Significance (21 page)

But as it was, stoked by the reports in the papers, it seemed that the Lucy he had known had evaporated in the days before she even left for France, and this other creature, this brassy usurper had taken her place. ‘Secret life of University lecturer' one headline in the gutter press had read. Another: ‘Sexual misadventures for “Miss”'.

Thom had particularly resented that use of the word ‘Miss', conflating her post as a higher education tutor with that of a schoolteacher in order to provide their readership with an even more titillating contrast.

Thom was offered a sabbatical afterwards. Time off from the daily round of lectures and seminars. He'd even been told that his research paper could wait. Time off to do nothing but sit in his flat all day. To traipse from the coffee percolator on the stove to the living room, from the living room to the downstairs loo, from the loo to the kitchen again. To pour another cup of coffee while the first, forgotten and abandoned, sat cooling on the window ledge above the cistern. Time to hear and rehear that stupid phrase pop into his head, ‘I should have known', followed by that other one which he shared with no one, but sometimes said aloud.

‘Why Lucy, why?'

Unanswerable, of course.

He did not take up the offer of the sabbatical. Did not take up the offer of money from the press for the inside story of Lucy, though her parents, the poor fools, did. Not for the money, they stressed, but in order to show the world
their
Lucy, their happy, carefree, intelligent and talented daughter.

No, they had never met that man she was seeing.

No, they did not know what sort of person he was. They thought it odd that she had never brought him home to Scotland to meet them.

Yes, she had seemed different after she started seeing him. She had become depressed. Overshadowed. Dowdy.

And he was older. Had a past.

‘We thought he might be married. Have a few bairns,' Mrs Swan said as she sat beside her husband in the cosy best room of their Motherwell council house. ‘She just wasn't our Lucy anymore,' Mr Swan added, putting a supportive arm around his wife of over thirty years. ‘It's like all the light has gone out of our lives now.'

Light and shade. According to this picture Thom was the obliterating cloud that shrouded Lucy's incandescence. The symbolism of her peroxide hair, the pale summer dresses, the sun
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drenched blue skies and the romance of France did not escape him. Was he more guilty than he knew?

Again it was unanswerable.

Gratitude

This was how they came.

At night. Sometimes just after dusk when the sky was still red
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tinged. Or at dawn. Just at the moment when the cocks began to crow, and the guard dogs began to bark. One dog went mad whenever it saw men in uniform. White foam would gather at and spill from the corners of its mouth. Its muzzle wrinkled, all its yellow teeth showing dagger points. The poor widow's mangy half
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starved dog. Chained to a post, powerless to act except with this display of noise and fury. The men, soldiers or police, would run past at a silent trot, feet kicking up clouds of orange dust.

Or it might happen like this, on a quiet street, under a blue sky. The car would screech to a halt, its doors flying open even before it had quite stopped, and the men would burst from it. Too fast, too sudden to think much. Fear set the heart going at a crazy speed, blood, adrenalin flowing. The mind maybe only able to mark time with a single word, no, no, no, no. Only that. Then they bundle you, limp and submissive, or taut and fighting, into their car. The doors slam shut again, the engine revs up. The interior of the car smells like onions and cigarette smoke, sweat and beer and Juicy Fruit chewing gum. The windshield is dusty and splattered with insect bodies; little husks and ragged translucent wings. The car is there and then it's gone. Maybe just a few tyre tracks in the road, and in one spot a multitude of footprints, the kicked
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over earth signalling a scuffle. You're there and then you're gone. And you might never know why. They may have mistaken you for someone else.

Your list of hopes proceeds thus: one, they let you go, two, they kill you quickly, three, they don't torture you before they kill you.

His father had been taken. They kept him for two days and two nights. He would not say what they did to him, but he was never the same after. And his uncle's business partner vanished one day just after he had opened the print shop. Where were they? Sometimes you just prayed that they were dead.

So when the police car, coming from nowhere it seemed, swerved in front of
Joseph, its tyres mounting the pavement, metal scraping on something, the brakes squealing, it was almost as if it had sprung out of an old nightmare. He watched with incredulity as two uniformed cops stared at him from the car.

But this is Europe, Joseph thought, and I am innocent. Who my father is, what tribe my grandmother came from, does not matter here. Nor my uncle's trade and indiscretion.

One cop gets out from the passenger side and comes at him fast, slams him against the car, presses Joseph's face, open
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mouthed against the hot car roof. The driver gets out more slowly. As Joseph watches from the other side of the car, the cop's head seems almost disembodied. He puts on dark glasses, removes his hat, wipes a hand over his sleek black hair, replaces the hat, then walks around the back of the car until he's beside Joseph. On cue Joseph is pulled up from the car to face his interrogator.

‘Why are you running?'

‘I just run.'

‘That's not good enough. Why here?'

‘Why here?'

‘Yeah. What are you running from?'

‘From?'

‘Yeah. What have you done?'

‘Me, sir. Nothing, sir. I just run.' Joseph lifted his palms to show innocence, emptiness.

‘What's that on your hand?'

Joseph raised his left hand, surprised somehow to see the anatomical words still there in biro on his palm. He read it out to them; pharynx, oesophagus, tongue, epiglottis, hyoid bone…

This seemed to anger them – the one with the dark glasses especially.

‘What?' he demanded, and Joseph, by way of explanation pointed to his throat.

‘I.D.'

‘Oh, I'm sorry, sir. My passport is at the hotel. In the safe. I only have my room key … here…' Joseph tried to reach into his pocket.

‘Hold it!'

