Significance (34 page)

‘Sabine!'

She jumped at the voice and turned to see Inspector Vivier.

‘Oh, sorry,' she said, ‘you startled me.'

He did not apologise, but merely raised one curious eyebrow.

‘The witnesses are here, so I thought we'd show them the bag first, then the body.'

‘Of course.'

The English couple looked as if they had aged ten years overnight, but there was something heartening about the way they sat side by side holding one another's hands, giving and gaining strength from each other. Although they looked immeasurably tired, they lifted their faces bravely and sat straight
-
backed in preparation for whatever horrors lay ahead.

‘This is Sabine Pelat whom you may have met yesterday,' Vivier explained, ‘and this is an item which we hope you may be able to identify.'

As one, they turned their faces to Sabine, then dropped their eyes to the bag she held. She stepped forward and offered the object to the man who, unthinkingly jerked his head back as if repulsed, but more likely he was trying to keep the object in focus. The woman, however, did not hesitate, but reached past her husband to accept the bag inside its protective plastic covering. She handled it confidently, turning it around in her hands several times, frowning and slowly nodding. Then she offered it to her husband – who accepted it, and seemingly taking the lead from his wife, turned it over in his hands, inspecting it.

‘Yes,' he said, at last. ‘It rings a bell. There is something familiar about it, but…'

‘It is the bag the young woman carried,' the woman said with certainty. The man glanced at his wife. He looked like the sort of man who listened to his wife's opinion, respected what she had to say. She continued confidently, ‘Or if it isn't the actual bag, then it is exactly the same style.'

‘Thank you,' Vivier said. ‘This is a great help to the investigation, but there is a more onerous task ahead which I hope you will undertake?' He stood up pushing the chair back, making a sudden harsh noise that caused the couple to visibly wince.

‘Sorry,' he said, then lifted his hand graciously to indicate the door. The couple rose hesitantly and, still holding hands, followed Sabine out of the room. Vivier went through last.

The morgue was located in the basement of the building and as they were halfway down the concrete stairway a strong smell of disinfectant and bleach permeated the air. No one spoke and the sound of their footsteps echoed in the confined space.

Sabine half turned to check that the couple were alright and noticed how the man was walking in an uneven shuffle, putting his weight chiefly on his left leg, while using his right hesitatingly. She had been walking briskly at her normal pace, but now she slowed down a little.

‘It won't take very long,' she said in an attempt to soothe them. They murmured in response.

At the door to the morgue itself, they stopped.

‘Could I ask that you view the body one at a time and that you do not indicate by any word or facial expression to one another whether this is the girl you saw?'

The man and the woman nodded, then drawing her hand reluctantly from her husband's, Hilda Eszterhas said, ‘I'll go first,' and stepping forward she stood side by side with Vivier at the threshold. Vivier grasped the door handle. ‘We shouldn't be longer than a few minutes.' He opened the door and with one hand lightly cupping the woman's elbow led her inside.

Revenant

Scott was having his old nightmare again. He was standing in a dim room holding the all
-
too
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familiar pillow. He could feel it in his hands, warm and slightly damp beneath his palms. He could see the mustard colour of the fabric and the repeated vignettes of the Lone Ranger on his rearing horse, the brightly coloured wigwam, the tomahawk and the tall cactus with two curving branches like upturned arms.

But the room in the dream was this room and not that other room from long ago. There was nothing in the room. No cot, no bed, no sleeping brother.
And he was not a child, but a fully grown man. Something was closing in on him, something heavy and black. The darkness itself seemed animate and malevolent; thick and dense, it seemed to pinion his arms and legs, then every part of his body. Yet all his focus was on the object in his hands. Then suddenly – in one of those rapid reversals so peculiar to dreams – his hands were no longer holding the pillow; they were pushing it away, because it was being forced onto his face, suffocating him.

He woke abruptly. He had been sleeping (unusually for him) on his belly, three
-
quarters of his face pressed into the pillow.

The room was beginning to grow light. He was bathed in sweat. He gave a groan of complaint and lifting his head, saw Marilyn seated at the table under the window. She turned to look at him, frowning sympathetically.

‘Bad dream?'

He grunted and flapped the hot damp covers away from his body, then moved over to the other side of the bed where it was cool and dry.

‘What time is it?' he asked.

‘Don't know. Early. What time's sunrise?' she said, then shrugged and turned back to her work.

He breathed out noisily, shut his eyes and felt his body relax. From across the room he could hear Marilyn's pen scratching over the paper. Short staccato sounds, then silence, then a decisive single noise. A straight line, a crossing out, the sound which was not dissimilar to that of an arrow being dispatched.

She murmured under her breath a few words from whatever it was she was writing. Her voice was musical, incantatory, fragmented.

‘My mother said, and said again,' he heard, then the fierce sound of the pen as she scored out some of the words.

‘Marilyn?' he said, opening his eyes.

She was hunched over the desk, writing another line, rocking slightly as she did so. She didn't seem to hear him.

He waited, watching. The small movements of her right arm as she wrote, barely perceptible. Then she stopped writing and twisted to face him.

‘Sorry,' she said, ‘I had to get that down or I'd forget.'

‘That's okay.'

‘Do you want some coffee?' she asked, brightly.

He considered this. It wasn't what he had interrupted her for, but her question demanded some sort of an answer.

Did he want coffee? Yes, probably, but there was something else too.

