Downfall

by Sally Spedding

  Something wasn’t tying up, she thought, shoving her pine-scented logs into the wood burner’s ash-filled bowels. Why had that man seemed so keen to leave the hotel by outside steps rather than the lift? And unless having been grown in a laboratory, the poor baby had come from a woman’s body. Or that of a girl. And just then, Delphine sensed a small light glowing in the back of her mind. Perhaps someone unable to give her new child a future. The result of rape, maybe? Perhaps ordered to kill it for religious reasons, or paid to, for expediency’s sake, to avoid a scandal? These possible motives stacked up in her mind like the woodpile in the barn as she struck a match, letting it rest on the lichen-covered side of the lowest log until the flame strengthened. Until the crackling began.

  Then suddenly came the noise of an unfamiliar car engine drawing closer to the farmhouse. Julie’s ferocious barking obliterated the rest, but Delphine jumped up to peer out through the front window’s net curtain. Yes, her 2CV was where she’d left it, but as for any sign of another vehicle or anything unusual, there was none. Only the spindly cross, and further away, those looming steel giants straddling the flat, bare fields. An invasion of sorts that had kept the Rougier’s afloat since the last earth-moving truck had left.

  She unbolted the front door, looked around and sniffed. Diesel, definitely – she’d been brought up on the stuff – and silence. A thick quietude that city dwellers would call ‘peace.’ But to her just then, it represented danger.

  “Julie?”

  Normally the friendly bitch would shimmy towards her and nuzzle into her hand. But not this time. Delphine called her name again.

  Nothing.

  That defenceless, dead baby came to mind, yet again. Hadn’t Pauline Fillol once said she was never a quitter? Pauline herself, a former physics student, had been robbed of a normal life, after falling from a faulty ride at a theme park near Paris, and was now a tetraplegic in a wheelchair. Someone Delphine often loved more than her own parents.

  *

  She stood behind the hedge, waiting for whatever vehicle had just ventured close by, to return, when all at once came headlights from the right, lighting up the lane once dug out by bare hands before the machine age. Its width barely enough for a normal-sized car, never mind much else. Once she’d recognised the familiar grey and rust of an aged Mitsubishi, she let out a sigh of relief. Relief, however, that was to be short-lived.

  LUCIUS

  Friday 30th November1968. 10.30 a.m.

  Through Bobigny and other unending, dreary suburbs we go, until we leave the new Péripherique to join the road south, where the sky is bigger than the land below it, and farms nestle among the flat hectares. Papa’s unusually relaxed, listening to France Musique, occasionally humming along with whatever song or orchestral piece is being broadcast. His hands steady on the steering wheel. His overtaking well-judged. His eyesight no longer a problem.

  “Well done,” I tell him, letting my right hand stray into my jeans pocket where I’d cut out the lining to access my cock. “And she’s not too thirsty.” Meaning the Jaguar. He smiles, and throws me an appreciative glance, before I tell him my other secret. He is a doctor, after all. “I think I might be bisexual and can’t help it. Do you mind, Papa? Will I go to Hell when I die? And will you still love me?”

  He takes his left hand off the wheel and pats my knee. His eyes still fixed on the busy road ahead.

  “Restraint is always better than profligacy, Lucius. Whoever your partner is. Even more so, should you later decide to have children. We’ll have a chat when we next stop, and as for Hell, you surely mean syphilis and gonorrhoea?”

  I let it go, wanting more than anything to remind him what I’d overheard six months ago. Him on the phone in his bedroom, booking himself into some brothel or other in Saint-Denis…

  Damned hypocrite…

  4.

  12.30 hrs.

  “Papa! Maman!”

  Delphine ran towards their old Mitsubishi Shogun as if she was still a kid who’d been abandoned for no good reason. “What did you mean in your note by ‘something’s come up?’” François Rougier’s lips pursed together, while Irène Rougier instead, stretched out her bare hand. Freckled, no wedding ring. That was a first…

  “We’ve just heard the news about your hotel,” she said, avoiding the question, then lowered her voice. “How truly terrible. And the police are hunting for a man driving a…”

  “Let’s go indoors, shall we?” Her father interrupted, pulled up the handbrake. “Can’t you see the girl’s getting wet?”

