The Lying Down Room (Serge Morel 1)

by Anna Jaquiery

  ‘Sounds interesting,’ said Morel, who had never heard of either man. He tried to remember the last book he’d read.

  ‘It’s a fascinating exchange, between a father with a rational, scientific mind and a son he hoped would build on his budding scientific career but instead chose a completely different path. He became a Buddhist monk.’

  ‘Disappointing for the father, I expect.’

  ‘It isn’t as simple as all that. You should read it.’

  ‘Maybe I will,’ Morel said.

  His father smiled, as though at some private thought, and put his glasses back on.

  ‘I’ll let you get on with it then. Goodnight,’ Morel said.

  ‘Goodnight.’

  Morel went downstairs to the kitchen, where he found the remains of a roast chicken and a ratatouille. Today was one of Augustine’s visiting days. She would have cooked for the two of them once she’d finished the housework. It always shamed Morel to think of the old woman having to prepare food for him and his father. But she had known him since he was a child and insisted that she wanted to, particularly now that her children were all grown.

  ‘What else am I going to do?’ she said. ‘Sit at home and watch TV?’

  While he waited for his ratatouille to warm in the microwave, he tried calling his elder sister Maly’s mobile number. It rang six times before going to voicemail. He left a message asking her to call back.

  He hadn’t heard from her in weeks. It was unlike her.

  In his room he placed a glass of wine on the bedside table and propped himself up with pillows before sitting up to eat and watch the news. The newsreader was saying the world’s population had now reached seven billion.

  Seven billion. It was best not to think about it.

  His father had turned the volume up on his TV. Morel knew it would continue now, long after he turned the lights off. His father seemed to get by on four or five hours’ sleep.

  Philippe had been a diplomat. Morel still clearly remembered the day he’d found out that his son was joining the police force. He hadn’t even bothered to conceal his disappointment.

  ‘Well, it’s up to you of course,’ he’d said. The two of them had gone out for lunch. Neither of them had spoken much and Morel had ended up drinking two-thirds of a bottle of wine. During the drive home, a violent argument had flared up, and both had said things they later regretted, things that were impossible to unsay.

  Now he felt something like what he’d felt then. A wave of anger so intense that it seemed to drain him of energy. Then, just as quickly as it had flared, it died.

  He’d been a rookie still when his mother died. Fresh from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Officiers de Police, painfully and proudly aware of his father’s disappointment. He’d always looked to his mother for affirmation. His father wasn’t talking to him, not since he’d decided not to pursue a career in mathematics even after completing his degree. Morel’s mother, who’d arrived in the French capital from Cambodia as a seventeen-year-old music prodigy, knew something about her son’s state of mind. Her own father, a minister in Sihanouk’s government, had sent her to Paris to study music at the conservatory. She never finished her studies, choosing instead to follow an ambitious young man who’d joined the civil service to his first posting in Beijing, the day after her nineteenth birthday.

  The courtyard was filled with shadows. As Morel watched, he saw the neighbour’s lights go out. His eyelids were getting heavy but he was on edge, thinking about his father – and of Isabelle Dufour.

  In the family living room, among his father’s CDs, he found Fauré’s Requiem, as he had known he would. Back in his room, he put headphones on so that his father wouldn’t hear him and sat in the blue armchair by the window, with all the lights off except for his bedside lamp.

  ‘In Paradisum’, the tune that Elisabeth Guillou had hummed and whistled so vigorously for him, was the work’s seventh and final movement. He listened for a while but found he could not bear it for long. It reminded him of weekends when, as a child, he struggled to fill the emptiness around him. Each hour seemed like it would never end. He re-enacted war games with his toy soldiers on the stairs while just steps away behind closed doors his father played music loudly in the living room, lost in his own private world. His mother and sisters remained upstairs. There was always noise and laughter there. Morel could have joined them but something drew him to the closed door and the presence of the solitary man behind it.

