“You know women and hair,” he said.
“It was very confusing.” Zac hesitated. “There was something about the way Marianne was talking. I think she was only telling part of the truth. I could not help wondering if… if perhaps the blonde woman existed, but she was actually Marianne.” He looked at Maurice seeking reassurance. “I don’t know. Jasmine insists Marianne was in the lane below the flat just before the murder.”
Maurice glanced down, fixing his gaze on the table.
“Speak to Alain,” he said finally. “We will speak to him tonight.”
Zac nodded. He stood up to go to the men’s’ room but at the door turned back instinctively. He saw that Maurice had pulled the letter out of his pocket again already.
“Maurice,” he said, returning to the table. “Your letter… is everything okay?”
“My partner Francine,” he smiled. “My EX partner… she’s getting married. But not to me, obviously!”
“I’m sorry, Maurice.” Zac didn’t know what else to say. He felt very close to him but he had no past with Maurice, no points of reference to help him. He had only this strange fortnight in which they were being thrown together.
“Oh it’s fine,” replied Maurice, standing up and stuffing the letter in his pocket. “Come Zac and we will prop up the bar together. God is in his heaven and all is well with the world.”
Zac was not sure that the others would turn up that evening but when they did, it was obvious that Rae and Jasmine were still snapping at one another.
“Oh I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” said Jasmine, enunciating carefully. She undid a scarf at her neck and retied it, carefully placing the trailing ends elegantly over her shoulders.
“Do you ever stop thinking about the way you look?” demanded Rae, watching her. “At your age!”
“I am younger than you, my dear,”
“You are a foolish old woman.”
Maurice was drunk, so drunk he could barely stand.
“Don’t serve him anymore,” Zac pleaded.
Alain shrugged.
“He’s used to it,” Alain said in English.
“Have you asked him?” Maurice asked, feeling in his pocket for a cigarette pack. He took one out and placed it between his lips. He looked at Zac through screwed-up eyes. “Have you asked Alain?”
“Yes,” answered Zac, but Maurice was not listening.
“A match,” said Maurice, almost falling from his stool. “Who has a match?” He straightened up, banging into a stranger at his side. The man steadied him, helping him back onto the stool.
“Here,” he said, taking a lighter from his pocket.
“Gitânes,” murmured Marianne, breathing in deeply. “May I have one?”
“Marianne, you have not smoked for thirty years!” protested Rae.
“What difference does it make now?” asked Marianne, taking a cigarette from the packet Maurice proffered.
“Marianne,” said Zac. “I am meant to be looking after you.”
“Ohh!” said Marianne, waving a dismissive hand at him, as if shooing a child. “Just one.”
“May I speak to you?”
The voice came from behind Zac, speaking in English but heavily accented. It was Alain. He had moved out from behind the bar and was standing beside them, looking directly at Marianne. She looked at him with black eyed interest.
“Are you…?”
“Alain Moreau,” he said, holding out his hand. Marianne did not seem to see it.
“So you are Patrice’s son.” She exhaled, choking slightly on the smoke. “Patrice…” She turned to Rae. “About the eyes.”
“Yes,” said Rae.
“My friend,” said Alain, nodding at Zac, “tells me you saw a blonde woman with my father the night he died.”
“And the mouth,” murmured Marianne. “Rae, you see the way the mouth…”
“Yes,” said Rae interrupting sharply. “I see.”
“It was you?” Alain said to Marianne politely. “You who saw the woman? The blonde woman? I always knew there was a woman but I did not know where this information came from. Perhaps you can tell me more?”
“It was a long time ago,” said Marianne vaguely.
Zac grasped her hand.
“Marianne!” he said. “You have just told us all… you said…”
“I know what I said.”
Marianne’s voice was so cold, so flat, that Zac was silenced. She had never spoken to him in quite that way before.
Alain sat down beside Marianne and picked up her hand, engulfing it in his.
“It does not matter,” he soothed her.
Marianne stared at her hand in his.
“You have your father’s charm.”
Alain smiled.
“My mother would say this is not a good thing.”
If he expected Marianne to smile back, she did not.
“I agree. I did not like your father,” she said, removing her hand.
“Marianne!”
“Yes, Zac?”
“That was very rude! Why are you…?”
“It is fine,” said Alain. “Marianne is of an age where she can say whatever she feels.”
“Does that seem fair to you?” asked Marianne. She took another small little puff of the cigarette. “I suppose it is in a way,” she added vaguely.
“The only thing I want to know,” continued Alain, “is if you knew this woman, if she was significant.”
“I imagine she was significant.” She turned, the cigarette dangling in her hand like a foreign object she no longer knew what to do with. “Pass me that ashtray, Rae.” She stubbed the cigarette out lightly and left it propped as if she might re-light it. She glanced up at Alain. “He certainly seemed… intimate with her.”
“She was my father’s lover?”
“I would have said so. But your father had so many lovers. He was not capable of being loyal to those he loved.”
Zac noticed the look that passed between Marianne and Rae at that moment but could not interpret the pain that it held.
