Downfall

by Sally Spedding

  “How d’you mean?”

  His earlier bonhomie hadn’t lasted long. He was still resurrecting my upsetting statement about being bi-sexual.

  “She’s either silent or garrulous. Up and down…”

  “Merci,” I say, and mean it, for she is to me – a mere fifteen-year-old – like Aphrodite. A Greek goddess with her golden tresses, her prominent breasts which on those rare occasions I’d met her, had pressed so tightly against whatever she’d been wearing, that her nipples had been clearly visible. Last summer, she’d come to Paris, and after dinner one evening, when Papa had gone into his study, she’d let me remove her brassière to stroke them until they were quite hard, like my copain Pierre Parrano and my magazines had shown me…

  Why just then, as we finally arrive at the Auberge de l’Aube, which certainly doesn’t live up to its advertisement photos, I can’t help still feeling that is only part of the story. My story. That something important is absent.

  6.

  13.10 hrs.

  Without the normal obstacles of trees and high, untrimmed hedges, the sleety snow hitting Delphine’s eyes had swiftly covered the flat hectares surrounding Bellevue. An area truly resembling the edge of the world. Where sky and land seemed indistinguishable, severed by those monstrous pylons. Aliens, she thought, making for the barn in case Julie had returned there. Hoping that any earlier paw marks might lie hidden beneath the snow.

  She held out a slice of baguette and cheese at the ready, just in case, but soon saw that the makeshift bed of straw bales was still empty. The recent, dry food untouched.

  “Julie?”

  Then she whistled as when they’d once kept sheep.

  Silence, not even a whimper. Her own breath the only one in that muffled place where the topmost tip of that strange, iron cross bore a little blob of white.

  As she drove her 2CV in a circle past the farmhouse, she saw her father peering out from the side of the net curtain. She pretended not to notice him, for he mustn’t think anything was amiss, and as for the unseen vehicle she’d been convinced had actually come into the yard, that too.

  The curtains quickly closed, and she turned her wiper speed to max, crashing into second gear ready for ‘La Gorge’s’ upward slope ahead.

  *

  “Damn.”

  Near the top, she had to quickly climb up the nearside bank to allow a huge, dung-spattered tractor room to pass. But instead of moving on, it paused, engine growling. She opened her window to ask what the problem was, but the stench from its gargantuan wheels soon made her close it.

  The driver was a youngish, stubbled guy whom she guessed to be in his late twenties, wearing a red, woollen hat and enormous black gloves. From the way he angled himself towards her, he clearly had something to say.

  “Yes?” She said, this time with her window open just a fraction. “I’m in a hurry.”

  “And I’m heading for Bellevue. I need a new exhaust on this old bastard.”

  “Just down there on the left,” she volunteered, wondering who he was. “There’s a shrine outside. You can’t miss it.” She then realised there’d never been a sign outside, unlike the hamlet’s other farms and homesteads. But Papa’s main source of income had been repairing these monsters, so perhaps this was a new customer, and who was she to lose him possible business?

  “I know. Cheers.”

  He revved up, clearly uninterested in the shrine that had suddenly appeared yesterday morning. “By the way,” he added, “there’s a roadkill further up from here, near the turning for Les Bourrels. Did my best to avoid it, sorry, but you should be able to…”

  “It? What does that mean?”

  But his engine’s din drowned out any reply, and then he was off, dumping a mix of slush and shit on her off-side wing mirror and little window.

  “Merci to you, too,” she muttered after him, bumping off the bank and into what the John Deere machine had left behind. It didn’t take long to reach the obstacle he’d mentioned. From the moment she spotted the black and white heap, half-covered by pink snow, she knew. Orange binder twine too, tight around Julie’s front and back legs. A look of terror in her dead, wide-open eyes.

  “Mon Dieu…”

  Delphine crouched over her pet, blinded by tears and the unrelenting white onslaught from above, listening to the deadly hush surrounding them where not even a predatory bird of prey was on the prowl. She cast around for the slightest clue as to who or what might have dumped Julie there, but found nothing. She then pulled out her phone, punched in the number she’d been given that morning by Lieutenant Lise Confrère.

