminded myself that unlike the mistakes on La Princesse Poole, I must avoid everyone. Least of all pass the time of day or chat about my traitorous mother. How could I know what lies she might have peddled about me? No, I had to stick to my uncluttered agenda. Besides, my bruise was still suppurating like an old plum and nothing I’d put on it had so far stopped the leakage.

  My left, gloved hand, was its shield. My eyes and ears my only weapons.

  *

  The gunmetal grey staff lockers lay stacked together under an inadequate light. I searched for Aimée’s, all the while on alert for an interruption. Some unwanted query.

  Violà…

  But what was I hoping to find inside it? Something she’d let slip after the third glass of cheap red at her apartment? Something with which to discredit her, should the need arise.

  Please God…

  I’d hung around when the clever Paolo Berrano had fashioned my car’s replacement key, also two small locker keys. Just a certain look and the undoing of my blouse’s top button had done the trick. Me, with the tightest, toned pelvic floor in the region.

  How little he’d known.

  Parfait…

  The thin, steel door of Aimée’s locker opened to reveal firstly, the distinct smell of stale excrement embedded in several soiled overalls. I searched each of their pockets in turn, mentally back in Mignonville and its bloodied, slippery tiles.

  Nothing.

  Voices.

  Damn.

  I re-locked the locker and ran along the muffling carpets up to the second floor where to my horror, that waste of old skin, Nelly Santorini complete with a single pink roller perched upon her unflattering, black hair, was wandering around barefoot in a too-short nightdress with a full bedpan in her hands. I tried not to breathe in.

  “Odette’s not here,” was said with more than a hint of satisfaction. “Gone to a safe-house somewhere. Who can blame her?”

  Hélas...

  “No-one’s had the courtesy to tell me. And I am her daughter. “

  She looked at me with those unfortunately hooded eyes that so many Italians seem to possess. “Didn’t anyone in the office mention it?”

  “The office was empty.”

  I brushed past her to fully open my Maman’s door. Having closed it behind me, I slid the one bolt across. If necessary, I could exit via the one window but as the sole-surviving daughter of a respected resident, I told myself had every right to be here. But not for long. I took in the made-up bed, the slippers I’d bought her last Christmas. The framed photograph of myself and Christine taken in our Confirmation dresses. Her birthday tomorrow would not be remembered in any way. She’d had enough attention as it was.

  No canvas holdall. A bad sign…

  Her handbag empty, hollow.

  Then came urgent tap-tapping at the door that broke my concentration as I began my search.

  “Did you know she escaped last Saturday as well?” Nelly Santorini’s shrillness made me stop. “Where were you then, you criminal?”

  Don’t reply. Keep looking. I must not leave empty-handed…

  A dressing gown. Another of my generous Christmas gifts, hanging behind the bathroom door. Both gaping pockets inviting exploration. I found nothing except a half-sucked lemon bon bon and an elastic band. Her washbasin and wc. had been recently cleaned. Not so a dirty linen box at least half full. Some items I recognised. Others not, and all the while, ‘Signora Bedpan’ was ranting abuse from behind the safety of the door.

  I shut her from my mind as my gloved fingers explored one unwashed garment after another. A brassière, whose spongy straps had lengthened over the years.; a pocketless blouse, two pairs of rayon slacks one of whose legs was badly torn, encrusted with mud around the hems.

  What in God’s name had the old bird been up to?

  I was about to close the wicker lid when I spotted something I’d not seen for a while. Something she’d certainl
y never worn whenever I’d visited her. And come to think of it, the last time had been the night Christine hanged herself.

  A beige cardigan, hand-knitted from wool kept after the final shearing. I sniffed the soft fibres. They still smelt of sheep. That choking, slightly sickly legacy of Les Tourels when we’d been there all together. Us and the animals and the past where I didn’t belong. To have forgotten it, she must have been in a hurry. But hurrying to where? That was the big question. Safe house or…?

  Four pockets in all - some almost too small for an adult’s fingers. But not mine. Oh no. My heart began to throb as I recognised a thickish piece of pale cream paper folded into a small, chunky square. The original version of a vital document which, because of Maman’s forgetfulness, could have been lost for ever. Now it was safe with me. The proof I needed.