He threw back the bed covers and swung his legs over the side.

‘I'll make it,' he said. ‘You carry on.'

‘I looked in on Aaron, he's still asleep.'

‘Okay. Coffee?'

‘Please.'

‘Marilyn?'

‘Mm?'

‘Let's go home.'

She had turned back to her desk and was once more scratching the pen rapidly over the page. She wasn't listening, not really. He stood behind her, wondering whether to say it again, but even as he did so he was calculating the cost of three more flight tickets, the lies he might tell in order to get their existing return tickets altered, the insurance claim he might be able to swing. If they got Aaron to a doctor here, if they lied, if they could invent some tragedy back home. Or he could pay for the flights with his American Express card. His credit was good and somehow at that moment, paying thousands of dollars back over the next three or four years sounded a small price to pay to get back to Canada now or at least within the next twenty
-
four hours.

‘Coffee then,' he said and pulled a t
-
shirt over his head.

Distractedly, still scribbling away, she nodded, her head dipping rhythmically in time with whatever was happening between her mind, her hand and the moving pen.

He could not fathom how he had wound up with this strange creature. Poets he had always thought, (not that it was something he thought about a lot) should couple with other poets. Painters with painters. Musicians with musicians. Or even, he thought reproachfully, good people with equally good people.

Or so it seemed.

But he loved her. There was no doubt of that.

Marilyn was trying once again to rewrite the poem about her mother, about the idea of escaping death, about drowning. She could not understand why she kept going back to it, the poem didn't work, its sentiments were inauthentic, her heart wasn't in it. It lacked grace notes and depth, and the word ‘hyperbole' was like a great lump of undigested food lodged in the belly of the poem.

She should abandon it. She should write about her pregnancy. But of course she was afraid Scott (though she had rarely known him to) might read something from over her shoulder and discover that she was expecting a child.

With each subsequent attempt at the poem she felt more lost, more useless; incapable of completing it, unable to produce any poems that had worth, and with that thought her past successes also crumbled. All her small triumphs seemed mere trickery, based on luck rather than real intelligence, skill or talent.

‘Okay, coffee,' Scott had said.

And she had said, ‘Please.'

Then he'd said something else, but she hadn't heard what it was.

She was half aware of him hovering in the room behind her, lingering as if he was waiting for something from her. But her mind was elsewhere. She was summoning the past, trawling her memory for the elusive, physical actuality of her mother; her scent, the sound of her voice, the precision of her movements and expressions, the theatrical widening of her eyes when outraged, the close press of her lips when concentrating, how the flesh on her upper arms wobbled when she was beating cake mixture and the irritating smack of her lips when she licked her finger in order to turn the page of a book. Her greedy boastful possessiveness when Marilyn did something well, her derision when she failed.

Marilyn crossed through one word, tried another, then crossed that out again and replaced the original.

Finally she heard Scott go out of the room and into the hallway. A few footsteps, then a brief moment of stillness and silence. He would be looking in on Aaron, checking that he was okay and still asleep. Then the footsteps started up again and she heard the second tread of the stairway creak as he went downstairs.

The poem, she suddenly realised, was not about her mother nor about almost drowning; it was about herself as a child. It was about her mother's words, the expression of awe and pride on her mother's face as she gazed at this miraculous back
-
from
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the
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dead child and how this had made Marilyn feel. It bestowed upon Marilyn a sense of uniqueness that was undeserved. There was a smugness in her child self that Marilyn squirmed to recognise. She had bought into her mother's version of events (how could she not?) and that had gone on to be a constituent part of her personality. And it was based on nothing. Or almost nothing.

There was no miracle.

Marilyn, aged two or three or however old she had been, had no active role in the story. She fell in a pond and was plucked out almost instantly, but at five, at six, at eleven she had heard and reheard her mother tell this story to whoever would listen and Marilyn had felt like a revenant, like one who has died and returned and is thus the bearer of rare knowledge and talent. A walker on water, a seer.

Hyperbole.

Her entire self was built around this and now that she looked more carefully at it she saw that where there was once legend and faith, there was now only a hollow space.

She put her pen down carefully so that in coming to rest it made no noise.

What was it Scott had said? Something about home? Something about wanting to go home? Or had she imagined that? Made him express aloud what she now desired more than anything.

To go home. To begin again.

Bodies

The man is tall, six foot two or three. Blond. And either American or South African or Australian or British. He is aged somewhere between twenty
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five and thirty
-
five.

Hilda Eszterhas reports him as saying, ‘I let strange women follow me then I fuck them.'

Her husband insists that what the man said was, ‘I follow strange women then I fuck them.'

Hilda saw the victim in the morgue and said that without doubt it was the same girl, or young woman rather, and that she was convinced she was English with a slight regional accent – possibly Scottish or Irish.

Her husband, Michael, could not identify the woman at all. But agreed that the man was tall and blond and unpleasant – if not sinister, but cannot define in what particular way he was unpleasant, aside from the words he'd spoken.

Then there was the other rather curious report. Another tall, blond man. No, not man, but boy. And this one, on the morning after the murder, is discovered either bleeding profusely from self
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inflicted wounds or is spattered with blood from a presumed act of violence; the murder of a young woman. This boy or young man is five foot ten or eleven, very slight, with bad posture. Wide
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eyed, dazed, mute, monstrous, craven, evil, ill, dangerous, vulnerable. Possibly Dutch or German. Also possibly American.