Downfall

by Sally Spedding

  ‘Those who mean harm… ‘

  Instinctively, she touched her bruise.

  “So, you thought at the time my father was involved?” She followed his springy stride out into the dark hallway.

  “That’s for you to ask him. And your mother. I’d say they’re lucky to have you.”

  He unlocked the front door and held it open on the unpleasant morning. The faint smell of manure met her nose. Distant neighing.

  “It was me who found that dead baby boy.”

  “I know.” He began to close the door behind her. “Also that it may be best to leave well alone.”

  “How can I?”

  The door clicked shut.

  She put her ear to its cold wood and heard his footsteps receding along the tiled hall. Then for some reason, during the empty silence which followed, recalled that hungry goldfish marooned in Basma Arouar’s office. Another victim, but hopefully not for long.

  22.

  09.10 hrs.

  ‘Devious fucker…’

  How could it be best to leave the dead baby case well alone?

  Although Éric Longeau was a man with a lot to be cheerful about, he was also haunted by the past. Delphine recalled the sudden tightening of his facial muscles at the Seghers’ surname. A tremor in his eyes.

  Just like at the Rue des Bergers house, she’d planned to show him that printed-out photograph but was glad she hadn’t. Yet it was also his virulent loathing of his own son and crude dismissal of Martin Dobbs that accompanied her south to Le Mans. There, with luck, she might discover more facts about that fateful last day of November forty-five years ago.

  Tired of being warned off this and that and to be careful, it was time to move on, and one piece of good news was that Cousteaux’s Marc Caballo whom she’d just phoned, promised he’d take Basma’s stranded goldfish home for his young daughter. However, when she’d also queried about that possible suicide, he didn’t reply.

  *

  Through the sleety rain, Delphine spotted the turning for Bonlieu, Pauline’s village, and was momentarily tempted to take it. But that household like her own, already had enough problems without her adding to them. As for her own parents, they knew her phone number, didn’t they? ‘Sorry’ from one of them would be a good start.

  She reached Beaumont-sur-Sarthe as always, with mixed feelings. An undeniably pretty town whose Christmas lights winked across and alongside its main road. But then seeing the stone-arched entrance to her old convent school where for seven years, her own personal Original Sin was blitzed by the regular chemotherapy of ritual. The Catechism and Rosary; lives of impossibly pious saints. What use was any of it now? she mused, switching to dipped headlights as the neighbouring flat, monochrome countryside spread out on either side of the road. Hardly the Peak District, of which Martin had spoken so fondly.

  Martin…

  Whom she didn’t know at all.

  If he phoned – and he might – she’d keep things general with no mention of where she’d just been and what she was about to do. Last night had changed everything. Touching her one minute, then his bombshell, of which he’d seemed proud. Not even saying goodbye to her, and that had hurt most of all.

  Nearing Le Mans’ northern outskirts, she caught a quick glimpse of the Mondiale Enterprise Zone, and even more briefly, the roof and upper windows of her hotel. Particularly the third floor. Strange to think of it as closed and silent, and this made her re-check her mirrors for any large, green car.

  She also thought fleetingly of Patrick Gauffroi. How he’d fixedly watched her drive away from his lonely home.

  *

  The public car park in the Place de l’Éperon was already almost full by the time she arrived there. Her only option, given that the street leading to Le Maine Express was pedestrianised.

  Delphine checked herself in her rear-view mirror. The bruise on her cheek still too darkly prominent. There might be a chemist in the nearby Rue Barbier, where she could buy some concealer. Not a priority, though.

  Her watch showed nine-thirty, with still too much to do. However, the moment she left her car to buy a ticket, the sky became the colour of her blanket at Bellevue. Wartime grey, releasing a different kind of hail that could do damage.

  Worse, her umbrella refused to open and by the time she’d reached the newspaper’s chic reception area awash with arty posters and an exotic bamboo plant, she must have looked wretched. Her hair a wet helmet stuck to her head. Her coat soaked through.