  That same officer picked up, gave her name and status, then asked who was calling.

  “I’m supposed to be seeing Captain Valon,” explained Delphine, having given her name. She tried to steady her trembling voice, seeing her breath escape in small, battered puffs. “But I’ve just found our dog’s been run over. Deliberately tied up and dumped in the middle of the lane by our farmhouse…” She took a gulp of cold, wet air. “I don’t know what’s going on here. She hadn’t done anyone any harm. She was… she was…”

  The shining sound of winter slinging its way across the land, bore the rest of her words away.

  “I’m so sorry, Mademoiselle Rougier. These things sometimes happen in small communities, and they’re usually…”

  “I can guess what you’re going to say,” Delphine interrupted her. “Vendettas. Acts of revenge, and yet…” Again, she ran out of steam. Took a deep breath. “Look, please can you come over? There may be fibres, even prints. Whoever did it, may try to kill one of us next.”

  A pause, in which Delphine could hear the Lieutenant conferring with a colleague, and straightaway knew the answer.

  “I’m sorry, but there’s a flu epidemic doing the rounds and right now, we’re short-staffed, but you and your parents could examine your dog thoroughly and report back to us. Even take some photographs. We have to prioritise, which is why we’d still like you over here before the weather worsens. There are things you should know, and,” she paused again, “things you perhaps should tell us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  A brief pause.

  “Your parents received a very serious threat on Sunday morning while you and they were out. Both came in to see us yesterday. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said, but given the circumstances…”

  It took a few seconds for this surprising news to sink in, and when it had, the Lieutenant was no longer on the line. Perhaps that threat, had referred to the pylons or Electricité de France’s compensation to her parents for the despoilment of so many hectares. She’d heard of the opposition to what many felt was ‘a gross violation’ especially by those inhabitants happy to continue using their own generators. Perhaps that very useful payment running out so soon had been the Rougiers’ punishment.

  *

  As for poor Julie, she had to move her quickly, before another vehicle appeared round the bend. Before her parents dragged themselves out of doors to look for their dog. But what if that tractor driver had already called at Bellevue and reported what he’d seen?

  Gritting her teeth, Delphine gathered up the half-frozen, bloodied bundle that had played so big a part of her life and placed her on a rug in the 2CV’s boot. The journey home was more a slide than a drive and she almost skidded past their yard’s entrance beyond which, sure enough, that same massive red tractor was positioned in her usual parking spot.

  François Rougier stood on the doorstep, arms slapping back and forth across his chest, obviously talking business with the driver who stood propped up against his tractor’s filthy radiator. She heard the words ‘devis’ – estimate – and possible dates for the job to be started. Both turned to face her as she walked towards them with the bulked-out rug in her arms. “All yours,” she said, passing Julie’s limp remains to the man who’d first brought her home as a puppy. “Do you know something? I’m pissed off with your secrets. And this might be to do with them. Some accident, not.”r />
  She then showed her father the orange baler twine that had made Julie’s escape impossible. “So perhaps when I come back, you might tell me about that threat, and what the hell is really going on here?”

  LUCIUS

  6 p.m.

  I’m still dwelling upon last summer and how, when Papa had been unexpectedly called out to one of his richest, elderly patients, Aunt Estelle encouraged me into the small, private courtyard behind our house in the Rue des Capucins. Here stood the hammock he used for relaxation, where she added to my instruction in the art of pleasuring a woman. While for my part, I showed her what would drive me to the point of no return. Like leaping, faint in the head, from the very highest peak.

  “You’ve a wonderful weapon, Lucius,” she’d whispered afterwards, helping me get dressed. “I’m sure you’ll make many, many women very happy, and after all the trouble here in this city and in the world, that’s a gift. So, use it sparingly.”