  He turned off the CD player and tried to read for a while but ended up watching TV instead. An American cop show where investigators collected evidence in the most improbable ways. Morel found it mildly entertaining for a while, until the absurdity of it all irritated him. Why were these shows so moronic? He poured himself another glass of wine and watched the late news. There was nothing fresh since the earlier broadcast, and nothing about Isabelle Dufour, but then he hadn’t expected anything. One old woman’s death was hardly news.

  Close to midnight, Morel dialled Solange’s number. It was far too late to call her but some perverse reflex made him wait until the moment he knew for certain his call would be disruptive.

  Neither she nor her husband bothered to answer. He let the phone ring twenty, twenty-five times before hanging up.

  He undressed and brushed his teeth, and got under the covers. He was exhausted but too wound up to sleep. As he lay there on his back, he thought about Isabelle Dufour, lying in her tidy bed, her fingers folded around a crucifix.

  He thought about the man and the boy going around knocking on doors, seeking out the vulnerable. Could they be responsible for Isabelle Dufour’s death somehow? It seemed an unlikely supposition. Where was the motive?

  But if not those two, then who? And why had they taken so much care with the body? She had looked so peaceful, lying there. Like she was asleep. It was hard to picture what had gone on before, the violence that had preceded her death. Morel thought about what Martin had said, about the bruises on Dufour’s arms. Had she tried to fight back? Or had she given up at once, knowing she was no match for her aggressor?

  He got up again and made his bed, tucking the sheets in tight at each end. Then, slowly and carefully, he slid under the covers. One side was not as tidy as the other now. He reached one arm out and tried to pull the sheet tighter at that end.

  He lay still with his eyes closed, picturing the apartment where Dufour had died. Among her many belongings there had been a sense of neglect. The cleaning woman had come three times a week to sweep and collect the dust, to freshen the place up, but you couldn’t breathe life into things that were unloved.

  What was it Maria had said? That Isabelle Dufour had lived an introverted life. Had she lost interest in the outside world as she grew older or had she always been this way? Morel pictured his father, sitting up in bed upstairs.

  Morel pulled a pillow from beneath his head and rolled over to his side. He longed for a cigarette.

  His bedside lamp was still on, casting shadows on the ceiling. For a long time he lay awake with his eyes wide open.

  FIVE

  ‘So you’re still driving that tractor,’ Lila said, looking at his car parked next to the police vehicle they were taking to visit Jacques Dufour at his Neuilly home.

  Morel ignored her comment. The cherry red Volvo, a 1962 PV544 model, was close to his heart. Never mind that it was a subject of great hilarity to his colleagues, who thought it a middle-aged car. After all, he and his car were only four years apart in age.

  Jean and Marco had spent the previous afternoon talking to everyone in the vicinity of Guillou’s, Latour’s and Volkoff’s homes. Before meeting up with Jean, Marco had also gone back to Dufour’s building. It seemed that no one recognized the description of the two evangelists.

  ‘How is that possible?’ Lila said. ‘It’s like they don’t exist, except in these women’s imaginations.’

  ‘We can only assume that there’s a reason why the evangelists picked these women. Did they th
ink they needed saving? They turn up on their doorstep and preach to them. Make them feel uncomfortable,’ Morel said.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Let’s imagine a scenario where they had something to do with Isabelle Dufour’s death,’ Morel said, ignoring her question. ‘They visit her, stand on her doorstep for a while delivering their spiel on religion, then come back a week later to kill her.’

  ‘Maybe they knew her personally? Maybe she had something they wanted?’ Lila said.

  ‘There’s no evidence anything was taken,’ Morel said.

  ‘So she said or did something that threatened them?’

  They were both silent for a while, trying to make sense of this.

  ‘Remember the concierge in Dufour’s building didn’t always have her eye on the ball,’ Lila said. ‘Someone else might have visited Dufour without her noticing.’

  ‘True,’ Morel said. ‘But we also know that the evangelists didn’t visit anyone else in the building. So it was her specifically they were looking for. They also went straight to Guillou, Latour and Volkoff. None of their neighbours. That means we need to find them. Right now they are the only strong lead we have.’

