Blood Wedding (25 page)

But what if she has? As soon as Valérie left, he went up to the floor where she lives. Reinforced door, three-point security lock. He stood for a long while, his ear pressed to the door. Every time one of the residents came into the building he pretended to be going up or down to a different floor, then returned to his listening post. Not a sound. He carried out the check four times over the course of the day. After 6.00 p.m., the sound from other apartments, from televisions, radios, conversations, however muted, made it impossible for him to detect the secret sounds that might indicate there was someone in Valérie’s supposedly empty apartment.

At about 8.00 p.m., when the young woman came home, Frantz was waiting a few steps up from the landing. Valérie opened up without a word. As soon as she was inside, he pressed his ear to the door again and, for a few minutes, listened to the everyday sounds (kitchen, toilet, drawers), the music and finally to Valérie’s voice in the hall, talking on the telephone. A clear voice. She is laughing, cheerful, but says, no, she does not feel like going out tonight, she has a deadline. She hangs up; more sounds from the kitchen, the radio.

Inevitably,
he is a little uncertain, but he decides to trust his instincts. He leaves the building. Seine-et-Marne is less than four hours’ drive.

*

Neuville-Sainte-Marie, thirty-two kilometres from Melun. Frantz drove around in circles for a while to make sure there were no police staking out the address. They probably did so in the early days, but they simply do not have the resources. And as long as public opinion is not stirred up by another murder . . .

He left the rental car in a supermarket car park on the outskirts of the village. Within forty minutes he has managed to walk to a small patch of woodland and from there to a disused quarry, where he forces open the entrance gate. From here he has an aerial view of the house. Not many people come here. A few couples, maybe, but they come by car. There is no risk of him being caught unawares: the headlights will alert him in time.

Sophie’s father appears only three times. First, to do his washing (the laundry room is in an outbuilding not directly accessible from the house), then to pick up his post (the mailbox is fifty metres down the path). The third time, he got into his car and drove off. Frantz hesitated: follow him? Stay here? He stayed. In a small village it would be impossible to follow him unnoticed.

Patrick Auverney was gone for one hour and twenty-seven minutes, and Frantz spent this time studying every detail of the house through his binoculars. When he first saw Valérie in the street, he had felt certain that Sophie was not with her, but seeing her father now, he feels unsure. Perhaps it is the fact that time is passing, the hours ticking by at an alarming rate that makes him hope for a swift solution. But there is a more fundamental reason for his decision to wait: if Sophie is not here, he has no
idea where she might have gone. Sophie is profoundly depressed, she has tried to kill herself. She is in a very fragile state. Ever since he heard that she fled the clinic he has been in a black rage. He wants to get her back. “I need to end this,” he says to himself over and over. He blames himself for postponing the inevitable for so long. Surely he could have ended it long ago? Has he not already got everything he wanted? He needs to find her, to finish this.

Frantz wonders what is going on in Sophie’s mind right now. What if she tries to kill herself again? No, in that case she would not have run away. There are lots of ways to end your life in a clinic, in fact it is probably the easiest place to die. She could have slashed her wrists again. Why run away? Sophie is completely disorientated. The first time she tried to escape, she sat for almost three hours in a café and came home without even remembering where she had been. He can think of only one answer: Sophie left without the faintest idea of where she might be going. She did not leave, she fled. She is trying to outrun her madness. She will eventually find sanctuary somewhere. And though Frantz has considered the problem from every angle, he cannot think where a wanted murderer like Sophie Duguet could turn for help if not her father. Sophie was forced to cut all ties in order to become Marianne Leblanc. Unless she has simply picked a destination at random (in which case she will have to come home soon), the only place she can come is here, to her father’s house. It is simply a matter of being patient.

Frantz adjusts the binoculars and watches as M. Auverney parks his car in the garage.