  Yet her misery was short-lived. A young woman labelled Giselle, wearing expensive high heels and an extremely short skirt, who was perched behind her desk, immediately made Delphine feel welcome and found a towel with which to dry her hair.

  Giselle gestured bleakly towards the front window being hit hard by hailstones.

  “I’ve a new Peugeot soft-top,” she volunteered. “So, pooff! Forget it.”

  “Mine’s a 2CV.”

  She checked her watch. “Where’s it parked?”

  Delphine told her.

  “So’s mine. I could go and check on them both if you like.”

  Delphine thanked her but insisted that she really wasn’t worried. She showed her ID card, relieved her name wasn’t recognised, and explained she was there for more information on a cold case.

  “How cold?”

  “Very.”

  “I meant which particular date are you interested in?”

  “30th November 1968,” Delphine replied, and the moment those three words fell from her lips, a thought like a strand of old, black gristle, delivered a connection. Hadn’t François Rougier created that wonky shrine outside Bellevue on Sunday? That very same day and month?

  “Right,” Giselle broke in. “There was a lot going on then, what with all the student unrest across Europe, the Vietnam War, and aftermath of the Prague Spring…”

  “I know, but I’m looking for something more specific, more local than that,” Delphine glanced at her watch to see that ten minutes had already passed. “The Bois des Hermites case.”

  Giselle began searching on her Apple Mac. A machine for which Delphine could have chewed her arm off, and while she waited, spotted yesterday’s edition of the paper, whose banner headline made her gasp.

  HOTEL OF DEATH TO SHUT UNTIL AFTER CHRISTMAS.

  My God.

  Beneath this were three photographs. One of Roland Seligman in more youthful days; the other two of that same hotel looking forlorn. Its signature palm trees by the main entrance now absurd. Delphine imagined herself passing through those revolving glass doors and making her way to the Rest Room for a coffee and brief chat with her co-workers, before taking the lift to the third floor and her chores. Mourning a lost routine.

  There was also summary news of the dead Basma Arouar and Carlos Serovia, with no mention of them having been married, ending with a plea from the police to the public for any information they might have, however small.

  “Are you alright?” asked Giselle, before glancing back at her screen.

  “Yes, thanks.” However, Delphine was doing the maths. There’d be at least three weeks’ pay, because that was the deal for the hotel’s lower orders. But why hadn’t either Martin or Jean-Marie Longeau mentioned this latest development?

  All at once, the desk phone began to ring. Giselle picked it up, covered the receiver and looked at Delphine.

  “Best you see Jérôme Meyer in our Archive Store. The police often use it to check alongside their records. I’ll call him once I’ve dealt with this. Mind you, he can be a bit cagey. To him, his material is his baby.”

  That last word made Delphine start. Because of necessity, her investigations would have to stay secret. But for how much longer?

  *

  Accompanied by Giselle and the din of hailstones hitting the roof overhead, she was shown into a large, beamed room at the very top of the building, given over to filing cabinets and wall-to-wall shelving. All were stacked tight with the newspaper’s earliest editions – almost bro
wn with age – to the latest. The smell of the past tangible enough to make her sneeze, and cause a short, bespectacled man with a thatch of grey hair, to look up from his computer screen. One of many, she noticed, plus printers taking up the end wall, where a black-out blind hid any possible view from the one window. In the far corner, stood a state-of-the-art photocopier, alive with an array of winking lights.

  “Delphine Rougier?” His substantial eyebrows embellished the question.

  “That’s right.”

  “I recognise the name.”

  Great.

  She waited for the rest, but instead he stood up to shake her hand, paying no attention whatsoever to her birds’ nest hair, or her stinging bruise. “Jérôme Meyer. Former editor for many a long year, and now archivist.”

  His grip was firm and sincere. Immediately, and maybe foolishly, she trusted him.

  Having thanked Giselle, he glanced up at the noisy ceiling. “God’s angry,” he observed. “And quite right too. Now then, Mademoiselle, I’m told you’re interested in 30th November 1968 and the Bois des Hermites case?”

