One Green Bottle

by Curtis Bausse

  ‘So this is where he was when he heard them come back,’ said Magali. ‘May I?’ She stepped into the room and took photographs.

  ‘She had a few jewels. Earrings, a gold chain. Downstairs a couple of pictures are missing, worthless except for the frames. And a porcelain vase which might fetch a bob or two. Maybe more, but that’s all Michel’s father noticed. He was too upset to look very closely, but even if there’s more, we’re looking at a few hundred euros at the most.’ Balland shook his head and sighed.

  Magali recalled her sense of horror when Charlotte had told her about Enzo. One minute you’re cooking supper, the next you’re lying dead. Below the surface of normality a current of something brutal and absurd could erupt without warning.

  Next to the bedroom was another one, smaller, unfurnished. ‘The baby’s,’ said Balland.

  ‘A boy.’ The room was empty apart from two packets of glue and half a dozen rolls of blue wallpaper, one of them unwrapped, waiting to be put up.

  ‘He came in,’ she said, pointing to the traces of mud. She tiptoed round the edge of the room, taking more pictures. ‘Didn’t just stand in the doorway. Why?’

  Balland observed her with raised eyebrows. ‘You tell me.’

  ‘When did they buy the paper?’ she asked.

  ‘No idea. Why?’

  ‘Just a thought. Did they buy anything else with it? Apart from the glue.’

  ‘You mean the Stanley knife?’ He moved to the window and opened it. ‘We’re checking.’ He lit his cigarette, took a deep drag and blew the smoke outside. ‘So you’re helping Darlier, are you?’

  ‘Well, I haven’t done much.’

  ‘I’ll give him a ring. Tell him to hand it over to you entirely.’ His laugh turned into a cough and he cast a distasteful glance at his cigarette before stubbing it out and tucking it back in the packet. ‘Anything else up here?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ They made their way back downstairs. ‘I noticed a car round the back,’ she said. ‘It belongs to the couple?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If they didn’t spot the burglar’s car when they got back, it must have been hidden. Behind the clump of trees, for example, further along the road.’

  ‘The fog was thick that night. It could have been closer.’

  ‘But still not next to the house. The best place to park would be where the Terrals’ car is now.’

  ‘Too hidden. Coming from the village, you can’t actually see there’s a space. Not from the other side either, not in that fog.’

  ‘Right,’ said Magali as she followed him into the kitchen. But although the explanation was reasonable enough, something didn’t seem right at all. She didn’t have time to think it through, though; her attention was now on the kitchen. ‘These carrots. Are they cooked?’

  Balland smiled. ‘A bit more than half, perhaps.’

  ‘Which means the killer switched them off before leaving.’ She peered through the glass of the oven door. ‘And in here?’

  ‘Was a fish and potato pie. Supermarket brand, frozen. The wrapper’s in the bin.’

  ‘Takes half an hour to cook?’

  ‘We think it had been in for about ten minutes. He switched the oven off too.’

  ‘Didn’t want the house burning down. Thoughtful of him.’ It was also the sign of someone calm under pressure. His burglary had just gone terribly wrong, yet he had the presence of mind to switch off the oven. Which on the face of it was an odd thing to do. If the house had gone up in flames, so would all of the evidence.

  She understood now how vital it was to get to the scene of crime early. The five months that had passed between Enzo’s death and the day she arrived in the house had wiped away the trace of what happened and carried it into oblivion.

  ‘Any clues in the garage?’ she asked.

  ‘Plenty of mud again. But nothing else apart from the fibres.’

  Balland led the way down three steps from the kitchen to the garage. The Terrals used it as a utility room: spare furniture, boxes, garden equipment, vegetable rack, washing machine, freezer. All very tidily arranged. Just like Antoine, Michel had a board on the wall where the outline of each of his tools was drawn to indicate where it should go. Next to the board was his workbench and above that the window which had been forced open from the outside. The damage to the frame was clearly visible, but the window itself was shut.

  ‘I imagine you’d need a crowbar to do that,’ said Magali. ‘It’s fairly high up as well. He’d never have managed without that ladder.’

  ‘They’d been pruning a tree at the weekend.’ Balland went back into the house. ‘Careless to leave a ladder outside, but people do. Burglaries always happen to someone else.’ He led her to the front door and opened it. ‘Well, now you’ve seen. Not exactly a pleasant line of work.’

  ‘No. But I don’t think they expect us to be doing this sort of stuff when we qualify.’ She shook his hand. ‘Thank you very much, Commander. My first assignment is to write a report on something I’ve observed. If it’s all right with you, I’d like to write about this.’

  ‘Glad to oblige,’ he said. ‘We’ll have the full forensic report in a couple of days. And we’ll get the bastard who did this pretty soon.’ He left a slight pause and added, ‘Just supposing we don’t, though, there’s something you can do.’

  ‘Anything I can, I’d be glad to.’

  ‘Send me a copy of that report.’

  As she drove away, he was still looking at her, fingers fishing in the packet for his half-smoked cigarette.