*

She still has work to do, but it has been a very long day and she is eager to get back. Since, as a rule, she starts late in the morning,
usually she does not leave before 8.30 p.m., sometimes 9.00. As she leaves, she calls out that she will come in early tomorrow, though she knows that this will not happen. On the drive back, she reminds herself over and over of the things she can and cannot do, the things she should and should not do. It is very difficult when you have never had much self-discipline. In the back of the taxi, she leafs through a magazine. In the street, she does not look around her. She keys in the door code and pushes it open. Since she never takes the lift, she does not do so today. She gets to her landing, takes out her keys, opens the door, goes inside, closes it and turns around. Sophie is standing in front of her, still wearing the clothes she arrived in the night before. Sophie flaps her hands impatiently, like a flustered policeman directing traffic. Keep doing exactly what she would usually do! Valérie gives a thumbs up, walks further into the apartment and tries to think what it is she usually does. But now she has a complete mental block. She cannot remember a thing. Despite the fact that Sophie made her repeat the list of actions several times, she can think of nothing. Pale as a ghost, Valérie stares at Sophie. She cannot move. Sophie places her hands on her friend’s shoulders and sits her on the chair next to the door where she usually leaves her bag. A second later, Sophie is on her knees, has taken off Valérie’s shoes and put them on herself. Now she moves about the apartment. She goes into the kitchen, opens and closes the fridge, goes into the bathroom, leaving the door open, waits for a moment, flushes the toilet, then goes into the bedroom. Valérie, meanwhile, has managed to regain her composure. She feels guilty. She is not equal to the task. Sophie reappears in the doorway. She gives her a nervous smile. Valérie closes her eyes, relieved. When she opens them again, Sophie is holding out the telephone and giving her a worried, quizzical look.
For Valérie this is a second chance. By the time she has dialled the number she is walking around the apartment herself. Be careful, Sophie has told her, nothing would be worse than overplaying things, so in a casual tone she says no, she doesn’t fancy going out tonight, she has a deadline, she gives a little laugh, spends longer than usual listening then says her goodbyes, yes, yes, you too, O.K., see you soon, then she goes back into the bathroom, washes her hands and takes out her contact lenses. When she re-emerges, Sophie has her ear pressed to the front door, she is staring at the floor, her face rapt as though praying.

They have not exchanged a word.

When she came in, Valérie noticed a faint smell of urine in the apartment. The smell is more pungent now. While putting away her contact lenses she noticed that Sophie has peed in the bath. She gives her a questioning look, gesturing towards the bathroom. Sophie abandons her listening post for a second, gives Valérie a sad smile and spreads her hands helplessly. She was determined not to make the slightest noise all day and had no choice. Valérie smiles in turn and mimes taking a shower.

Over supper they are silent. Valérie has read the long document Sophie spent the day writing in longhand. From time to time, as she reads, she hands her a page and gives a dubious frown. Sophie picked up the pen and carefully wrote more words in the margin. Valérie read slowly, shaking her head again and again, it all seems insane to her. Sophie turned on the television, allowing them to talk in low voices beneath the sound. Valérie finds these precautions excessive and faintly ridiculous. Sophie squeezes her arm and looks her in the eye. Valérie swallows hard. In a barely audible whisper Sophie says, “Can you buy me a laptop, a little one?” Valérie rolls her eyes. What a question!

She
gave Sophie everything she needed to change her bandages and watched as she did so. Sophie seemed thoughtful. She looked up for a moment and murmured:

“Are you still going out with that girl from the pharmacy?”

Valérie nodded. Sophie smiled.

“And she still can’t say no to you?”

A little later Sophie yawns, she is so tired her eyes are watering. She smiles by way of apology. She does not want to sleep alone. Before she dozes off, she puts her arms around Valérie. She wants to say something, but the words will not come. She hugs harder.

Sophie is sleeping like a stone. Valérie holds her close. Every time she sees the bandages she feels her stomach lurch and a shudder run through her body. It is strange. For more than ten years, she would have given anything to have Sophie here in bed with her. “But it had to be now, like this,” she thinks. It is enough to make her cry. She knows how much that desire played a part in her instinctive act of hugging Sophie when she showed up last night.

It had been almost 2.00 a.m. when Valérie was woken by the doorbell: Sophie had spent two hours making sure the building was not being watched. When she opened the door, Valérie immediately recognised that shadow of what was once Sophie in the woman standing in the doorway, arms dangling by her sides, wearing a black vinyl jacket. She looks like a smack addict, was Valérie’s first thought. Sophie looked ten years older, her shoulders sagged, she had dark rings around eyes that spoke of utter desperation. Valérie took her in her arms.

