by James Brydon
For a long time Erwann sits perfectly still, rigid, his greenish-gray eyes blankly reflecting the light.
“Was it like that? Say it.”
He shakes his head.
“Say it. You need to say it.”
Once again he shakes his head. He blinks, as if confused for a moment. Then he smiles. There’s something like relief in the twitch of his lips. He looks weary, though. The skin around his eyes is a maze of wrinkles.
“Is that all?” he asks.
I nod.
“Am I free to go?”
He picks himself up slowly, swaying slightly. His tanned skin looks gray in the dullness of the strip light above us. He walks slowly out of the room, and in my mind I follow his halting steps along the corridor and past the front desk. Nobody stops him. He walks out untouched into the light.
* * *
Lafourgue touches my shoulder. “You can’t sit in this room all evening.”
I feel his grip beneath my shoulder, lifting me out of the chair.
“What did you think would happen?” he asks.
“He needed me to know. To understand. That’s why he begged me to investigate the case. So that the poison of it wouldn’t only be inside him. He could have gotten away with it. The case was dead and nobody would have picked it up. He knew that. But he felt the memory of it corroding him. He thought that I could explain to him what he did. That’s why he cut Anne-Lise’s flesh, and that’s why he needed me to investigate long after the case was cold: to understand and interpret what he did.”
“I had some forensic work done in his house while you were questioning him. We didn’t find anything yet, although some of the samples will take time. You understand that we had to let him go.”
“I know. There was nothing to keep him with. No traces. No witnesses. No confession. It’s over.”
Lafourgue purses his lips. His shrewd eyes narrow. “Okay. Then it’s over. For now. But we know how to put pressure on people. We’ll keep track of him. Follow him. Put a man behind him, someone in his peripheral vision. We’ll be like his conscience, his memory. We won’t let him rest or sleep. Then we’ll see what comes out.”
My body feels numb as I step slowly out into the chill of evening. For some reason, I don’t want to take the car. I need to try to calm my muscles. The frozen air tastes clean, disinfected.
In my mind I see only Anne-Lise’s sightless eyes gaping, her hands scrabbling, her final moments consumed by wordless terror.
I see Erwann’s face twisting and distorting as his guts heave and he spews his bile across the interrogation room floor.
Abject, he said.
The heathland is one immensity of white glowing spectrally, staining the sky with its brightness. I still have the picture of Anne-Lise in my pocket. I can’t bring it out to look at. My fingers are bent with cold, as if they’ve iced up, become pure bone. And the light that radiates from Anne-Lise is unbearable. Cancerous.
Three words throb in my mind: Do you know? Do you know? I thought I knew before. I was convinced that de la Hallière had killed her in his basement. I have become more like a schizophrenic than an investigator. The hum of the past is a constant distortion in my head. I can’t hear my own thoughts. I hear only the whispers of words long forgotten, fluttering like bats’ wings, murmuring in the dark, brushing the inside of my skull.
Do you know? Do you know? Do you know?
Epilogue
Day Nine
Morning
Loud and insistent knocking wakes me up from a deep sleep. As my brain gropes for reality, I am aware of something clinging to me, a cloying embrace that only slowly loosens its grip on my lungs and heart. Fear. I can’t remember what I was dreaming, but the feeling wears out my nerves and digs deep into my brain.
As I stumble to the door, I am convinced that it will be Erwann. The wish to see him is overpowering.
It is Lafourgue who stands in the mist, his face impassive, and says, “Erwann Ollivier’s body was found this morning smashed on the rocks of the La Fosse beach. We don’t know if he jumped, fell, or was pushed. Some kids found his body around seven a.m.—or rather, what was left afterward. Most of its left side was obliterated when it hit the rocks. The drop is over fifty meters. The rest of the body was pounded by the tide all night. The flesh was green and swollen. It was him, though, there’s no doubt about it. I think it will go down as suicide.”
Lafourgue speaks laconically and I hear once again the promise he made yesterday: We’ll be like his conscience. Was this what he meant?
“We never got a confession from him and we couldn’t find anything at his house either. I suppose that means that the Aurigny case is never going to be officially closed.”
Not closed, just left abandoned until her death sinks into amnesia. Finally, like Julie Bergeret, she will exist only in the memories of a few paranoid, addled drifters who carry their visions of her out into the blind and indifferent world.
