The Dead of Winter

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Yet Contini, I am now equally certain, suspects primarily me.

  The light in the window is extinguished. In its place, as if to echo my new racing clarity, the moon appears amidst hurtling clouds. It casts furtive shadows on the snow. Amidst them I see the outline of a man. His head has the solid mass of a helmet, but fuzzier round the edges and peaked at the top, like some prairie buffalo.

  I wait for the promised siren call and as I wait, the shadow shifts its position. There is something in that hovering outline which makes my skin prickle, a tugging at the edges of sensation - a shape, an impression of bulk, a particular stance. A line from one of my last anonymous letters to Madeleine comes back to me, a description of a man watching her as she came down the steps of her apartment.

  Suddenly the shadow moves. On the snow there is an agitated blur of feet and arms and wavering boughs, like an exotic dance.

  The impact takes me by surprise. All I see as shoulder and head butt me to the ground is a thick bullish huddle of a coat.

  My shout echoes through silence, but the boots have already gone.

  As I extricate myself from branches and find my breath, the light in the window comes on again. I do not stay to watch Contini’s stagecraft. Anger fuels me. It is clean and strong. It creates its own purpose. I race across the thin fresh layer of snow which carries tracks even the greenest of scouts could follow.

  The man knows the woods well. He has dropped down into the dip at the nearest opportunity, forsaken fields and a straight line, skirted the sharpest incline and moved into the density of forest. Where is he heading? I can hear the creak of branches. But if I can hear, so can he. I fall back a little and wait.

  The ground is uneven here, packed and hard, then abruptly, it swallows my leg and I have to clutch at a trunk to regain my footing. The only light now comes from the snow itself. A silvery sheen indicates ice. I slither down it on my bottom.

  When I can stand again, there are no more tracks. There is no sound either. Even the night creatures are silent. I hold my breath and listen. And then I hear it, the slight rustle of a footfall. I can’t distinguish its direction.

  A wave of panic flows through me. Who is pursuing whom? Is my assailant behind me or in front? I take a step and then another when a sudden eruption of noise, a lurching and crack of branches, makes me freeze into position. A deer bounds across my path, swifter than an arrow. In the cover of its steps, I walk swiftly downhill.

  And then it is there in front of me: the river, a sheer stretch of ice. Across its expanse on the southern shore, lights flicker. With sudden decision, I slip down the bank and examine the ground. Nothing.

  I turn left, treading carefully. Within a few metres, the prints emerge - sliding indentations on the fresh, powdery surface. I hasten my pace.

  At first, when I hear the sound, I mistake it for the whirr of a saw poised to cut through wood. But the bulge of an old boathouse which emerges on my side clears my mind. I heave myself up the bank, slip along the side of the building. I have almost reached its front when a car emerges. Its headlights dark, it lumbers stealthily up the track.

  I know that car. I have seen that car. Where have I seen it? I listen to its rumble until it disappears into the night.

  Half way up the track, in the shelter of the tall arching maples which all but obliterate its existence, it comes to me with a thud as jarring as the one to my body. I want to sit down and nurse the impact, but my feet are already running, bolting over the surface of the snow at a pace which is also the pace of fear.

  19

  ________

  The narrow track opens onto a country road which is not much wider. To the right it twists round a bend. To the left, it rises and dips into nothingness. Behind me the narrow lane to the boathouse is all but invisible in its density of snow-clad vegetation.

  I cannot make out where I am. My head is swirling with too much knowledge, my heart beating too fast.

  I turn to the right and follow the road round the curve hoping that a car may turn up, any car but that one. The wind is icier here. It blows down the gully of the road as if the passage had been constructed for that very purpose. Flurries come with it, a glut of racing whiteness in the air, dissolving the solidity of shape and contour.

  My country has too much wilderness. I am neither trapper nor voyageur used to covering it on foot. Familiarity comes only with an engine roaring in front of me, a speed which tames distance and domesticates it.

  I walk. Numbness has taken over my extremities. Feet and fingers and nose have moved beyond coldness. Like a robot powered only by some distant radar source, I place one foot in front of the other.

