Cupid's Arrow

by Isabelle Merlin

  So I told her, and they took it all down, and then she said they were in touch right now with the police in Montreal, and getting them to check various things there. Then she got up and thanked me, said that I'd been of great help, and then they left. But before Mum and Nicolas could bombard me with any more questions, I jumped up and said, 'Please, let's go to the hospital right now. Remy will be waiting.'

  Mum's mouth opened. Closed. Then opened again. She gave me a little smile, and a big hug. 'Okay, darling. Okay. But later – later – I want to hear all about it. All, do you understand? And no leaving anything out.'

  'Yes, Mum,' I said, meekly.

  Blooms in the

  wasteland

  Remy was already dressed when we finally made it into the ward. He was sitting in the armchair by his bed, waiting for the doctor to come through on his rounds and pronounce him completely well and ready to go. His bruises and cuts had been dressed but his black eye had gone a weird shade of green and purple, making it look as though he'd gone ten rounds in the boxing ring, or that's what Mum said anyway, making him crack a smile. I felt a bit shy at first because Mum and Nicolas – and Wayne, who had appeared in the ward a short time after we'd arrived – were all there looking at us interestedly, but thank God after a short time Nicolas anyway got the message and gently took Mum and Wayne off to have a cup of coffee in the hospital cafeteria, while Remy and I waited for the doctor to give the all clear.

  As soon as they were gone, I drew the curtains around the bed and sat on Remy's lap and for a little while we did nothing but kiss and hold each other. I was pretty careful because I'd seen Remy wince when I squeezed him too hard and caught him on a bruise, but it was just like heaven to be there with him. Eventually though we started talking and I told Remy about my dream, and about what the police had said. When I finished he said nothing for a moment or two, and then he held me close and kissed my hair and murmured my name. That was all – but I could see the light in his golden eyes, I could feel the feelings in him that were too big to speak out loud. Then, in a soft voice, he began to speak about his mother, about things they'd done together, things he'd said, and then a bit later still about his father, or what his mother had told Remy about him, and I listened without saying anything, because I didn't need to. I knew in some part deep inside me that though it would still be very hard for Remy, and though he would miss his mother every day, something had begun for him, something that in time would heal his hurt and his sorrow and make the wasteland of his life bloom again.

  After a time, the doctor came, checked Remy and said he was fine to go. We picked up all of Remy's bits and pieces and walked out into the corridor where Mum and Nicolas and Wayne, back from the cafeteria, met us. Mum looked at us and smiled and said, 'Obviously all went well. Now, Remy, what are your plans?'

  'Mum, I thought –' I began, but she hushed me. She turned to Remy. 'The police have finished with us and we will not be needed until the trial. Fleur and I will stay in Avallon tonight and tomorrow so that I can finish in the Bellerive library, as Raymond wanted, but the day after we will be going on the train to Paris.'

  'Mum!' I cried, horrified.

  'Going on the train to Paris, where we will spend a week or so before returning to Australia,' went on Mum, firmly.

  'And where I will come and visit you,' said Wayne Morgan, beaming. 'I've always wanted to visit the land down under.'

  Nicolas Boron said nothing but the expression in his eyes as he looked at Mum spoke volumes. I felt the rage rise in me like an unstoppable tide. After all that had happened, she still thought she could just treat me like a child, rip Remy and me apart, trample on the feelings of poor old Nicolas, who clearly loved her to death! Just like that! I couldn't bear it. I said, 'No, Mum. I'm not going. I'm staying with Remy. He needs me.'

  She looked at me. 'Be quiet, Fleur. Be quiet for the first time in your life and listen.' She turned back to Remy. 'I was going to say, Remy, that if you did not have any plans, you might like to join us. For the trip to Paris. Maybe even to Australia, if you choose to.'

  I gaped at her. Remy swallowed. He looked from me to her, and then he said, quietly, 'I–I can't go from here. Not yet. Not till, not till Maman –' He broke off.

  'Oh my God,' my mother said, and I saw she'd gone very red. 'Oh, Remy, I am so sorry. I didn't mean ... You must think me so insensitive. I'm so sorry. Of course. We, of course Fleur can stay till the funeral, if that's what you want. What you need.'

