“All lines of communication are cut off,” Monsieur Mouchotte said. “The town is in ruins, whole families are out on the streets. Who do you think you are to assume that your problems should take priority?”
His words were absolutely true, appallingly unfair, and entirely motivated by a desire for revenge so despicable that people’s hearts sank. Even Antoine felt like leaping to Monsieur Desmedt’s defence.
In normal circumstances, Monsieur Desmedt would have hurled himself at his enemy and others would have had to prise him off. But today there was no such need; Monsieur Desmedt did not lift a finger. This was precisely the response he had expected, and the fact that it had been delivered in such a shameful manner made little difference.
“Come now . . .” the mayor began feebly, but then words failed him.
It was not simply the fact that they were unable to help Desmedt that left them choked up, but the thought that the disappearance of his little boy, however tragic, had been relegated as a secondary concern and, swept away by this catastrophe that had affected everyone, would never again be something that concerned them all.
They could not carry on searching for the child; they accepted that he was gone for ever. Had he lost his way, had he been alive in the terrible hours of the storm, he would not be alive now.
Their only hope was that he had been kidnapped . . .
For Monsieur Desmedt, the ensuing silence foreshadowed the empty solitude that would henceforth mark his life.
Happy to have scored a victory, however dishonourable, Monsieur Mouchotte walked up to the mayor and offered his services, if there was anything he could do to help, in any capacity . . .
On his way home, Antoine tried to find supplies that could be used to clean up the house, a flashlight, maybe some batteries. He had no money with him, although in the circumstances, he could surely ask for credit, but the metal shutters on the ironmonger’s shop were closed. Then, in a flash of inspiration, he thought of going to get some candles from the church.
As he went inside, he bumped into Madame Antonetti carrying a huge shopping bag. She glowered at him contemptuously.
There was not a single candle left in the holders.
14
The twin cyclones, the thunderstorm, the torrential rains had caused such a shockwave that, in Antoine’s mind, everything that had gone before had faded. Only a few hours earlier he had been terrified that Rémi’s body would float from the crevasse in Saint-Eustache and be carried through the town by the torrent; he had seen the child, floating on his back like a dead fish, drift past Antoine’s house, past his parents’ house . . . But this was not to happen. Though undeniably dramatic, the damage wreaked by the storm offered Antoine an unexpected reprieve. The body might be found kilometres from Beauval, the rains would have washed away much of the evidence.
Or it was simply a postponement and, a few days from now, the searches would begin again. If it was still where he had left it, Rémi’s body was not so carefully hidden that a second search could miss it.
Antoine’s fate was now governed by a deep uncertainty, a chance he began to cling to.
Madame Courtin had already begun to scrub the house armed with a mop and a dozen floorcloths, a Sisyphean task. Antoine told her about the measures being taken by the mairie, none of which would have any positive impact on their situation.
“They don’t care about people like us!” she said.
“Maître Vallenères is dead.”
“Really? What happened?”
Madame Courtin stopped what she was doing and turned, still holding the mop over the bucket.
“A tree fell on him, apparently.”
Madame Courtin returned to her scrubbing, though more slowly now. She was one of those people who struggled to juggle thinking with other activities.
“And his little girl, what’s going to become of her?”
Antoine felt a pang of sympathy at the thought of the emaciated little girl. Who would push her wheelchair down the aisle at Sunday Mass? Who would take her out on summer afternoons, wheeling her through the town centre, stopping in front of the shops she never entered, buying her an ice cream which she would eat solemnly, sitting with the other customers on the terrace of the Café de Paris?
Usually, change in Beauval came slowly, evolution was gradual. The swiftness and savagery of events over the past three days had caught the townspeople unawares, the landscape was changing fast, too fast.
Antoine thought again about Monsieur Weiser. Like most people, he had little time for the mayor, but he thought about his efforts to mobilise the handful of available volunteers. Despite the circumstances Monsieur Weiser had focused all his energies on the community even though – as he would find out later that day – the roof had been blown off his factory, and urgent measures would have to be taken to safeguard the machines, protect the stock, salvage as much as possible. He would have been completely justified in thinking about himself, like most of the inhabitants.
Given that their house was still standing and they still had a roof, thought Antoine, surely they should go and help the Desmedts.
“Do you honestly think I’ve nothing better to do?” his mother snapped with shocking thoughtlessness.
*
In the early afternoon, before a crowd of silent spectators, a chainsaw was taken to the plane tree outside the mairie. Some wondered how old it was, it had been there longer than anyone in Beauval could remember. The town square now looked like a barren desert. Meanwhile the roads around Beauval were littered with a veritable forest of fallen trees that prevented the workmen from carrying out repairs. For the next two days, communication with the outside world was fitful. Eventually, the electricity and later the telephone lines were restored.
The Courtin house stank of river mud, all the furniture would need to be replaced. People began to fill out insurance claims, submit requests to the département which promised speedy emergency funds; they were slow in coming, and for the most part did not arrive at all. Blanche Courtin worked like a Trojan, silent, focused, but she was irritated by the slightest thing, her manner and her reactions were brusque and brutal.