  Round the turn of the second bend, lights appear. Their gleam steadies the landscape. Suddenly, as if the grail were within my reach, I am running, running fast.

  When the house takes on form and size, I feel a laugh rising in my throat. I blunder towards the door and press the bell. A shadow appears in front of the eyehole. A cautious voice asks, ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Pierre.’

  Elise unlatches the door. There is bewilderment in her face.

  ‘Pierre! How’d you get here? I was listening for your car, though I’d all but given up waiting.’ She takes in my state and urges me towards the fire. Did you have an accident?’ She pours a glass of brandy and forces it into my hand.

  I shake my head. ‘But I need to borrow yours Elise. And a telephone directory.’

  She gives me a queer look, then opens a cupboard and pulls a directory down from a top shelf.

  I leaf through the pages quickly. Yes, the address is here. I jot it down.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you because Oscar’s upset. Very upset,’ she says as I write. ‘You’re angry with him. Because of the portrait of Madeleine Blais.’

  ‘I can’t talk now, Elise.’

  ‘It’s not what you think.’ Now that she’s started, she can’t seem to stop herself. ‘Though I thought it too. He didn’t sleep with her. Okay? I know that. I’m his wife. But she asked him to keep it secret. So it felt like that. Funny woman. I guess he wanted to, though. Guess you all want to.’

  I squeeze her shoulder. There are tears in her eyes. The speech hasn’t been easy for her.

  ‘I have to go, Elise. But do something for me. Do it now.’ I write down Mme Tremblay’s number and pass her the slip of paper. ‘I want you to ring here and speak to Detective Contini or Serge Monet. Tell them to get to this address quickly. Insist. As a last resort, try Gagnon. Ring him at home if necessary.’ I hold out my hand. ‘Car keys.’

  She gives them to me. ‘You’re going to do anything crazy, Pierre. I can feel it.’

  ‘Less crazy than some of the other things I’ve been doing this last week. Thanks for telling me about Oscar.’ I give her a quick kiss and go out into the night.

  The blizzard is restless, tossing the snow as erratically as confetti blown by some great whirling fan. Its force prevents speed. My thoughts charge ahead of the car. They are noisier than the heater.

  I quiet them and concentrate on the route. It occurs to me, as I pass the darkened hulk of the Rosenberg house, that I had never realised how much shorter the distance was from Mme Tremblay’s to Oscar’s cross-country than along the road. That would explain Will Henderson’s appearance on the morning of the blaze. Will may have been guilty of a great many things, but I suspect not that.

  Another kilometre passes. On my left an old gas station emerges from whiteness. It’s two rounded pumps stand like sentinels to the past, reminders of a time when this road led to the busy army camp. Now both station and camp are deserted.

  I creep along, my eyes peeled for a sign of the house which should be somewhere along here. But nothing materializes to left or right and abruptly the road comes to an end.

  Two high metal-meshed gates topped by barbed wire block my route. On either side, the perimeter fence stretches into oblivion. From it a battered sign creaks, its letters so defaced that only a U and an S are distinguishible.
>
  Could anyone have been granted permission to inhabit the derelict barracks?

  Baffled, I leave the car engine running and try the gates. The heavy padlock is firm, if rusty. I peer through the fence. It comes to me that somewhere I have heard a rumour about strays bedding down in the camp. But strays don’t have telephone numbers, I remind myself.

  Cursing the lost time, I turn the car round and retrace my route, crawling now, my imagination willing shapes out of the storm of whiteness.

  The outline of the garage takes hazy shape in my headlights. From this direction, I can make out a cluster of barnlike buildings behind it. I have almost passed them, when amidst the blur of white I detect a change of tone, a flicker of yellow, a rapid movement of light.

  I reverse into the garage and realise as I do so that someone has cleared the snow here not too long ago or my entrance would not be so easy. Quickly, I kill lights and engine and head round the side of the building.

  It is dark here, too dark. My eyes have grown accustomed to the glow of headlights, my body soft in the warmth of the car. I steel myself, test the anger which will give me cunning and strength. For a fleeting second, Madeleine’s pale face, as it looked there, hanging in the barn, flashes before me. I tread quickly, the snow muffling all sound.