  That was quick.

  She nodded, then, because he obviously already knew of her hotel job and the rest, short-cut as to why. “I’m unofficially checking a few things out for one of our local gendarmes,” she began, bending the truth just a little.

  “Which gendarme?”

  Pause.

  That same photocopier was giving birth to a spreadsheet, then several monochrome posters. The strange sounds from its innards combined with the hailstones, unsettled her.

  “It won’t go beyond these four walls,” he added.

  “Lieutenant Lise Confrère at Labradelle. It’s connected to her late father.”

  “Nicolas. Lieutenant Colonel.”

  The former editor sat down at his machine and indicated a nearby vinyl chair. “I’ll see what I can do. By the way, just to put things in context here, and in case you didn’t know, Le Maine Express was originally known as Le Journal until the time of our liberation. Unfortunately, a collaborationist paper, which has since made subsequent editors including myself, committed to maintaining independence and open minds.”

  “We touched on this at school,” she said. “But I’ve often thought if your country was never occupied by the enemy how can you judge one that was?”

  *

  By 10.15 hours, with a promised cup of coffee about to arrive, Delphine had learnt more of Nicolas Confrère’s agonising and lonely death on Christmas Eve, twenty years after Lucius Seghers’ mysterious disappearance. Someone had apparently planted a cleverly-disguised man-trap in his woodland near Solesmes. Not only that, but he too, like Éric Longeau, had been convinced till the day he died that the missing Parisian teenager had survived.

  Nicolas 88…

  “How did you know?” Delphine asked, detecting the faintest smell of dog. “Who reported it?”

  “His daughter, an only child. She’d also remembered him saying he possessed tangible evidence about that case. What exactly, she never said.”

  “Why not share it with the police? The gendarmerie? Whoever the Prosecutor and Judge had been at the time?”

  “Who knows? Fear, maybe.” He then turned to her, pushing his glasses above his forehead. “Besides, the case never came to court, and I’ve only spoken to Lise Confrère a few times since his death. Since she became a Lieutenant, my overpowering sense was of a wary young woman. And yes, I’ve often wondered myself what this so-called ‘evidence’ was, or is…”

  “Lucius Seghers was raped, then dragged to the River Sarthe, and left for dead. That’s what this article I found says.” Delphine extracted the print-out and unfolded it, trying to avoid meeting the teenager’s cold, staring eyes.

  “We can do better than that,” said Meyer, without any hint of one-upmanship “His father sent us several items in the hope of finding him, but what, in hindsight, was the point? On 30th November 2000, he phoned here saying he’d not heard from him since.”

  “Where did he call from?”

  Meyer looked puzzled. “I don’t think it was checked, and shortly afterwards all our connections were updated.”

  “Had his Paris home been searched at the time?”

  Meyer nodded. “To no avail. Then when he retired, he sold it. Or so I heard.”

  “Apparently, he went to the Cote d’Azur.”

  The archivist smiled.

  “You have been busy.”

  “But I’ve not had time to check Henri Seghers. Or rather, Doctor Henri Seghers.”

  “He may be using another name. Grown weary of the publicity surrounding the case. I’d be tempted to do the same…”

  “So, he could be still alive?”

  “Certainly, with a Mediterranean climate and diet. Being in your mid-to-late seventies is nothing these days. Especially if you’re a gerontologist.”

  “Really?”

  A nod.

  “And his wife?”

  “She died in 1964 when their son was eleven. So now that boy would be either forty-nine or fifty.”

  That would fit the bill…

  “Any other close relatives?”

  “Not that I’ve heard of. But you do know that once a case has been investigated, it can’t be re-opened if more than ten years has elapsed?”

  “That’s rubbish.”

  A nod, then silence, save for the dwindling weather attack on the roof.

  “But what if the criminal is identified later?”

  “Makes no difference,” he shrugged. “A travesty, I agree, especially when you consider the serial killer Francis Heaulme’s case. He was believed to have been active long before that poor nurse’s murder in Brittany in 1989, but for any crime before 1981, the law couldn’t touch him.”

