I was also digesting the implications of what Girard had said. Someone – ‘they’ – had an interest in the cove. They seemed prepared to take life in pursuit of their aims. Which were? Ownership of the properties? For a holiday enterprise, or something sinister? All of us out of the way?
I had some questions for myself. Why had I not let Girard know that I kept Giuseppe’s gun? It would have solved what? In fact as soon as I mulled this question over, I knew it would further implicate me. I had lied, and the weapon would have my fingerprints on it. There might even be powder residue from my handling of it, not on my washed hands, but on the wrapping and things I had touched, when I hid it in the wall at the back of the house. ‘Just in case I needed it’. Yes, Giuseppe, I now felt the threats were getting closer to home.
I took a long walk out into the maquis to calm my nerves. I found myself struggling through the undergrowth towards the ruins of the Pisan church. I felt it would provide a quiet corner in which to brood on possible actions if things went wrong. Whilst I did not have my passport, I could not leave the island. There was no easy way out. I would have to face any issues on the spot.
I reached the ruins of the church and pushed the door aside. A shaft of light broke through the trees which shielded it from the outside world. It shone on the altar that Nicole and I had insulted with our rush of lovemaking. I felt guilty at our disrespect for what had been a holy place all those centuries ago. The passage of time did not now excuse our abandoned behaviour. The mood had been changed by events and it did not feel right to intrude on the sanctuary’s isolation.
Except once again I noticed marks in the dust on the floor. The tarpaulin had been moved. I was sure of it. There were new signs of disturbance. Splinters of wood which I had not noticed before lay in one corner. Fragments of boxes. And footprints.
I was not the only visitor it seemed. I looked carefully around but found no other clues. The ancient walls with their tones of black and grey granite blocks stood firm. The stone figurine of a saint set in a niche. Damaged in the Revolution, it still retained enough of the face to give me a critical look. What had he witnessed recently?
Outside it was difficult to assess how often other people might have been here. The undergrowth was so dense that one felt any shepherds, randonneurs or intruders would have to had cut their way through. From the distant road above? I saw no cut marks on the trees or shrubs in front of me, but the plants grew so quickly they might well disguise such movements. I had come to find peace and quiet, but somehow that peace had been taken, to leave an eerie silence. But silent testimony to what?
3. RESISTANCE
cunfilittu
i
As the sun began to set I returned from a lazy day on the beach, full of Antoine’s coarse wine, clambered wearily up the mountainside and wandered dreamily through the front door of the house. It was very quiet, and dropping my books on my bedside table went in search of Nicole.
I found her at the table in her study, surrounded by plants, as if in the middle of an analysis, but slumped forward, seemingly asleep, as her head had fallen forwards on top of some botanical drawings and bottles of test liquids.
For a moment I felt I shouldn’t wake her, but her breathing seemed so short, so soft that it was almost undetectable. I watched her in a tired gaze, expecting her to jump awake at my presence, but she didn’t move, and as I observed her inert form more closely I gradually came to appreciate that she wasn’t breathing properly, in fact was hardly breathing at all. She remained dead to the world. It was not like her.
I went over and put my hand on her arm, applying my ‘magic touch,’ which she had chosen to receive as a token of love, but there was no response. I tried to hold her head, but no response. I tried to lift her by the wrist, but she remained a dead weight in my hand. There was very little pulse under my thumb and finger.
It took me a further minute, or in reality seconds, to realise that she was not well, was not simply sleeping off tiredness. Her breathing was faint.
I panicked, recognising yet again that we were a long way from help. Serious help, doctors. I managed to lift her into an armchair, where her body slumped against the back, and her head fell to one side. She seemed to have bruised her neck when she had fallen asleep. There was a smear of something frothy in the corner of her mouth. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know enough what to do. Antoine was down at the taverne but it would take me quarter of an hour to get down and half-an-hour to climb back. What could I do?
I tried giving her a sip of water but it just fell back and dribbled down the side of her neck. I noticed that the bruising was on both sides of her neck, possibly discolouration from some experimental potion she had taken. That didn’t tally with anything, unless she had shaken her head too roughly when she first felt ill. I sniffed the empty test tube beside her. There was an odd musty smell, but not from a plant I recognised.
I heard sounds down in the bay. A motorboat had come in. I rushed out with the binoculars and saw immediately in the lens it was the Gendarmerie Maritime on one of their occasional patrols. It anchored in the centre of the bay and the dinghy was launched for landing at the jetty. Its arrival broke my hesitations. I knew I had to go down and get their help. There was no other way. I lent Nicole’s head back as gently as I could on the headrest and folded her arms so she remained upright. I put the glass of water on the table beside her in case she woke up. Her pulse was very weak.
I ran down the mountainside risking life and limb, slipping and sliding on the loose scree, until I reached the beach and fell on the sand. Picking myself up, I ran to the taverne and the gendarmes talking to Antoine.