  At the far edge of the garage building I bump into something that blocks my path. Not a fence, no, too soft. I try to edge round it, but it is still there, a resilient barrier. I scrape away snow and the blackness of piled tires emerges. I hoist myself over them and leap down to the other side.

  I am behind the garage. To my right is an assemblage of massed shapes amongst which the yellow flicker of light I was so certain I saw is indistinguishible.

  Staring begins to give the shapes a kind of meaning. I am in some kind of yard, a dump perhaps amongst which there are three, maybe four structures, their roofs sloping irregularly. From my vantage point, they tumble into each other like a portion of some erratic cityscape after a bomb has fallen.

  I edge along, find myself face to face with a tractor, its attached snow plough lifted like a giant’s mittened hand. I weave my way round it, between tires, a stack of timbers, tin barrels, a redundant refrigerator, concrete blocks, unidentifiable rubble. Another turn and I find myself in front of two large wooden doors. They creak slightly in the wind. I prod one and it swings towards me on rusty hinges. Through the gap I make out the shape of a truck and a car. That car. My pulse beats faster.

  I turn a corner and see the light. It comes from a window in the furthest of a series of sheds and shacks. Flickering shadows play into the night. Television.

  I tread carefully, hugging the sides of walls, until for a few metres I dare the narrow ploughed path. In front of me is the window, cut high, slightly above eye-level. I look down at the ground. The heaped snow makes a mound against the wall. I test it for solidity and clamber to its top. It sinks beneath my weight. But I can see. Yes. Now I can see. I shudder.

  A pot-bellied stove stands at the far end of a shabby room. Next to it are two straight-backed wooden chairs. A doll sits on one chair - a large doll, with a porcelain smile and crimped golden hair and thick glistening lashes lowered over cornflower blue eye. She wears a long blue chequered dress and a white pinny.

  I know that doll. She used to be Madeleine’s. She disappeared during that second summer of our friendship. Mémère threw her away, Madeleine told me in a voice which was half-way between laughter and tears. ‘I forgot her in the barn and Mémère threw her away. She thinks I’m too big for her. She’s right. I’m not going to say a word about it.’

  Draped over the second chair is a woman’s frock, a spattering of daisies on pink ground. Edging out from beneath it is a creamy camisole. On the floor, stand a pair of high-heeled sandals. Are these, too, all Madeleine’s? I don’t know. I don’t want to know. Nor do I want to see the images moving across the screen. But my eyes are drawn to them in confirmation of what I already suspect.

  Madeleine is there, her face slightly lowered in that expression which is at once seductive and pure, transgressive in its very purity. There is a man’s hand on her shoulder. The camera follows its movement to pause at the cleavage between her breasts. Madeleine’s skin glistens. Her lips move.

  I do not need to watch this. I know it too well. I could speak her words for her, breathe her poignant sigh. It is my tape. The recorder sits on the floor next to the television set.

  My eyes veer towards what I have been avoiding.

  The man sits in a dilapidated armchair just below me to one side of the window. His mouth is crimson against the darkness of his beard, his lips slightly parted. His tongue moistens them, as if they were parched. One hand grips the arm of the chair. The fingers are thick and splayed.

  His other hand holds a black stocking. Partly wrapped in the stocking is his penis. He caresses it with a growing urgency and then his whole body shakes, as if some predator had him by the neck.

  I look away, my stomach turning in a spasm of pity and disgust. ‘Mon semblable, mon frere,’ I find myself thinking and then a terrible clatter ruptures the stillness of the night and I am lying in the snow on my back, my platform dispersed into an assortment of lead pipes and ducts and cylinders.

  I pick myself up quickly and run round to the far side of the building. The advantage of surprise has been lost and suddenly the fear that I have kept at bay grips me more fiercely than a man-eater’s claw.

  ‘Qui est la?’ A voice booms.

  I hear the creak and bang of a door, the clink of pipes, a curse. Then nothing. Silence and darkness. I tread softly through deeper snow and cling to the side of the house. Why didn’t I pick up one of those pipes?