  “Any exceptions?”

  “I’m neither a flic nor lawyer. You’ll have to check.”

  Meyer returned his glasses to his nose and clicked on a different search name.

  St Eustache.

  Delphine blinked away her nagging doubts, for there lay the Cadastre – Land Registry – map for the small but sprawling Commune that had been her world for too long. Most dwellings stood, like Bellevue, marooned in their flat hectares. But unlike its neighbours, the farm had been sold by an elderly widow to François and Irène Rougier just one month after the crime. Only the Gauffroi’s place had more land, she noticed, while Bertrand du Feu the least of all.

  Meyer was speaking again.

  “The Sarthe really is some river. See how it widens and floods beyond St. Eustache on its way south. Look.” He pointed to the curving, thickening blue line. “And every day, my sister would watch for anything unusual as it flowed past her house.”

  “Your sister?”

  “She lived just outside the Commune’s southern boundary until she was flooded.”

  “Please go on.”

  “There’d been a lot of rain that November. Non-stop. She’d never seen such a torrent, and even on her death bed here in Le Mans three years ago, claimed that not even a giant, could have withstood that river’s force of water. So, you see, we may never know what happened to the lad.”

  Giselle finally brought in a tray of coffee. She handed them a mug each then addressed the former editor.

  “The Cousteaux gendarmerie has just phoned.” She lowered her voice, but not low enough. “They want anything we’ve got on that Algerian woman found hanged there yesterday.” She also passed him a small piece of paper with a name and number written on it. “The Public Prosecutor’s breathing down their necks. They’re also trying to contact Jean-Marie. No joy so far.”

  “Jean-Marie?” Delphine repeated without thinking. Then thought about Martin and what digging he might be doing.

  Meanwhile, a frowning Jérôme Meyer dropped two brown sugar lumps into his mug. “As a roving reporter, he should be on call.” He then drained his cup in one go.

  “Everyone else is so tied up with deadlines.” Giselle glanced down at Delphine. “It’s hopele
ss. And his office at home is closed. Until when, who knows?”

  “And I’m supposed to be the angel bloody Gabriel.” Meyer began punching numbers on his phone. “Why, in the end, I asked for this job. Storage and retrieval…” He then paused to give his name to whoever had answered.

  Éric Longeau.

  “Is your roving reporter son around by any chance?” he asked him with curt familiarity. “We’re being leaned on.” His frown then deepened. Bad news, obviously, thought Delphine. “Well, if he does get in touch, call me. OK? Or better still, Captain Gayak himself. Yes, he can be a prize jerk, but anything for a peaceful life.”

  Call ended, and Delphine’s coffee still untouched. She couldn’t hold out any longer, and while the hailstones above gave way to sleet, she relayed what she knew of her dead boss. Her previous, hidden life in Saint-Denis with a man also dead, and a possible, albeit slender connection with that infanticide at the hotel. As she spoke, Meyer wrote in shorthand, and when she’d finished, let his pen fall from his hand.

  “All very interesting, but so far, we’ve been given no more detail on Basma Arouar’s death in her own home, and to me it stinks.”

  *

  With Giselle gone, she and Meyer trawled through any possible leads from other media sources in the Capital. They found half a column from Le Canard Enchainé from the previous June, arguing for state funding to make brothels safer for the women they employed. Especially in those dodgier banlieues such as La Défense where vicious attacks on street-walkers were common.

  “Keep going,” Delphine encouraged him, finally taking a sip of her tepid drink. “And if there’s nothing else, perhaps I could phone Le Canard myself, if you didn’t have the time.”

  Was that another small smile? she wondered, as he duly punched the keyboard with his squared-off fingers and nice nails.

  BROTHEL ATTACKS IN SAINT-DENIS.

  “Hello?” He said, suddenly sitting back in his chair. “Take a look at this.”

  And at that moment, with her blood turned cold, Delphine witnessed another piece of the murky puzzle falling into place.

  23.