I sat in Léon Roussel’s office, aware of a dull ache pulsing in me. I’d made a statement. Included the stevedores. Described the one with the black whiskers and the metal bar.
‘But you saw nothing?’ Léon pressed me.
‘No.’
‘No one who came too close? Who might have stabbed him?’
‘We were all too close. All falling over each other to escape the water.’
‘Eloïse, did you see a knife in anyone’s hand?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
He rose from his seat and came to sit on the front edge of the desk, less than arm’s length from me. I could touch his thigh if I reached out. I wanted to touch him to make sure he was real. I had lost faith in my version of reality right now.
‘Eloïse.’ His voice was gentle but his eyes were a policeman’s eyes locked on mine. ‘Do you have a knife?’
‘No. I have no knife. Mickey was murdered with a knife. Léon, I am not a murderer.’
He seemed to hold his breath and when he finally released it I was aware that in some way we had crossed a line.
‘Then let’s look at the alternatives,’ he said calmly. ‘Either he was stabbed by some random attacker just because he was American and anger had spilled over.’ He ticked the point off on his fingers. ‘Or . . .’
‘Or he was targeted for some other reason. By someone who wants to create more serious ill-feeling between the American airmen and locals.’
My voice shocked me. So steady. So controlled. Thick black shadows were shifting at the back of my mind, edging forward, and it took an effort to think straight.
‘I want you to go home, Eloïse. The first time you watch a man die, part of you goes with him.’ He eased forward and ran a hand softly down my wet hair. ‘Go home to your horses.’
I let the weight of my head rest for a moment in his palm. ‘We are at war,’ I said, ‘but the people of France don’t know it.’
‘Let’s keep it that way. The turmoil and unrest in the factories and on the streets is already more than they can bear. It will take more time than we have to straighten out this chaos.’
‘Léon, Serriac is lucky to have you to watch over it.’
‘Hah! The American investigators will be down here like a shot, crawling all over the town like locusts to find the attacker. They also know how to look after their own.’
I felt the darkness edge forward. ‘Léon.’ It came out as a whisper. ‘Léon, what if the knife was meant for me, not Mickey? What if in the confusion and chaos the blade found the wrong target?’
He stepped away from the desk and knelt on the floor in front of my chair. ‘What if you go back to Paris today? I’ll put you on the next train.’
I leaned forward, lowered my head to his shoulder, and felt his arms wrap around my back. He held me tight.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I walked into my father’s house. I say walked, but what I mean is ran. Out of my car and into the coolness of the gloomy hallway as if my heels were on fire. I’d spent more time looking in my rear-view mirror than at the road ahead on the drive back home.
From outside came the rattle and bang of hammers and shovels and the stink of ash stirred up in the humid air. Men were dismantling the incinerated remains of the stables but inside all was silent. The house felt empty. I headed straight to the dark sideboard in the living room and poured myself a healthy shot of Papa’s cognac. I drank it down in two swigs, feeling it burn its way through the ice-cold rage inside me. I was grieving for Mickey, a man I scarcely knew, and I didn’t know how to cradle the grief to me, how to rock it in my arms, because it didn’t belong to me.
I heard a noise and swung round to find Papa standing in the doorway, his usual black felt hat on his head, black shirt stretched across his bull-chest. His boots were filthy but still on his feet. More floors for Mathilde to clean up.
‘Are you all right, Eloïse?’
My father had not asked me if I was all right since Goliath had taken a chunk out of my shoulder blade with his horn when I was running from him at the age of seven. I’d sneaked into his pasture to rescue a fox cub caught in a snare but nothing ever got past that mean sharp-eyed bull. I suddenly recalled that Léon had been the one to patch me up and mop my tears. I’d forgotten that. It was a moment of failure in my father’s eyes that I had not cared to dwell on till now.
‘I’m okay,’ I said.
‘You look . . .’
He didn’t go further, but his thick brows hunched together and his gaze travelled from the empty glass in my hand to the bottle in my other. In the end it was my clothing he remarked on.