  Girl? I’m twenty…

  “She’s too pale. Look at her.”

  “I’m OK,” said Delphine, picking up on the tension. But how could she reveal she’d been the one to find the baby boy’s body? Especially to a woman who’d already suffered too much. Whose eyes were permanently ringed by sadness. She couldn’t.

  “I said, let’s get inside,” grumbled Papa, beginning to get out. “Even the damned birds round here have ears.”

  “I’ve re-lit the woodburner,” Delphine volunteered, casting around for any sign of Julie. Aware that south-westerly sleet was intensifying. “But I wasn’t sure about lunch...”

  “We’re not hungry,” he snapped, slamming his driver’s door shut. “Who would be?”

  “So, where’ve you been? And what’s happened?”

  “Not out here, if you don’t mind. Come on now,” he grumbled. “Hurry yourselves up.”

  *

  Pauline had said last week that her parents would be bringing in a real fir tree for Christmas and putting up their home-made decorations early to give her something cheerful to look at. Not so at Bellevue, where everything seemed cast in a terminal gloom. Even the woodburner’s meagre glow.

  François Rougier shed his ancient coat which added to his growing bulk and slung it over the back of one of the three chairs around the kitchen table. His once fine head of dark brown hair lay in thin, greying strands across his scalp, glistening damply beneath the one ceiling lamp. Although he’d been a handsome young man with the look of a typical Catalan, each passing year since buying Bellevue had taken the light from his eyes. Made him old before his time, as testified by the one and only photo album kept in her mother’s small wardrobe.

  He opened a beer which Irène had brought wordlessly from the fridge and sat down. A picture of despondency. Part of Delphine wanted to put her arms around him. Another to complain how she too had enough on her plate. That the morning’s grim discovery could have the severest repercussions, not only for the hotel but also all its employees in an area where paid work was like frost in July. Meaning herself and indirectly, them.

  “Tell her!” Irène ordered him from the kitchen as she sawed a baguette into slices. “She’s a right to know, and all we’ve got.”

  All we’ve got… From the woman who’d once lost everything, and for whom, she’d once said, having Delphine survive an ectopic pregnancy, was almost too much to bear.

  He looked up and his daughter felt another surge of pity for this man who’d once carried her to the long-abandoned École Maternelle on his proud, broad shoulders, smiling at the laughter this had caused. Who, after her appendix operation eight years ago, had brought her Julie, still a puppy.

  Julie…

  Delphine glanced towards the window, but not for long.

  “I’ve been given three months at the most,” he said.

  She spun round.

  “What for? I don’t understand.”

  “It’s a tumour,” her mother explained, placing the bread slices in the centre of the table. “On the brain, and they can’t operate.”

  Non…

  “Wouldn’t want them to, neither.” He took a gulp of his beer. “What’s the point? However,” those once-black eyes met hers. “There is something else I have to say to you.” She numbly watched her mother set down the butter dish, a single, large tomato and a square of goat’s cheese, the sight of which brought acid into her mouth.

  “You fin
d that baby’s killer before I die.”

  Was that flicker of hope she could see in those dulled eyes as he began to speak again? “There are too many wrongs not put right. Our justice system’s a joke. Our police corrupt. It seems only our soldiers can hold their heads high. Your friend Pauline’s father, for a start.”

  “But…”

  “No buts. You’re a Rougier.” He beckoned her to him, still in her coat. Took both her hands in his. Dried cement still beneath his thumbnails, she noticed. “I’ve a little money set aside for a rainy day if you need it. Just make an old man happy, hein?”

  However, her smile wouldn’t come, for she’d just remembered that strange assertion her boss had made in the hotel’s car park earlier.

  ‘I’ve been looking into your family.’

