by Simon Toyne
‘Briefly.’ Parra flipped open a notebook. ‘Says she got here shortly after eight because there was a queue in Moulin where she gets Monsieur Engel’s baguette. She let herself in, smelled what she thought was blocked drains, went into the atelier and saw Monsieur Engel lying on the floor. Then she saw the rats and ran outside. She called us on her mobile and was sitting there when I got here. She hasn’t moved since.’
Amand watched her rocking back and forth slightly, her eyes open but her focus vague. He imagined she was picturing whatever she had discovered lying on the atelier floor and his chest tightened a little at the realization that he was about to see it too.
‘Make sure she’s OK,’ he said. ‘See if there’s anyone around who can give her a coffee or something stronger.’ He stepped past Parra and entered the atelier.
The foul smell hit him the moment he was inside; sewage and ammonia and rust triggering some primal part of his brain, making him want to turn right around and run. His father had told him once that being brave was not about being fearless, it was about being full of fear but doing the thing that frightened you anyway. Papa had spent five years in the Foreign Legion fighting in North Africa and been invalided out after getting shot in the leg, so he knew what he was talking about. Amand reached into his pocket, popped another glycerine capsule under his tongue, and carried on walking forward.
A plastic mop bucket lay on its side with bottles of bleach and cloths spilling out across the floorboards. He imagined Madame Segolin dropping it when she’d seen what was in the room. He moved towards it and looked ahead, but crowds of headless mannequins in various state of undress blocked his view. The rising heat of the day was already starting to stir the first pungent smells of decay into the odour of blood and piss and shit. He reached the bucket and the slumped figure came into view. It was lying in a dark puddle that reflected the light streaming down from the overhead skylights. Amand took another step forward and a slight movement on the body made him freeze. He watched a small pointed snout lift up from behind the old man’s head, its whiskers wet, its teeth long and red. The rat sniffed the air for a moment then ducked back down to continue feeding.
Bile burned in Amand’s throat. He stamped on the floorboards to try and scare the vermin away and more rats appeared from underneath the body, scurrying away to the safety of the shadows, wet fur and claws leaving trails across the floorboards. One stopped by a small wooden box lying close to the body and looked back. Amand stamped on the floor again but the rat squeaked a challenge, its ragged ears twitching towards him. It turned and started moving towards the body again. Amand felt the bile rise higher. He reached for his service pistol, unsnapped the safety strap and drew. The gunshot boomed in the silence of the workshop and the rat spun away across the floor, a smear of blood and splintered wood marking the spot where it had been. Amand heard running footsteps behind him and turned and held up his hands. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I’m OK. Call La Domial in Les Cabannes, tell them to grab some rat traps and bring them up here. Traps, not poison. These damn things are evidence now.’ Parra nodded, reaching for his phone, his wide eyes staring past Amand at the body on the floor. ‘And call Albi to get a move on with the STIC team. We need to process this room and bag the body before anything else takes a bite out of it.’
He turned back and stepped further into the workshop, weaving between the mannequins to take a closer look at the body. He swallowed hard when he saw the old man’s face. He had known Josef Engel well enough, but he did not recognize the thing now lying on the floor before him. His face and upper body were red and scourged, thousands of tiny bites showing where the rats had feasted. Amand began to rehearse the conversation he would have with Josef’s next of kin, wondering how he could translate all of this into quiet words of condolence.
‘Call Marie-Claude,’ he said. ‘Check she’s at home, and if she is, make sure she stays there. Whoever did this might have a grudge against the family. In fact, send someone round, make sure she’s OK and tell her I’ll be along short—’
The sound made both their heads whip round.
It was music. A piano being played inside the main house.
Amand raised his gun towards the sound and glanced at Parra. ‘You said no one was inside.’
‘Madame Segolin said …’
‘You didn’t check?’
Parra shook his head. ‘I saw the body and called you.’
‘Where’s your gun?’