Antoine, together with Théo, Kevin and a few of the others, got involved in a few of the community projects. The damage wreaked by the storm had put an end to the differences between Antoine and Théo, the pupils from the school showed a great willingness to help the distressed families, often at the expense of their own. They were like an army of scouts.
In the end, unable to bear it any longer, Antoine slipped away and took the path up to Saint-Eustache.
In the municipal forest, hundreds of trees had been toppled. Those directly in the path of the cyclone had been cleanly felled, leaving a series of eerily straight paths through the forest.
At Saint-Eustache itself, the damage was even more spectacular. The tangle was so thick it was impossible to penetrate, the forest seemed to have been completely levelled, the trees lay in a twisted heap. The one or two that had withstood the storm, for some unknown reason, seemed like lookout towers planted in a ravaged wasteland.
When he arrived home, Antoine was thoughtful.
Madame Courtin had dug an old transistor radio out of the attic and loaded it with batteries ransacked from various appliances around the house. She had her ear pressed to the crackling broadcast, as though she had gone back in time to the Occupation.
“Be quiet, Antoine, I’m trying to listen!”
The capitaine of the gendarmerie was insisting that the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Rémi Desmedt “will continue to be rigorously investigated”, but that the devastation suffered in the Beauval area was such that it would be impossible to carry out further searches. Forces across the département are actively pursuing lines of enquiry, etc. . . .
The impact of the storm on the local area was the subject of a “Special Report”. In a brief interview, Monsieur Weiser said that he was devoting every effort to persuading lumber companies to come and h
arvest the hundreds of hectares of fallen trees in the municipal woodland so the timber would not go to waste.
Meanwhile, the land around Saint-Eustache, long the subject of legal wranglings between numerous heirs – to say nothing of others who could not be traced – was of no significant market value and would be left in its current state.
Antoine went upstairs to his room. Rémi was dead, gone for ever.
It was over.
Rémi Desmedt had become a memory, and would remain so for a long time to come. Sometime in the distant future, when the forest of Saint-Eustache was redeveloped, there would be little left to find of the child’s remains.
And by then, Antoine would be long gone.
Because from that moment his mind was focused on a single plan: he would leave Beauval.
And he would never come back.
2011
15
Time wrought no changes in Madame Courtin’s sense of propriety. From an early age, Antoine had learned that to defy her was as fatiguing as it was futile. Alright, he agreed, he would come home for Monsieur Lemercier’s party – I’ll be there by seven o’clock latest, promise. The only concession he managed to extract from her was that he would not have to stay long; as far as his mother was concerned, the fact that he still had to study for exams was an unimpeachable alibi.
While waiting for Laura to call, he had decided to take a short walk around Beauval. Without her he was quickly bored, he missed everything about her, her slender, sensuous arms, her sweet breath. He felt a longing to be with her . . . and a fierce desire to fuck her. Young, dark-haired, exhilarating and utterly uninhibited, for Laura desire and pleasure were as vital as food and oxygen. Intelligent and somewhat wild, she was capable of throwing herself headlong into all sorts of dubious situations, but she had a keen sense of integrity that got her out of trouble at the first sign of danger. This woman, who promised to be an exceptional doctor, was just as capable of dragging Antoine into wicked yet wonderful escapades. Life with Laura was a firework display, a myriad of pyrotechnical possibilities into which Antoine launched himself happily, passionately. Laura was the shining shore of his existence. There were times when he took pleasure in these moments when they were separated, in the mingled melancholy and anticipation. But there were others, like today, when being apart from her weighed on him and he felt terribly alone. From the very beginning, their relationship had been volatile, like Laura, whose notion of sexual relationships was that they were passionate, fleeting and wholly impermanent. And yet somehow it had lasted, and lasted still; they had been together for three years now. They had established that neither of them wanted children, which might seem rare in a young woman but perfectly suited Antoine: he could not imagine bearing the burden, the responsibility for a child’s life, he was panicked at the very thought. Then Antoine, ever restless and eager to travel far away, confided that, when he finished his studies, he wanted to work with a humanitarian aid programme and Laura said she had been thinking the same thing. A relationship that had begun with wild and wanton sex was cemented by this shared goal. One day Laura had said, “From an administrative point of view, working in humanitarian aid, it would be more practical if we were married . . .” She said it casually, the way she might have mentioned something they needed to add to a shopping list, but once planted, the idea burrowed into Antoine’s mind.
Now, the prospect of marrying Laura made him happy, and the thought that it was she who had proposed restored his faith in himself.
He needed to buy batteries for his computer mouse. He decided to walk into town.
As he left his mother’s he could not help but glance at the garden of what had once been the Desmedts’ house. Now remodelled, almost rebuilt, it was home to a forty-something couple and their twin girls with whom Madame Courtin was polite but distant – after all, they weren’t really from these parts.
