“Wait a minute.”
She snatched up the admitting papers, glanced over them rapidly, then stabbed her finger at the name of the nurse who was present at the birth. The woman must have looked after the mother for the entire time she was in Obstetrics. It was reasonable to think the two women would have talked, shared confidences. The nurse might well know something about the relations between Terney and Carnot’s mother.
“Pierrette Solène. Does she still work here?”
“I’ve never heard of her.”
The physician put the binder away and smiled.
“Just so your visit isn’t a total loss, I’ll check the personnel files and give you her address—you never know, maybe she still lives there. Would that do? And afterward, perhaps you might let me take you for a cup of coffee, Miss Courtois?”
29
It was well past one o’clock when Lucie knocked on the door of Pierrette Solène’s home in the suburbs. Apart from the coffee she’d had at the maternity hospital with Blotowski, who had begun flirting with her openly, she hadn’t eaten since leaving Paris. After this visit, she would absolutely have to find a place for lunch. She had to recharge her batteries if she didn’t want to fall asleep at the wheel and wind up in a ditch. She’d covered more miles in the past two days than she usually did in a year.
The nurse lived in one of those small, low-cost cinderblock bungalows with chalk-white façades on the outskirts of town. According to the records, she would have been sixty-eight years old now, and had left Colombe Hospital eight years earlier for a retirement that she no doubt well deserved.
Pierrette Solène opened her door a crack, blocking the space with her body. She was dressed simply in a long flowered dress and black pumps from another age. Wrinkles furrowed her forehead and cheeks like grid lines, tracing complex geometric patterns. She was wearing large glasses with brown frames, the lenses slightly enlarging her pupils, the stems attached to a cord.
“Sorry, whatever it is you’re selling, I’m not interested.”
“I’m not selling anything. I’m with the police.”
Lucie showed her card a bit longer this time. Suspicious, Pierrette Solène examined it closely, eyes slightly squinting. Lucie did her best to reassure her:
“Nothing to be afraid of, you’re not in trouble. My investigation has led me to Colombe Hospital. According to the personnel records, you worked there for over thirty years. I’m trying to reconstruct something in the past, and I’d like to ask you a few questions about one episode in particular.”
Pierrette Solène glanced toward the sidewalk and Lucie’s 206 parked at the edge of the street.
“Where’s your partner? On television, the police always work in pairs. Why are you here on your own?”
Lucie gave her a polite smile.
“My partner is off questioning other parties at the hospital. You shouldn’t believe everything you see on TV. Being a cop in real life is a different thing altogether.”
After hesitating a moment longer, the sexagenarian invited the other woman in. Five minutes later, Lucie found herself on a sofa topped with a thick wool coverlet, a cup of black, sweet coffee in her hands. A European shorthair slinked affectionately between her calves. Pierrette’s face lit up when Lucie asked about Stéphane Terney.
“I worked under him for the four years he practiced at Colombe. He was a good doctor, a dedicated man. He always took on too much.”
“How do you mean?”
“He had a finger in everything: obstetrics, gynecology, immunology. Anything having to do with procreation fascinated him. He never punched a clock but spent all his time at Colombe. At work, he kept his staff on a tight leash. He didn’t like people taking vacations. All he cared about was work, work, work.”
“Did he often handle deliveries himself?”
“Yes. Despite his gruff exterior, he loved bringing babies into the world. In any case, he came into the operating rooms at least once a day, to cut the umbilical cords and talk to the mothers he’d treated as a gynecologist. It didn’t matter what time it was. I’d never seen a department head like him. He pushed us pretty hard, but overall we liked him.”
Lucie thought of her online research. Terney the medical orderly discovering the baby lying on the ground, still attached to its mother by the umbilical cord. Algeria and its traumas had never really left him. Bringing her coffee to her lips, Pierrette gave Lucie a sad look, as if the reason for the visit had suddenly dawned on her.
“Has something happened to Dr. Terney?”
Lucie gave her the terrible news and let her absorb the shock. Behind her thick lenses, Pierrette stared at the floor with empty eyes. Memories of the hospital must have been flooding in, good and bad, which would now take on a whole new significance because of this death, and would be shut away in a precious box. Lucie seized the opportunity:
“Tell me about the night of January 4, 1987, when Dr. Terney helped deliver a baby boy that he named Grégory Carnot. You were on call that night, in room three of the maternity ward. The mother died on the delivery table, from massive internal bleeding caused by preeclampsia. Do you remember?”
The nurse’s face seemed to close in on itself and freeze. Then her upper lip began trembling, and the old woman passed her hand over her mouth in astonishment. She set down her cup, which clinked against the porcelain saucer. Lucie squeezed her fists together: twenty years later, Pierrette Solène still bore the scars from that night. The former nurse abruptly stood up and said, “That’s all too far in the past. I’m sorry, but I don’t remember.”
Lucie stood up as well and stood only inches from her.
“There’s no way you’ve forgotten. What are you afraid of?”
Pierrette hesitated for a few moments.
“Can you promise I won’t be in any trouble?”