  And here I am, in the middle of bloody nowhere, with my cock all excited just thinking of her, while Papa orders dinner for two, from the owner of the Auberge de l’Aube.

  Pretty enough, with brown hair piled up in a trendy beehive style, but she’d eyed me with suspicion from the word go, and if she’s not careful, might soon be getting more than she’s bargained for…

  7.

  13.20 hrs.

  Delphine hadn’t liked speaking to her father like that, especially in front of a stranger. But terminal illness or not, he and her mother had put her in that position. It was OK for her to keep grafting at a rubbish job for the lowest pay and handing most of her money over to them every Friday afternoon, but not it seemed, to want explanations for their behaviour. For a start, there’d still been no convincing reason for him creating that weird shrine poking so prominently from their front hedge.

  What they also didn’t realise was their glumness had become corrosive, like dark brown oxide which disfigures the beauty of white marble. Or the warble fly in a horse’s gut. In other words, her life.

  Anger kept the sole of her boot on the car’s accelerator, and more than once came the kind of skid he’d taught her how to drive into, not against. Yes, there’d been good moments, even the occasional fun moments and she’d be wrong to forget them. But today, especially with two recent deaths swamping her mind, they’d vanished.

  LABRADELLE 6 KILOMETRES.

  She was now on the D338, whose official title was the Rue du Mans, amongst other cars, trucks and juggernauts, all keeping to the speed limit in single file on the whitening tarmac. Her skimpy little wipers struggled to keep what had become pure snow from collecting along the base of her windscreen, and several times her vision was limited to a bare minimum strip of clear glass. She switched to dipped headlights which she realised needed adjusting against the encroaching darkness.

  Over a slippery, unmanned railway crossing and up into the market town itself where Christmas decorations had sprung up since midday. Here an inflatable Santa climbing up a drain pipe. There another perched by a chimney on houses lining the thoroughfare where every chemist and Tabac, boulangerie and food store seemed either closed or about to close. That poor baby wouldn’t be seeing even one Christmas, she thought bleakly, turning off by the wind-battered GENDARMERIE sign. Aware that Julie’s blood still clung to her coat and gloves. Worse, she could still smell her, unlike that tiny, little boy who’d had no smell at all.

  And then a thought suddenly occurred to her. What if he hadn’t been real? If the police were keeping that quiet for some reason. After all, she’d seen advertisements for ‘new-born’ dolls so lifelike they’d creeped her out, and what about those images of embalmed, almost full-term foetuses on show in Orléans that in Le Figaro’s Arts pages, that had looked so alive. Afterbirth and all? But no. These thoughts were just her way of coping with a terrible reality. There’d been definite blue-black bruising around his little neck.

  The single-storey building she needed soon came into view.

  “Too small to ever house a caserne,” her father had once remarked. No lover of the law. “So that lot have it cushy. Living rent-free wherever they want…”

  She’d argued that gendarmes still had to be on call twenty-four hours a day, but he’d merely walked off, and as she pulled up the handbrake in the empty, public parking area, fear returned. Supposing she was now a suspect who wouldn’t be going home for a while and surely lose her job? That blonde gendarme would have said or given a clue. Wouldn’t she?

  *

  The gendarmerie’s side entrance boasted an intercom, and once Delphine had given her name and address, the reinforced door opened into a waiting room stickered with posters on how to prevent distraction burglaries, the dangers of Romanian ‘gitans’ and where the nearest defibrillator was situated. Nothing on dogs being tied up and run over, and no sign of the female Lieutenant who’d taken her last, desperate call.

  “Mademoiselle Rougier?” Came a voice from behind. She twisted round to see Captain Serge Valon, less flushed than at the hotel, but also less groomed. As if he’d also had a tough time. “Thank you for coming.” He then glanced towards the one unshuttered window in his office, beyond which the sky was darkening.

  “Look, time is of the essence, so please sit down. May I call you Delphine?”

  “Of course.”

  “Would you like a coffee?”