Did Erwann jump? I saw him walk out into the light yesterday but perhaps he felt the darkness hemming him in. Perhaps he had lived through these last months waiting only for the moment when he could pass his burden on to someone else. He needed another person to know what he knew. Someone else had to carry it, like a malignant strand of DNA buried deep in the body. Once the transmission was complete, he could walk slowly to the cliff top and feel the fury of the wind lashing his face. He could see the leaden mass of the sea and do the one thing he had dreamed of for so long: walk into the void.
He didn’t just want to kill himself. He wanted to annihilate himself. To return his flesh and bones to the churning and indistinguishable pulse of matter that is nature. He wanted to pretend he had never existed. It took courage, to step off the end of the world like that. He must have felt gravity wrench him through the air. Did he feel the impact? Was there a moment of atrocious pain? Or did oblivion come at once as the rocks smashed his unquiet skull and pulverized his body? Is this what he finally wanted? To disappear? To leave the world as if he had never been in it?
Or was this his final revenge? Leaving us amid a mocking, unending silence, an emptiness in which only the drone of that eternal question recurs with the furious monotony of the waves battering his body to nothingness and the rocks to sand: Do you know? Do you know? Do you know?
“Do you want to see the body?” Lafourgue asks.
The skin sodden, bloated, broken. Water rotting the flesh before bacteria could break it down. Moldering flotsam strewn on the beach.
I shake my head. Lafourgue turns to go.
“Hey, Jacques, I forgot to ask. Are you done with the car now? If so, I’ll take it back to the station.”
I stare up at Lafourgue’s blank, gray eyes and at the blank, gray air behind him glinting through the mist. “No. I have an idea. There’s something I need to check. And then there’s one last thing I need to do.”
* * *
The road to le Quéduc winds through rows of trees and over icy stone bridges. The town is sleepy. Old ladies with shopping bags shuffle outside the bakery. Passersby stare down at the pavement, trying not to lose their footing on the frosty concrete. The lycée Balzac is a small stone building with bright yellow shutters drawn back from its windows. Pupils sits in groups outside, smoking cigarettes and huddling into their jackets. I park outside and make inquiries at reception. I can feel my body shaking. I am so impatient that I can barely get the words out.
I lie. I say that I am a police officer and that I am investigating a violent crime. I explain that the case may be connected to the murder of Julie Bergeret. I ask to see the school’s personnel records going back to the end of the war.
I need to see Erwann’s name on the list. Where was he before September 1948? I am now convinced that he was right here, at the lycée Balzac, where one of his students, Julie Bergeret, through what Père Clavel called her luminous goodness, drew his attention. It was the fact that he noticed her, picked up some glowing signal from her, that led to her strangled corpse
being dug out of the hard ground in the winter of 1947. If Erwann taught here before working at the lycée Cartier, then I can finally answer that question that throbs in my head. It wouldn’t be enough to get a conviction, or to close the case file. But it would quiet the murmur in my mind. I could let Anne-Lise go.
I trawl through the records very carefully. Name by name. Year by year. Erwann has to be there. In dull brown ink on yellowing paper, I have to find his name.
The years trickle past. There is nothing. My heart is thumping. I try to breathe steadily and I begin again. Earlier this time. I go right back to 1940. I read and reread each piece of paper but still Erwann does not appear.
I ask to speak to the proviseur. He beckons me to sit down but my legs are twitching too much to be still. I ask him whether the records are complete. I ask him whether there is any memory of Erwann being at the school. He says not. I ask him to make some further enquiries. To check. I need to be sure.
He nods and withdraws. There is something uneasy in his glance but I am too impatient to inquire into what is bothering him. I simply need the answer to this one question and then whatever else happens will no longer matter.
After a while he returns and assures me, calmly but with a clear note of finality in his voice, that he has spoken to various teachers who have been at the school for decades and there is no possibility that a Dr. Erwann Ollivier has ever taught here. He wishes me the very best of luck with my investigation and stands politely and holds the door to his study open for me.
Outside, the winter sun strews sparkling jewels through the air. The pupils have all gone inside to begin their lessons. I am alone in the courtyard, staring up at the clouds dispersing above.
Nothing connects Erwann to Julie Bergeret. And what about Anne-Lise? He loved her and it tormented him. She haunted his dreams and his waking hours. Sickness wracked his body when he thought about her death. But was it guilt or simply despair? Did he murder Anne-Lise, or had he lost the only thing that brought light into his life?
