The Way I Found Her (23 page)

The thing that made me feel worst about the departure of Meaulnes was that Millie was embarrassed in front of the superior Madame Meaulnes, who came to collect him. It had been Millie's washday and all the damp sheets and towels were draped around the classrooms to dry, which made the schoolhouse seem like some old stinky laundry, and so she was ashamed. Millie is a tragic character. She makes new hats out of bits and pieces sewn on to old ones; she cooks on the school stove to save fuel.

The rain had stopped, but the wet wool smell seemed to linger in my room and merged in my mind with the smell of Millie's laundry. I was thinking about the power a book can exert over my psyche, when I suddenly asked myself a question. I may even have asked it out loud. The question was: ‘Why, when every other book in Valentina's study is on a shelf or in a pile on her desk, was that one Russian book hidden in a bureau drawer?'

I sat up and looked at my clock. It was just after midnight. In the maids' rooms opposite, some lights were still burning. I crept down to Valentina's study. Sergei still slept on his tatami mat in her bedroom, just as though she were snoring there in the enormous bed. Dogs' memories are meant to be good, but Sergei's sometimes seemed a bit flawed.

I took the book out of the bureau drawer and went back up my stairs with it. The cover had no picture, only a lot of Russian writing in red and black. In my search with Mrs Gavrilovich I hadn't paid it any attention, but now I saw that it was interleaved with yellow Post-It notes, about twenty of them, going right through the book. As well as these, there were pencil writings in the margins – all in Valentina's handwriting. They said, for example,
voir Pierre, voir Isabelle, utilise ceci à prop. de B, idée possible pour Belfort (ville)?, quels étaient les poisons?, voir Père H
 . . .

I could guess immediately from this what she was doing. It was completely transparent: she was snitching ideas from this old Russian history to use for
Pour l'amour d'Isabelle
! I remembered what Alice had told me about the pressure on Valentina from Bianquis and I thought, this is how she's getting through the new novel – she's stealing stuff from a Russian source that nobody will ever unearth.

I turned back to the red-and-black jacket. The author was called
Гρиґoρий Паиии
I thought, I bet
Гρиґoρий Паиии
whoever he may be, lives in some horrible little apartment, worse than Violette's, where the electricity comes on for only a few hours a day. He's probably never earned any proper money in his entire life and would die of shock if he knew what Valentina had spent on her ‘Ypres' scarf.

I went to sleep dreaming about the scarf. I was counting the number of poppies on it and the number came to ten and then to thirty-one and then to fifty-three and then to a hundred and seventy-five.

In the morning, it was as if the rain had never been. The rue Rembrandt was dusty and dry again and the sky was bright.

Alice told me there was a parcel for me, from Hugh. ‘What's he sent you, then?' she asked.

I said: ‘I can't tell you. It's to do with his project,' and took the package up to my room.

Hugh had wrapped Elroy in a piece of kitchen roll. When I took him out, I saw that his Royal Marines uniform, which had got dirty over the years, had been washed and ironed. The feel of his plastic body in my hands evoked for me all the hundreds of missions I'd sent him on and, to my horrible shame, I found I was quite affected by this. I threw him on my bed and thought, God, I'm a retard.

Included with him was a letter from Hugh, which went:

I made my bed and buried Elroy in it, so that Alice wouldn't find him. I put all the packing stuff and Hugh's letter in the wastepaper basket.

I heard footsteps on my stairs then. Footsteps on those stairs were always Valentina's in my mind.

Alice's head appeared and she said: ‘I just had a phone call from the commissariat. An Inspecteur Carmody. He wants to see us straight away.'

‘Why? Has something happened?'

‘He wouldn't say. He wants us to go there now.'

I sat down on the top step. Alice sat three steps lower. All I knew was that if I was going to be told that Valentina was dead, I wouldn't be able to bear it. I'd start screaming or howling like a wolf, or throwing chairs around, or biting the wall. I just wouldn't be able to get through the next moments of my life.

‘How did he sound?' I said. ‘Did he sound as if he had bad news.'

‘He sounded ordinary . . .'

‘What do you mean, “ordinary”?'

‘Calm. Polite. He just said he wanted to talk to us.'

‘About Valentina?'

‘I assume. Shall we go now and get it over with?'

I didn't want to ‘go now'. I felt as if I wanted to sit rooted to this step for the rest of time.

I said quickly: ‘If anything terrible had happened to her, he wouldn't have wanted
me
to go, would he? He'd have tried to protect me, because I'm thirteen. He'd just have asked to see you on your own, wouldn't he?'

‘Yes, probably.'

‘Definitely, he would. Then you would be able to tell me later, when I was at home, when I was sitting down, or something . . .'

‘Perhaps.'

‘No, it's certain. Are you sure he asked to see us both?'

‘Yes. “You and your son”, he said.'

‘Then it's OK. I know it's OK . . .'

The walk to the commissariat took only about four minutes. Part of me wanted to get there right away and another part didn't want to get there at all, ever. We didn't talk on the way, but just walked hand in hand, like we used to do when I was small. It was Saturday and some of the residents of the rue Rembrandt had their chauffeurs there, polishing their cars, and I wished I was a chauffeur with nothing to worry about except a Mercedes.

There was a different
brigadier
on the desk, older-looking, with better handwriting. He asked us to wait. I wondered if there was ever a moment in this commissariat when there was no one waiting and the
brigadiers
could all lounge around and talk about football.

We waited quite a long time. I thought I was going to get that feeling of being behind a glass panel again, but I didn't. I just had a pain in my chest that felt like a tumour. Grandma Gwyneth told me that shock and terror can give people cancer. It makes their immune systems forgetful.