  But Nelly Santorini was still in full spate.

  “And did you know she’s being accused of drugging a priest from Normandy, who died?”

  The bathroom mirror showed my mouth had fallen open. My bruise like some disgusting war wound.

  “What?”

  “Si. He didn’t have a prayer. It’s awful, as well as everything else going on…”

  I was soon pulling open the bedroom door to see how her hair roller had slipped to above her right ear making her look even more ridiculous. That red nail-varnished hand no longer holding her outstretched bedpan, but thumb and forefinger rubbing together in a gesture I knew only too well.

  “A hundred francs to keep me quiet that you’ve been here, and for other news as well,” she smiled bad teeth, then shiftily looked around.

  “What other news?”

  “A new, ladies’ bicycle’s been stolen from the staff cycle rack. Red it was.”

  “When?”

  “This morning. I bet it was your Mama up to her tricks again.”

  If true, there was only one place she’d have gone to.

  41. Odette.

  Tuesday 15th March. 1.20 p.m.

  My Jacques had always been too trusting, and if he’d been here, he’d be letting Eduard Gallas and the Welshman lead the way, wherever they might have chosen to go. But not me. Not after the betrayals I’d seen in St Junien, and how my childhood friend who’d moved to Oradour-sur-Glȃne in 1936, had been burnt to death alongside her mother in its crowded church on that obscenely sunny, June morning.

  “You said ‘into them firs,” I reminded the huge man behind me. “And you’d pointed to behind the farmhouse.”

  “’Sright,” as he struck a match.

  I turned to face him. Half a cigarette already between his thick lips.

  “Please. No smoking,” I said. “Unless you want to give us all away.”

  Gallas reached over and pulled it free. Buried it underfoot. A man keen to keep out of trouble, but all too late.

  “She’s right.” He then seemed to freeze. “Merde. Did you hear that? Engines? Shouting?”

  My stomach tightened as I listened. “No. Only birds.”

  “Funny, bloody birds,” said the Welshman. “Look here, I think us boyos should shift ourselves. And quick. God knows what could turn up…”

  Elisabeth, for a start, I thought, irrationally torn between going with them and hunting for Mathieu.

  “Whatever you do, please call John Lyon,” I pleaded. “Tell him I’m here and possibly my daughter and grandson as well. You can hide your number, you know. Pretend to be other men…” I was beginning to sound ridiculous, and before I could finish, they were away, loping, stumbling up towards the top field which would take them past the shack to an overgrown path eventually leading to Soulebec.

  “If no reply, tell Philippe Aubouchon. Please!”

  But only the pale, whispering snow drifting from the north-east, replied.

  *

  My old hands were already numb. My trusty coat too thin as I turned past the farmhouse to where our once fine orchard lay abandoned. A carpet of brown, rotten apples giving off a pungent smell.

  The snowy drizzle sneaked down between my neck and coat collar, chilling and unnerving me, all alone again. But nothing would stand in my way now. Not even the fact that somewhere out here, were two men - two criminals, to be precise - I’d been persuaded to trust - who might have changed their minds about going. Instead seek revenge on me for having brought Elisabeth into the world…

  With each step over last autumn’s dead leaves and the rust-coloured clumps of pine needles blown in from another plantation, my recollection of being Mathieu’s age when Papa had first brought Les Tourels after the Treaty of Versailles, was growing more cear. So too, were other things best left until the time was right.

  Here I was, back in 1922, a seven-year-old holding his hand, exploring this new farmhouse’s surroundings, which had then amounted to thirty-five hectares of mostly good grazing. We’d moved north from Limoges where he’d owned a shoe factory and sold it on for a good price when my Maman’s health was deteriorating.

  “Country air will make her better,” he’d said hopefully and indeed she’d lived another ten years, leaving me not only motherless at fourteen, but bereft. Here became my reason to keep living. To strive at school and be a good daughter to a man who’d never looked at another woman since.

