The Lying Down Room (Serge Morel 1)

by Anna Jaquiery

  ‘What things?’

  ‘That you killed those women. But I don’t know whether I can believe that. Because of the make-up and the wigs, you see.’

  Armand sits very still. Waiting to hear what Morel will say next.

  ‘I was confused about that for a long time, I must admit,’ Morel says slowly. ‘On the one hand, the ritualistic aspect of the killings. The way the widows were dressed and displayed in their beds. So tidy and methodical. On the other hand, the make-up and the wigs. This looked to me like a joke at the women’s expense.’ He gives Armand a sharp look. ‘But it wasn’t like that, was it?’

  Armand shrugs and doesn’t bother replying.

  ‘I had a chat with a colleague in Moscow,’ Morel continues. ‘And he’s been talking to Nina Dimitrova. You know who I’m talking about, right?’

  ‘Yes. She worked at the orphanage.’

  ‘Dima’s had a harsh life, hasn’t he?’ Morel says. ‘Much harsher than any of us can possibly imagine. It’s a wonder he’s come out of it intact. In fact, it’s highly likely that he isn’t the same boy he was before he was brought to the orphanage. To be abandoned, then neglected like that . . . surely that would cause irreparable harm to anyone. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘He was such a sweet boy,’ Armand whispers, before realizing he used the past tense.

  ‘Yes.’ Morel nods. ‘Nina too realized he was something special and she took him under her wing, didn’t she? She was the only one who provided any kind of solace for Dima in his new situation. She has told my colleague in Moscow that she loved the boy. She cared about him so much, in fact, that she was willing to bend the rules so he could be adopted and escape the fate that awaited him. The prospects in a Russian orphanage for a child diagnosed as being disabled are pretty dire.’

  ‘And Dima loved her too.’

  Morel gives Armand a searching glance. Then he stands up and walks to the other side of the narrow room and back in just a few paces, as though he needs to stretch his limbs. All the while, the woman hasn’t said a word. She sits with her legs crossed, watching Armand. In the room’s dim glow, he can’t read her expression.

  ‘Yes, Dima loved Nina too,’ Morel says as he starts pacing the room again. ‘One might even say that he still does. But to have such feelings can also be a source of great torment, don’t you agree?’

  Armand doesn’t answer. He doesn’t trust himself to speak.

  ‘Particularly,’ Morel continues, walking back across the room to stand straight across from where Armand is sitting, ‘when that love is betrayed.’ Without waiting for a response, he sits down and leans across the table towards Armand. ‘When Nina helped organize the adoption, she saw it as a way to save the boy. To get him away from the orphanage and give him a new start in life. She liked you, didn’t she? You made sure of that.’

  ‘There was nothing devious about it.’ Armand says. ‘I liked her, too. She is a good person, genuinely interested in Dima’s welfare.’

  ‘Yes, she is. But look at it from Dima’s perspective. As far as he was concerned, the woman he loved and whom he believed loved him was giving him up and sending him away. Further away than he could possibly have imagined. How could she? So to Dima,’ Morel continues, looking at the wall behind Armand as though he is just talking to himself, ‘the wigs and the music serve as references. Reminders of the woman who provided comfort to him, when he needed it most—’

  ‘And then broke his heart,’ came the female officer’s voice. She leans in and searches Armand’s face. He turns away from her and looks across the table at Morel.

  ‘Dima has done nothing wrong,’ Armand says. His voice is cracked and sounds as though it’s coming from a long way away.

  ‘What happened, Armand?’ Morel asks. He seems to be pleading, almost. He is at the end of his rope too, Armand thinks. ‘What happened to Isabelle Dufour, Elisabeth Guillou and Marie Latour?’

  Maybe it’s all the hours he’s spent in this room and the desperate longing for sleep. He’s so exhausted he can barely keep his eyes open. Maybe it’s the lighting and four grey walls that give no indication of what time of day it is, or the intense looks he is getting from Morel’s colleague, making him feel like a lab experiment, some kind of specimen being dissected. He can feel clearly that he has reached the end of a road and has nowhere to turn.