After the storm, the Desmedts had been offered a council house in Abbesses, on the outskirts of Beauval. Amazingly, in early 2000, Monsieur Desmedt had been spared in the wave of redundancies necessitated by the state of Weiser’s factory. Word had it that he had been kept on only out of pity. Monsieur Mouchotte spread vicious rumours about him at the time, but they stopped some months later when Monsieur Desmedt suffered a ruptured aneurysm and died in his sleep.
It had put years on Madame Desmedt, her face was deeply lined, she seemed utterly drained. Antoine occasionally bumped into her, she had put on weight and walked arthritically, as though she had spent her whole life working as a cleaner.
She and Antoine’s mother were no longer friends. In fact, they both behaved as though there had been a falling-out, as though some secret, unpardonable incident had led to a parting of the ways. After Bernadette was rehoused in Abbesses, they rarely ran into each other except at the shops, and even then it was just hello and goodbye, the storm had swept away their neighbourly camaraderie. No-one really noticed, not even Madame Desmedt. In that period of turmoil and grief, many friendships had faltered and new and often unexpected bonds had been forged, the calamity visited on the town had profoundly unsettled relationships between its inhabitants. In the case of his mother and Madame Desmedt, Antoine obviously knew rather more than other people, but that period, rarely discussed now, was invariably dismissed by Madame Courtin as “the storm of ’99”, as though nothing of note had happened in Beauval beyond some fallen trees and a few damaged roofs.
For a long time she had worried, tirelessly watching local news bulletins, reading the newspaper every morning, things she had never done before. Then, gradually, her anxiety had faded, she turned off the television and cancelled her newspaper subscription.
Antoine took a right turn towards the town centre. He felt as he always did. He hated everything, their house, this street. He hated Beauval.
He had got out while still at school. His mother had been surprised when he said he wanted to go to boarding school. Now, even though he still came to see her, his visits were as brief and as infrequent as possible; in the days leading up to these trips he felt uneasy, and he was always finding new excuses to leave early.
In his day-to-day life he put it out of his mind. Rémi Desmedt’s death was an old wound, a painful childhood memory, he would go for weeks without being troubled by it. Not that Antoine was indifferent; his crime simply ceased to exist. Then he would see a little boy in the street, or in a film; the mere sight of a gendarme triggered a nameless, uncontrollable dread. He would be overcome by a suffocating panic, a palpable sense of impending doom, and it required a superhuman effort to dispel the terror with slow deep breaths and positive reinforcement, constantly scanning every judder and lurch of his imagination as one might worriedly keep an eye on an engine that has suddenly overheated.
Truth be told, the terror never went away. It dozed, it slumbered, and it returned. Antoine lived with the knowledge that, sooner or later, this murder would catch him up and ruin his life. He was facing thirty years in prison, a sentence that would be halved because he had been a minor when the crime was committed, but even fifteen years was a life sentence since, afterwards, he would never have a normal life. A child murderer can never be a normal person, because it was impossible to think of a twelve-year-old murderer as normal.
The investigation had never officially been closed. He could not even count on the statute of limitations.
Sooner or later, a fearful storm would loom and, with a power born of its age, would lay waste to everything in its path, his life and the lives of his mother, his father, it would not be content merely to kill him, it would ensure that he went down in history, his name, his face, would be notorious, not a trace of the man he was now would survive, he would be the “child killer”, the “killer child”, the “schoolboy slayer”, a new precedent for criminologists, a clinical case for child psychologists.
This was why, more than anything, he wanted to go far, far away. He knew that even on the far side of the world these images of Beauval would continue to haunt him,
but he was relieved to think that at least he would not have to run into people who were closely or distantly caught up in his tragedy.
Laura would sometimes wake to find him sweating, feverish, frantic or, alternatively, brooding, bleary and desolate. She could not fathom the reasons for his unexpected panic attacks and there were times when she felt that Antoine’s urge to work in humanitarian aid was questionable. And, being one of those women who cannot bring themselves to turn a blind eye, she often tried to raise the subject. To no avail. Antoine had never brought her to visit the place where he had grown up. When eventually he did, perhaps she would be able to talk to those closest to him, understand him, help him.
He had just arrived at the mairie when Laura called.
“So,” she said, “how’s your mother . . .?”
Madame Courtin was unaware of Laura’s existence. Antoine’s curious, irrational secrets had annoyed Laura for a time, but she was not the sort to attach too much importance to social niceties. She liked to joke about it precisely because it made Antoine uncomfortable.
“I hope she’s not angry that I didn’t come . . .”
This time, Antoine was not embarrassed. Instead he was aroused by Laura, he had always found sex to be a powerful anxiolytic. He began to murmur to her, crude, urgent whispers that left her speechless. He talked as though he were lying on top of her and she had her eyes closed. Then he would pause, leaving long silences that dripped with desire as he listened to her staccato breathing.
“Are you still there?” she said.
The silence suddenly felt different. Antoine was no longer thinking about her, he was somewhere else, she could sense it.
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