‘Is that blood on your dress?’
I looked down. My dress had dried, but the stain that darkened the front of it was unmistakable. He strode into the room, filling up the space, and I could smell the sweet scent of hay on him. Had he been feeding Cosette?
‘Where is André?’ I asked.
‘He has gone to the doctor in Nîmes. For x-rays.’
‘Is he worse?’
‘He says not. I have to believe him. He tells me little.’ His head swayed from side to side, a habit he’d picked up from his bulls. ‘Louis drove him in my truck.’
‘Papa, I saw a man die today.’
A low curse. ‘Who?’
I put down the glass and brandy bottle. ‘An American airman in the street in Serriac. There was an anti-nuclear demonstration of workers from Marseille and fights broke out. It was like a . . .’ I paused. ‘. . . a war.’
He turned away. ‘You know nothing of war, girl.’
‘Papa, please.’ I went to him, close enough to see that the sinews at the side of his neck were taut as bowstrings. ‘I know about fifty-three people,’ I said softly, ‘shot in a barn during the First World War.’
He made a sound. A cough. As though he’d been punched in the chest.
‘Please, Papa, tell me about it. Tell me what happened and why it’s important to Mayor Durand.’
‘One of these days I’ll kill that bastard,’ he growled into his beard.
‘Papa, everything is twisted in a maze of lies and secrets that lead me in all the wrong directions. Please, Papa. Talk to me. I need to know what happened.’
‘Eloïse, you need to know nothing.’
I delved into my bag, pulled out the envelope from Mayor Durand’s desk and held it out to my father. For a fleeting second I thought he was not going to take it, but he did and eased out the yellowed newspaper cutting from inside. I heard him inhale, a gust of air. That was all. For two minutes we stood without a word until slowly his voice rumbled up from somewhere deep in his chest.
‘It was in the filthy winter at the end of the battle of the Somme in northern France where there was mud in our boots, mud on our teeth, mud in our souls. Jerome and I had got separated from our company one night. We found ourselves on the edge of a village, just a pile of burnt-out ruins, but there was a stone barn still standing. It was full of Boche soldiers in German grey, asleep in the hay, even the guard. Jerome and I shot them all. Fifty-three of them. We counted each one.’
Papa was breathing heavily, mouth open to drag in air. I listened to him in silence, imagining the rifle hot in his hands.
‘We were kids,’ he said. ‘Barely seventeen. We’d watched all our friends slaughtered at our sides, brains or guts blown into the mud by German guns and bombs. When we started shooting in the barn, we couldn’t stop. Our fingers kept pulling the trigger, and then we hurled grenades. The smell was terrible.’
He halted, shook his head and looked at me as if he’d never seen me before.
‘Somehow Charles Durand got his hands on a cutting from a local newspaper up there. He has been using it for years to blackmail me.’
‘Why would anyone blackmail you for shooting the enemy?’
‘They weren’t the enemy. The bastard Germans had dressed up a bunch of their French prisoners in German army uniforms t
o make us think that they had more troops in that area.’
My heart tightened for him. ‘They were French?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, Papa, how terrible. For you and for Father Jerome. No wonder he turned to the church to find forgiveness.’
He turned his back to me. He rested his hands heavily on the ancient sideboard, still clutching the piece of newspaper between his fingers, and hung his head, reminding me so much of a wounded bull in the arena. ‘Jerome was lucky,’ he muttered. ‘Forgiveness is not easy to come by.’
I moved closer. ‘I know,’ I said softly.
‘Fifty-three Frenchmen’s lives.’ He stared down at his hands, at his thick-knuckled fingers and the thin gold wedding band as though seeing blood on them.
‘It wasn’t your fault, Papa.’
‘Of course it was my fault. Just like André’s injuries are your fault. Facts don’t change just because we wish them to.’
‘I know,’ I said again.
He uttered a guttural sigh, his hefty ribs rising and falling again and again, and said, ‘I’ve never told anyone. Not even your mother. Jerome and I never speak of it. It is my own cross to bear.’