A woman police person came to get us. She wore trousers like the men and carried a gun in a holster on her hip and the
brigadier
addressed her as Denise. She had black hair in a ponytail. As we followed her up a flight of echoey stairs, I thought, I hope Denise will hold me when I start to hurl the chairs around.

We were shown into Carmody's office. The room was small, on the sunny side of the building, with a venetian blind drawn down. Inspecteur Carmody didn't look like a policeman; he looked more like a flamenco dancer. He had large brown eyes that glittered in a tanned face. He wore a white shirt and a smart little blue waistcoat, undone all the way down because of the heat. ‘Sit down,' he said.

We waited. I wanted Alice to say something, but she didn't. Carmody had a piece of paper in front of him with typed notes on it. He picked up a pen and rolled it in his brown hands.

‘She isn't dead, is she?' I blurted out.

Carmody looked at me kindly. ‘I hope not,' he said. ‘We don't know where she is or what has happened, but we have realised now
who
she is and so we are treating this as a possible kidnap. This is why I wanted to talk to you.'

So, he didn't know anything. He wasn't about to describe finding Valentina's black-and-white dress on a piece of wasteland or floating in the river. Nothing was going to become final – at least, not yet. I began to breathe deeply again and after a minute I felt my tumour get small again, as if the air I was taking in was making it melt away.

We bought hot dogs and sat in the Parc Monceau near the kids' roundabout. The children all had big smiles on their faces, as if this carousel ride were the most brilliant thing that had ever happened to them. Alice said: ‘Sometimes I wish you were a child again,' and I said: ‘I
am
a child for about two point three minutes in every twenty-four hours. But on certain days I'm seventeen, as I expect you've noticed.'

Alice smiled. Then we started to discuss our meeting with Inspecteur Carmody. He told us that the likelihood of a kidnap having occurred was, in his opinion, high. The motive would be money. Everyone knew that Valentina Gavril was rich. If she had been kidnapped, he would expect a ransom demand to arrive within the next few days, sent either to Valentina's publishers, Bianquis, or to Mrs Gavrilovich, or possibly even to us at the flat. He said the case had been assigned to him and he would be talking to everybody who had had anything to do with Valentina in the last year.

He watched us closely all the time he was speaking, as if, in the back of his mind, lay the idea that we might be guilty in some way, and then asked us to state exactly what we were doing in Paris and how long we intended to stay.

Alice remained calm. She smiled at Carmody and I watched him to see if her beauty was going to affect him and I saw immediately that it did. He leaned forward as she began speaking and rested his chin on his hands. He wrote nothing down.

Alice told him about Valentina's new novel and the need to translate it quickly. She said the period of time we intended to stay was a further four weeks and then we would go home to Devon. Carmody interrupted her and said: ‘Would you go home in four weeks even if the translation isn't finished?'

‘Yes,' said Alice. ‘Lewis has to return to school.'

Carmody said: ‘So if you can go home in four weeks, you don't really need to be here in Paris at all to do this work. Is that right? Mademoiselle Gavril could send you her text, or fax it to you, and you could work on it in England. Is that the position?'

‘Yes,' said Alice, still staying calm, ‘but Mademoiselle Gavril likes to have her translator there, with her, when a deadline is approaching. She did it before, when she employed an American translator. She – I don't know her name – lived for a while in the apartment, working on the book, just as I'm doing.'

‘How long have you been her translator?'

‘This is my second book of hers. I started working with her in 1992.'

‘And this arrangement was going all right?'

‘Yes.'

‘You get on well with Mademoiselle Gavril?'

‘Yes, I do.'

‘Does she pay you fairly?'

‘She doesn't pay me. The English publishers pay me.'

‘Pay you well?'

‘Yes.'

‘Good. And your son. Why is he here? Does he speak French?'

‘Yes.'

Carmody turned to me. ‘Tell me why you are here,' he said.

I opened my mouth. I didn't know what words were going to come out of it, if any, or in what language. ‘Pour apprendre . . .' I said.

‘Pour apprendre le français?'

‘Oui. Pour apprendre beaucoup de choses.'

Carmody smiled kindly. ‘Quelles choses?' he said.

I thought, I can't tell him what I've learned – that women's lipsticks have names, that the bouquinistes aren't really interested in selling books, that Russians eat real bread in church, that there are eight different strains of broccoli growing in the Jardin des Plantes, that Paris roofs are complicated, that cheap cafés once sold coal, that Yves Montand used to be Valentina's favourite singer and that I had become her favourite lover in my mind . . .

‘Tout est different ici,' I said. ‘J'ai appris celà.'

He nodded. He seemed to be satisfied with that. He was a man who could look very severe one moment and gentle the next.

He asked Alice a lot of questions about Valentina's routine and the answers to these he wrote down. He wanted to know if she had any enemies and I was afraid Alice was going to mention the ‘killing' of the American translator, but she didn't. She said Valentina had no enemies as far as she knew.

Then he asked who came to the apartment and who worked there and I knew that what Alice said next might alter Violette's life for ever, but I couldn't change it or stop it from happening. At least Alice called her Babba, and I knew that as Babba she was difficult to find.

We were there for about an hour, then Carmody said we could go. He said he didn't want this story coming out in the press and that we should mention nothing to anyone. He said we should phone his personal number if anything happened that worried us, or if any information of any kind came our way. He gave Alice a card with his name on it: Inspecteur Francis Carmody. The only person who never got mentioned in the entire interview was Hugh. It was as if it had never occurred to Carmody that Hugh might exist.