“I guarantee it.”
A pause. The nurse thought it over. Lucie knew she must have been carrying a heavy secret, one that Terney might have forced her to keep all these years. Now that he was dead and she’d left the hospital, the locks might finally loosen.
“You spent time with Carnot’s mother during her hospital stay. You brought her her meals, cared for her before the delivery. Do you remember her name? It’s very important.”
“Of course I remember. It was Amanda Potier.”
Lucie felt a great wave of relief at finally being able to put a name to that blank face, to that woman who had perished in childbirth in horrible pain. She didn’t ask for a paper and pencil to write it down, not wanting to alarm the other woman and interrupt the flow. It all had to remain informal, spontaneous. But she was memorizing every word.
The nurse continued:
“She was very young, twenty or twenty-one at most. A beautiful woman, with long black hair and dark eyes.”
“Why did she want to give birth anonymously?”
“She decided she didn’t want the child, and it was too late to abort . . . Her louse of a boyfriend had abandoned her a few weeks earlier. She felt incapable of raising a child all alone, at her age.”
Lucie clenched her fists, reminded, despite herself, of her own story. But she had to put that aside for now.
“Tell me what you remember, whatever comes to mind. Take your time.”
Pierrette kept her eyes closed for a long while, then opened them again.
“Amanda Potier was an artist, a painter, but she was just getting started and couldn’t make a living off it. She had a small apartment on the outskirts of Reims, just a few miles from here. She and Dr. Terney knew each other even before her admission; he’d bought a few of her paintings at a show to give her support, encouragement. She seemed to be very fond of him. He even commissioned some paintings from her, having to do with DNA and birth, which he wanted to decorate his house with. She told me privately that he had weird tastes, but he was paying her well.”
Lucie recalled the painting she’d briefly seen hanging in Terney’s library and in the crime scene photos. That vile placenta, and the signature “Amanda P.” in the corner.
“Amanda told me he sometimes took her to lunch, where they mainly talked about art. Then one day their conversation turned toward her pregnancy. The doctor convinced her to leave her regular ob-gyn and see him instead. He followed her care for the last four months of her pregnancy.”
Lucie tried to think even as she was listening. It sounded as if Terney had been eager to get close to Amanda, and to her baby. Had Terney intentionally made contact with the expectant mother? Was he keeping an eye on her, even as she took him for a friend? Had he bought her paintings merely to gain her confidence? Lucie asked the question that leapt into her mind.
“Do you know why the doctor came to Reims in 1986? Why this hospital? Terney had an excellent job in Paris; he directed huge research projects and traveled widely. Why would he cloister himself away in the provinces?”
Pierrette shrugged shyly.
“I think he just seized an opportunity. Dr. Grayet, his predecessor, was three years away from retirement. He resigned when Dr. Terney applied for the job.”
Lucie’s heart jumped.
“Resigned? Three years before retirement? Had he been planning that?”
The nurse shook her head with lips pressed tight.
“Grayet had never said a word about it, and we would never have believed it. But that’s how it was . . . He wanted to enjoy life a bit more, I think. He left the hospital quietly, without any big fanfare.”
“What was the doctor’s name—his first name, I mean?”
“Robert. But you won’t be able to question him. He died from Alzheimer’s five years ago. I went to his funeral. It was sad that he ended up like that.”
Lucie stored away the main information. Could Terney have forced his predecessor to leave so he could take his place, and thereby get to know Amanda Potier and become her doctor? She felt almost lightheaded. It seemed completely unreal. And yet the dates matched perfectly. Terney left Paris in 1986 and moved to Reims precisely when Amanda was expecting. He took charge of her prenatal care, overseeing her delivery in early January 1987. According to her research, Terney had divorced a few weeks before leaving Paris. Had something precipitated the breakup? Had his first wife found out something related to Amanda Potier or Robert Grayet?
Lucie put these questions aside for the moment and continued:
“Didn’t Amanda Potier have any family? Didn’t anyone visit her in the hospital?”
“Yes, of course. Her parents lived in Villejuif and were very supportive. Her mother was a beautiful woman, still young, who looked a lot like her. A prospective grandmother at little more than forty . . .”
The nurse ran her finger around the rim of her cup. These memories were obviously painful, but Lucie didn’t let up.
“During her hospitalization, how did the doctor behave toward her?”
“He was there constantly, staying very close to his patient. Day and night. He even pitched in with our nursing duties. I remember the tests he had her take, the blood samples. Amanda was extremely tired, and her belly was enormous. I remember she ate constantly. Fruits, biscuits, whatever she could get her hands on.”
“Were she and the doctor close?”
The woman clenched her jaws.
“Not close enough for him to shed a tear over her death, in any case.”
Lucie pondered this, increasingly disturbed. She was certain now that Grégory Carnot had never been normal. Something about him had fascinated the doctor. Something that might even have pushed Terney to get a divorce, change cities, and arrange his life around the child.
“Tell me about the delivery.”
Pierrette Solène swallowed hard.
“The night of January 4, Amanda’s readouts started going crazy. Her blood pressure shot up, her heart was racing. She was still a week before term, but we had to get the baby out no matter what. The doctor immediately called in the anesthesiologist and a midwife and had her brought to the delivery room.”
Her voice was now trembling.
“From that point on, everything happened very fast, and went from bad to worse. The patient went into convulsions and she started hemorrhaging. We couldn’t stabilize her. The doctor performed a cesarean. It was . . . horrible. She soon lost several pints of blood. It was as if her body was emptying itself of energy. We couldn’t understand what was happening.”
Lucie felt her hair stand on end.
“Amanda Potier wasn’t even conscious for the birth of her son. In my thirty years on the job, I had only seen three mothers die in childbirth. Each time it was a deeply traumatic, inhuman experience that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”
Lucie imagined the atmosphere in that delivery room. Blood everywhere, the flat line of the electroencephalogram, the sunken faces. And the horrendous feeling of failure.
“And what about the baby?”
Pierrette made a grimace of disgust.
“He was in great shape, while his mother was bleeding out. A nice fat baby, much higher than normal weight, in fact. Extremely rare for a case of preeclampsia.”
She spoke with great bitterness, tinged with revulsion.
“Did you ever find out what happened with the infant?” asked Lucie.
“No. He was sent to Neonatal, and that wasn’t my ward. I never knew what became of him, and to tell the truth, I didn’t really want to know. His mother had died before my eyes, while he seemed just fine. And with what you’re telling me today, it makes me feel even worse . . .”
Pierrette ran her hands over her face. She seemed to hesitate, sighed, then finally said:
“That night, I saw something, Miss. Something I’ve never told anyone. Something that seemed to contradict the doctor’s diagnosis of preeclampsia.”
Lucie leaned forward. She felt as if she were at the edge of the abyss, as did the nurse, who continued slowly:
“It had to do with the vascularization of the placenta.”
The placenta . . . Lucie thought once again of the painting in Terney’s library. The nurse struggled to let out the words that had probably never emerged from her lips.
“You know, preeclampsia causes the placenta to be very, very poor in blood vessels. This is always the case, even if the child is of normal size. When this child was removed by cesarean, the doctor quickly suctioned out the placenta that had remained in the womb. The midwife and anesthesiologist didn’t see anything, since one was busy with the baby and the other trying to stabilize the patient. But I saw it.”
A pause. Lucie was all focus.
“What exactly did you see?”
“That placenta. It was like . . . like a spider’s cocoon, it had so many blood vessels on the surface. To be perfectly honest, in all my career I’d never seen such a well-irrigated placenta. That might be why the baby was so big and round—he had everything he needed to develop normally.”
Lucie bolted out of her chair, nerves on fire.
“Hold on a second . . .”
She ran to her car and came back with the envelope containing the crime scene photos. She pulled out the one showing the placenta painting and handed it to the nurse.
“Is this what Amanda Potier’s placenta looked like?”
Pierrette nodded.
“Precisely. It was as vascularized as that. But . . . where did this come from?”
“From the doctor’s house. He asked Amanda to paint it for him. Which means the doctor knew about the ultra-irrigated placenta.”
The nurse handed the photo back to Lucie.
“The whole thing is so strange. Could he have known from the ultrasounds?”
“I think so, yes.”
There was a pause, both of them trying to understand. Lucie al
so pointed to the painting of the phoenix, just in case, but the nurse had no idea what it could mean.
Pierrette continued her tale:
“You might not believe me, but when . . . when the doctor saw his patient’s placenta after the delivery, I saw his eyes shine. As if in . . . fascination. It was very quick, not even a second, but that was the feeling I got.”
She rubbed her forearms.
“Look, I’m telling you the truth, I’ve got goose bumps. When he saw I’d noticed, he gave me the coldest look I’ve ever received in my life. As he suctioned, he stared at me without saying a word. And I understood that I had to keep quiet about this . . . And then a minute later, the mother was dead.”
Tonelessly, Pierrette continued her story to the end.
“There was a debriefing several hours after the delivery, with the head of the hospital, Dr. Terney, the anesthesiologist, and the midwife. They drew up a report. Officially, Amanda Potier died of preeclampsia. Terney had all the figures, the test results, the proofs of proteinuria, high blood pressure, even the statistics of how many preeclampsia cases resulted in normal-weight births. The hospital was off the hook. Her parents never wanted to bring suit.”
“And what about you—you never mentioned the placenta?”
Pierrette shook her head, like a child trying to deny her guilt.
“What would that have changed? It was my word against the doctor’s. The placenta had been destroyed. And besides, the mother was dead and there hadn’t been any medical malpractice. She had bled out without our being able to stop it. I didn’t want to complicate matters or jeopardize my career.”
She sighed, looking deflated.
“You want to know what I think, twenty-three years later? The illness that killed Amanda Potier looked like preeclampsia, and it could be diagnosed that way because of certain symptoms, but that’s not what it was. And with what you’ve told me today, I’m convinced that the doctor knew it all along. That horrible painting proves it.”
She got up from her armchair, using her hands as support.
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