Significance (19 page)

It's over now?

For them perhaps – those gaping strangers who could walk away, for whom this event would become a piece of fascinating gossip to be told and retold. How much would the witnesses relish the image it gave of tourists – of Americans in particular?

But it was not yet over for her and Scott, or for Aaron and his parents.

Scott got his handkerchief, a large white cotton one, and as they walked he attempted to wrap this around both of Aaron's hands. An act which set off a low moan of protest from Aaron.

Marilyn followed a few paces behind and the kindly postman fell into step beside her.

Someone in the crowd called after them and when Marilyn turned to look she saw a smartly dressed middle
-
aged man heading in their direction. He was waving a mobile phone at them.

‘You must wait for the police to come,' he shouted. ‘They will want a report. They will want details, an explanation!'

Marilyn hesitated, but the man looked past her, his face twisted in anger.

‘Attention! Attention!' he cried, even after the postman had responded by shouting that it was nothing, not to worry, the boy was not badly hurt.

‘But I have called the police already!' the man cried, but his voice was fading away in resignation and he did not pursue them any further, returning instead to the place where the crazy young man had been discovered and the evidence of drips and smears of fresh scarlet that he would eagerly point out to the police when they came. Lying amongst the rust speckles and crimson splashes was the blood
-
smeared razor blade; its edges still lethally sharp despite its morning's work. The man stood over this, carefully guarding it, his mouth turned down sourly at the edges and his chin jutting out resentfully. He folded his arms. He frowned and narrowed his eyes. Impatiently tapped one foot. Waited.

As Marilyn and the others neared the house they heard another siren in the distance. It was far off. The postman shook his head and clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

Scott guided Aaron through the door and into the kitchen.

Marilyn and the postman followed. It seemed right somehow that this good Samaritan should stay with them, and yet there was something strange about it too. He put his mail sack at one end of the table and Marilyn noted that it was still half
-
full with undelivered mail, and wondered if the man would get into trouble for not completing his round. Scott sat Aaron down at the other end of the table, then filled a large white enamel bowl from the hot tap and added a few drops of disinfectant which clouded the water.

Marilyn switched on the electric kettle and as Scott began to dip a flannel in the water to clean up the worst of the blood, the postman pulled a packet of Gitanes from his pocket, and without asking permission, popped a cigarette in his mouth and lit it with a silver Zippo, shutting the lighter with a sharp and distinct click once the cigarette was burning.

Aaron moaned softly as Scott cleaned and examined his wounds.

A siren seemed to travel from south to north, the Doppler effect distant, but distinct. Or perhaps it was going from west to east. Marilyn looked at the postman, but her worried eyes only produced a shrug and a cloud of cigarette smoke in response.

She was concerned that they might have committed a crime of some sort by leaving with Aaron the way they had. As happens when an automobile accident is not reported. But the nature of that crime had to do with ascertaining responsibility for the accident. Aaron had only hurt himself. He was both the victim and the perpetrator, yet their status as foreign nationals made it all the more difficult to explain the circumstances. There again, perhaps a French law pertaining to the neglect of vulnerable individuals by those responsible for them existed. Just as it would in the case of minors.

‘Alright, Aaron, buddy,' Scott said soothingly. ‘Alright, kiddo. Got yourself some nasty cuts here. Okay, that's it.'

The kettle boiled and clicked itself off. Marilyn made coffee in the jug, poured three cups and wordlessly placed two on the table within reach of the postman and Scott, but a safe distance from Aaron. One disaster was enough for a single morning. She sat with the three men cradling her cup in both hands trying to absorb everything that had happened.

The water in the white enamel bowl turned from pale milky pink to bright red. Aaron's moans had taken on a drowsy sound. Marilyn looked at his hands, she had been too frightened before; the sight of blood had a visceral effect on her, turning the pit of her stomach sour and hollow, settling on her tongue with a metallic tang. But as she looked she saw that most of the cuts seemed to be closing up; they criss
-
crossed his hands in red welts and the skin around them was inflamed and sore looking. Only in one or two places did droplets of blood appear to well up and trickle down in slow moving rivulets.

‘I'm sorry,' she said suddenly addressing the postman, ‘but we don't even know your name.'

The postman stubbed out his cigarette and offered her his hand, dense black hairs on its back, a little rug, and wild tufts on the fingers too. She shook it, sensing its strength.

‘Tadeusz.'

‘Tadeusz? Is that a French name?'

He smiled a proud, self
-
contained smile as if caught possessing a secret, but he neither confirmed nor denied the question.

Aaron moaned again, the sound musical as if he was crooning some strange lullaby.

Scott poured the bloody water away, got the First Aid kit and began the slow and delicate process of applying antiseptic cream to Aaron's hands.

‘Well, I have work to do,' Tadeusz said, hefting his bag over his shoulder. ‘Thanks for the coffee.'

‘Thank you, you've been very kind.'

He shrugged. ‘It was nothing.'

Marilyn saw him to the door. Another siren sang in the distance.

‘I have a question,' Marilyn said. ‘Should we inform the police? About what happened, I mean. Tell them that everything's fine?'

The corners of his mouth quirked down.

‘No?' Marilyn asked.

‘Too much red tape, perhaps,' he said.

‘And there won't be a problem?'

Again he shrugged.

‘Okay, well thanks.'

At the gate Tadeusz waved at her and grinned. His grin seemed to indicate that he sympathised, but also that she should know that life was absurd. Absurd and fleeting.