I put out a hand and touched his back, rested my palm gently on his muscular shoulder blade, offering a scrap of comfort. I wanted, this one time, for him to accept my love and not spurn it. Just this once. He didn’t move, didn’t pull away.
‘Did Mayor Durand extract payments from you?’ I asked.
‘Yes, he did. He knew that I would be tried and sentenced, probably to death if the truth were known.’
I could feel the tremor that shook him. ‘Is that why you sold part of our land to the Americans? Because Durand insisted?’
‘It is. He was getting a rake-off from them for persuading me to agree to it.’
‘Papa, I am so sorry. You should have told me before.’
I stepped right up to my father but still he didn’t turn to look me in the face. I leaned my forehead against his broad back and I could smell the bulls and the horses and the rich earth of Mas Caussade on him, not just on his shirt but deep in the marrow of his bones.
‘I love you, Papa,’ I whispered.
Neither of us moved. For this brief moment we were father and daughter, and I felt a warmth flood into somewhere inside me that had been ice cold.
‘Thank you for the newspaper cutting, Eloïse. We will never speak of this again.’
He straightened up and without a glance at me he strode out into the yard where his faithful Juno was waiting to greet him, snuffling her muzzle into his hand. I watched him scratch her slender neck, light one of his filthy cheroots that stained his beard, and take a long look up at André’s bedroom window before making for the ruins of the stables.
*
It is a joy to hold something beautiful in your hands. It possesses a strange power to bring comfort. Is that what Father Jerome feels when he holds the Bible?
In my room – a bare, unloved kind of place – I sat holding two things of beauty. My subminiature camera. And my developing tank. Both created to perfection by the German-Latvian genius called Walter Zapp and marketed under the name Minox. I lined the equipment up neatly on the dressing-table surface and set to work at once. I planned to have the 9mm film developed and dried by the time André returned from the doctor.
I snicked open the elegant little silver camera, removed the tiny cassette of thirty-six frames and placed it in the recess in the glossy black developing tank. The tank itself was a cylinder about half the size of a wine bottle with a screw interior that made it simple to use. Which was just as well, because my hands disengaged from my brain and took over the job smoothly and efficiently. My mind went into freefall. Ripping through my day.
Isaac. My skinny little brother Isaac.
Father Jerome in his black soutane, yearning for Papa’s soul.
My fingers turned the drum to engage the film-keyhole, then inverted the tank, pressing firmly into the sealing ring. The tank, with the cassette of film inside, was now sealed and lightproof.
Mayor Durand’s office.
The busy clicks of the camera.
The secrets of the US air base laid out like cherries for me to pick.
They flashed bright as fireworks in my head.
Slowly, precisely, my hands screwed the drum anticlockwise down into the black tank.
Papa and Father Jerome in grainy black-and-white. Young soldiers.
Always another war. A Cold War now.
I thought about what that meant for my family as I picked up the bottle of developing liquid, poured it through a hole in the top and agitated it gently with the thermometer.
Fifty-three bodies in a barn.
What terrible deeds did a war make you do? I thought of the gun in my bag today. What was I capable of to help my country?
To protect my family.
My hands knew what they were doing, even if I didn’t. They pumped, they emptied, they washed the film again and again with clean water inside the tank to rid it of all trace of film emulsion.
The placards in the street. A ravenous creature with a thousand legs.
Pouring in fixer. Waiting. Waiting. And while I’m waiting, voices fill my head.
Out! Out! Out!
An iron bar.
Mickey, poor tragic Mickey. You were here to help protect us.
My fingers poured in the wetting agent to prevent drying streaks, while words rose to the surface of my mind like bubbles that had been trapped in my developing tank. Words I’d heard years ago in the mouth of Father Jerome.
‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’
My hand removed the cassette. Unspooled it. Hung the negative up to dry.
Mickey asleep on the wet flagstones with a circular crimson stain like a target drawn on his back.
Léon on his knees. My wet head resting on his shoulder.
Was the knife blade meant for me?