  I’d just reached the earliest of our three plantation of fir trees – a sombre place if ever there was, when my bladder, never the most reliable of timekeepers told me I needed the w.c. As a child, and even my own daughters had been encouraged to use the great outdoors for such functions, but not here. Not now, when my enemy might have me in her sights…

  Holding my breath, and inwardly telling Mathieu that wherever he was, I’d come looking again, I headed back to the house and, foregoing the lower cloakroom, made my way upstairs.

  *

  I sensed immediately that the bathroom on the first-floor landing had been recently used, and I knew by whom. Her scent still hung in the damp air. Still clung to the damp, blue towel draped over the side of the bath. A thin layer of water glistened in the shower tray, tempting me to take a closer look and, having locked the bathroom door behind me, bent over to notice several fine, brown hairs beached up on the surrounding tiles.

  No…

  Panic made me reach the wc. just in time, and as the flush died away, I unlocked the door and held my breath. She amd Mathieu could be just steps away. My own child waiting to finish me off as well.

  Ssshh…

  And the house I’d grown into like a snail into its shell, told me I’d have to start searching all over again.

  *

  Memory plays such strange tricks as the mind ages, I reminded myself, travelling from room to room along the second landing, it was as if some perverse editor had spliced different spools of film together, diminishing the focus to a spectral blur…

  “We’re all guilty of re-configuring the past,” my late uncle Pierre had once said when Elisabeth began working at the abattoir and I’d reminisced with him about her earlier, more normal years. He’d been a professor of psychology at Orléans university, but drowned in a freak yachting accident off Heraklion harbour on a hot, blue-sky day. He’d never married, and we’d never been that close. Particularly after I’d joined the local Resistance, which he’d felt was too partisan.

  But while checking under the various beds that Elisabeth had installed in place of mine, I suddenly missed him glimpsing that crooked smile, so like Papa’s, reaching me down the years.

  What would he make of all this mess now? I wondered, closing the door on what had once been mine and Jacques’s bedroom. Next, hers, done out in purple and dark red and, instead of Maman’s antique mirror, a large, colour reproduction of Dante Alighieri’s strange, avian profile hung on the wall over her bed. And was that again the faintest whiff of of her strange perfume still hovering over her contemporary-styled dressing table, crammed with expensive make-up and a supply of unopened tubes of Leichner covering fluid?

  I’d been away too long, and it was as if my own ghost followed me
around while I called out Mathieu’s name, listening for the faintest, giveaway sound that he and even she might still be here. That my surviving daughter had brought him somewhere she knew well enough to hide him.

  My hearing wasn’t as keen as of old, when a snap of the smallest twig, the brush of leaves against a moving enemy would bring my finger to the trigger. But I’d surely have known if my grandson was trying to connect with me? He was, after all, a determined, noisy little boy…

  The cellar.

  Three cavernous rooms whose once-limed walls were blackened by damp and neglect. The largest had been Jacques’ wine store but all that remained of his hand-crafted wooden racks were a few splintered pieces strewn on the stone flags. With every hesitant step in that poor light, I imagined Elisabeth behind me in the shadows, waiting for the right moment to erase me from her wicked life. And as I scoured every ancient cranny in that windowless, airless place, a long-buried memory began to surface.

  More particularly, the memory of a particular smell. With it, came the creeping realisation of what, in this dismal month, the ‘dead month,’ according to most farmers, might have lain behind events of the past three years.

  *

  Being outside again triggered another memory. Of course. This was the way me and Papa had come to the western side of the farm, away from the spectacular lake he’d created with other local men. Yes, here was where he’d planned all kinds of planting to provide a haven for birds and other wildlife because grazing land it was not. Rock-strewn, barren, more like those primeval stretches that make up the Caussade further south. Here would go hazels, there, the second planting of native firs arranged in a circle as a more natural memorial to his wife lying beneath a granite slab in the local churchyard next to her brother and granddaughter. Where I must go tomorrow on her birthday and tell her what lay deepest in my heart.

  I stopped where we once had. At the end of what could hardly be described as a track. More a depression between one low ridge of rock and another, seemingly undisturbed, while all around lay trapped pockets of snow. Pure and beautiful against the dark wetness of soil and stones.