  'Yes,' he said, simply.

  'Good. Yes. We'll help in whatever way we can. And when, if you think you might be ready to come with us, afterwards – maybe meet us in Paris, if you'd like time to, well, we will delay our departure till then, and we can wait for you in Paris, till you're ready to come. That is if you'd like to –'

  'I'd like that,' he said gently. 'I'd like that very much. Thank you.'

  'Till then you are very welcome to stay at my place, Remy,' said Nicolas. 'I have plenty of room.'

  'And if you need a lift anywhere – if you need any things fetched from your place,' said Wayne eagerly, 'I can help you there, son. Just let Nick here and me know, and we'll do what's necessary. Right, Nick?'

  Nicolas looked at him and gave a faint smile. 'Right, Wayne.'

  'And you two ladies of course, too,' Wayne went on. 'Anything you need, just call on the two amigos, okay?'

  I thought I saw Nicolas wince at this description of himself and Morgan, but he said nothing to dash the enthusiasm. And in fact Wayne's intervention, however naff, did at least have the benefit of lightening the atmosphere, relaxing the tension, so that we went out of the hospital and into the car park with Mum and her beaux chatting more or less normally, while Remy and I lagged a bit behind, hand in hand.

  It was as we'd just all piled into Wayne's car and he'd started it up that Mum's Blackberry rang and she answered. Cuddled up against Remy in the back seat, I didn't pay much attention at first. But then Mum turned to me from the front, held out the phone to me and said, 'You'd better take this.' There was a funny expression in her eyes.

  'Who is it, Mum?' I cried, fear suddenly racing in my veins again.

  'Someone who wants to talk to you,' she said.

  I stared at her, and took the phone. Everyone was watching. I whispered, 'Hello? This is Fleur. Who, who wants to speak with me?'

  There was a small silence at the other end. Then a deep voice answered, the voice of a stranger, speaking English with an American kind of accent. 'Hello, Fleur. It's Tom Mallory speaking. Your father.'

  I was speechless. I just clutched the phone.

  'Fleur, are you there?'

  'Yes,' I managed to squeak. 'I–I ... hello.' What should I call him? I couldn't call him Dad. No. Not yet. Not Mr Mallory either. Or Tom. So I didn't call him anything.

  'I am on my way to Montreal Airport,' he said. 'I should be in France tomorrow. Will you –'

  'You are from Montreal?' I said sharply.

  'Yes. Well, not originally. I've been living here on and off since I was a small child though. I–I met your mother when I was visiting Australia. I didn't know you –' He broke off, then went on, more strongly, 'I was pretty hopeless then, Fleur. I loved your mother – but I couldn't cope. I told lies. I ran away. I didn't know your mother was pregnant. Well, probably, even if I had known, it would have made no difference, back then. Your mother saw that. She was much more grown-up than me.' He paused. 'But I've changed. I really have. And I'd like to – to get to know you, perhaps. If you'd let me.'

  There was a plea in his voice. I sat there and listened to this stranger – to my father – trying to explain himself for sixteen years of silence – for never having been in my life – and I didn't know what to think or what to say. I'd wanted to know so much about him, and now here he was and I suddenly didn't know – didn't know what I wanted anymore. So I said, 'I'm not sure. But if you want, well, if you're coming, then I suppose I will see you.'

  He laughed. 'You sound so delighted, Fleur. My
fault, I know. I understand. I won't rush you. If you'll agree to see me – well, that's good enough for me, for the moment.'

  'Mmm,' I said, then because it felt rude not to say any more, I said, 'What do you do, over there in Canada? Are you still a spy?' I couldn't resist adding that dig.

