Deadly Slipper (7 page)

“Or old Benoît. Being a butcher, killing would have been easy for him. Even you.”

“Are you joking?” Paul gaped, incredulous.

“All I’m saying is, you could stir up something. Especially if she’s really offering a reward. A thousand euros is a lot of money.”

“Hou!”
Paul went back to his sports page. “I’ll wave the photo under people’s noses. No one’s going to identify this
bougre
of a
pigeonnier.
Besides, the boyfriend probably did it, even though they couldn’t hang anything on him. Or else the sister drowned in the river or fell down a hole.”

Mado shrugged. After a pause, she resumed, “She’s not his type, you know.”

“Who?”

“This Mara. She’s all wrong for Julian.”

Paul threw his paper down at last to squint ferociously at his wife.

“What’s right? The problem with Julian is, he’s got no staying power. He takes up with a woman for a while, and just when things start to look serious,
fsst.
It fizzles out. Sometimes I think he doesn’t really like women. He wants them, but he doesn’t like them.”

“He likes me,” pouted Mado.

“You’re different,” her husband pointed out. “You’re safe.”

“Safe?” The redhead bristled.

“Unavailable. Married. He can fantasize without running any risks. In any case, he has no idea what makes a woman tick.”

“You do?” Mado challenged, rubbing the glassware hard.

“At least I’m not scared of them.” Paul retreated from possibly thin ice. “Anyway, if this Mara’s putting moves on him, she’s as good as any. Julian needs a woman, any woman. He’s going to seed. You should have seen him watching that dog of hers hump Edith. Pure envy.”

Mado gave a throaty laugh, put away her towel, leaned across the bar, and nuzzled her husband’s ear.

“Poor Julian,” she whispered throatily. “Poor, poor Julian.”

He had been christened Armand some fifty years ago, but round about they simply called him Vrac. The name meant “in bulk” or “loose goods.” He grew up large and brutish, with an oversized head, slack mouth, and pale hair that stood up in tufts. He lived with his mother in a grim farmhouse, eking out an existence from a few hectares of soggy land in a valley below the village of Malpech.

The mother, Marie-Claire Rocher, otherwise known as la Binette, was herself no beauty: a hulk of a woman, with a massive jaw rising out of a creased dewlap, and a livid birthmark covering one eye. Her nickname suited her, for the word binette meant “hoe,” an implement she had once nearly decapitated a man with for trespassing on her land. Its more archaic meanings, “visage” and “wig,” could equally be taken to refer to her unsettling face or to the coarse yellow clump of horsehair that sat on her head like a turkey’s roost.

Of Vrac’s father, nothing was known. Everyone suspected it had been old Rocher himself.
“Mon dieu
, his own daughter and barely thirteen!” they had exclaimed those many years ago as the smock front of the young Marie-Claire grew daily shorter for all to see. Over time, Vrac the child and Vrac the man
came simply to be accepted by the scattered farming community as an unpleasant feature of existence, like bad weather or mud. If he was shunned—children ran when they saw him, and women crossed themselves at his approach—he was at the same time tolerated and even protected by the fierce local loyalties that defined a region where in times past a person’s entire universe was measured by how far he or she could walk out and back in a day.

In fact, it might even be said that Vrac enjoyed a kind of ill-favored celebrity. Local farmers sometimes employed him to fell trees and heave tractors out of ditches, for he was enormously strong. He also had a certain understanding of the darker side of machinery and was often able to bludgeon exhausted and antiquated farm equipment, which normally would have been left on a hillside to rust, into some level of fitful functioning. These odd jobs gave Vrac cash in his pocket, a tenuous claim on society, and a kind of preposterous self-conceit.

All the same, Vrac understood murkily that he was not wanted. Even his own mother called him names. These rejections filled him with an inarticulate rage that erupted from time to time in crude acts of violence perpetrated randomly against inanimate objects and living things that chanced to cross his path.

Like a bear, Vrac covered a vast territory, killing and taking at will, poaching on reserves and fishing on private land where the streams and rivers of the
region formed pools attractive to pike and perch. There was only one place that he avoided—a deep pond in the forest where tall reeds whispered and frogs and small fry abounded. For reasons known best to him, he would not eat things taken from its muddy depths.