She shut the door, and the hallway was plunged into semi
-
gloom again. She stood there a moment, thinking about Aaron, and Scott, and herself; assigning and assessing blame, countering her imagined accusations with the defence that none of it could have been imagined and therefore the question of guilt was neither here nor there. But she did feel that it was really Scott's fault; he shouldn't have gone out, he should have remembered to lock the door and remove the key when he came in, and ultimately it was he who bore the greater burden of responsibility for Aaron, who was after all his brother.

Intermittently a short burst of siren and air horn sounded, suggesting an emergency services vehicle caught in traffic, and from the kitchen, almost achieving the same Doppler effect, Aaron's moans rose and fell in pitch.

Marilyn laid the palm of her hand on her stomach and closed her eyes. This was the closest to praying she had ever come, and what she prayed for was hardly extraordinary. ‘Please let the baby be normal. Just normal, that's all I want, nothing more.'

It wasn't so much to ask really.

But she felt a dark atavistic fear rising inside her, something vague and barely perceptible. It was like a little death; the death of love and the death of hope.

Duty

Michelle Brandieu, her hair restored to youthful raven
-
black and fixed in a halo of tight, stickily lacquered curls, hurried home and, after shuffling her tarot pack, laid them out in a simple fifteen
-
card spread. At their heart was the Princess of Swords – this represented a wise and vengeful woman, fearless. The card to its left was the Empress, representing beauty and love and success, the one to the right was the four of swords which stood for truth. This told Michelle all she needed to know, she barely glanced at the remaining cards.

She changed out of the unflattering but serviceable clothes she had worn to the hairdressers; a lime
-
green acrylic sweater with a small white cat embroidered over the left bosom, comfy grey slacks with an elasticated waist and white orthopedic shoes with lace ups, and carefully considered her options for a more serious and elegant look.

Over the years (by means of penury and monomaniacal self
-
deprivation) she had retained the same trim figure she'd possessed in her youth and thus her wardrobe contained clothing she had bought as far back as the late 1960s. After some thought, she chose a navy polka
-
dot blouse with an oversized teardrop collar, a pleated red polyester skirt and a royal blue jacket in a naval style with gold buttons and epaulettes, white tights and navy patent leather shoes decorated with a jaunty gilt chain.

She applied her make
-
up: frosted lipstick the colour of raw veal. Greasy black eyebrow pencil applied with a trembling hand which thus affected a rather surprised and surprising look. Then too much rouge which gave the impression she was suffering from high blood pressure, rather than the youthful and healthy glow she had meant to achieve, but with the light coming from behind her and her somewhat muted vision, what Michelle saw in the mirror was herself as she had been thirty years ago. Thirty years ago when, for a brief rare moment in her otherwise unremittingly lonely life, she had been in love.

Gazing lovingly at herself, forgetting for the time being how that love affair had ended, she perceived a new beginning for herself; she saw how she might solve this monstrous crime and would thus be asked to appear in the newspapers and on TV. How she would gain a platform for her astrology, her card readings, her powers as a medium.

The fear she'd felt the night before had entirely evaporated. There was not one drop of doubt diluting her resolve. Michelle knew what she had seen. Knew what it meant, knew what she now must do and knew what it would result in for her. She even, as she left her flat and passed down the three gloomy flights to the street, imagined her lover from all those years before seeing her on TV or in an interview in
Paris Match
. He would fall in love with her all over again, would regret his past infidelities and his hasty marriage to that librarian.

Michelle had never stopped loving him. Astrologically they were an ideal match; she was a Scorpio and he was Pisces – a conspiracy of stars, the precise day and hour of each of their births making their union perfect. Perfect except for the interference of persons and factors beyond their control. Thus it made absolute sense that they should find one another again. Or at least that was what Michelle now told herself.

It was five o'clock before Madame Michelle Brandieu entered the main door of the police station, walked smartly up to the desk where a junior PC was surreptitiously eating curry
-
flavoured instant noodles from a polystyrene cup, and announced that she knew who the killer was and needed to speak to the official in charge of the case immediately.

The young PC reluctantly lowered the pot of noodles into the metal waste bin under the counter. He was hungry and tired and should have finished work hours ago, but the unexplained death meant a double shift. Jean
-
Luc might not have minded if he had been assigned to work in the field alongside a man like Paul Vivier, but to be stuck behind a desk?

Jean
-
Luc was twenty
-
four years old, had graduated less than a year before from the police academy with high hopes of rapid progression and an exciting job. But paperwork and lost cats and unlicensed cars had depressed and bored him, and he was considering the possibility of resigning. Or was, until the moment Madame Brandieu had declared confidently to him that she knew who the killer was.

Yet that moment of hope passed so quickly. He picked up the internal phone and spoke directly to Inspector Vivier, repeating in a low tone what the woman had claimed to know of the murder.

‘Nutter?' Vivier asked in a perfectly reasonable voice.

‘Don't think so,' Jean
-
Luc said, surreptitiously eyeing the woman as she stood waiting at the desk with two hands neatly resting on it, the fingertips partially interlaced and her gaze directed pointedly at him. The inspector's single word question seemed to the young policeman's hypersensitive ego to imply that both the witness and Jean
-
Luc (if he believed her) were crazy.

Perhaps Jean
-
Luc should have thrown the woman out and not troubled the inspector at all, but that would have been a dereliction of duty. He sensed that somehow by being the messenger who announced this woman, if it turned out that she was a time
-
wasting, and in all probability undiagnosed, schizophrenic, he would be endlessly blamed and teased about her.