  “Yes please.” But a second cigarette would have been even better. Also, if he’d spoken about Julie, but no. Maybe he’d not been told. He swiftly delivered her a piping hot café long, then with a ring-bound file open in front of him and his computer screen showing the hotel’s empty reception area, continued speaking.

  “There are some puzzling discrepancies surrounding yesterday, Sunday 30th November. Our task has been compromised by the lack of any CCTV footage since that morning. An obstacle we don’t need.” He turned the screen further round so she too, could clearly see it. “Otherwise, anyone arriving or leaving the hotel by the normal routes could have been identified. Now we’re even more reliant on truthful eyewitnesses.” He leaned towards her. His fine brown eyes almost too intense. “According to your Statement, you stayed on for some time after your morning shift ended. Correct?”

  She glanced at her untouched coffee and nodded.

  “I was in the restaurant having lunch,” she said, unwilling to add that going home to Bellevue had been a less inviting prospect. “And as I’m only a chambermaid, I wouldn’t really have been interested in who came and went.”

  “But Madame Arouar says you’re very observant and,” he leaned even further forwards. “Honest. So, please…”

  A blush began to creep upwards from below her coat collar. She not only ached for another cigarette, but Julie’s blood on her coat was turning brown and beginning to smell.

  “Normally, I sit near the kitchen,” she said. “Out of the way of guests, but as only three tables were occupied by businessmen in suits, I chose to be near the bar area where Didier, who’s the barman, always cheers me up.”

  “He’s been very helpful, too. Please go on.”

  “I also wanted to be near the new tropical fish tank that’s been installed. It’s really calming, and some of the fish are amazing.”

  “They are indeed, and…?”

  “I remember hearing the clicking of high heels across the reception area, and noticed Josette Lecroix with her coat and scarf on, running towards the exit. I assumed she was off on a quick errand somewhere. Most of the desk girls do that if they can. They work longer shifts than me.”

  Delphine saw a frown etch a crease across the Captain’s otherwise smooth forehead.

  “So far, there’s no reply at her flat,” he continued. “Monsieur Salerne did try calling there just after your awful discovery, but no luck. She’s not answering her phone either, so perhaps…” that intense gaze fixed on her again. “You might like to try. She might respond to you. How well do you know her?”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘know,’ but we sometime
s smoke together out the back, near the paddling pool. Chat about stuff, you know. She’s got a few family problems too…”

  She’d not meant to add that, but his neat, dark eyebrows had already met his hairline.

  “Oh?”

  “Usual stuff. Split-ups, sibling rivalry… She’s not under suspicion, is she?”

  Just then, Lieutenant Lise Confrère entered through a discreet door set in the far wall. Upon seeing Delphine, she immediately seemed embarrassed as if she’d not noticed the turquoise 2CV parked where it was.

  Having introduced her as “our last man standing,” Valon immediately headed for the coffee machine again.

  “We have met,” said Delphine, surprised he’d not mentioned the fact. Instead, he handed his colleague an espresso and gestured to a spare chair. However, she wasn’t quite ready to sit down. Her nose was red, while her loose, less-than-blonde hair dripped from beneath her képi onto her shoulders. Shorter, stockier than Delphine remembered, she ignored her drink. Focussed instead on the bloodstains disfiguring the yellow coat in front of her.

  “I never said about your dog or your parents coming in to see me,” she took off her sodden outdoor gear and hung them behind the main door, causing a pool of water to creep across the tiled floor. “Sorry. There just aren’t enough hours in the day.”

  “It’s OK,” said Delphine, aware that she might need these two people on her side further down the line. “I know the feeling.”

  Captain Valon coughed. Back at his desk, he tapped his open file. “Mademoiselle Rougier has just agreed to call in on Josette Lecroix and Adriana Facchietti. They may relate to her better than either of us at this early stage.”

  Delphine stared at him.

  Adriana as well?

  A knot of panic hit her already unstable stomach. Lieutenant Confrère glanced at her, then sat down, clearly unhappy.