La Binette was a more complex being. She assessed the world about her with a cynicism that usually worked to her benefit. Her son she treated like an animal, with a bitterness that arose from her belief that he was a punishment for past sins. He was of her making, and he never should have been made. Nevertheless, need arising, she probably would have defended him to the death. And if she attended but minimally to his bodily needs, it must be said that she did no more for herself.

For the rest, la Binette tended her sheep and made a surprisingly good cheese from ewe’s milk. In fact, her
brebis
was something of a local specialty, which she sold at nearby periodic markets, arriving with much backfiring in an ancient wood-paneled truck. Occasionally, she augmented the household income by picking up unwary hitchhikers or motorists in distress, driving them not to where they wanted to go but to some isolated spot where she demanded a
forfait
, usually what cash their wallets contained, for “transportation services rendered.” Most paid and were then dumped, shaken but relieved, to make their way back to civilization as best they could.

Curiously, mother and son slept together. Whether
they joined in an incestuous relationship was beside the point. The point was that, apart from routinely cooperating out of necessity to till the soil or harvest or slaughter, these two creatures went their own way from dawn to dusk. At night, however, like beasts made uneasy by the dark, they drew together, sharing a sagging double bed. Vrac had slept with his mother since his first day of life, when she had given him the breast, the only bounty he had ever received from her, and continued to do so unthinkingly into adulthood and middle age.

In a region where places took the names of the inhabitants, the Rocher farm was simply referred to as La Binette. Its narrow fields lay between the forest and the road. The house, built over a byre, a style more typical of Quercy than Périgord, stood in a wooded combe.

The byre, once used for stabling animals, served la Binette (the woman) as a cheese cellar and Vrac as a storehouse. There Vrac kept his fishing tackle, gutting knife, shotgun, and other items—a book (he could no more read than fly, but he liked the pictures of the flowers); a dog collar; a canvas backpack; old boots; a green bicycle bearing the stamp
Phoenix Made in China
, which he occasionally rode.

For the most part, the mother was incurious about the son’s treasure hoard, her only interest being the possible value of a given object. However, one day many years ago, la Binette happened to notice that a camera had been added to the collection. She picked
it up and examined it because it looked to be expensive. Then she heard a noise behind her. Turning, she saw her son’s form, framed in the low doorway of the byre, blotting out the light.

“No,” Vrac croaked hoarsely, hands dangling heavily at his sides. “Put.”

Dropping the camera back onto the pile, la Binette pushed roughly past her son to the outside. Sometime after that, she saw that the camera had gone.

•

High on a prominence above La Binette (the farm) and at the top of a tortuous road, stood the grand but decrepit château of Les Colombes. It, too, was heavily screened by trees—from most angles, nothing more than its numerous chimneystacks could be seen. To the northwest, it looked across a broad valley to the village of Malpech. In all other directions, it was surrounded by forests and fields.

At one time all of the land for leagues around, La Binette included, had been part of the Seigneurie of Les Colombes, owned by the powerful de Sauvignac family. However, over the course of ten generations, the Seigneurie had been so parceled, hacked, sold, and ceded that only the château, with its adjoining woodland, remained. Nevertheless, the fact that the estate was still in the hands of an unbroken line of de Sauvignacs was a matter of local pride.

How la Binette’s father, a drunken day laborer with never two sous to rub together, had come to
acquire a corner of Les Colombes was a mystery. “Silence is golden,” the more cynical locals said knowingly, tapping the sides of their noses, suggesting that the scoundrel Rocher had rooted out something about the family worth the price of a parcel of land. When Rocher died—“Fetched by the devil,” they said, for he had been found in a ditch one winter morning, frozen stiff, mouth wide open as if mid-shout—the farm had passed to his stony, antipathetic daughter and her son. And so things had continued over the years, with la Binette and Vrac tending their sheep and wresting their harvest of root crops from the wet, exhausted soil.