  But what could she possibly have found?

  LUCIUS

  Friday 30th November 1968. 2.50 p.m.

  You can imagine after that confession and the pompous advice, our journey is frosty, to say the least. My father, despite his unimpeachable bedside manner with his patients, never seems to know what to say to me. His only child. Which is why my little outburst was so untypical. I’d learnt, especially since Maman died choking and retching from her terrible disease, to keep my thoughts to myself. But there’d seemed something significant about this trip from the word go. Something too subtle to be defined. As if at the end of it, nothing would be the same again…

  “We can hire skis when we’re there,” he says at last, on a completely different subject, once we’d reached Alençon in poor light. “No point in scratching the car unnecessarily with a roof rack.” All very logical, but whenever we pass a vehicle loaded up with skis and bikes, I can’t help feeling something important is missing.

  We pause at a café for a croque monsieur and a chocolat chaud, which I must say is very welcome indeed, as is the fact that he shows me a postcard from Aunt Estelle wishing us bon voyage. Two gorillas grooming each other. This replaces any planned ‘chat’ about sexually-transmitted diseases, and so we leave with a spring in our step, eager to reach our overnight stop.

  5.

  13.00 hrs.

  Delphine left her parents to their silent lunch and made her way upstairs. She had to feel clean again, but what about her mind? It was in turmoil and would be until the hotel’s grim mystery was solved, and her father’s death sentence lifted.

  Despite her cold bedroom, she removed her coat, stripped away her work overall and tore off her jeans and jumper beneath it. Her movements quickening as she did so. Her ID badge with its photo seemed to glow like a tiny spectre in that unlit space under the eaves, whose floorboards recorded every step, unlike the muffling carpets in the Hôtel les Palmiers where people soundlessly appeared and disappeared. Except of course, for that mysterious guy from room 45.

  While sleet thrummed against the roof above her, she crept down the short flight of steps into the bathroom. Strangely enough, the biggest, bleakest room in the farmhouse where its one radiator never got warm. The shower water was little better, but then, having left her phone on the cracked cork-topped stool, she’d longed for its purifying flow. As if having shared that same space as a cold-blooded murderer, had contaminated her.

  Two minutes in, her phone rang, making her start. Unable to ignore it, she stepped out of the shower tray, shivering under the less than fluffy towel. Martin sounded breathless. Stressed.

  “Miko, I mean, Michel Salerne’s just been carted off to the ‘pig pen’ for withholding information,” he began, without asking where or how she was. “And apparently, Josette had become unwell at the start of her afternoon shift on Reception and took herself home. As things had been so quiet, he’d decided to take over the desk himself…”

  Delphine recalled the manager dashing into the hotel via its back entrance as she and her boss had been leaving. How taut and pale his face had seemed. His normally well-groomed hair a total mess.

  She shivered again, trying with one hand to pull the inadequate towel more tightly around herself. She’d never mastered the knack of gripping her phone between her ear and her neck, and now wasn’t the time to try.

  “That’s two women off sick at a crucial time,” she observed. “Is anyone checking up on them?”

  “God knows, but he’s done himself no favours charging in like a lunatic and then not saying much at all…”

  “Perhaps he’s scared. He certainly looked it to me and Basma.”

  Pause.

  “And he must have had sight of the checking-in and out books. You don’t think he’s…?”

  “Look, I can’t talk any more. It’s pretty toxic in what Seligman calls the ‘best hotel north of the Loire.’ I’ll call again once I’m out of here. If I get out of here. People still need feeding, damn them.”

  “OK.”

  Yet his tone alarmed her. He’d always been so positive about his job. Perhaps she should get over there. “Oh, by the way,” she added. “I meant to add that I’d seen the number plate of the mystery man in room 45.”

  “What department?”

  She wondered why he seemed even more anxious.

  “The Lot.”

  *

  Delphine didn’t finish her shower, just rubbed herself down, dwelling on not only the latest logistics of what had happened and of François Rougier’s almost impossible expectations, but also if Martin really did just more than merely like her. However, all this musing ended when she heard a strange noise curling upwards through the old farmhouse.

