The Dragonfly

by Kate Dunn

  As they approached the centre of Chatillon, still holding hands in a loose and non-committal grip he turned round and looked back the way they had come. “This afternoon,” he began, “At the lock, you were going to say something…”

  She nudged him forwards, “Was I?” she asked casually. “Oh, yes. It seems such a long time ago already.”

  The town was subdued; the houses had their shutters up. As they walked from hushed street to hushed street, still hunting high and low, every movement seemed magnified by disappointment.

  “Maybe now is not the moment,” she faltered, as they crossed through the main square and passed down by the church. They stood facing one another, the street lights casting conflicting shadows. Tyler was squinting off into the middle-distance, automatically searching still. “I’ve never had a… you know, a kid of my own, and what I was going to say before all of this–” she gestured round the square, at the empty benches and the trestles piled up ready for the market. She swallowed, “–you know, before Delphine… what I was going to say, what I want to say… is that I know she has lost her… mom… I don’t want to presume, or, you know, go where I’m not wanted, but if there’s a way of spending some time with you and maybe helping her–” her words slowed to a trickle. “Oh my God, this is turning into a whole long speech. Wrong place, wrong time, as usual. Sorry, sorry – let’s go.”

  The canal side throbbed with light, arc lamps illuminating the lock. Several police cars were drawn up nearby and there were officers conferring in groups. The policeman Colin had spoken to earlier came over as soon as he spotted them.

  “No news,” he reported; he looked tired but extremely focused. “We are still within a positive time frame. We are using all resources. We have a family liaison officer – I will introduce you,” he broke off to speak into his radio and then was hailed by one of his men. “One moment, a moment please.”

  Like a moth in the glare of the arc lamps, Colin stood on the lock side, the realisation of what had happened as searing as if he had come to it new and unprotected. He shaded his eyes from the horrible limelight, which seemed to illuminate his loss for everyone to see. He watched the dark shapes of the divers in the water, thinking that his own heaviness would drag him under, wishing that it might be so.

  Tyler touched his sleeve, “Why don’t I make you a cup of tea? You need to keep your strength up and we’ll be close by if they need us.”

  He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t answer, he could hardly think. He was intent on making promises: let her be alright, please let her be alright, let her come back safe and sound, I’ll do whatever it takes, I’ll do anything at all.