  This doesn’t trouble him that much. He’s left so much of himself behind. What’s left is hardly worth preserving.

  ‘Dima and I visited seven women in total,’ Armand says, slowly and clearly, as though they might misunderstand otherwise. He sees Morel and the woman exchange a look. ‘We returned first to those three you mentioned. The way they reacted to our first visits, I was afraid they would report us. They were so frightened, and angry. We planned to revisit the homes of the others later.’ He takes a breath. ‘I killed those three women. Dima was there but he didn’t do anything. It was me, the whole time. Even the wigs and the make-up. I did that to reassure him. I played the music he loved. I made it so he could be in a safe place with her, with Nina. He was away in his mind then, reliving that memory of something good, while it was going on.’

  ‘While what was going on?’

  ‘The drownings.’

  Morel’s eyes are full of disbelief. Armand is almost relieved to see that the man is angry. For the first time, he looks ruffled.

  ‘Why did you do it to them?’ Morel asks.

  ‘They are better off where they are now.’

  ‘Where is that?’

  Armand shrugs. ‘If you have faith, then you know this life is not all there is. I can’t possibly explain this to you.’

  ‘What was your motive, Armand?’ the woman asks. ‘Unhappy childhood, unloving mother, is that it?’

  Armand gives her a look of pure hatred. He sees Morel gesture to her. After a moment’s hesitation, she leaves the room.

  Armand is still seething with anger. Then he hears Morel’s voice.

  ‘What did she do to you, Armand?’

  He says it like he really cares.

  This is where it pours out of him, like he knew it would some day, only who could have predicted it would be here, with the policeman’s thoughtful eyes trained on him with a look of – what – pity? Compassion?

  He and Charles on his mother’s ugly sofa. He is straddling Charles, looking down at him while every inch of his body trembles and strains towards the half-naked body beneath his. He moves back a bit so that his hand can reach Charles’s lower belly, where the pubic hair begins, soft and curled. Charles’s blue eyes are watching him while his hand grabs Armand’s, sliding it further down.

  When Armand’s mother walks in, his hand is on Charles’s cock and their tongues are in each other’s mouths.

  His mother doesn’t raise her voice. Instead, she politely asks Charles to get dressed and leave. Then she sends Armand to his room. He spends a terrorized afternoon there, waiting, not daring to come out even when he desperately needs to use the toilet.

  It is evening when she finally comes to him. Without a word she takes his clothes off. He is too petrified to move. Once he is naked, without looking at him she guides him into the shower and turns the cold tap on. He is made to stand there for a good ten minutes, while she stands and stares at him with cold eyes.

  Afterwards she hands him his pyjamas. Once he’s dressed she points to the bed and speaks for the first time since she caught him with Charles.

  ‘Get in.’

  That’s when the unbelievable happens. Quickly and without warning, she grabs one of his wrists and ties it to the bedpost behind him with a rope she had in her hand. She does the same thing with the other hand. Once he’s tied with both arms raised by his head, she steps back and takes a good long look at him. He is too shocked and scared to say anything.

  ‘This way you’ll keep your hands to yourself, I expect,’ she says. Then she walks out of the room.

  For the next three weeks, he remains strapped to his bed for eight hours a day. A
fter that, he is free to move about the house, but for six months he isn’t allowed out and he remains indoors under her watchful gaze.

  She never looks at him with anything but contempt again.

  Once Armand stops talking, there is a heavy silence. Several minutes go by before Morel speaks.

  ‘You didn’t kill those women, did you, Armand? But I can see it all more clearly now. Who better to understand Dima than you? Now there is a sacrifice worth making. A soul worth saving. You want to save him, don’t you?’

  Armand shakes his head. ‘I killed those three women. I hated their empty, useless lives. They are better off now.’

  He sees the first signs of defeat in the detective’s eyes.