  Lila began rolling a cigarette. Morel tried to ignore the sharp smell of tobacco, which immediately made him think of the gratification of taking a long, satisfying draw. Lila’s fingers moved deftly over the paper, rolling it into a perfect, tight cylinder. A quick flick of the tongue and she was done.

  ‘Did Jean call the lab yesterday?’ Lila asked.

  ‘Yes. No fingerprints on the pamphlets at the Dufour apartment, except hers.’

  Lila raised the cigarette to her lips before remembering that she couldn’t light it yet. She kept it between her fingers, in her lap.

  ‘What’s the link between the four women?’ she said. ‘All four of them, if we include Dufour, live well away from each other,’ Lila said.

  ‘Maybe they were acquainted through a shared hobby or interest. Or they frequented the same place. A place where for some reason these two guys marked them. Without being noticed themselves, apparently. None of the widows remember seeing them before they turned up at their door.’

  ‘So maybe the theatre or opera. Or a swimming-pool?’

  ‘They live too far apart to go to the same pool. So it has to be something else.’

  ‘They do have a few things in common, don’t they? They are all widows. And they all seem to spend very little time with their kids. At least that’s the impression I got, reading through the transcripts,’ Lila said. ‘Also, they may live in different areas, but the places these women live in are quite similar, when you think about it. Latour lives in Maisons-Laffitte, Guillou in Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Volkoff in Versailles. Not exactly working-class areas,’ Lila concluded. ‘You’d have to be pretty well off to afford a house in any of them.’

  ‘What about Dufour? She lives in Neuilly, that’s an inner-city suburb. All the others live further out of the city. So Dufour’s different.’

  ‘Still wealthy, though. Those apartments, in her building? What would they be worth? A million euros? More maybe?’

  Lila pulled a lighter from her pocket.

  ‘Don’t even think of lighting that before we get there and you’re out of the car,’ Morel said.

  She gave him a malevolent look. ‘I meant to ask: how are those patches working for you?’

  ‘I’m not using patches any more.’

  ‘Ah, that explains it.’

  They parked outside a house that was so large Morel checked the mailbox to see whether there was more than one occupant. There wasn’t. He was about to press the intercom button but then the gates opened. Morel looked up to see a camera pointing at them.

  ‘Well, that’s handy,’ he murmured.

  ‘His and hers,’ Lila said, nodding towards the dark blue Jaguar and silver Peugeot convertible parked in the open double garage.

  As they walked to the house they could hear a child wailing, and then the sound of a door slamming inside. Lila lit her cigarette and inhaled deeply.

  ‘Sounds like the family’s enjoying some quality time,’ she said.

  The front door opened and a woman stood before them. She smiled, though she was evidently distraught. The black eyeliner around her eyes was smudged and the tip of her nose red as though she’d been crying. She was in her forties and even in this state it was clear she was striking, the sort of woman who would still turn heads in the street.

  ‘If this is a bad time,’ Morel began, but the woman waved her hand to usher them in.

  ‘Sorry about the mess,’ she said.

  Morel and Lila stepped into a living room that was spotless. The wailing child could still be heard somewhere in the upper floors.

  ‘You must be Anne Dufour,’ Morel said.

  ‘Yes. And this is my husband, Jacques,’ she said, and from the sofa a man got up and extended his hand. He was a good-looking man in his fifties, a good ten years older than his wife, Morel guessed, and not as striking. Still, they made an attractive couple. Morel could imagine they would be popular at dinner parties.

  ‘I am sorry for your loss,’ Morel said, looking at Jacques Dufour as he said it. ‘It must have been a shock.’

  ‘My mother and I were not close,’ he said. Seeing Morel’s expression, he added, ‘but yes, it was a shock. She was getting on but in good health.’

  ‘I know you said you think it’s a suspicious death,’ Jacques Dufour continued. ‘I really don’t understand how that can be. Who could possibly have wanted to kill her?’

  A woman in a maid’s uniform walked in with a tray and set it on the table.