  As they walked along the towpath in the darkness Tyler clasped his hand in both of hers and held it to her cheek. “Don’t be too hard on yourself,” her eyes sought out his, holding his gaze by degrees. “It’ll come out right in the end, I know it will.”

  ~~~

  The only sound in the cabin of Sabrina Fair was made by the clock, each tick tearing up what was left of his hope. Colin sat hunched at the table staring at the grain of the wood, those journeying lines which never meet, while Tyler was curled sideways at the far end of the sofa, her tea growing cold.

  At last, when they were ashen with tiredness, with the strain of waiting recorded in every muscle, the phone rang.

  “Oh Jesus,” he breathed before he answered it. He held the handset in his hand.

  “Do you want me to take it?” asked Tyler in a low voice.

  “No. No, no.” In his head, they were lifting Delphine from the reedy water; he had seen the grey green colour in her face before, “Hello? Yes… Oh God, oh my God… yes… yes… straight away.” He laid the handset on the table, matching it exactly with the grain. He rubbed the heels of his palms into his eyes and tears ran down his wrists, making salt pools over his blue veins. “They’ve got her,” he stuttered, with a wrenching laugh that was born of grief. “They’ve found her; they’ve got her; she’s safe.”

  It took him a minute to pull himself together; he leapt to his feet, hurrying, turning back, stopping, starting. “She’s in somewhere called Eguilly. By the canal,” he cried, halfway up the stairs. “She just walked off, heading south–” Until the butter melts. He was brought up short at the thought. “My phone,” he rifled through all of his pockets. He ran back down again.

  “Do you want me to come?”

  “Yes. More than anything. But it’s better if I do it on my own. Thank you,” he made as if to kiss her mouth, “Thank you – for what you said. For everything you’ve done today.” He wanted to wrap her in his arms. Instead, he cupped her face in his hands, regarding her searchingly. “When there’s time to stop and think… can we talk? Can we? But not now – I really have to go.”

  Sitting in the police car driving sleekly through the darkness, the golden gleam from the instrument panel cast a glow over everything. He watched the outline of the Morvan hills roll past the window, their shapes only visible through inflected shades of black, his own reflection superimposed upon the view. The police radio provided a commentary on other people’s heartbreak: burglaries, accidents, and God forbid, lost children, in a language that he didn’t understand.

  The gendarme explained that a young woman, putting out the rubbish, had found her. She had been curled up in a little ball, leaning against the wall of the lock keeper’s cottage at Eguilly. When they arrived there, Colin flung open the door of the car before the vehicle had come to a halt. His head was spinning, but he walked as calmly as he could up the path, as if he’d come to collect her from a friend’s house after school. The door opened before he had a chance to knock.

  “Monsieur?”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, as if he were admitting everything.

  He hardly took in the young woman or the interior of the house. He had a vague impression of terracotta tiles and dark furniture and lots of crocheted lace. Delphine was sitting docilely at the kitchen table with a glass of milk in front of her. For a moment she looked dazed, as though the arc lamps had turned their light on her.

  “Grand-père–” she exclaimed, as pleasantly as if it was a coincidence which had brought him to this heathland cottage in the middle of the night. When she saw the policeman, her eyes widened and her mouth moved the way it did when she was reading to herself. Colin held back while she made her small and silent reckoning, although he was longing to offer her some sort of reassurance, to give her a hug and ruffle her hair. She slipped from her chair and he bent down and held out his arms.

  She didn’t move. She made the kind of little gesture that she used when she reached to find Amandine, but Amandine wasn’t there.

  “Delphine?” he began in an undertone, lowering his arms to his sides. “Am I glad to see you!” She looked like a creature at bay and all he wanted was to make things easy for her. “We ought to be making tracks,” he suggested, speaking carefully and gently.

  She pressed her lips together. She rubbed her sleeve across her eyes as if she was very tired. “It was my fault–”

  “Darling girl,” he knelt beside her. “It wasn’t your fault. It was an accident. It wasn’t your fault at all.”

  She turned from him to the policeman, her face disconnected and bemused. “It was my fault,” she repeated. “When Maman fell. It was my fault. It was me.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Laroche was given four years and nine months and seemed unmoved by the sentence. “This is me home, ’ere,” he gestured around him, taking in the bed, the cell, the view of the hospital wing. “’S where I live. ’S where me mates are; got me little ickle job in the library. Board and lodging, no rent to pay. Who needs the outside? All that trouble? All them rellies? Nah.” He resumed filling a carrier bag with his belongings. “Right,” he said. “Got the kanga to give me five. Sit down.”