“Is it possible that she was his… meurtrier?” He looked round the company for help. “Meurtrier?”
“Murderer,” said Maurice drunkenly, before placing his head on the bar.
“His murderer?” said Marianne.
The company fell awkwardly quiet.
“No, I don’t think she was his murderer.”
“How do you know?”
Marianne shrugged.
“It is an opinion.”
Rae drained her glass.
“You are lying!” Zac’s words came out in an impulsive burst. Marianne turned to him and he flushed. “I am sorry. I have no idea why you would be lying about this but I know you, Marianne!”
“They were very intimate,” said Marianne. “Very loving. The way he was holding her, it did not look as if she was about to murder anyone.”
“How was he holding her?” asked Alain.
“As if his life depended on her. As if hers depended on him.”
Zac caught another look flash between Marianne and Rae. There was the conversation in the room, he decided, and then the secret, silent conversation between them. Mind to mind, heart to heart.
“You know who she was,” said Jasmine flatly.
Marianne shrugged.
“Of course she doesn’t,” said Rae. “She would have said.”
Jasmine was staring at Rae.
“How stupid,” murmured Jasmine. “It is so clear now.”
“Did you tell the police?” asked Alain.
“I told them I saw her.”
“But her name. Did you tell them her name?” asked Alain.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” said Jasmine.
“No,” said Zac. “Why?”
“Because the blonde woman was Raymond.”
“Ah Jasmine,” said Marianne sarcastically, “you were always so clever.”
“Alain!”
Zac caught up and grasped Alain’s arm as he walked through to the office behind the bar.
“Are you okay?”
Alain looked suddenly greyer, older. For a second, Zac caught sight of a slackness in his facial skin, the way his top lip seemed slightly thinner than it should be, as if the tiny lines around his mouth were pulling it inwards into itself. Strange that he had not noticed it before.
The thought unnerved him, made him aware of the difference in their ages in a more acute way for the first time. Alain’s age had made him seem so confident, sophisticated. Now Zac had a glimpse of something else. He pushed down the unease and ran his hand comfortingly up Alain’s arm.
“I think that she… the woman Rae… Did they say…they think she murdered my father?”
“Don’t.”
Alain shook his head gently. “It is not that I feel…” He seemed at a loss to explain, his eyes full of an appeal that he could not voice. “I did not know my father. It is so long ago. And yet…” There was a rickety old chair and a desk in the office and Alain sat down suddenly, as if he might fall if he did not sit, the chair wobbling unstably to one side.
There was so much Zac wanted to say as he watched him but for the first time with Alain, he regretted being alone and wished he had some other support to help with this. Someone who knew Alain better. If only Maurice wasn’t snoring over the bar in a drunken stupor, he thought in frustration, glancing through the open doorway at the slumped figure.
“I do not understand,” Zac began. “All the talk of Jasmine and black hair and blonde wigs and Rae, it was all so confusing and I do not know which of them is mo…” Zac broke off suddenly, realising he was talking in English and Alain was lost.
“What will you do?” he asked in French.
Alain shrugged disconsolately.
“My mother is so old.”
Zac nodded.
“She cannot.”
“It may be nothing,” said Zac. “Marianne said…”
“But you said she lied,” interrupted Alain.
“Perhaps not lied,” Zac stopped abruptly. What was it he had sensed with Marianne? Perhaps that she knew more than she said.
“I do not know what to think,” said Alain.
Neither did Zac. He reached out and ran his hand comfortingly down Alain’s arm. It was strange to no longer fear being demonstrative, to touch naturally, without anxiety.
“I know.”
“I need you to find out more, Zac.”
“I will try. Of course I will try.”
“I will not say to my mother,” Alain said quietly, almost to himself.
“Will she be upset?”
“She was always upset when it came to my father. Upset when he was alive. Upset when he died. This… brings it all back.”
“I will do my best to find out discreetly.”
“Thank you. Because there is something I feel very much.”
“What? What is it that you feel?”
“I have never known my father,” said Alain haltingly. “This is the closest I have got to him in my life.”
“Does he matter to you?”
“Of course he matters. He is my father. Was my father.”
Yes, Zac thought sadly. Fathers – and the absence of them – were important.
“It is hard to say you love someone you have never met,” continued Alain. “And yet I do feel a love of sorts. Abstract, certainly but… but a bond for the man who should have been my dad. Should have been.”
“You feel his loss?”
“I feel the loss of a father. When I felt sad as a boy, I did not feel sad for him, for Patrice. I felt sad for the father I had never known. Perhaps I cried for me, for my loss, not his, if that makes sense.”
“Yes. Yes it makes sense.”
“This is the first time there has ever been anything I can do for him rather than for me. The first and the last thing. For him. For justice.”
Zac woke with a start, staring into the darkness. He rolled against a ridge of bedding that had twisted beneath him where he had kicked it, felt the coldness on his bare shoulder. Shivering, he pulled the blanket up round him, nestling in, searching for warmth and physical comfort.