  'A spy?' he said, surprised. 'Why would you think I, oh dear.' I could hear the wince in his voice. 'That was one of the stupid lies I told back then. I'm sorry, Fleur. I was so panicked about the seriousness of our relationship. I behaved very badly. I hope one day you and Anne might forgive me.' He waited, but I said nothing. He went on, with a little sigh. 'Actually, I'm a psychologist now. I know, you'll be thinking, what's this, he can't even get his own life in order but he presumes to try to fix other people's.' He laughed again. I thought, if I didn't know this deep-voiced stranger on the other end was my father, I'd think he sounds really nice. Funny. Kind. Sort of humble. But it wasn't just any old Tom, Dick or Harry. It was one particular Tom. Tom Mallory. My father, a psychologist in Canada. Nothing like what I'd expected or pictured or . . .

  But then I nearly dropped the phone. He was still speaking. I could hardly believe what I was hearing.

  'I'm not your usual kind of psychologist, though,' he was saying. 'My speciality is dreams. I help people understand their dreams. It's something I've always had a talent for, though I rebelled against it as a young man. Anyway, I've got a practice here in Montreal. I've even got a website, which I run as a kind of outreach thing, under a pseudonym.'

  'You're Dreaming Holmes,' I said, the words hot and strange in my mouth. 'My God, you're Dreaming Holmes.'

  'You've seen my website?' he said, surprised. 'Why, Fleur, what a wonderful thing! Then in a sort of sense we'll already have been introduced, you and I.'

  'And I'm Caroline,' I said, bluntly.

  'What?'

  'Caroline, who wrote to you about my dreams. And Laurence Ferrier. And all that stuff.'

  There was a long silence. Then he said, 'Oh my God, Fleur. I can't, I can't quite take this in. Is it really –' He broke off, then went on, more strongly, 'The police have already been in touch with me about this. I had no idea.' Another pause, then he said, in a rush, 'Then this makes it even more important that we meet, don't you think?'

  'Yes,' I said hollowly. 'I suppose it does.' He said a few more words – I can't even remember exactly what they were, something about texting Mum as soon as he arrived in Paris and arranging to meet – and then he rang off. I handed the phone back to Mum and I sat back with Remy, my head on his shoulder. Thank God no-one asked me anything just then, because I would've screamed and burst into tears and said things I would've regretted later. I didn't even know if what I was feeling was angry or scared or happy or creeped-out or any combination of these. I only knew I needed time. Time to sort it all out in my head, and to begin to understand everything that had happened, and what it all meant.

  For no reason I can really explain, I suddenly thought of the dream book: not just Raymond's fateful journal, but my own, the notebook I was given by Raymond long ago, in which I used to write down all my dreams and nightmares, back home. And I decided right then that that was what I had to do, write it all down. Because just as writing down a nightmare helps you to deal with it, or writing down a good dream helps you remember it forever, then writing down everything that had happened would help me both to remember – and to deal with it.

  The once and

  future king

  A year's gone by. I'm sitting alone in my hotel room in Avallon, writing the last few pages of this testimony. Because I suppose that's what it is, really, isn't it? A testimony. A sort of witness statement. Or maybe a reconstruction of a case, just as it happened, all of it, without hiding anything. A way to get to the truth, to make sense of it. If ever I do become a detective – and I hope someday I will – then maybe one day I'll re-read this, and I'll know this was where it really started, this urge to piece together the truth.

  We're back in Avallon, briefly, because there's something special on today. Something at Bellerive, something important. It's going to be weird being back there. Going to be strange walking into that house again, which has changed because ...

  Wait. I'm not up to that yet. Last week, I had to testify at Christine Foy's trial. Even with her confession, it still took time for her to finally be brought to trial. Lieutenant Balland says it's not really that slow, that in fact it's a record, getting such serious criminal charges to trial in just under a year, and she'd know, I suppose. But it still seems like a long time to me. A very long time, in which Christine Foy's face has come to me sometimes in horrible dreams, though much less now than at the beginning. She never got bail, of course, so she's been in prison all that time while she waited for her trial. Lieutenant Balland says that with the four murder charges and two attempted murder charges – of me and of Remy – that Christine has admitted to, she'll be in prison a whole lot longer. They can't bring in the suspected murder cases from Canada – justice doesn't work like that, unfortunately – but even without those brought into the picture, she's in deep trouble. She is likely to face what they call here 'life imprisonment in perpetuity', that is, life without parole or at least no parole for a very long time, at least 30 years. The trial would be over soon, she reckoned. Christine had condemned herself out of her own mouth. The jury would have an easy time of it. And the judge would have no choice but to impose the harshest penalty.