The fireworks in my brain abruptly blacked out. All I saw now was the blood on my dress, and I seized its hem, tore it over my head and threw it in a corner.
There was more to Father Jerome’s New Testament quotation that echoed quietly like a distant church bell.
‘Resist not evil.’
*
I dialled a Paris number. Let it ring twice, hung up and dialled again. That way she would know it was me.
‘Chérie!’ It was like a gust of Parisian smoke in my ear. ‘I was going to ring you this evening.’
Clarisse’s silky voice blunted a sharp edge within me. It sounded so real and ordinary that it made me smile, though she couldn’t see it. Never did I think I would ever call my boss ordinary.
‘Any news on Gilles Bertin?’ I asked.
‘Some.’
‘Good or bad?’
‘A mix.’
‘Stop sitting on the fence.’
She chuckled, warm, throaty and infectious, so that I laughed too. A sound unfamiliar in my father’s house. I stood in the dim light of the hallway, alone in the house, and I hadn’t decided whether to be worried or relieved.
‘Come on, Clarisse, what have you found out?’
‘He’s a hard nut to crack, your Gilles.’
‘He’s not my Gilles. And anyway, you are always an expert with the nut-crackers.’
Again the low chuckle. I heard her light a cigarette, and I could almost smell the whisky on her breath though it was only mid-afternoon.
‘What have you got?’
She kept me waiting just long enough to start to annoy, then she slipped into professional investigator mode. ‘All right. Gilles Bertin was born and raised in Brittany. In Concarneau. Parents were strict Jesuits. Dead now.’
‘Jesuits.’
‘I know. It fits with Intelligence work.’
‘I agree. Both systems of thought can be fanatical about an idea. Anything more?’
‘He lives in a smart apartment near the Trocadéro. Keeps a low profile. Works at the Ministry of D
efence as an analyst and has a weakness for opera.’
‘You’re good, Clarisse. I’m impressed.’
She exhaled smoke with satisfaction. ‘There’s more.’
‘Let’s have it.’
‘He is down in Arles on an assignment to liaise with the USAF at the air base.’
‘Liaise on what?’
Another soft chuckle. ‘Ah, there you have me, chérie. That is for you to find out.’
I frowned at the telephone in my hand. I was disappointed. Clarisse had given me nothing new, despite all her good work. I already knew from André that the MGB Soviets had him embedded in the Ministry of Defence.
‘Thanks, Clarisse.’
‘I haven’t finished.’
I heard a secretive smile in her voice. ‘What else?’ I asked quickly.
‘Gilles Bertin is cousin to your mayor, Charles Durand.’
I let out a whoop of relief that echoed through the empty house.
‘Clarisse, I love you.’
*
I dialled again. This time a local call. It was picked up immediately at the other end.
‘Good afternoon. Dumoulin Air Base. Airman Starkey speaking. How may I help you?’
Americans were very polite.
‘I wish to speak with Major Joel Dirke, please.’
‘That’s not possible right now, I’m sorry, ma’am. Would you care to leave a message?’
‘Yes, I would. Could you please ask him to telephone Eloïse Caussade.’
I supplied my father’s telephone number and was assured my message would be placed in the mail box in the orderly room.
‘Thank you very much.’
‘My pleasure, ma’am.’
I hung up. Wheels were turning.
*
Outside, the stink of charred wood had settled in the yard and the air hung thick with grey ash. Papa and four gardians were shovelling the blackened remains of the stables into a large trailer, their movements etched with anger as they worked. I donned a scarf over the lower half of my face and picked up a shovel. I laboured alongside them, the work heavy, my muscles protesting. I had grown lazy. Not much call for spadework in Paris, unless it was of the digging-up-dirt-for-clients kind.
When the trailer was piled high with burned debris and hauled away, I brought us all a jug of cold lemonade and just for a fleeting moment it was like old times. Sharing a drink and a joke. The sense of a job done. The fond camaraderie that is the mark of Camargue farmers. I had missed it. I cleaned up, changed into fresh shirt and trousers, then went to tend to Cosette.
The Guardian of Lies Page 15