  Michael sat abruptly on the chair that was thrust at him.

  “Don’t move and this won’t hurt,” said Laroche from behind him.

  “What–?�
��

  There was a rustle of plastic bag then a click and a buzzing sound that Michael realized too late was an electric razor.

  “Don’t move.”

  “What the–?” The first featherings of hair sifted down onto the floor. “Get off me, you maniac!”

  “I’m doin’ it for yer own good.”

  “You’re a madman. What are you doing?”

  Hair, like feathers from a pillow fight, drifted downwards.

  “Who’s going to watch your back, now I’m crossing to the other side?”

  Michael twisted his head round to look at him. “What?”

  “I’ve only got five minutes. Don’t move.” The razor skimmed the contours of Michael’s skull. “You’re gonna have to watch your own back, because I won’t be there.”

  “Have you been watching my back?”

  “What do you think, ya murdering Rosbif ponce? You’re bloody lucky Joubert only caught you a glancing blow with a wrench. Could’ve been much worse. Now turn round and look at me.” Laroche surveyed him critically then zipped a strip of hair from above his ear. “That’ll do. ’S toughened you up a bit.”

  Gingerly, Michael felt the scalp around his scar. “Were you really? Looking out for me?”

  “Yer about to find out.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Why would you teach me to read?”

  He opened his mouth to say something about owing him one – two – for the phone calls, but then stopped.

  “There’s your answer, mate.”

  As they heard the key turn in the lock and the kanga stuck his head round the door and beckoned him into the corridor, Laroche slung the razor into the carrier bag, then picked up his copy of The Monstrumologist. “S’long, dude.” He punched Michael on the knuckles. “Will you look at us now – me the bookworm, you the crim.”

  Michael ran his hand across his scalp, seeking out the soft abrasions. “S’long… Lilian, and – thanks!” he said, torpedoed by a feeling of aloneness as the door slammed shut. He listened to the sound of receding footsteps, that desolate childhood sound, and a faint oink oink filtered back to him on the stale prison air.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The police car drove through the dizzyingly dark night, Delphine huddled in one corner of the back seat, Colin a stiff consignment in the other. After they had radioed their Paris colleagues, the officers in the front had given up trying to make conversation with them, or with each other. The wildness of the Morvan was only guessable through the blackness: a bleak incline lit by moonlight, the charcoal bone yard of a forest. He glanced across at his granddaughter; her face retained its white, strained aspect, although her eyes were closed and he assumed she was asleep. He leaned back against the headrest, too tired to sleep himself, caught in the headlights of what was happening and unable to think or move, waiting for the moment of impact.

  Be careful what you wish for, that’s what they say. Be careful… With the barest, most bitter of movements, little more than a contraction of muscle, he shook his head. Michael was innocent. He should have been delirious with relief, rhapsodic. Instead, he felt as if he were hardly inhabiting his body, barely breathing.

  “I pushed her, and she fell,” the child said, and while Colin tried to explain to the policeman about Charlotte’s death and Michael’s confession, she sat and drank her milk, detached from everything that was going on around her. The policeman squatted down on his haunches and asked her what had happened. “I pushed her, and she fell,” she repeated, as if speaking from some far country, a distant hemisphere. There was a small moustache of milk on her upper lip and Colin handed her his handkerchief, without thinking.

  “Wipe,” he said abstractedly, and she said his name, whispered it – Colin – and the music of it seemed terrible to hear.

  The policeman went outside to make a phone call. The woman who owned the house put a plate of biscuits on the table and fled from the room.

  He ran his fingers through his hair. He went to the limits of the pool of light and then turned back to face the child. “I’m sorry,” she said in a tiny, fractured voice and he could see that for her the word had lost the magical, healing properties of childhood, the kiss and make better facility that puts everything right. Her mouth was trembling. “Will I go to prison, like Papa?”

  “No, darling. No, of course not. Of course you won’t.” He knelt down and reached to take her in his arms and she winced as if he had hit her, as if that were her punishment. She was standing at an awkward, bunched up, twisted angle, straining away from him, but he took her hand in any case and held it in his big paw. “Nothing bad will happen to you. I promise you. Cross my heart.” He tried to draw her close, but she gave a jittery shake of her head, her body crooked with fright and he understood entirely what Michael had been trying to save her from. “I’m here,” he said, “I’m here for as long as you need me. And everything will be alright.”