‘In the car. I could go and—’
‘No. Stay here. Watch my back and call the office. Get more people over here fast and send someone to Marie-Claude’s house.’
Parra nodded and looked down at his phone. Amand moved towards the door to the main house, leading with his gun. The music continued to play, complex clusters of notes tumbling over each other, and the tightness in Amand’s chest grew worse.
Bravery is being afraid of something and doing it anyway.
He reached the door, twisted the handle, and entered the main house.
6
The loud knock on the door made Marie-Claude spill the milk she was pouring on her son’s Cini Minis. She glanced at the clock: 8.22 – too early to be a social call.
‘Who’s that?’ Léo asked, his thick, round glasses making his already large brown eyes look even bigger. ‘Is it Papa?’
She called this look his Disney Eyes, big and wide and filled with all the hope and desire a seven-year-old could muster. But sometimes it was a Bambi look, a look of fear, and this was one of those times.
‘No,’ she said, and Léo’s glasses magnified his relief. ‘It’s probably a delivery or something. Eat your breakfast, I’ll go see who it is.’
Marie-Claude stepped into the hallway and pulled the door almost shut behind her. She could see the dark shape of whoever was standing at her door shifting behind the large pane of frosted glass that let light in. He looked too small to be her husband – her ex-husband. It couldn’t be him. Only it could. Jean Baptiste had been released from prison three weeks ago, early and with no warning, and no one had seen him since.
She moved down the short hallway, glancing at the baseball bat buried in the coats and rubbing the scar on her forearm. Amand had offered to get her a gun, but she’d said no. What would she do with it anyway? She couldn’t shoot her ex-husband, and she didn’t want a loaded gun in the house, not with Léo around. She peered through the peephole, her heart hammering hard. A gendarme stood on the other side, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Marie-Claude let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, checked the chain was on properly, then opened the door. The rattle of the chain made the gendarme snap to attention. ‘Sorry to bother you, madame. I was told to come and check you were home and make sure you were OK.’
‘Why?’ She dropped her voice. ‘What’s happened? Is this about my ex-husband?’
‘I don’t know. I was only told to make sure—’
‘Who told you?’
‘Commandant Amand.’
‘Did he say why?’
‘I didn’t actually speak to him, I just got the message to make sure you were here and tell you to stay put until the Commandant gets here.’
‘So I’m under some kind of house arrest?’
‘No, Amand – I mean, the Commandant, said—’
‘My son’s due at school in twenty minutes, how’s that going to work if I’m not allowed to leave the house?’
‘I was only told to … I’m sure the Commandant will be here before then.’
‘Well, he better be, or I’m taking my son to school regardless.’
She closed the door before he could answer, locked it again and leaned back against the wood, her knees trembling slightly from the adrenaline. She hated living like this, hated the effect her ex had on her. Jean Baptiste. Out there somewhere, gone for four years but still casting a shadow over her life. Every knock on the door, every time the phone rang, every footstep she heard following her down the street, all of i
t making her senses sharpen and her heart hammer harder. It was exhausting. Infuriating.
She had seen a counsellor for a while after it had happened, a lady psychiatrist who’d told her how post-traumatic stress sufferers were in a constant state of heightened alert – fight or flight – all the senses lit up all of the time. She’d also told her how kids healed faster than grown-ups and that she should concentrate on herself and stop worrying so much about Léo. Marie-Claude had stopped seeing her after that.
She moved away from the front door, her legs still shaky, and paused by the open door of her bedroom. She had been logging some interview footage before Léo woke up, and her messy bedroom was lit by the cold glow of her laptop screen and a freeze-frame of a ninety-year-old man with tears shining on his cheeks. She kept her work away from home as much as possible, realizing that what was therapeutic for her was not necessarily the best thing for her son to be exposed to. As soon as he was old enough to deal with it all, she planned on telling him everything: about their family history, about the dark legacy they carried. But for now she shielded him from it, squirrelling her work away in a small unit on the other side of town, far away from watchful eyes.