  Christine had talked and talked and talked. They couldn't shut her up. Her defence lawyer must have had a hard time of it. She spoke coolly, clinically, without emotion. She talked of how Raymond had not liked her from the start. He'd had a bad feeling about her. And he was sure she was just after Oscar's money. Raymond had hired the PI to snoop into her past life. He'd discovered that records about her in Ireland went back to the age of sixteen, but there was nothing before then. It might have ended there because the PI could not find out any more but then by a very unfortunate coincidence, Raymond had come across the fateful souvenir, the piece of paper from the Hotel du Lys, which she kept tucked into the back of her address book. It must have fallen out of there without her noticing it. She didn't discover its loss at first. And then one day Raymond called her and told her he wanted to speak with her, alone.

  Fool of a man, Christine said. He really thought that I was just going to stand there meekly and answer his questions about just why I hadn't told Oscar that I'd once lived in Canada! He didn't let on that he knew any more than that, but I knew I couldn't take the chance. I had come ready to do what I had to do. It was an easy enough matter to shut him up completely. He was much older than me. I was stronger than him and I had the advantage of surprise, because I don't think he expected me to attack him. Simple as that. It felt good. Right. Powerful.

  Christine took his laptop, and all his disks and his records, making it look like some kind of burglary gone wrong. She searched his files. She checked his emails and discovered the existence of the PI. She made an appointment to see him, under another name. He wasn't expecting any problems. The thing was, they had no real reason to suspect yet who she was. But she'd had to act. She couldn't wait till things had really advanced. She'd tied him up and killed him. She was quite proud of the method she'd used on him – a syringe full of air introduced into a vein, which had caused an embolism. She'd read about this method once, in a book. It had worked like a charm, hadn't it? They'd thought at first it was a heart attack.

  Once he was dead, she'd ransacked his files – the silly man still confided all his records to paper, not computer, she said – and taken away and burnt the one he'd started on her. By that time she had discovered the loss of the paper, and had expected to find it in the PI's office, because she'd searched Bellerive and found nothing. But it wasn't there. In fact there was no reference to it at all. So she concluded that Raymond could not have found it, that it had just fallen out of her address book by misadventure, somewhere. Anywhere. She had just lost it, that was all. He had found
out about Canada some other way. And when time went on and on and the police didn't come to question her, she thought she must be right. She could stop worrying. Everything was all right. Nothing was linked to her.

  Then she had seen Valerie Gomert, that evening. It had been a real shock. She'd recognised Valerie at once. She wasn't sure if Valerie had recognised her, though. Christine said that she was a lot younger back then, and didn't look the same – but she was sure she noticed something – an inflection in her voice, a way of moving, something which reminded her of Maurice. People used to tell her we looked a lot alike. Valerie looked shocked. So Christine wasn't willing to take the chance. She slipped out that night as soon as Oscar was asleep and made her way to the Gomerts' cottage. She had no idea if Valerie would still be there, or had already fled. If she had, she'd have made some other plan, Christine said. But as it was, she found Valerie alone, the dream book in front of her. Remy had already gone. Valerie turned and saw her. We looked at each other, said Christine. I saw her expression change. She whispered, 'Hotel du Lys' and her eyes fell back on the dream book, and I knew then, I knew that Raymond had found it, and had hidden it, and she had it now. I took a step towards her. And in that moment, she knew for sure. She knew Death had come for her at last.

  I still gave her a chance, Christine said, indignantly. More of a chance than her rotten husband and brother had given my poor Maurice. I told her to run. I said she'd know what it was like to be hunted, now. But she was a poor thing. No spirit. No strength. She didn't run far before she'd tripped. And then, well, it was a mercy to kill her, really. She had nothing left in her. That woman was dead inside. That's why she drew that picture of herself as the Hanged Man, as Death. She wanted to die. That's why she hadn't even tried to escape. It was a mercy, what I did.