  ‘Coffee?’ Anne Dufour asked. Without waiting for an answer she poured two cups, for Lila and Morel. Morel picked his up and looked around the room. He thought about Isabelle Dufour and remembered something that Lila had noticed straight away at the dead woman’s flat. There hadn’t been a single photograph. It seemed odd, for an elderly woman with children and grandchildren.

  ‘At this stage we really don’t know. But it’s what we’re trying to find out. Did you know who her friends were, the people in her life?’ Morel said.

  Jacques Dufour stirred a teaspoon of sugar into his coffee. ‘She had a few old friends but they’re all the same age as her. Hardly the sort to go around murdering people.’

  ‘I’d be grateful if you could pass on any names and phone numbers of friends your mother had. Anyone else you’ve noticed in her life? Any new faces lately?’

  ‘I’ll give you any information I have, but like I said, we weren’t close. If there was anyone else in her life, anyone she met recently, I wouldn’t know, I’m afraid.’

  ‘How often did you and your mother see each other?’ Morel asked.

  ‘She came for dinner once a month.’

  ‘And I understand you rarely visited her.’

  ‘Yes, well, I’m a busy man. It was easier for her to come over here.’

  Easier for you, Morel thought.

  ‘So the last time you saw her would have been—’

  ‘Two weeks ago. She was here for dinner.’

  ‘Have you spoken to her at all during the past fortnight?’

  Jacques Dufour thought for a moment and shook his head. ‘She didn’t like the phone much. Often she didn’t bother answering it. It was maddening. That’s old age for you.’

  ‘Sounds quite healthy to me,’ Lila said. ‘All of us are much too dependent on our phones and gadgets these days, don’t you think?’ She smiled sweetly.

  ‘I can’t afford not to answer my phone,’ Jacques Dufour said. ‘People depend on me.’

  ‘That must be hard. That burden of responsibility,’ Lila said.

  ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters, Monsieur Dufour?’ Morel asked. He gave Lila a look. She’d seen it before. It meant shut up and behave.

  ‘Two sisters and a brother.’

  ‘And did they spend much time with your mother?’

  Jacques Dufour shrugged his sh
oulders. ‘My sisters both live in America. They couldn’t wait to get out of here. They know as well as I do that France is still caught up in the Middle Ages. While the world turns, we’re being left behind with our antiquated socialist ideals. We’re so caught up in the past, so busy venerating our ancestors that we’re completely unprepared for what lies ahead. The future is elsewhere. I should have followed my sisters but things turned out otherwise.’

  He gave Morel a bitter look.

  A well-rehearsed little speech, Morel thought. He imagined it had been delivered many times and was well received among the Dufours’ wealthy friends.

  ‘And your brother? Does he live overseas too?’

  ‘He lives in Marseille. He owns a fishing business. Takes people out on fishing expeditions, that sort of thing. He rarely comes up to Paris.’

  ‘I see.’ Morel pretended to write something in his notebook but he was thinking about Isabelle Dufour. A woman with four children, who had lived and loved and raised a family, yet ended up dying on her own, surrounded by indifference.

  ‘I’ve contacted my siblings,’ Dufour said. ‘To tell them about our mother. They’ll fly back for the funeral, of course.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Was there anything else?’

  ‘At this point, probably not,’ Morel said. He stood up. ‘We’ll be in touch once we know more.’

  Anne Dufour had remained on the edge of the sofa, quiet, smiling vacantly, but now she suddenly spoke up.

  ‘Jacques wasn’t always here when his mother came for dinner. But she came regardless of that. And I visited her with the children. Our youngest loved his grandmother.’

  ‘I understand you have two children?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Look,’ Jacques Dufour said, standing up. ‘I need to leave now if I’m going to catch my flight.’

  ‘How long are you away for, Monsieur Dufour?’ Morel asked.

  ‘Two nights.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Talk to my wife, she has all the time in the world to answer your questions. The most she’s got on is a manicure or a date with her personal trainer, isn’t that right, dear?’