She closed the door and moved back up the narrow hallway, stopping outside the kitchen door for a moment and watching Léo through the crack. He was eating his breakfast and reading the back of a cereal box. Always reading. She wondered if it was a form of escape for him, a way of zoning out the real world and disappearing into an imaginary, better one. Or maybe he just liked reading and would have been exactly the same if he’d been born into a normal family, whatever one of those looked like.
Léo looked up when she stepped through the door, his curiosity magnified by his glasses. ‘Who was it?’
‘No one. A friend of Uncle Benny’s.’
‘Was it about Papa?’
‘No.’ She picked up the cereal box and moved it over to the worktop. ‘Finish your breakfast or you’ll be late for school.’
‘But the man at the door said we weren’t to go anywhere.’
Marie-Claude shook her head. She tried so hard to protect Léo, make sure he had as normal a life as possible, but he picked up on everything. For the first couple of years after it happened he had been totally mute. It was like the trauma of seeing what his father had done to his mother caused him to sink deep into himself. It had made him extra-sensitive, watchful. He saw everything, more than most people, too much, and it made her want to cry because she just wanted him to be a regular kid and she couldn’t do anything about it.
‘Eat your cereal,’ she said, moving over to the sink to keep her back to him. ‘I’ll decide who goes to school and who doesn’t, not you, and definitely not Uncle Benny.’
He watched the gendarme walk away from the house, get back in his car and light a cigarette.
He had parked his own car pointing away from the house, far enough that he wouldn’t be obvious and close enough to watch the house using his mirrors. He was waiting for the woman to leave so he could search the house. She would leave soon and maybe drop her son off at school before heading to the Commissariat de Police, or perhaps she would go straight to the morgue to identify her grandfather’s body. It all depended on how the lead investigator wanted to run things. Commandant Amand, that was his name, he had picked that up from the police scanner plugged into the car’s cigarette lighter. The gendarme smoking in the parked car was far too junior to be him and he had spent too little time talking to the woman to have told her anything much. She hadn’t seemed upset either. Maybe he was here to collect her.
She would certainly be upset when she found out what had happened. Someone would sit with her, a grief counsellor or someone trained in dealing with the recently bereaved. The police would have questions they needed to ask:
When did you last see or speak to your grandfather?
Did he have any enemies?
Do you know of anyone who might have wished him harm?
He felt no joy in having caused all this and reminded himself that her grandfather should have died in the war. By rights she shouldn’t even exist and neither should the little boy. They were mistakes of history. Mistakes needed to be corrected.
He opened his window a little to let in some air.
He waited.
7
The piano sounded much louder in the main house. It was something complicated and classical, and a vague memory popped into Amand’s head of a movie where this same tune had driven a pianist insane. Whoever was playing it now was having no such trouble. It sounded so good that Amand wondered if it was actually a recording, a CD player or something on a timer that had switched itself on automatically. Except a note kept cropping up, muted and flat, that would never pass on a commercial recording. Someone had to be playing it.
Amand followed the music down the hallway, keeping his footfalls soft and straining his ears for any sounds beyond the music. He had never been in the main house before and he peered into each doorway before passing, checking no one was there as he moved closer to the room where the music was leaking through a partially opened door. The house had been searched, he could see that from the mess and all the opened drawers. What they were looking for, he had no idea. Maybe whoever was playing the piano might know. He reached the end of the corridor as the music reached a crescendo, raised his gun and stepped through the door and into the room.
Adrenaline-sharp senses took in the salon all at once – drape-softened windows, elegant antique furniture, bookcases filled with fashion magazines, and more tailor’s dummies arranged around the room like headless party guests listening to the recital being given by the tall, pale man sitting at the upright piano against the far wall. This room had been searched too.