I garbled my concern in my best French, and eventually go them to understand what had happened, was happening back up at the house. The gendarmes explained that there was no doctor on their patrol boat, but they had basic emergency training, and agreed at once that two of them would come up to the house with me.
Even scampering as fast as we all could, it still took us twenty minutes to reach Nicole. She hadn’t moved, she almost wasn’t breathing. The crewmen tried to revive her, but failed to bring her back to consciousness.
“She’s alive, but only just.”
“Looks like she is in a coma,” the second man suggested.
“She spends her time testing herbs and plants for medicine,” I found myself volunteering. “She may have taken something that didn’t agree with her.”
The crewmen looked around at her work-desk and saw the pile of bottles beside a mix of herbs on the window ledge. Then they picked Nicole up and one took her into a fireman’s lift. It was not the time to argue as to whether this would make her condition worse. There seemed no other way to get her down safely. It took them fifteen minutes to carry her body to the jetty, taking just enough care on the slippery hillside path to avoid dropping her. From her mouth the dribble of spume fell on the man’s shoulder. There was a glimmer of breathing, but that was all.
“There isn’t room in the dinghy for all of us, and we need to move fast,” one said, indicating quite clearly that I should stay behind. As they rowed off to the patrol-boat, the other shouted at me to look after Nicole’s effects and not throw anything away. “Keep the evidence. We’ll need any clues there are.” Ten minutes later the craft powered out of the cove and turned north at the headland. Even at full speed I knew it would be nearly two hours before they would reach Calvi harbour. I hoped they could do something on the boat to save the day.
ii
I found myself wandering around the house in a stupor. I couldn’t think straight. Nicole’s accident – if that’s what it was – brought an abrupt end to my complacent and indulgent way of life. What had seemed idyllic and untouchable had now been shattered. The scorching sun became oppressive rather than a beacon of light that enchanted the landscape. I took to whisky as a cure for a new malaise.
As the only available help, the gendarmes, had left on the boat, I was left to exam
ine the evidence that remained on the table or in Nicole’s study. Antoine and Angelique were shaken, but had not offered to climb the mountainside and calm my nerves. I understood.
The drawings and plants that were scattered across the table included some I had learnt to identify, some not. I was looking for signs of danger amongst them. A branch of Viburnum tinus was evident (its fruit a dramatic remedy for dropsy), Urginea maritima too, the Sea Squill - its bulbs used in the treatment of heart disease; even cough mixtures since Pliny’s time. Then again Datura stramonium – the evil poison narcotic that I had met before. Was this some mix of narcotics, sedatives and cures which Nicole had been exploring? Would she have taken risks with sipping a potion made from these to see if she felt a calming effect from the anxieties now impacting on us at the cove? If not, had she kept ready the glass of water to dilute a more toxic reaction? What was in the test tube that was a less familiar item of her research?
I realised how little I knew – in terms of specific knowledge – in relation to her testing, of the accumulated expertise she had developed over the years. Data she had stored away long after any help I had given out in the maquis gathering samples.
iii
The doctors’ prognosis was not good. Nicole is in a coma. This news was relayed by the Gendamerie Maritime back on patrol. Antoine had taken the message, and called me over at the first opportunity, when I had come down to the beach for a much-needed drink – and some company. It was time to finish off my literary critiques and I was finding my lone existence less than tolerable, not helped by thinking all day of Nicole and praying for her recovery.
From his brief first words, this now seemed a forlorn hope. The second part of the message was that I should be prepared for the worst. “She could die any time,” was the clear import of what had been said.
I had to admit that hope was not sufficient and I began to consider the consequences and what would happen to her body, who to contact, how to pass everything on to her family. The words of a stranger would be attempting to explain to them the very special relationship we had shared this summer. Would they question why I had come to the island? Was a motive of love sufficient? I had not come here to harm Nicole. Or would they suspect otherwise?
The arrival of another boat brought a couple of detectives checking over the scene of the incident up at the house and interrogating me about everything that had happened and what I knew of Nicole’s family. It sounded ominous. Inspector Girard was not amongst them as this was a preliminary enquiry. The cove community was becoming accident-prone. Until a crime had been established he would not attend. Again I was found wanting, not just in shock, but because they felt I was hiding something, and that the actuality – that I knew nothing of Nicole’s ‘accident’– was suspicious and unlikely. I began to doubt myself. Was I telling the truth, or would I transpire to be the common denominator in the loss of life here? No wonder the investigators doubted my word.
Antoine was interviewed at length, protesting he had been out in their olive grove that day, whilst Angelique had been in her potager all the time too.
“What about visiting yachts?” one detective asked.
“None were here,” Angelique could candidly answer. “No customers,” her angry aside.
“So,” the other detective said, turning to me, “no one from outside. That leaves you again as the only person involved.”
“Involved in what?”
“The marks on Nicole’s neck. We assumed they were from when she was carried on our man’s shoulder. But they can’t have been. The bruising was more compatible with someone trying to strangle her.”
“But they … whoever they might be …”
“You?”
“No, of course not. They didn’t succeed, I mean didn’t strangle her.”
