One Green Bottle (Magali Rousseau mystery series Book 1)

by Curtis Bausse

  He hadn’t expected euphoria. On the contrary, he’d assumed he would have to battle with guilt and disgust. Yes, he’d been giddy with excitement during the months leading up to it, rehearsing it all in his mind, but that was because it was still nothing more than a plan. He hadn’t projected much beyond that because he found it too hard to imagine, but once it was actually done, and that brief tug had turned him into a murderer, he supposed it would be like stepping into a nightmare.

  But what he had done in fact was prove to himself that he had what it takes – the sheer guts that set him apart, made him superior, brought him in touch with something close to the very heart of creation. Because giving a life is easy. Perhaps not all men could – thanks to Marion – father a child as sweet and pretty as Elodie, but thousands of lives were created every minute. Taking a life away though – who had the might to do that?

  With a slight grimace of squeamishness, David carefully removed the wire from the woman’s neck and put it into a plastic bag which he slipped into his pocket. He stepped round the chair to face the chimney. He put another log on the fire and watched as a blaze of sparks rose up. Without raising their heads, the two dozing Labradors wagged their tails in unison. David found the gentle thud of their tails on the carpet a very comforting sound.

  He took a quick look round the lavishly furnished house. Up in the bedroom, he found a couple of antique brooches, one with jade, the other with rubies, and a pair of silver candlesticks. He tipped them into a nylon bag which he stuffed into his rucksack. On his way downstairs, next to a vase in an alcove, he spotted some Chinese figurines which, if he wasn’t mistaken, would fetch a tidy sum. They went into the rucksack too.

  Then he stepped out of the house into the chill of the mid-October evening. By the dim interior light of the car he’d hired in Nantes, he changed into a new set of clothes. A few minutes later he was out on the road, having disappeared from Dorothy Fourlin’s house as silently and invisibly as he’d arrived.

  It was bad of course, he was well aware of that. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have a conscience or couldn’t grasp the concept of right and wrong. What he had done was deeply, dreadfully wicked, and somewhere inside he did indeed detect the guilt and disgust he’d expected. But they thrashed about ineffectually, like insects drowning in a puddle, unable to compete with the exultation of going where no one else dares.

  After he’d driven for an hour or so, and before getting on the N12, he drove up a side road and removed the tape from the number plates. He put the crumpled tape with the clothes, then stood by the car gazing up at the sky. It was a cloudless, starry night and he drank the cold air till he was cleansed and innocent.

  No trace of his presence would be found in Fourlin’s house; therefore he couldn’t have killed her. The car would be returned in immaculate condition, the clothes would go into a roadside bin and by tomorrow evening he’d be back with his wife and daughter in Orange. A few weeks from now, he would surreptitiously leave the stolen items in an antique dealer’s shop. The astonished dealer would marvel at his luck and perhaps, when he sold them, he would indeed be lucky enough for the police not to notice. If not, he’d have a lot of explaining to do.

  On the other hand, suspicion could also fall upon Romain and Simon, Monsieur Fourlin’s sons from his first marriage, who’d been dismayed when he effectively robbed them of their inheritance by marrying Dorothy. The Englishwoman went out of her way to be nice to them but they hated her all the same. Nor did she get much joy from her husband, who only returned from his politics, and his mistress, at weekends. And the very helpful, talkative gardener, who would never make the connection between Dorothy Fourlin’s death and the pleasant young man researching haunted houses, had added that poor Madame’s only real friends were a pair of soppy Labradors that she optimistically thought of as her guard dogs.

  He entered the motorway and headed south. It was almost midnight but he was wide awake, his senses open to the vastness and the wonder of existence.

  Back home, Elodie now would be fast asleep, a little princess with flowing auburn hair. Had she cut out more shapes today? Or learnt another song? Marion would have read to her, but not for as long as he did. Her mind was too full of the patterns and colours of jackets and dresses and skirts. He wondered if she’d cut out shapes when she was Elodie’s age. Was that where her talent came from? But he must have cut out shapes himself and he couldn’t design a jacket to save his life.