Perhaps my accusation seemed like an unbearable betrayal. Did remorse kill Erwann, or my need to offer justice to Anne-Lise and so to atone for Amira?
His silence now is absolute.
The sea beats its tattoo against the rocks, monotonous, eternal: Do you know? Do you know?
* * *
The creek by the Château de la Hallière has frozen over and the ground is bone-hard. The car’s engine purrs softly as I pull in by the trees, then all is quiet as I turn the ignition off and wait. I sit there with my eyes on the road, staring as the glare of low-slung winter sun sparkles on the horizon and makes the vast expanse of snow dissolve into myriad individual crystals. The mist wafts slowly, obdurately, across the estuary. Birds mill about, squawking and wheeling in the weak blaze of light.
I remain motionless for a long time, my eyes straining against the sharp sunlight to see both the château and the road. Hours go by. The sun starts to fade. The mists thicken and wreathe the car. The world is all whiteness.
Finally, I see what I have been waiting for. A shadow moves amid the fog, coming out of the château, tripping lightly down the path, toward the road to town.
Aïcha.
Even in the murk, I can see the shimmer of gold around her wrists and neck. I watch the bounce and the rocking of her gait. I watch her silhouette diminish in the distance before I put the car into gear. I take the hill down to Sainte-Élisabeth gently, letting the car roll forward under the influence of gravity until I am right behind her. She waves a hand at me without turning around, to signal that I can pass.
I pull up next to her and wind the window down. “Aïcha, do you remember me?”
She nods. She is a riot of color. Her golden-brown skin. Turquoise lids above her black-rimmed eyes. The crimson flashes of her nails. I speak to her in Arabic.
“I’m leaving Sainte-Élisabeth. Today. Now. I’ll take you with me, if you want. I can drop you off wherever you want to go. I don’t mind where. I’m not going anywhere special. Or you can stay with me for a while, if you want, while you figure out where it is you’d like to go. That’s okay too.”
Aïcha looks puzzled. “Where would I go?”
“You can decide that later.”
“You should leave me alone now.” She reverts back to French. “Christian wouldn’t like you talking to me like this.” She gnaws at her lower lip and turns away from me. I watch her steps dwindling into the distance.
Then she glances down at the empty grocery bags in her hands. She drops the bags into the snow, turns around slowly, and walks back up to the car. She taps my window with one scarlet nail. She speaks Arabic again. The words sound gentle.
“It’s just a ride out of here? You’ll take me wherever I want to go?”
“Wherever you want.”
“Then I’ll come.”
As she sits down on the leather seat beside me, I breathe the sweetness of her perfume right down into my lungs. I can feel the breath suddenly tighten in my chest. I think about picking up some things from the house but I don’t ever want to go back there again. I hope that Robert or Madame Gallier will fix the door, which is hanging off its hinges and flapping madly in the madness of the wind.
I let the car start to roll slowly down the hill toward Sainte-Élisabeth, and as we reach the edge of town, I turn into the corniche. We trundle unhurriedly along the icy, empty route and on our left the heather lies hooded and buried in the snow and on our right gusts rip inland from across the sea. Beneath my hands the steering wheel jerks when the tires struggle to grip the ice. I turn away from the metallic mass of the sky. I try to blot out the sweet scent of Aïcha’s skin and the thump of breath quickening in my lungs and I grip the wheel tightly and concentrate on holding the car steady on the snaking, deserted winter road.
JAMES BRYDON grew up in North Shropshire, England, and studied English at Oxford. For over a decade, he has worked as a cryptic crossword setter. Under the name Picaroon, he sets two puzzles a month in the Guardian, and he compiles for the Spectator, the Times of London, and the fiendish Listener puzzle, drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as the films of Akira Kurosawa and the six-fold symmetry of snowflakes. He is fluent in French and Serbian, is currently polishing his German, and can hold a conversation in passable Chinese. He lives in St. Albans, England, with his wife and daughter. The Moment Before Drowning is his debut novel. Author photo by Danica Minic.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
©2018 by James Brydon
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-625-2
eISBN-13: 978-1-61775-652-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017956560
First printing
Akashic Books
Brooklyn, New York, USA
Ballydehob, Co. Cork, Ireland
Twitter: @AkashicBooks
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Website: www.akashicbooks.com
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