A sudden memory had assaulted him so fiercely that his head pounded as if it would explode and he turned his face into the pillow. Greenfield Nursing Home felt like another life, an eternity away from France, but he had a clear vision of Shona, her pasty face rigid with shock and twisted into a grimace of concern. Marianne had linked her husband, Raymond, to a murder, she said. Was such a shocking thing possible? Did Zac know?
At the time, Zac had thought two things: firstly, that Marianne was goading Shona as only she knew how, and secondly, that she was talking about a dead man. Both those things had made him reassure Shona and then ultimately forget all about it. But something had dragged that memory out of his subconscious. Now he suspected that Marianne was indeed telling the truth. And Raymond was very much alive.
It all seemed so unlikely. Certainly he had seen Rae angry at times in the last week, especially with Jasmine, but it was not an uncontrolled anger. It did not strike him as in any way explosive and Rae had, at heart, a deferential quality that Zac recognised. But when it came to love, who knew how another’s heart worked? Zac turned over to face the other way in bed, wishing he could simply drift back to sleep. The bed felt big, lonely. He realised, with some surprise that he wished he could speak to Abbie about this, lie in the darkness and hear her voice as they worked out what should be done.
Another pang of guilt stabbed him, and his stomach flipped instantly into a tight knot. He had betrayed her. It was as if, for most of the time, he protected himself from that admission but every so often, the truth broke through the shell of his carefully constructed psychological protection and pierced his heart. Each time it happened, he felt physically sick with himself. Betrayal was ugly. He was ugly. And yet, he reasoned, it was a betrayal that he felt was a necessity to gauge the truth of his own heart. By the time he went home, would he not know how he felt? Where his future lay?
The bed felt warm now after so recently feeling cold. He kicked the blanket down leaving only the sheet, then turned again to face the other direction. What were his responsibilities in this? Was justice possible after all this time? Did it even matter anymore? Zac had felt so much unfairness in his life that justice meant something to him. Justice for Patrice. Justice for Alain.
And then there was Marianne, with her sad wreck of a body, just waiting to die. Marianne with her overwhelming, unflinching devotion to Rae. Or rather to Raymond. Was he to be taken from her as a murderer, just as she had found him again?
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Zac
I can hear Zac being sick in the mornings. He seemed so relaxed in our first days here, but he is in the bathroom now, retching and coughing and spluttering. He emerges, white-faced and wan.
“Why are you so anxious, Zac?”
I pat the covers and he comes and sits on my bed, one hand absently rubbing his stomach.
“Marianne, did Rae murder Alain’s father?”
Poor Zac. So innocent, so well intentioned.
“No, Zac. He did not.”
Zac breathes out deeply and I look for his long, thin hand in the rumpled bed covers.
“You told Shona he did.”
“Oh, Shona!”
Zac looks tense.
“Zac, does Rae strike you as someone who could murder another human being?”
He shakes his head.
“But he was the last person to be seen…”
“That’s true. And of course, how do you tell a murderer from an ordinary person? What does a murderer look like, Zac?”
His eyes seem darker than ever with confusion. It affects me, his confusion. For a moment, I forget what I want to say to him and concentrate only on his pain, stroking his fingers gently on the bed cover.
“Do you know that the majority of murderers offend once and n
ever again?” I ask eventually. After Patrice died, I read a lot about murder. And then, of course, there was my job. “Unless, of course,” I continue, “they are a career criminal or a member of the mafia. For most, the circumstances that lead to their actions occur in an explosion only once in their lives. An alignment of stars. Imagine that, Zac!”
“An alignment of stars? You make it sound almost poetic! What are you saying?”
“That lots of murders might never have happened if only there had been one little detail different. A chance meeting that did not occur. Some piece of knowledge that never came a person’s way. A turn down one street - literal or metaphorical - instead of another.”
“But it was not Rae? You are sure it was not Rae?”
“I have already told you that!”
“Please don’t get angry with me, Marianne. I don’t know what you are saying anymore!”
“It was not Rae.”
“Why did you split up then?”
“Oh. Oh I see. Oh no, Zac you are going in quite the wrong direction with that!”
“Am I?”
“Well…”
Well actually, is it the wrong direction? Perhaps Zac is at least partly right. We did split up because of Patrice, in a way. Though perhaps he also held us together for longer than we would otherwise have been. Terrible events do that, bind you in secret unexplained ways. Until they destroy you, of course. Before that happened, I wanted to replace that terrible binding event with a wonderful one: a child. Of course it never happened. But yes…
“Yes, I suppose it was a factor.”
“Are you trying to confuse me?” asks Zac.
“Now it is you who is getting angry!”
“I’m sorry.”
“Come here.”
He is like Raymond was, so needy. His cheek feels soft to the touch. It is like petting a small, trembling bird; the years turn back.
“After Raymond had his surgery, he needed to spread his wings. He came here, to Saint Estelle.”
“And you never joined him?”
“It never happened as we planned.”
“Why?”
“Because I did the one unselfish thing of my life.”
I can feel Zac’s body still and he looks up at me expectantly.
The Chrysalis Page 18