  Nor, he thought with a wry smile, anybody else’s, for that matter.

  He switched on the radio. Jacques Brel. Perfect for this particular time and place and mood. He sang along as the road ahead gently fed itself into the headlights.

  ***

  Then there was Perle. A nice enough man, who hadn’t complained strongly, even though several pages of the music score were obliterated by ink. But a complaint, however mild, is still a complaint, and David had to punish him for that.

  That, at least, was how he justified his expeditions. He had to choose his victims somehow and that was as good a method as any. There was a certain randomness to it but at the same time a rule he had to respect: if a buyer didn’t complain, he couldn’t go after them. And surprisingly, some didn’t, no matter how broken or soiled the item he sent. Too busy perhaps, or couldn’t be bothered, or thought they’d be wasting their time.

  Most of them complained, though. Not always vociferously, rarely with all the magnificent, blustering rage that Albert Roncet had mustered, but generally you could sense the indignation. And David didn’t like that. He didn’t like it one bit.

  Not that he actually managed to work up an anger, certainly nothing as close to the fury he’d felt when Treboulay gave him a zero rating and treated him with such scorn. It was somewhat ironical, in fact, that Treboulay, who most deserved his fate, was the only one he hadn’t intended to kill. Of course, he said to himself, the others deserved it too, but really it was only because he’d provoked them into falling into his trap. He was fairly sure that neither Fourlin nor Perle bore him any ill will.

  But express the slightest displeasure and that’s it – you’re a candidate for a visit. Rules are rules, after all.

  He wondered why he did it. Not the immediate reason – that heady thrill of preparation and aftermath – but the deep-seated wound to his psyche that meant he was even capable of doing it, let alone enjoying it. But there wasn’t one, or not one that was obvious. His father perhaps. If there had to be a reason, it could be his father, always criticising, always saying he was useless. David never knew why but nothing he ever did was good enough.

  He wasn’t a brute all the same. He took them fishing, built them model aeroplanes, taught them what goes on beneath the bonnet of a car. But even then it was always Cyril who got the praise. David tried as hard as he could but in the end he understood that both of them would rather he wasn’t there.

  Marion knew. He’d never made any secret of the reason he came to Marseilles. His father was glad to see the back of him, he said, and besides, Beauvais was a shithole. He’d even been upfront about his life of petty crime; she knew that but for her, he might have gone down for good.

  Once, before Elodie was born, they’d been driving along and Marion made some sarky remark about a mistake he’d made, and he gripped the wheel tight and said, ‘Don’t … do … that!’

  She stared at him in surprise. ‘Do what?’

  ‘Don’t criticise me, understand?’ He said it softly, but with a pent-up rage and his jaws clenched, and it frightened her. She was about to answer but decided against it and they drove on in silence. She looked away from him, out of the window, and he became very scared she was going to say she was leaving him. Eventually she pointed out that if she couldn’t ever say he’d done something wrong, it was going to be a problem. ‘It’s not as if you’re infallible,’ she said. Which of course was true enough, even if he tried to be.

  So she knew he was touchy and accepted it, turning it into a joke. ‘Permission to critici
se?’ she’d say, holding up a finger as if addressing some pompous military honcho. And after a while she didn’t need to say anything, she’d just hold up her finger and wink, and even if he didn’t know what he’d done wrong, he’d say ‘Apology,’ and they’d laugh. Marion was the only person in the world who could get away with that.

  But now he was haunted by the one thing no apology could ever make better again.

  ***

  When he murdered Enzo Perle, everything changed. What could he put it down to? The law of diminishing returns? Each time you kill, the thrill gets a little bit less?

  But they weren’t just diminishing, they were absent. There was still the excitement, the joy of victory, but no angels. No rapturous applause, no triumph in the spotlight, no elation.

  Driving away from Mannezon, he tried to recapture the sensation of floating, of being part of God, but for all the beauty of the evening, he was obstinately tethered to the sluggishness of the world.