  ~~~

  They arrived back at Chatillon en Bazois in the smallest hours of the morning. The arc lamps were still in place around the lock although the lights were out and the night was closed around the town like a vice. The car came to a halt above the tow path. The crack and crunch of the gravel died away as the policeman turned around in his seat.

  “The family liaison officer will be on hand tomorrow. You have her number, yes?”

  Colin touched the phone in his pocket.

  “It is best that you have the day to recover yourselves.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then you go with the officer to Paris. There will be some assessments. My colleagues will wish to interview Delphine.”

  “What assessments?”

  “Everything will be handled carefully. We have special protocols…”

  “Yes, but what assessments?”

  “She is young. They will want to determine if she knows the difference between telling the truth and lying. They will want to look at her recall, her memory. Everything is very careful…”

  Colin closed his eyes to the terrible seepage of tiredness.

  “What will become of her?”

  “She will be looked after.”

  Heavy-limbed, he roused himself and opened the car door. He twisted to look back at the policeman. “Yes, but what does that mean?” He went round to the other side of the car and lifted out his granddaughter.

  “They will take care of her. Therapy, counselling. She is young. There are experts to help.”

  Cold comfort to carry into the darkness with the sleeping child.

  ~~~

  Tyler was propped up at the table in the cabin of Sabrina Fair, fast asleep. When Colin tapped on the window, she sat bolt upright, blinking, her hands clattering around her head in surprise. She scrambled up the stairs and on to the deck.

  “Are you guys OK?” she gasped, catapulted from slumber into over-wakefulness. “Is Delphine–?”

  “She’s here.” The inside of his head felt as if it were silted with ash. “Did you get my text?”

  “Yeah – here, let me–” Tyler reached out her arms to take Delphine from him, but although the incline of the gangplank seemed impossibly steep, he lumbered up it holding the child to him, her head in the crook of his neck, her body limp against his chest.

  “Is it alright for us to stay? We’ve got nowhere else…” he was too tired to explain, too tired even to finish the sentence.

  “Of course it is,” she was in lifeguard mode. “I’ve made the spare beds up. It’s this way.” She led him to a compact little cabin with two small bunks cunningly wedged in at one end. They were made up with fresh sheets – the benison of clean white linen – and he laid the child down in the nearest one still in her clothes, then fumbled helplessly with the buckles of her sandals.

  “I’ll do it…” Tyler removed Delphine’s shoes and paired them neatly on the floor beside the bed. “Come with me–”

  She sat him at the table in the saloon, then unobtrusively she made him tea and brought him
slices of brioche spread with lock keeper’s honey. She settled herself beside him, ready to accompany him through the wreckage and seemed not to mind that he didn’t eat and didn’t talk.

  “It was Delphine–”

  “I know. I know. You said…” she touched his wrist with her hand.

  “Did I?” he searched her face.

  “You did. In your text.”

  “Not Michael.”

  “No.”

  His head bowed of its own accord. “No.”

  “You need to get some sleep,” she traced her finger down the side of his face. “Tired one.”

  He looked sideways at her. “In the little cabin…”

  Tyler nodded. “Sure, I know. You need to be with Delphine and she needs to be with you. I understand.”

  “Thank you,” he said, which seemed too brief a phrase, and with too brief a kiss on her rainwater hair he stumbled off to find his bed.

  Dawn was spilling the new day carelessly through the porthole in splashy pools of light as he lay down on the bunk opposite his granddaughter. When he awoke in the shallows of the afternoon, she had crept across the little gap and was lying in the harbour of his arms.

  ~~~

  They took things gently, the three of them, with the remains of the day. They ate a hybrid meal of breakfast and tea on the shady deck. There was ham and stinky cheese, and French bread which still felt warm, and cherries in a china bowl, and croissants and fresh juice and tarry black coffee and banana milk shake. To begin with, the child sat close to her grandfather and watched him, following his movements as if she had forgotten what one did at meal times; as though there were customs that she didn’t understand. He hung cherry earrings from his ears and buttered her a croissant. She picked uncertainly at the crispy flakes of pastry and ate three cherries: tinker, tailor, soldier…

  “Ah-ha!” said Tyler, remembering something. She disappeared into the galley and returned bearing a great big bag of marshmallows, “Look what I tracked down – guimauves, I believe!”

  “Go on,” Colin nodded, beginning to comprehend that this new, chastened Delphine needed permission for everything. “Tuck in.” He ate an earring to encourage her.