  It was somewhere between three and four in the morning. Morel, reeling with exhaustion, fetched coffees for Lila, himself and Armand from the dispenser in the hallway. For once, Lila took hers without complaining. Armand looked at his as though they might be trying to poison him.

  ‘Have it,’ Lila said. ‘It’s crap but it’ll keep you going.’ Her voice was rough but Morel noticed she was looking at Armand differently, like she wasn’t so sure what to think any more.

  ‘Tell us where you first saw the widows,’ Morel said.

  ‘It was at the Holy Russia exhibition at the Louvre, in May,’ Armand said. He took a sip of the coffee and winced. ‘I wanted César to see it. It was so emotional for both of us. I was excited by what the exhibition represented. Finally, a religious revival in Russia. Twenty years earlier an exhibition like that one would have been unthinkable.’ He shook his head. ‘We visited the exhibition every day over the two weeks it lasted.’

  ‘Every day?’ Morel asked.

  ‘There were hundreds of exhibits. We wanted to see everything.’

  ‘And the widows?’ Lila said impatiently.

  ‘Isabelle Dufour was the first one I noticed. She was wandering around on her own. Looking at the icons without seeing them. Pretending to be interested, but it was obvious she was just killing time. She didn’t understand what she was looking at. She seemed more interested in the cafeteria and the cakes on offer there.’

  ‘What the hell was she supposed to understand?’ Lila asked.

  Armand seemed to get annoyed. ‘It was a stunning exhibition. It was supposed to make people think, to amaze them. Instead I watched these women walk around like chickens. Just like stupid chickens.’

  Lila looked like she was about to say something but Morel placed a hand on her arm.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then I followed them. That first time I followed Isabelle Dufour to her home. I returned to the exhibition the next day and the same thing happened with Elisabeth Guillou. She too was just killing time at the exhibition. She looked bored. Then Marie Latour, then the Russian woman, and the others too. Each time I noted where they lived, so I could return. I thought maybe I would teach them a thing or two about faith. Inject some meaning into their lives.’

  ‘That’s generous of you,’ Lila said.

  ‘So you noted where they lived and sometime later you returned with the pamphlets,’ Morel said. ‘Were the pamphlets just a ploy to gain their trust? So you could check out their homes and plan your next visit, the one where you would kill them?’

  Morel saw Armand hesitate then. It was a moment so brief he wasn’t sure, in his sleep-deprived state, whether he’d imagined it.

  ‘I gave them a chance to improve themselves. But they rejected it.’

  ‘So you killed them.’

  ‘I gave them a way out.’

  ‘Out of?’

  ‘Out of their empty lives. And the possibility of a new beginning.’

  ‘Do you seriously expect us to believe that crap?’ Lila said.

  ‘You can believe what you want,’ Armand said.

  ‘What makes you think you are big enough to make these sorts of decisions?’ Lila said. Morel turned to her, surprised. ‘Do you think you are God, that you can decide a person’s fate?’

  ‘Listen, Armand,’ Morel said without waiting for an answer. ‘The pastor told us that Dima was in your old rooms last night. He must have gone back there after what he did to Irina Volkoff and to our colleague. We checked and there was no one there. But we think he’ll come back. And we’ll be waiting for him when he does.’

  Armand looked at Morel. ‘You do what you have to do. Now just tell me what you need from me to make my confession official, then let me sleep.’

  When they finally leave him alone Armand drops his head onto the table and closes his eyes. He wonders what possessed the boy to return to the faculty instead of staying put. Granted, the place at the back of the church where he’d settled César was more of a cupboard than a room, but it was safe. Armand knew the church community there and he knew they would look after the boy when they found him. He’d left César with a letter to make sure of that. The letter absolved him of all blame.

  A sob escapes his throat and he digs his fist into his mouth so that no one will hear him.

  César! he thinks, sorrow washing over him like rain.

  César, what have you done?

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Everyone except Akil was in the office when Morel arrived.

  ‘The kid’s confirmed everything that Le Bellec told us,’ Lila said. ‘He also confirmed he’d beaten both Marco and Volkoff. He said he was terrified and he panicked. Because he couldn’t find Le Bellec.’