  He could never have explained, of course, to Marion or anyone else, that the reason he killed was to be in touch with God. What could he say? It’s murder, I know, but it makes me pure, don’t you see? It makes the whole world pure. No, there’d be no point even trying. But that was indeed why he murdered Roncet and Perle, so without it, logically, he had no reason to continue. Yes, there was satisfaction, but whereas before he’d been an artist, with Perle he was just a technician.

  Without the angels, what was the point of carrying on? It was almost midnight when he got back to his hotel in Montpellier and there he lay on the bed, puzzled and frustrated, and took the decision never to murder again.

  Which was why, when he did, his only reward was to hate himself.

  ***

  He was Speleo for that, crawling through invisible gaps, evolving in the darkest corners of the underworld. He hadn’t lost his touch in the slightest, but all the joy had gone out of it. He would have liked to be Coussikou again, touched by the grace of God, but the angels had abandoned him and that was impossible.

  A long time ago, back when life was tolerable, almost good, Coussi and Sikou had kept him company. How old was he? Seven? Eight? Before his father began to question the worth of his existence. Back then, presumably, he was cute, almost as cute as the tabbies. He never knew what happened to them but they disappeared, both of them, all of a sudden, and he was left only with an inconsolable sadness.

  A couple of months after Roncet, he Googled the name on an impulse, his heart fluttering as he half expected to see it linked to the old man’s death. But Coussikou turned out to be a woman in Montreal who posted countless pictures of herself, her friends and her beloved terrier, Maple. A real maestro, huh? That was one of Maple on a piano stool, paws resting on the keys.

  Maestro, he thought. Yes, it suits me well. And all the time he was planning the murder of Enzo Perle, he knew that it would be masterfully carried out.

  The beauty of the Internet was that you could be anyone. Not exactly invisible but hidden behind a whole range of cloaks of anonymity.

  He didn’t drive past the Terrals’ house till July, two months after Michel Terral complained that the purse he’d received was damaged. It was just out of curiosity: supposing he chose to, how easy would it be to kill him?

  Very, he thought when he saw the spot, except of course that he couldn’t and wouldn’t because Terral had a young wife and she was pregnant. The rule was to kill the one who complains, not a whole family.

  Come September, though, he was thinking that rules are never set in stone, they evolve. And why had he bothered to damage the purse in the first place, if not to punish the buyer if he dared to complain? It was no doubt for Lucie anyway, so she was guilty by association, and as for the baby, what sort of life could it expect to have in a tiny village in Charentes, which he knew very well to be literally godforsaken? Did a foetus really count in any case?

  Of course it did. He was hardly one of those pro-life fanatics, but the little seed in Marion’s womb had eventually turned into Elodie, and by that reckoning, however unformed it might be, an unborn baby is a life as beautiful as anything on earth.

  Which in fact was another advantage – he’d be getting three in one go.

  ***

  When Marion became pregnant, they both gave up smoking. David relapsed a couple of times but then hit on a method which was highly unorthodox, but effective. From a dozen a day he upped his consumption to thirty. Then he felt so sick that giving up came as a relief.

  Around the time he had Coussi and Sikou as pets, he started learning English at primary school. Ten green bottles hanging on the wall. There wasn’t much else he learnt but the song stuck in his mind because every time another bottle accidentally fell, the teacher pointed to someone who had to drop down dead. They used to plead with her to make it twenty but she was always adamant: the tenth green bottle was the last.

  He knew there’d be no angels this time. Only the satisfaction of a job well done.

  He held the cutter in his left hand, while his right hand gripped the victims’ foreheads, pulling them back to expose the flesh of their neck. He’d practised the movement countless times in the garage, using a plastic knife and a cushion wrapped round a lampstand. The Terrals were so surprised that they barely managed more resistance than the cushion.

  They had both admired the purse, more colourful, they thought, than the first, and Lucie went into the kitchen while Michel, wanting to compare the two, was moving towards the stairs when David struck. Michel had hardly fallen to the floor when his wife came rushing out and David grabbed her.