“No, they didn’t. But may have held her down. To make her drink something. A poison of some sort. An insecticide, for instance.”
“Why on earth would someone …?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? What would you say?”
“I can’t believe it. We were happy here. She had no enemies.”
“Just you.”
“I’m a friend.”
“A dangerous companion it would seem.”
“Why me? I called down to the boat as soon as I discovered Nicole had collapsed.”
“At the moment that is all that is saving you.”
However they had to agree, if reluctantly, that I would not have called for help if I had been complicit in trying to do her serious harm. The shock, evident on my face, was judged to be real. I felt empty and annoyed at their presumption of my involvement. Why would I endanger someone who had become so precious to me? We went together up the mountainside. They looked around the house, saw its simple effects, the rooms barely furnished, nothing unusual other than the cornucopia of plants, flora, jars, boxes and notes that were the object of Nicole’s research. Things they didn’t understand.
My attempt to explain once again my reasons for being here, cut off from civilisation, was difficult and to the investigators still feebly presented. Back at the taverne Antoine gave me a bottle of his cheap whisky and a glass. I declined the jug of water. Neat was needed. I stayed in a stupefied state on a bench on the terrace, whilst the detectives wrote up their notes.
Antoine was subjected to further interrogation about life in the cove, but he explained it was a hermitage in effect, where very little ever happened. The detectives found no leads to determine the likely cause of the accident to Nicole. The incident that was in danger of taking her life. Except this was a corner of Corsica. Was it one with a link to the past, to some unrecognised history, some forgotten vendetta, some secret long lost? And what about Giuseppe, that lovelorn escapee? Had someone come to collect a due from Nicole as well as him?
The questioning reminded me that I really did not know Nicole as well as I thought. We had shared an intimacy that had been extremely passionate. A privacy between two people out of sight of the world, intense yet calm too, free of remorse, full of warmth. Ships that had passed in the night, but with time to exchange signals of desire and to fulfil moments of pure joy.
The detectives and the patrol-boat left. I felt an impulse to look at Nicole’s research materials in the sudden chill of the evening, the sun having long slipped beneath the headland. They had told me not to disturb anything, but had proved reluctant to trudge up the steep hillside to the house again for a second look. The one man who did was sufficiently exhausted by the climb as to only make a cursory look around. He reminded me I was sous dètention and could not leave the cove.
iv
I did not touch anything in the house that night, as instructed, but the next morning it was impossible to resist. Looking through the house again for signs of forced entry or theft with a new and watchful eye, I found nothing unusual. In the kitchen the table was covered in a mix of dishes of fruit, olives and some flower specimens being prepared for dissection. The coffee pot stood ready on the bottled gas burner. In Nicole’s study the table where she had collapsed still had the same specimens, test tube and plant samples. On the sideboard rows of bottles, seeds, leaves and roots all bore testimony to her summer occupation. On shelves were her botanical illustrations, with many comments and corrections scattered over the well-worn pages. In my room I had changed nothing, the mess exactly as usual with my papers and writings lying all over the table. No one had been to the house, whilst I had been questioned down at the taverne. No one ever did come, other than Antoine with his mules delivering goods.
It seemed an invasion to go in to Nicole’s bedroom, although we had spent many a passionate hour there in the afternoons – though never at night, when she had preserved her privacy, yet I felt it necessary to look now for clues, though I expected none.
Her few clothes, the light cotton shifts, the white linen shirts, the shorts and the tough jeans she wore some days to wade through the bristles and thorns of the m
aquis, were all in their usual places, with some casually thrown into drawers or the wardrobe. Her scent lingered in the room, the subtle hint of floral notes that were a by-product of her own pickings from the aromatic landscape. We lived – we had lived – in a permanent haze of Nature’s perfumes with which kept us entranced. She was gone, but her presence remained in the air.
The logbooks I found in the bottom drawer of her bedside table, a corner of her life I had never had cause or need to enter before. She had kept this table and the drawers in her desk out-of-bounds in the most clear manner. I had never wanted to intrude, but now I held in my hands two books of notes, one for the previous year, one for the current summer. For a moment I felt I had no desire to enter into matters outside our ‘contract’, and a strong sense of guilt imposed itself on me. I held them in my hands for quite some time, looking around once again to see if there was some other more obvious source of information to give clues to this sudden change in our lives – but there was none.
I took the logbooks back to the terrace and opened a bottle of rosé wine from the cool-box, and sat down apprehensively in the shade of the vine. At first I gazed blankly out to sea, glimpsing the narrow gap between the headlands. It was calm and there was no wind even up here. The cove was silent except for the vague tinkle of glasses down at the taverne occasionally drifting on the wind. A yacht crew would be enjoying the relaxing hospitality and cooking of Angelique. She would have some income despite the possible impact on the cove from the tragedies inflicted on it. I wondered again whether their business would suffer if the word got around amongst the cruising yachts that Giuseppe’s murder had taken place.
The Dark Side of the Sun Page 16