•

La Binette was on the big-nosed postman Gaston’s route. For years, his canary-yellow minivan had bucketed past the place, making only infrequent stops. There was rarely any mail for the residents, mostly circulars and bills that the
facteur
deposited in a rusty iron box set on a cairn of stones at the roadside. Never had he needed to negotiate the narrow track leading from the road to the farmhouse itself. Just as well, for Gaston, like others, preferred to stay well clear of mother and son.

However, on this afternoon there was a delivery requiring a signature. From the Electricité de France, so it had to have something to do with the electricity. As he turned off onto the muddy, rutted lane, Gaston reflected that, in all the time he had come down the valley, he could not recall actually having spoken to
either of the La Binette pair. Today, he wondered nervously if Vrac would be around. Of the two, he thought he would rather deal with the woman. Once or twice he had seen Vrac standing on a hillside roaring unintelligibly at the sky, or glimpsed him in the rain, moving like an animal among the trees. Besides, he didn’t think Vrac could read or write, let alone sign his name.

Gaston pulled up in front of the farmhouse. The day was turning overcast and windy, with the suggestion of an impending storm. Reluctantly he heaved his bulk out of the minivan. A crow rose flapping from the roof.

“Allo?”
he shouted from the bottom of the six deep steps leading up to the front door. In addition to its unusual style, he noted that the house was built of darker stone than normal, giving it a damp and secretive air.

Laboriously, he climbed up to the elevated stoop. He knocked. Silence. The front of the house had one window. Peering through grimy glass, he could make out nothing of the darkened interior.

Not here, he concluded, considerably relieved. He wondered if he could get away with putting the EDF envelope and the signature form in the mailbox at the roadside with a note instructing la Binette to sign the form and leave it for him to pick up the following day. He wasn’t really supposed to do that, and he had no reason to believe she would comply. Ah well, he supposed he’d just have to try again.

As he turned to descend the steps, he saw, with a sense of shock, that la Binette was waiting for him at the bottom. She wore overalls tucked into knee-high rubber boots, and a black jersey with the sleeves pushed up. With her massive forearms and her birthmark obliterating one eye, she reminded Gaston uncomfortably of a beached pirate.

“Ah, madame,” Gaston stammered. Perhaps she had been in the byre at her cheesemaking, for her hands were wet, and her wig, the color of dirty straw, was tipped askew over her forehead. Fleetingly he wondered what had become of her own hair, not that he would have dared to ask.

“What?” she said. Her voice was hollow and harsh, like wind blowing down a chimney.

“Er,” he said, “it’s this. For you.” Tentatively he held out the electricity board envelope.

She ignored it, glaring balefully into his face.

“What do I want with that?”

“
Eh bien
, how am I to know?” he gabbled apprehensively, realizing that it was probably a final notice of arrears. “However, as you can see, it requires your signature.”

She spat, aiming for a spot just off his right toe.

“Madame!” Gaston pulled his foot back. “I am only doing my duty.”

At that point Vrac appeared, rounding the corner of the house and stopping up short behind his mother. Together the pair of them blocked the
facteur’s
way like standing stones. Gaston thought how
much bigger Vrac seemed up close. He wore dungarees over a greasy sweater and a pair of steel-rimmed sunglasses with one lens missing, giving him a patch-eyed look and the bizarre appearance of parodying his mother’s birthmark. The expression on his large, misshapen face was not friendly, and he smelled strongly of sheep.

Gaston tried affability. “Come. I’ll leave it here, shall I?” He placed the envelope on the third step. “And if you’ll just sign this. A mere formality.” He extended the required paperwork.

Vrac gave a sudden, braying laugh. He moved close enough to poke Gaston hard in the chest and plucked the form from the postman’s hand. Scowling, he goggled at it upside down and right side up, turned it over, and gave another burst of mirthless laughter. Momentarily, Gaston was taken in by this dumb show. Then he caught a gleam of malicious cognition in Vrac’s eye.

“Monsieur,” he cried, somewhat shrilly but with all the dignity he could muster, “I really must—”

But Vrac merely stuffed the paper inside the bib of his dungarees and stalked away.

“Madame,” Gaston appealed to the mother, who still barred his path, “I regret to trouble you, but I must have that back. With your signature.”