‘Hands where I can see them,’ Amand said. The man at the piano ignored him and continued to play, swaying slightly as his long white fingers coaxed music from the keys. ‘Stop playing and raise your hands.’ Amand raised his gun and took a step into the room.
The music grew louder in response, building in intensity before the last chord fell and echoed away into silence. ‘I wondered if I could play,’ the man said, his voice soft and deep. ‘I saw the piano and had to know.’ The fingers of his right hand rippled up the keyboard, hitting the hollow note at the end of the run. ‘The G above middle C needs some attention,’ he said, stabbing it a few more times with his little finger. ‘But that’s not going to happen now, is it?’ He turned slowly on the stool and looked up at Amand. ‘He’s dead isn’t he, the tailor?’
He was younger looking than the white hair had prepared Amand for, his pale skin unlined and tight over high cheekbones and a sharp nose. His eyes were dark though. They didn’t look at the gun at all. ‘What makes you think he’s dead?’
‘The blood,’ the man said in his deep, soft voice. ‘I can smell the blood.’
Amand frowned at the odd answer. ‘Who are you?’
‘I was hoping the tailor might help me answer that. I assume that’s him lying dead in the back?’
Amand blinked, his head throbbing with low-level pain. This whole situation was bizarre. The stranger seemed utterly unbothered by the fact that he had a gun pointing at him or that there was a dead man close by. ‘Who are you?’ he repeated. ‘Tell me what you’re doing here.’
‘I came to see a man about a suit,’ the man replied, rising slowly and carefully buttoning his jacket. ‘This one, to be precise. And my name is Solomon Creed.’
‘How did you get in the house, Monsieur Creed?’
‘Through the front door.’
‘You just walked in?’
‘No, I knocked first. The door was unlocked, so I came in. How did he die? I assume not peacefully. May I see the body?’ Solomon took a step forward.
Amand raised his gun. ‘No, you may not. What you can do is put your hands on your head and turn around.’
Solomon glanced at the gun for the first time. ‘You’re not going to shoot me. Not like that rat in the other room. Big
difference, shooting a rodent and shooting a man.’ He took another step forward.
‘I’m warning you, monsieur.’ Amand moved back to maintain the distance between them and felt the edge of a chair bang against the back of his leg. There was a blur of movement and a slight tug at his hand and Solomon was gone, darting past and through the open door. It happened so fast it took a moment for Amand to realize he no longer had his gun.
‘Parra!’ he shouted, and launched himself through the door. Solomon was almost at the door to the atelier. He could see the gun in his hand, his long fingers wrapped around the dark metal of the barrel. The door to the atelier flew open and Parra stood there, eyes wide in alarm. He tried to block Solomon, but he ducked, twisted and was past him and into the room without even breaking stride. Parra lunged forward grabbing at air, and Amand barged past, carried by his own momentum and ready to throw himself at Solomon if he turned the gun on him. Parra stumbled into the room behind him and they stopped in the doorway and stared at Solomon. He stood in the centre of the room, looking down at the body of the old man.
‘Give me the gun,’ Amand said.
‘I will.’ Solomon leaned down to study the old man’s face. ‘There are smears around some of his wounds, like someone was cleaning him.’ He looked up and scanned the room.
Amand’s eyes flicked to the gun. It was too far away to grab, especially now he knew how quick this man could move.
Solomon breathed in through his nose and turned towards the deep shadows on the far side of the atelier. Amand turned and saw something there. Solomon moved towards it and Amand followed, squinting against the light flooding down from the skylights.
Solomon stepped into the shadows and stopped. ‘The killer wasn’t trying to clean the body,’ he said, his eyes fixed on the writing on the wall. ‘They were using Monsieur as an inkwell.’
The sharp sound of metal on metal made Amand flinch and his head whipped round to discover his gun, field-stripped and held out for him to take. He took the pieces and looked back at the wall, reading the words dripping down the white surface where the blood had run, translating the German in his head: