By nightfall, Mr. Philippe Desmoulins had been taken into custody and presented to the prosecution. He was being investigated for the involuntary manslaughter of a vulnerable person, taken before the judge, released on bail, and required to appear at the police station once a week for the duration of the trial.
Seeing Is Believing
But tomorrow! Terrible tomorrow! When your weakened organs, the nerves worn thin, the titillating yearning to cry, the impossibility of applying yourself to any work tell you that you have played a forbidden game. Hideous nature, stripped of last night’s glow, resembles the melancholy debris of a celebration.
Charles Baudelaire, “Morale,” Artificial Paradises
60
“Hello?”
“Hello, this is ChildLine. I’m listening…”
“A lady told me I could call this number…”
“Yes, hello. I’m listening to you.”
“She gives me piano lessons. She told me that this was a secret number and that she knew it because she was a teacher before. But it’s not a secret number.”
“No. It’s a number you must have seen on a poster in your school.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know why children call this number?”
“Yes. When someone’s hurting them.”
“What’s your name?”
“… My name is Laurie.”
“Hello, Laurie. Could you tell me how old you are?”
“I’m seven years old.”
“My name’s Odile and I’m here to help you. Now that we know each other’s names, can you tell me why you called?”
“For Kévin.”
“Who is Kévin?”
“My little brother.”
“Are you worried about your little brother?”
“Yes. Because of my dad.”
“Your daddy isn’t nice to your brother?”
“No.”
“Does he hurt him?”
“… I wouldn’t want Kévin to go down into the basement.”
“Why are you afraid of your brother going into the basement?”
“…”
“Laurie, has your dad been violent toward you?”
“No, not with me, with my other brother… I hafta hang up, my granny has come home…”
“Laurie, can you tell me where you’re calling us from?”
“From my granny’s house.”
“What town does your granny live in?”
“In Auxerre.”
“And you, what town do you live in?”
“I can’t tell you… I have to go…”
“Laurie… Hello?”
61
The death of Madame Préau had two notable effects on her son. He stopped biting his nails, and he started to lose his hair. Audrette’s grief manifested itself differently. Three weeks after her mother-in-law’s funeral, she became pregnant.
The couple was euphoric for a short while—a month and a half. Before the miscarriage. But the hope of an unborn baby had well and truly taken hold. Martin’s wife was determined. She fell pregnant in the next six weeks and gained weight quickly, as if she were fortifying the walls of a castle. This time, life stuck.
The press had shown surprising discretion with respect to Martin. When the evil grandmother left the stage, leaving the audience with a dry trial, the media hype dropped off completely, the journalists in a sulk. Martin mourned unthinkingly, working through the administrative details of his mother’s death, filling out forms, shaking unknown hands. At the reading of the will, which had been written before 1997, he wasn’t at all surprised to learn that his mother had bequeathed her house to Bastien. However, a clause stipulated that in case of the death of the heir, the property valued at seven hundred thousand euros would go to a charity dedicated to child protection, provided that the latter resell it to a couple with children. Martin inherited everything else. A hundred thousand euro in various savings accounts, and furniture, which he quickly divested himself of by contacting Emmaus. Martin only kept a few family heirlooms and the small inlaid table he had given his mother for her last birthday. To this was added thirty boxes filled with personal effects: memories of thousands of students in plastic bags, and various personal and other letters, photographs, collections of old postcards. Finally, Martin’s father had not been forgotten: he received the Gaveau “in memory of wonderful childhood memories shared around Erik Satie.” The instrument was the weight of ten dead donkeys. It would be difficult to slide it into a FedEx package to Montreal.
“The bitch!” was Audrette’s only comment on the misadventure of the disinherited son.
At his surgery, Dr. Préau’s patients did not fail to offer their condolences—with or without an ulterior motive. Some, those with a parent suffering from mental illness, shared his grief sincerely. The few hateful anonymous letters that he received in the weeks following the attack at the Desmoulins family home had dried up.
When he was coming home at night, lowering the car window to breathe in the fragrances spilling out of the gardens of suburban houses on the edge of town, aromas of roses, laburnum, and lilac, and wafts of skewers and merguez sausage, Dr. Préau allowed himself to have some hope. If he left the task of organizing the house in anticipation of its new residents to Audrette, unable to project himself into the future, he willingly indulged ironing—a static activity Audrette discouraged. Since the age of six, Martin had acquired a true mastery of this skill, thus easily earning his pocket money. He knew how to do the basics, set the table, vaccum and dust, and many other household chores shared willy-nilly with his mother. She had been preparing him constantly for his future role as a husband—or as the perfect bachelor. Once the clothes were folded and put away in the wardrobe, Martin ran aground on the sofa against his wife, one hand on her little round stomach, and slept for about twenty-two hours, sated with tenderness.
In a year or two, the trial would take place; he would be called to testify, as would Dr. Mamnoue, and he would try to rehabilitate the memory of his mother, in vain. Dead Elsa Préau was no longer of interest to anyone.
62
He had forgotten the beauty mark. Discreet, below the left cheek, and that gently parted mouth, as if a regret might escape from it, a sweet nothing, a silly comment. She was there, a few meters away from him, sitting in the waiting room, her coat on his knees, alone. Some ten years had passed. Martin remembered when and how he had made love to this woman. Forcefully, three times, almost bloody-mindedly. Why her and not the others? She wasn’t even the first of a series of sentimental dalliances. Curled up on a chair, she seemed smaller and severe.
Maybe it was the boots and turtleneck? And him? What was he like in his wide-wale velvet jacket and Timberlands?
“Valérie?”
A lock of hair fell into her face. She pushed it aside, staring at the man who stood in the hallway, bag in hand.
“Hello, Doctor.”
She smiled. It was half past two; Martin was returning from his lunch break. With a gesture, he invited her to follow him into his office. Rising, she unfolded the body he had enjoyed, and which still troubled him. Her figure had gained in years, curves, and abundance. He hurried to close the door behind her.
“Valérie Tremblay… The last I heard about you was at a police station.”
“I’m still working there.”
They exchanged a friendly kiss.
“How are you? What are you up to? Do have a seat.”
After a brief exchange about their lives, in which each pretended to have found a good balance, Valérie explained why she was there, which owed nothing to chance. The social worker hadn’t come to choose a new referring physician, either. And what she had to say would get Martin into an entirely different kind of trouble.
“Before telling you why I’m here, I wanted to tell you how saddened I was by your mother’s death and how much I regret not having had the courage to come to see you sooner.”
She crossed her legs. She winced slig
htly. She must have a bad back—or what she had to say weighed heavily on her heart.
“I can’t say that I knew your mother well—I only saw her once. But I can’t get it out of my mind that I was partly responsible for her death.”
Martin came back down to earth with a thud. He was looking at an alien. No one had ever expressed such feelings toward his mother.
“You know that she had made an official report for the police logbook. After her statement, I contacted her so that we could meet.”
“The police lieutenant filled me in. She brought you a photo of an abused child, is that right?”
“I saw her on Monday, the twenty-sixth of October, five days before the attack. And I called her back on Thursday to tell her that I couldn’t do anything, because aside from her report, there was no evidence that a child of the age she described was in close contact with the neighbors. That’s when she told me about the photo.”
“But no one ever saw that photo.”
“No. But I know that it exists.”
“Really?”
“Last week, Sevran contacted the photo labs in town.”
“Sevran has reopened the investigation?”
“A man confirmed having printed the blurry pictures found at your mother’s during the search. But he also remembered having made enlargements of another photo that wasn’t among them—one of the face of a little boy with dark curly hair, aged about seven or eight.”
“Why did the police reopen the case?”
“Because something happened at the Desmoulins’ house.”
Valérie lowered her eyes, embarrassed.
“Could we go outside somewhere to talk about it? A café?”
The bistro in the market square wasn’t at all welcoming. On this rainy October day, the windows were steamed up, and nothing could have warmed the fake leather banquettes. Sitting in the back of the room by the bay window, the man and woman drank coffees sticky as pitch. With her coat hanging over her shoulders, Valérie brought her face close to Martin’s.
“Ordinarily, I would never have the right to bring up ongoing cases, but because I know you and because I feel partially responsible, I wanted to speak to you about it before Sevran called you. He’s a good policeman. He’s very good at his job. And I very much like working with him. But I think that this time he was backing the wrong horse.”
“Valérie, tell me what you know.”
She sat up straight and placed her palms on the Formica table.
“Philippe Desmoulins was charged with involuntary manslaughter and was released on police bail until the trial. But at his lawyer’s request, the condition that he appear at the police station was dropped after seven months by the judge. The Desmoulins sold the house and left the area.”
“Where did they go?”
“We don’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
“The address that they gave their lawyer was fake.”
Martin ran a hand through his hair. He gave himself an odd cowlick at the top of his head.
“Shit! Was my mother right? Was that bastard hitting his kid?”
“That’s not all. The new owners moved in in August. Two weeks ago, they had water damage in the house. They had to redo the floor in the kitchen, and they got some contractors in. The workers started by pulling up the floating floorboards. And there, inside a broom cupboard, they found a trapdoor. A locked trapdoor.”
Martin slumped on the banquette.
“Would the police have passed it by?”
“Martin, no one ever believed that a child existed. The police forensic team didn’t see anything because they didn’t look. The guys from the lab examined the back of the cupboard where your mother had hit. They testified that there were breezeblocks behind the wooden paneling, and that was the end of it. They didn’t probe the floor. In the crime scene photos—”
“You saw them?”
“Sevran showed me a few bits of the file. We’re very friendly,” she added, blushing. “In one of the shots, you can see lots of stuff crammed down into the bottom of the cupboard: household cleaners, basins, sponges, a shovel, a broom… The kind of mess that nobody would think of removing to see what was underneath.”
Martin took a deep breath and made a sign to the barman.
“Go ahead, Valérie.”
“The new owners are from Paris. A young couple with two children. They didn’t know about the tragedy that took place in their house. Can you imagine? I wouldn’t want to be the agent who sold them the house… But the contractors, they knew, and they thought it was better to contact the police before touching the trapdoor.”
Martin raised his hand higher.
“Excuse me! Brandy.”
“Two!” Valérie corrected him.
The barman called back the order from the bar. Valérie continued with her story on fast-forward: “So Sevran rolls up and has the trapdoor opened. It gives onto a windowless room with a low ceiling that must have originally been a storeroom. On the ground they found a mattress, half-burned and bloodstained, along with an iron bar… They took loads of swabs…”
Martin had both elbows on the table and covered his mouth with his fists.
“The kid was there.”
“Sevran isn’t so sure of that,” said Valérie flatly.
The barman brought over the little glasses of alcohol. They emptied them in a few gulps. Martin put Valérie’s coat back on her shoulders.
“Martin, when your mother came to see me, I believed her. Without a shadow of a doubt. She trusted me. And then, after she assaulted her neighbors, I learned from my colleagues what she had done to your son. So I thought that she had imagined the mistreated child. Like everyone else. I wanted to believe her story.”
“You did your job. You couldn’t do anything else.”
“We don’t even know who the boy is… God knows where he is now, what he’s going through…”
She looked down at her handbag, searching for a tissue.
“Sorry. I never cry, shit… Tears never helped anyone.”
Martin gently caressed her cheek.
“This time they did.”
63
At three o’clock, a retired couple and two African mothers with their babies were sitting in the waiting room. Martin gave himself ten minutes to call Audrette and filled her in on his meeting with the social worker. He promised to come home as soon as possible, but wasn’t able to leave the surgery until seven forty-five. When he arrived back home, he was surprised that Audrette hadn’t thought to turn on the garden lights outside. There weren’t lights on inside the house, either. The table wasn’t set, and there was nothing simmering in the kitchen.
“Audrette? You home?”
Martin turned on the light. Audrette was sitting on the sofa, stock still, her round belly visible.
“What’s wrong?” Martin asked, worried. “What are you doing in the dark?”
He knelt down beside her and took her hands in his.
“Are you not feeling well? Your hands are burning up… Is it the baby? Are you having contractions?”
“No.”
Martin put a hand on her forehead, then grasped her left wrist to check her pulse. Audrette pulled back her arm.
“I’m fine, Martin, it’s not that.”
He stood back up. There were dark circles under her eyes and her face was drawn. She looked overwrought.
“Did something happen to your parents?” he asked, sitting at her side.
She shook her head, staring at her belly.
“Darling, you’re worrying me, tell me what’s happened.”
“Just now, when you phoned, you spoke about the child that your mother might have seen in the neighbors’ garden, who looked like Bastien.”
“Yes?”
“You said it might not have been her crazy imagination.”
“It’s more than likely,” he said, putting an arm around his wife’s shoulders.
“I know where the photo is that
the police are looking for.”
Martin asked Audrette to repeat what she had just said.
“Do you remember the day that the policeman came to the house to say that he was closing the case?”
“Yes.”
“A package came in the mail.”
“A package from your parents, for Christmas.”
Audrette didn’t answer. Her husband blinked.
“… My mother? Mum sent me something?”
“I don’t know what came over me. I couldn’t deal with your mother anymore. She was destroying our lives, she was destroying you. The package that she had addressed to you, it was… I didn’t want her to hurt you anymore. I tore open a corner of the package, and I saw these photos…”
She lifted her right hand gently. Audrette was holding two photographs that her belly was hiding from Martin. One was an enlargement of the other. He seized the enlargement and scrutinized the blurry contours of the child’s face. Black curly hair, cheeks pale and hollow.
“Good Lord!”
“He looks so much like Bastien…”
Martin stopped himself from retching. He put the enlargement down on the coffee table and got up, not knowing what to do with his hands.
“Where were the photos?”
“In a drawer in my office,” she murmured. “For almost a year.”
“What else was there in the package?”
“Notebooks. Five notebooks.”
“What did you do with them?”
“They’re here, in the house.”
Martin stamped his feet.
“Well, there’s a stroke of luck, you didn’t throw them out.”
“Removing them, yes; destroying them, no. Your mother would have come back from the dead to punish me,” she joked.
“Stop talking rubbish. Did you read them?”
“I didn’t open them. I couldn’t bear the thought of reading horrible things about our son, you, or me.”
The Stone Boy Page 18