  ‘How did he tell you all this?’ Morel said.

  ‘In writing.’

  They hadn’t had to wait long for the boy to return to the faculty. He’d returned the night after Le Bellec’s confession.

  ‘He had a letter that Le Bellec had given him,’ Morel now told the team.

  ‘What letter?’ Marco said.

  ‘It’s essentially a signed confession. Le Bellec admits to killing Isabelle Dufour, Elisabeth Guillou and Marie Latour. He says the boy was not involved in any way and that he’s sorry for exposing him to this violence, that the boy is as much a victim as the others.’

  ‘Well, not quite,’ Lila said. ‘He’s not dead, for one.’

  Morel had asked colleagues from the child-protection unit to sit in today while the boy was being charged with assaulting Marco and Irina Volkoff. He would need to undergo a psychiatric evaluation before anything else happened.

  If what Le Bellec said was right, and the boy had been present during the killings, then he would be needing some serious therapy.

  Morel thought about Dima. He looked to be about fourteen or fifteen. With his baseball cap and oversized clothes, he looked like an ordinary teenager.

  But his eyes had made Morel pause. There was no light in them.

  Morel thought about Le Bellec’s detailed confession. Something didn’t sit well with him. For one, he couldn’t see Le Bellec messing about with the make-up and wigs, just to comfort Dima. It was clear Le Bellec cared about the orphan. In which case, why would he expose him to such horrors?

  It made little sense. But they had Armand’s confession, and the boy had corroborated his statement. Perrin was ecstatic, planning his next media briefing with all the enthusiasm of a fame-seeking starlet.

  ‘Is the kid going to prison?’ Marco asked Morel. Marco had returned, looking pale but determined to get back to work despite the bandage he still wore around his head. Morel didn’t have the heart to send him home. He felt partly responsible for the boy’s injuries.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Morel said. ‘He did after all attack you and Irina Volkoff. But I think it’s unlikely. Given the boy’s age and history, and the trauma he’s undergone, I suspect he’s more likely to spend some time in psychiatric care.’

  ‘Is that a good thing?’

  Morel looked into Marco’s youthful face. He was waiting for something, for his boss to tell him that everything would turn out OK.

  ‘I don’t know, Marco,’ Morel said. ‘It probably isn’t the worst outcome for the boy. But I seriously doubt whether it’s a good thing.’
>
  At that moment the phone began to ring. Morel went to answer it. He listened for a while and spoke quietly into the receiver. When he got off the phone, he stared into the distance for a moment before summoning the other three.

  ‘That was Vincent,’ he said. ‘Calling to say his wife died in hospital this morning.’

  Lila followed Jacques Dufour’s car even though there was no need. She knew exactly where he was heading.

  Once she’d arrived, she parked the car and walked the rest of the way. She could hear voices, the same ones she’d heard on two previous occasions when she’d followed Dufour. Now she could match names to the two voices that weren’t his.

  Taking care not to be seen, she took photos while the men carried out their exchange.

  ‘That’s a big bag, Jacques,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Surely that’s not all for you?’

  When she was satisfied she had everything she needed, she walked back to the car and drove off.

  It was time to tell Morel. He might be pissed off with her for having tailed Dufour without telling him what she was up to. But once he found out just what the man was doing, he would see things differently.

  I’ve got you, you son of a bitch, she thought.

  With that amount, he must be selling. He might actually have to serve time.

  Anne Dufour might finally have a life.

  Charles’s life was falling apart. There was no other way to look at it, he thought, standing in the reception area waiting for the orderly to take him through.

  His wife had left him for good. The kids stayed with him for now because it was easier that way. But he knew that as soon as Geraldine had found a place of her own she would fight him for custody. It was just a matter of time.

  He had lost his job. Too many missed opportunities, too many days off when he felt incapable of dragging himself to work. He was getting by on the dole, but what with the divorce he would have to find a job soon.