Now she lies listening to her steady breathing. Without moving, she tries to see Sophie’s face, but can make out only her forehead. She wants to turn her over, to kiss her. She feels tears
welling. She opens her eyes wide, determined not to succumb to such facile temptation.

She has spent most of today turning over in her mind the information, the interpretations, the signs, the theories that Sophie rattled off when she arrived last night. Valérie remembers the countless telephone calls, the anguished e-mails Sophie sent her over several months. Months when she thought her friend was going mad. In the nightstand beside the bed, she can sense the presence of a passport photograph that is Sophie’s most treasured possession, her spoils of war. It is not much: the sort of dreary photograph you realise looks awful the second it is spat out of the booth, but you think “It doesn’t matter” because it is only for a travelcard and you find yourself having to stare at it for a whole year, dismayed by how ugly you look. In the photograph, which Sophie has carefully preserved with layers of Sellotape, she has a slightly inane expression, a forced smile. The flash makes her complexion deathly pale. But in spite of these flaws, this photograph is the one thing Sophie values above all others. She would give her life for that photograph, if she has not already done so.

Valérie imagines Sophie’s bewilderment on the day she stumbled across it, imagines her turning it over and over in her hands. In that first instant, Sophie is too distraught to understand: she has slept for ten hours straight and woken with her brain more fogged than ever, her skull feels as though it is about to explode. But this discovery has such an effect on her that she drags herself to the bathroom, clambers into the bath, angles the shower nozzle above her head and, after a flicker of hesitation, grimly opens the cold tap. The jolt is such that the scream sticks in her throat. She almost faints, but steadies herself against the tiled partition, her pupils dilate, but still she stands in the freezing spray, her eyes
wide open. A few minutes later, wrapped in Frantz’s bathrobe, she is sitting at the kitchen table cradling a steaming bowl of tea and staring at the photograph. Though she has gone over and over it in her mind until her head aches, what she is staring at is literally impossible. She feels like throwing up. On a sheet of paper she jots down dates, reconstructs the logical timeline, correlates the events. She scrutinises the photograph, making a note of her haircut, of the jacket she was wearing when it was taken. But the conclusion is always the same: this is the photograph from the travelcard she kept in the handbag that was stolen in 2000 by a motorcyclist at the traffic lights on rue de Commerce.

Question: how can she have found it in Frantz’s flight bag? It is
impossible
that Frantz could have found it among the affairs of Marianne Leblanc because it has been missing for more than three years.

She had been looking for a pair of old sneakers in the hall cupboard when she slipped her hand into the lining of one of Frantz’s old travel bags and came out with a small photograph three centimetres square. She glances at the clock on the kitchen wall. Too late to start now. Tomorrow. Tomorrow.

*

The next day, and in the days that follow, Sophie scours the apartment from top to bottom, leaving no trace of her movements. She suffers vicious waves of nausea. Ever since she began to force herself to vomit up the various medications Frantz gives her (this one for migraine, this one to help her sleep, this one to keep her calm, “don’t worry, they’re just herbal remedies . . .”), she finds herself retching and just has time to run to the bathroom. Her insides are churned up. Despite all this, she searches, she probes, she turns the apartment upside down: nothing. Nothing but this
solitary photograph, but that in itself is something major.

It leads her to other questions which date from much earlier. Sophie racks her brain for hours on end, looking for answers that never come. Sometimes she is literally blazing, as though truth is a flame she cannot quench, that burns her hands.

Then, without warning, it comes to her. It is not a revelation, more an intuition, a bolt from the blue. She stares at her mobile on the living-room table. Calmly she picks it up, removes the back, takes out the battery. With the point of a kitchen knife, she unscrews a circuit board and discovers a tiny orange microchip stuck on with double-sided tape. She removes it using tweezers. With a magnifying glass, she manages to make out a code, a string of letters, some numbers: SERV.0879, then: AH68-(REV 2.4).