  Chapter 8

  In her hotel room Magali lay on her bed and wondered what she’d achieved. She had more than enough material for her assignment, though what Verney would make of it was anybody’s guess. In the first batch of documents she’d received from Nîmes, the example they gave was to sit in a bus station for an hour and note everything that happens. A far cry from whatever went on in the Terrals’ house.

  As far as she could tell, she’d also gained the somewhat grudging respect of Yves Balland, which in itself was a cause for celebration. It meant she was closer now to the person she’d been pretending to be, or at least to some strange version of it. A private detective whose only interest was murder.

  But none of that would be of any comfort to Charlotte.

  Tiredness now caught up with her, but she still couldn’t sleep. Every time she closed her eyes, the image of Lucie’s severed throat appeared, escaped from a nightmare to haunt her daylight hours. Perhaps, after all, it hadn’t been such a good idea to come here. Charlotte was paying her to find Enzo’s killer, not the Terrals’, but now in her restless mind, the two crimes blurred into one. The last supper. A single presence lurking at both, lurking everywhere in fact, a face in the shadows, cruel, grotesque and unknowable.

  She rose from the bed and read Enzo’s file yet again. Not so much to find anything new but to bring it back clearly to her mind, not let the Terral case confuse her. In the section devoted to Brigitte Bussert was a photo, printed from Enzo’s computer. Brigitte was sitting at the desk in his bedroom, writing. She was looking at the camera, surprised, as if he’d just called her name, but her lips were parted in a spontaneous smile of delight. She was wearing a T-shirt too large for her, Enzo’s perhaps, and one side had slipped below her shoulder. She was slimmer than the wood-chopping harridan Magali had imagined. And she was holding the pen in her left hand.

  She turned to the autopsy report, which described in detail the state of Enzo’s body, right down to a minor bruise on his shin and a cut to his thumb to which he’d applied a plaster. But the cause of death was the two wounds to his skull, the first on its own probably fatal. In order to follow Darlier’s thinking, Magali had to imagine the scenario anew. According to the coroner, the first wound was ‘consistent with’ a blow struck from behind and to the right. Mention was made further on of the ‘probable’ position of the killer. But that left room for doubt: the blow could also have come from the front and to the left. In whic
h case, Enzo was facing the killer.

  Brigitte Bussert was in love. Madly. On a Thursday evening in March, she went to her lover’s house, expecting to be welcomed as usual. But instead of that, she was told the affair was over. She begged and pleaded and cried, but eventually had to accept it. As she walked away, she spotted an iron bar among the debris outside. It had the effect of focusing her rage, making her realise that what she had accepted was not acceptable at all. She picked up the bar and went back into the house.

  Enzo heard the door open. When he saw it was Brigitte, he told her to leave, not trying now to be gentle. Then he moved towards the kitchen, dismissing her. She followed him, screamed his name. He turned round. From behind her back, the iron bar came into view. He had no time to recoil before she brought it down on his head.

  That, or something similar, was what Vincent Darlier was asking her now to consider. Why not? It was entirely plausible on the face of it. And yet for some reason, she couldn’t make it fit. She looked again at the pretty, smiling woman at Enzo’s desk. Was she really capable of doing something like that? Reading again the string of emails Brigitte sent to her lover as he was lying dead, Magali concluded that she wasn’t.

  In an attempt to think of something different, she returned to the documents from Nîmes. There was an outline of the course, a list of books to read and a thick brochure, written by Verney himself, Private Investigation: A History of the Profession. Magali managed to read a couple of pages before her eyelids began to droop.

  She was drifting off to sleep when the chambermaid knocked – check-out time. She went downstairs, settled her bill and ordered an espresso at the bar. Then she opened her computer and spent the next two hours researching a single topic on the Internet.

  Not so long ago, she’d sigh with exasperation when the news went on about murder. It was one of the reasons why the National Front was so popular. When the news was telling you every day that France was overrun by homicidal maniacs, pledges to make the country safe struck a chord. It wasn’t that she had any greater respect for the media now than she did before, but murder had acquired a new significance. It was like visiting a country – you pay more attention afterwards when its name crops up in the news. The country she’d visited was dark and dreadful and the people who lived there moved through the shadows, warily.

  Magali now had doubts of a different kind. Less about her competence or lack of it than about the very nature of the work. It took her beyond what she’d ever known or seen, into areas of the human mind that she’d never had to face. Intellectually, yes, she knew that murders exist, that people kill other people in the most abominable ways, but the reality of standing in the room where the Terrals lost their lives, of staring at those patches of blood on the floor, had left her in a state of shock.

  A burglar caught in the act. A jealous woman jilted. What goes on in the mind of a person who kills?

  There wasn’t a single answer to that, there were dozens. Or that, at least, was how it seemed at first. The descriptions of the victims and the circumstances of their death were all different. From toddlers to pensioners – anyone, anywhere, any time. There wasn’t any pattern to murder. It happened out of the blue, a random event, like lightning.

  But the more she looked, the more she managed to impose an order on what at first seemed meaningless. If you took out the (mercifully few) fanatics like Mohamed Merah, the self-proclaimed terrorist in Toulouse, or the Norwegian fascist Anders Breivik, what you had left appeared to fit into three broad categories, accounting for practically every murder she read about: families, lovers and relationships; criminals, money and greed; perverts, madmen and psychopaths.

  Within each category, there was of course a multitude of variations. But after a couple of hours, Magali started to feel that murder could perhaps be understood. When you can put a label on something, it no longer overwhelms you. Of course she would never get into the mind of the person who killed Enzo (she’d been in love, yes, but not madly), but this, she supposed, was how an investigation advanced: you sorted through the categories, seeing how well the evidence you had could fit.

  There were also, she discovered, a lot of victims whose killers were never found. Cases could be investigated for years and never solved. Relatives campaigned to have them reopened, but resources were stretched. Suspects might be held for a while and released because a procedural error meant the charges had to be dropped. When it came to murder, there may indeed be categories, but this was also a world that was messy and inconclusive.

  One thing was obvious though: there were many more victims than murderers. France had its fair share of men who for some reason obeyed a dreadful compulsion to kill again and again, and a handful of these could account for dozens of deaths. In the 1990s, eight men were murdered in Alsace, all of them homosexuals. Between 1995 and 2001, four women disappeared in Perpignan, three of them later found dead, mutilated and naked. The fourth was never found. In Toulouse the target was prostitutes, while in the west of France, teenage girls went missing. Sometimes these killings continued over several years and then mysteriously stopped without the murderer ever being caught.

  Then there were isolated cases which didn’t seem to fit any pattern. A young woman battered to death in Bordeaux. A middle-aged woman strangled in Brittany. A man in Montauban, lying by the hearth with his neck broken. The police appeared to be making no progress in any of these cases.

  The affair which caught her attention, though, was one which had been solved. Two years previously, an old man, Albert Roncet, had been stabbed in the neck in Wallenheim, a village not far from Mulhouse. A fortnight later, Nassim Benamrouche, a thirty-eight-year-old drifter with a previous record of petty larceny and pimping, was arrested. Several witnesses had seen him wandering through the village on the day of the murder, and the following day he had turned up in Noubach, twenty miles away, causing a disturbance at the home of a former girlfriend. He was currently serving a twenty-five-year prison sentence. All cut and dried then – except that a local journalist was campaigning to have the case reopened. According to Philippe Roudy of the Courrier de l’Est, a convenient culprit had been locked up on evidence so flimsy it was practically non-existent.

  If that was true, the murder had been put in the wrong category. Was Roncet’s killer still at large? What category did Roudy put it in? He seemed convinced that Benamrouche was innocent, but offered no alternative solution. The mind of a murderer must be as hard to enter for him as it was for her. Except he’d been trying for two years now – had he drawn up a map? Did he have an idea how to get there?

  As the afternoon drew to a close, Magali shut down the computer and made her way to the station. After hours of reading the grisly stuff of murder, she found it a relief to be surrounded by normal people. Except, of course, that none of them was normal. Or rather, you just couldn’t tell. Beneath the expression worn on the platform, any one of these travellers could be planning right now to kill another person. And any one of them could end their lives as a victim.

  Her telephone buzzed: a text message. Terrals to DIY shop 3 weeks ago. Bought paper & glue, nothing else. Y.B.

  She nodded to herself. The message meant two things. Firstly, whoever killed the Terrals had in all likelihood brought the weapon with him. And secondly, Yves Balland was taking her seriously.

  The train to Marseilles drew into the station, but Magali didn’t get on it. Instead, she returned to the entrance to consult the timetable board. Then she made six phone calls in succession. The first was to the Courrier de l’Est, where she was put through to Philippe Roudy. He agreed to meet her at 7 p.m. the next day. Then she booked a room in a hotel in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, close to where Charlotte Perle lived. Then, to Charlotte herself, she asked if they could meet in the morning. Charlotte said she was busy – how about this evening? Call number four was the hotel again, to cancel – she’d taken up Charlotte’s offer to stay in her flat. That left Paul Daveney, who thankfully didn’t answer. ‘I’m r
eally sorry, Paul, I got confused. I didn’t mean Thursday but Sat– no, make that Monday. Next Monday, all right? Call me back if there’s a problem. And well done, seriously. I know it’s not easy to talk about your father but you’ve decided to and… well, that’s great. I’ll see you soon. Bye.’ She lowered the phone.

  Was that a good message? It was meant to be encouraging but she’d really messed up with the days. And would he be encouraged by the mention of his father? She picked up the phone again and called his landline. But she still didn’t speak to Paul because it was answered by his mother.

  ‘I’ll tell him, of course,’ said Lucille Daveney, a little stiffly. ‘But he’ll be so disappointed. He loves having those chats with you.’

  ‘Oh... That’s good to know.’ Magali was taken aback: psychotherapy reduced to an afternoon chat. For a moment she debated whether to pursue the issue further but decided it was neither the time nor place.