  No angels, no peace. Just a form of resignation, bordering on numbness, as he carried out the scenario he’d conceived. He worked quickly, his feet painfully compressed into trainers two sizes too small. Contorting himself through the garage window in the dark, he reflected on the aptness of his pseudonym: it was like squeezing into an underground cave. He kicked off his mud-stained shoes before lowering himself gently on to the workbench, which he then moved back to its original spot before putting on his shoes again.

  When he’d finished, the house bore all the traces of a burglary: fractured window, ransacked drawers, tell-tale footprints all over. And two bodies lying in pools of blood: a burglary gone wrong.

  The baby, he noted as he entered its bedroom to seize an imaginary Stanley knife, was a boy. Not that it would ever get to see the light of day, let alone the pretty paper in its room.

  There wasn’t much of any value to take but that didn’t matter – the burglar was clumsy and amateur, high on some crazy cocktail of drugs, out to check the first empty house he came across.

  When he came downstairs, steam was billowing from a saucepan of carrots in the kitchen. He wondered what would happen if he left it – would the whole house catch fire? A shame if it did: all his careful craftsmanship destroyed. It would be as tragic as the burning of a museum.

  He switched off the hotplate and the oven and then, as a final touch, overturned the dining-room chair where Michel had sat to admire the purse. He let himself out through the front door, got into his car and drove away through the silent, foggy night.

  Michel, Lucie and an unborn boy. That made six. Seven if he counted Treboulay. Only three more to go.

  He’d driven for twenty minutes or so when the cold, ruthless efficiency of his encounter with the Terrals abruptly drained away, leaving him with the realisation of who he really was.

  He pulled over to the side of the road and wretchedly, violently, threw up.

  ***

  A shame, really, to pour olive oil over a lovely little engraving by Delacroix. But all that mattered now was to finish. The sooner he got to ten, the sooner he would be free. This, he said to himself, was a temporary sickness and once it had run its course, he would be cured. Patience.

  Three green bottles hanging on the wall.

  There was a temptation, naturally, to get it over with quickly, throw caution to the wind and go on a spree. That would in fact be easy, tha
nks to the Colt, but it would also be an admission of defeat. Inevitably, people who go on sprees end up killing themselves or getting killed.

  Besides, that wasn’t his way. It was sloppy, noisy and unprofessional and it broke every rule in the book.

  When the purchaser duly complained, David set off with a second Delacroix engraving. And snug in the side pocket of his rucksack, a twenty-four-ounce claw hammer.

  He told Marion he was going to see a customer in Alès. He’d probably mooch around a bit, but chances were he’d be back the following day. If not, he’d give her a call. And he told her to take care and said that he loved her.

  Everything he said was true. The love, the mooching, the destination. He always kept her informed of his coming and going, and he liked to think it mattered. It did, in a way, of course. He couldn’t just take off and not say anything. But the words he used were odd, like something pretty sprayed on a surface to hide what was underneath. It was what he didn’t say that mattered.

  He didn’t say it because he couldn’t. It wasn’t that he couldn’t admit it, but the right words didn’t exist. The words that would help him to say it in a way that people would understand. Not forgive – he wasn’t expecting that. Just understand. And not everybody either. When it came down to it, there was only one person who had to understand. But how could he ever find the words to tell her what was hidden below the surface?

  Perhaps it was because he didn’t understand himself. Or he didn’t want to. Or perhaps there was nothing to understand. It was just the way he was.

  And words, in any case, were peculiar. Mooch, for example. What did he mean by that? When he said it to Marion, he meant he’d be looking for Christmas presents. Walk through the streets until he saw something he knew would appeal to her. By the time he got to Alès, though, mooch meant something different.

  Thomas Dallet, the designated victim, was unpretentious and affable. He accepted David’s apology and said the replacement engraving was better than the first. They sat in his study and chatted about antiques. Resting his rucksack on his lap, his hand gripping the hammer through the fabric, David said he’d let him know when he had other items likely to interest him. Dallet was pleased.