  She left the bathroom to lean over the wobbly bannisters and listen. Her newly-ringless mother was weeping.

  Just then, her phone rang again. This time, Captain Serge Valon of the Labradelle gendarmerie was asking if she could call in there as soon as possible.

  “If you’re feeling unwell, Mademoiselle, we can leave it until tomorrow, or else I could call round,” he added.

  “I’m fine, thanks,” she said rather too quickly. Anything than have him at Bellevue seeing the state of it. “I’m on my way.”

  “We appreciate your co-operation,” he added. “And when you arrive, please use the side entrance. It’s rather more discreet.”

  *

  ‘Le nouveau DETECTIVE’ magazine had gripped her from its very first edition. She’d followed its complex stories of murder and mayhem, wondering if the wrong person had been convicted, or if a suspect was on the run, where they might be. But her own research into crime rarely happened, because Papa had refused permission for France Telecom to install the internet, even though it would have helped his business. Even though the hamlet of Saint Eustache had been offered a good reduction. Therefore, a coveted Sony Ericsson or Motorola was off-limits, and not solely because of cost. She was sure Martin noticed this shortcoming, but never said.

  “It’s like having unwanted strangers in the room,” Papa had argued. “We’ve enough problems without that.”

  His wife had stayed silent, locked in her own world of sepia-coloured photographs and the bad memories they carried, so, Delphine had used the computer in the Office de Tourisme in Beaumont-sur-Sarthe, where the kindly receptionist had refused to let her pay. “One day, you’ll be a top-ranking officer,” she’d smiled on the last occasion before she’d retired. “And to think I’d have helped you on your way.”

  *

  “I won’t be long.” Delphine gave her wet-eyed mother a final hug, and her father a pat on his solid shoulder. “Captain Valon wants me over at Labradelle gendarmerie. It’s probably for more information about today which can’t be given over the phone.”

  Her parents shared a look of concern.

  “We never heard ours ring,” he said, clearing the table around his wife whose once-lovely hands still cradled her coffee mug. “Did we, wife?”

  “It’ll be dark before long,” she said, staring up at Delphine. “Please be careful.”

  “I will.”

  “And because you’ve not eaten anything today, I’m making bouillabaisse for dinner.
”

  Delphine buttoned up her coat, then rooted in the pockets for her gloves. “Thank you.” Yet mention of that thick stew alive with everything possessing fins or shells or both, brought another sickly lurch under her ribs.

  She waved back at the stricken, secretive pair, knowing that something even more serious than her father’s grim news had caused her mother to cry in such anguish. But finding out why, could only happen when they were alone together. For now, that would have to wait. First, she had to find Julie.

  *

  The further she walked along the hallway away from her parents, the more that oppressive miasma surrounding them seemed to clear. As far as she was aware, Martin Dobbs knew nothing significant about her background. Even if he did decide to snoop in the Staff Record book, there’d only be her skeleton CV. Date and place of birth, education – the usual bare bones of a life. No Personal Statement, as her interview with the hotel manager had been purely verbal, with him jotting down notes then immediately shredding them. As for references given by Sister Bernadette, her former head teacher and Pauline’s mother who’d been a department store buyer, they were lodged on file at the Les Palmiers’ headquarters in Tours.

  She opened the front door and hesitated.

  If the attractive restaurant manager realised what had really shaped her existence so far, apart from a punishing convent school and the simmering secrets and unending sorrow, he’d surely be giving her a wide berth, not keeping her updated. Even perhaps sensing a kindred spirit in a time of adversity. Wouldn’t he?

  LUCIUS

  4.15 p.m.

  “You know, Lucius, you do sometimes remind me of my sister, Estelle,” Papa says out of the blue, once we’d driven through some stone-built town called Beaumont-sur-Sarthe in even worse light, which wasn’t yet darkness, but a dreary, cloud-covered substitute.