They slammed his body against the car again, wrenched his arms backward, then he felt hard circles of metal go around his wrists. The handcuffs, he noticed, were not cold as he might have expected, but warm as if they had been heated by someone's skin.

‘I am innocent,' Joseph said.

The first cop pulled him backwards off the car, he stumbled awkwardly, stepping blindly, then a strong hand was on his neck and shoulder, pressing him down and as he resisted, something, a boot, kicked one of his feet from under him and he half sat, half fell down on the pavement's edge. The cop with the dark glasses looked at the roof of the car where Joseph's face had been pressed seconds before. Looked at it, a scowl on his face showing disgust, then taking a white handkerchief from his pocket he wiped the paintwork as if it were contaminated.

‘Sir, please, I have done nothing. I am a tourist.'

The cop ignored him, spoke instead into a phone, then moved away out of earshot and out of view. Came back. Something had changed. The other cop put a hand under Joseph's arm, jerked a fist into his armpit, pulled him up again, then took the cuffs off.

Joseph felt relief, even gratitude.

No more questions, only a request; would he mind coming to the station to help them?

They weren't arresting him, but his assistance was necessary, and there was the matter of checking his I.D. Foreign national. How did they know he was who he said he was?

Joseph nodded. It was a small matter. This was France, and as far as he knew, its landscape wasn't littered with unmarked graves, nor was it a place where a police car speeding through the marketplace at dawn might disgorge a broken body from the back door. He had no history and no future here. He was a tourist.

He nodded again.

They opened the car, gestured politely for him to get in. A sharp smell inside, perfume and something else, something fainter, urine perhaps. Dangling from the driver's mirror, swinging slightly as the two men got in the front and slammed the doors, a small green cardboard shape with sharp triangular edges like a Christmas tree, and yet it was only the beginning of August.

Mise en Scène

Paul Vivier pulled into the police station car
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park, turned off the ignition, then sat for a few minutes with his hands resting on the steering wheel. It was as if
he might, at any minute, change his mind about being there and drive away to another life. As if he did not wish to relinquish the control that the steering wheel seemed to offer. That was it exactly – when he was driving he was the master of his destiny; not only that, but as long as he was driving, was between places, going determinedly and purposefully from point A to point B, he did not have to think about very much else (though of course he did) and so now having arrived, he was in some primitive childlike part of his brain regretting it deeply.

He had been at the crime scene for the entire morning, then at the forensic lab. He was emotionally drained. Would anyone believe that about him? Or about the countless others who dealt professionally with murder and tragedy? As a police inspector, as a detective, he had seen versions of himself portrayed in countless movies and TV series. There was Simenon's Maigret, the witless Inspector Clouseau, the Belgian Hercule Poirot, the very English and iconic Sherlock Holmes, Raymond Chandler's Marlowe. These were, of course, old school. Vivier knew from conversations with Sabine Pelat that there was now a profusion, a veritable swarm, a multitude of fictional detectives, some like him who were trained and worked for the police department, others who were private investigators and lastly there were the amateur sleuths who unwittingly stumbled across murder and (while the idiotic police could not see the obvious) managed to unravel mysteries and gain access to people and places they would not logically in the real world get within a mile of.

Absurd.

And what was more, murder as entertainment sickened him. Sudden violent death in real life, on the other hand, saddened him to the core of his being. Wasted lives. Innocence caught in the snare of evil. Evil erupting like so many smallpox lesions on the body of the world – now here, now there. The profiling of serial killers (and it was by no means certain that this was what they were dealing with) did in some instances help, as did the victim's characteristics and the means by which they were dispatched.

Physically, in terms of age and, well, he hesitated to even think it, beauty, these two women, Marianne Sigot and the as yet unidentified victim could not be more different. He found himself remembering the texture of both women's hair. No one would imagine a police detective laying an interrogative and yet surprisingly tender hand on the heads of murdered women. But that was the case, these women, one with her stretch marks and scars, her loose skin, the tell
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tale signs of self abuse, the needle tracks, the other with her pale and unblemished skin, had in death lost all self
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determination, and belonged in some sense to the state, or at least until such a time as they were released for burial. Vivier's hand – in his mind at least – symbolised a promise to do all in his power to bring their killers to justice.

The interior of the car darkened suddenly, and Paul Vivier glanced up to see a cloud drift across the sun. A single small cumulus humilis moving slowly and brazenly through the otherwise empty blue heaven.

Vivier sighed, then tapped his fingers twice on the steering wheel as if that signalled action. Then he got out of the car and strode at a pace through the back entrance and into the station.

The first person he spied was Sabine Pelat. She was sitting in an alcove near the coffee percolator, her back straight, legs elegantly crossed, with a paperback book held open at eye level. The cover of the book showed an expanse of twilight blue snow and beyond that a stand of spindly black pine trees.

He stopped and studied her for a moment.

Without taking her eyes from the book, (and after she had seemingly let him watch her for a few beats of time) she said, ‘I'm making fresh coffee, Inspector, do you want some?'

He was tempted to ask her how she knew it was him, but that would reveal a certain weakness on his part, it would reveal him as the guileless subject of her watchfulness; the interrogated rather than the interrogator.

Such games they played.

‘Yes. Can you bring it through to my office? If it's not too much trouble?' It was perhaps a cheap shot, a means of regaining power.

At last she turned to look at him.

‘Certainly, sir.' She smiled briefly. It was a real smile; the eyes alive and fully animated, the white teeth momentarily displayed and yet the speed at which her face became impassive again, suggested something like insubordination, sarcasm.