  Before me desolate fields stretch on which every print will be clearly visible. To my right is the maze of shacks and sheds. I dip round to the right. My hand grazes a curve and I make out an upright barrel. One heave and I am on top of it, a second and I am lying flat on the slight incline of a sheet aluminun roof, icier than the snow which covers it. I slither towards its lower edge and peer round.

  A flashlight points a beam at my tracks. He is picking them out, one by one, slowly. His right hand is raised. In it he holds a stretch of piping. In the shadows, he looks as big as a grizzly and more terrible.

  I ease myself into a crouch. When he has moved just past me, I leap. I scream a scream I didn’t know I possessed. The scream of a banshee. It rebounds through the snow-muffled night as I topple him to the ground. Then everything is in a fast forward which is also a dizzying slow motion illuminated by the feeble light of the fallen torch.

  I am astride him, but the pipe is still in his hand and he won’t release it, no matter how much I tug. I am tumbling, thrown back like a squealing puppy by a mammoth. He stands above me, the whites of his eyes huge.

  ‘You!’ he grunts. ‘You!’ His lips twist into a venemous leer and the pipe is coming toward me.

  My legs arch into a kick and hit solid muscle. The pipe flies through the air. I hear a groan. I am on my feet. But he is coming towards me again, a looming vastness. I take a few steps backward. My heels hit something rubbery. In the flush of instinct my hand reaches behind me. I heave the tire at him.

  He reels. I lunge, my head a butt. His arms close round me like a vice squeezing, squeezing, toppling us both to the ground.

  He is on top of me now, pummelling, thrashing, his knee at my groin. There is a kind of dazed ecstasy on his face. I claw at it, try to worm out from under him. His weight is so great, each breath requires an effort of diminishing return. There is something sticky and hot in my mouth.

  An immense longing to sleep comes over me, as sweet as the brush of angel’s wings. And then I am being carried. My legs flail uselessly, skim the ground. My head and back are thrust against the wall of the house. Again and again. It judders. I am falling. The snow above me is falling, cascading from the roof. We crumple to the ground together.

  My hand touches something solid. The message takes a long time to r
each my brain. The length of piping. I finger it, get a firm grip just as he comes down on me. I can hit him now, land a killing blow on the head of Madeleine’s murderer.

  Our eyes meet and hold. His are crazed, black and shiny like stones washed by a primeval tide.

  Yes. Now.

  I try to find the centre of my fury, try to unleash the blow. But I can’t. I have this aching sense of affinity, a painful compassion. I scream at my hesitating hand and already it is too late. He has seen the pipe. He wrests it from me. Lifts it.

  I am going to die here, my blood a fugitive smear in the falling snow.

  I close my eyes and wait for death. My life races before me and away in a kaleidoscope of images. My mother’s voice calls, ‘Pierre, hurry.’ A placard-bearing crowd gathers round a steeple and cheers. The hot yellow sands of the desert trickle through my fingers. A golden Madeleine materializes from them like an oasis. She stretches her arms out towards me. There is a lingering smile on her face. It shapes itself into the sound of my name.

  But the voice isn’t Madeleine’s. It is raucous, raging. It booms out orders like a cannon. It pulls me to my feet.

  With an effort I open my eyes. Contini is at my side, his arm round me. Everywhere there is the beam of flashlights.

  ‘Lunatic,’ he grumbles. ‘Trying to play the hero. Can you walk? Miron, you, get over here.’

  Two men take hold of my elbows.

  Contini plays the light over my face. ‘He’ll live. But get him checked out by a medic. I’ll catch up with you later Rousseau.’

  He walks away before I can shape a word.

  In the distance, I make out three shadowy figures. The burliest one is in the centre. Like a tethered animal, he drags his feet reluctantly through the snow. His keepers push and prod.

  As we pass them, he snarls and spits in my direction.

  ‘Good thing we got here in time,’ Miron stammers.

  My yes falters and doesn’t quite make it to my lips.

  Streaks of pale lemon sun criss-cross the bed. The house is quiet. The only pounding is in my head. It detracts from the stiffness of my body and the ache round my ribs as I shift position. But last night old Dr Bertrand declared me fit if somewhat battered, before popping a pill into my mouth to enforce dreamless sleep.