The Way I Found Her (24 page)

I thought I'd have nightmares about the things that were happening, but I didn't. I had a velvety kind of sleep, quite soothing and still, and I woke up feeling hungry again. But when I went down to get some breakfast, I realised there was hardly any food left in the fridge.

I woke Alice up and told her everything was disintegrating round us, without Valentina and without Violette. ‘Without who?' said Alice, but I ignored this. I pointed out to her that there was a smell under the sink and that we'd run out of tins of dog food and the oranges Valentina kept in a glass bowl were going grey.

Alice made coffee and sent me out to buy croissants in the rue Sainte-Honoré, and while we ate this breakfast she announced what we would do that day: we would go to the Sunday market near the Bastille and buy the kind of provisions we'd never eat at home. Then we'd bring them home and clean the apartment from top to bottom and cook ourselves a crazy meal and watch TV Just occasionally, the plans that Alice makes are reasonably good.

The market was in the Boulevard Richard Lenoir. Alice told me this was where Inspecteur Maigret supposedly lived. I said: ‘Well, it's a shame he isn't real and still living here. He'd be useful now.'

I liked the market. I wished we'd been there in the very early morning, before anybody got there, when it was setting up, when the vans came in and all the fish and flowers and cheeses and cooking pots were unloaded on to the stalls. You guessed that some stuff had come from far away because the stall holders looked really tired, with grey circles under their eyes; they could have driven all night from Brittany or somewhere to sell red mullet or pine nuts or helium balloons.

One stall had nothing on it but tiny little turtles, made of flimsy brass, inside walnut shells. The limbs of these turtles palpitated all the time, to make it seem as if they were alive, and a whole cluster of people gathered round to watch them. Things which look alive but aren't sometimes interest the human mind more than things which look alive and are. Waxworks, for instance. The sellers of the turtles were a Japanese couple. They kept calling out: ‘No batteries in these turtles! No batteries anywhere!' I don't know where they'd driven from, but they'd had to bring their two babies with them, and these Japanese babies were fast asleep in a double pushchair, with their round faces nodding towards each other like sunflowers in a breeze. Some of the people took their eyes off the turtles to watch the babies instead.

We walked a long way before we bought anything at all, because Alice wanted to see everything before she decided what we were going to get. During this long walk, it was my job to restrain Sergei from eating everything in sight, even old cabbage leaves and squashed grapes. Then we stopped at a fantastic caravan selling fish and Alice got squid, mussels and prawns. She'd decided she was going to cook a gigantic paella. She bought a bunch of coriander the size of a bouquet of flowers, a rope of garlic, peppers, tomatoes and onions, a yellow-looking chicken with its feet still on, a twist of saffron in a muslin bag, a sack of rice and 250 grams of cashew nuts. I said: ‘This paella's going to feed about ten people, Alice.'

We were wandering back with the pannier full of all this food, with our heads in the kind of trance you can go into in a market, when we came face to face with Didier. He looked as if he were in a trance, too, not really paying attention to things, but when he saw us he seemed shocked almost and just stopped dead in his tracks.

He wasn't alone. There was a girl of about twenty-two hanging on to his arm and they both had shopping bags filled with stuff from the market. I thought, it's like they're a young married couple doing the Sunday grocery shopping. I was about to say to Alice, ‘I thought Didier lived by himself,' but there was no time to say anything because there we were, right near to him.

He stared at us and we stared at him. It was like we were German infantry and they were French Resistance fighters and we'd met by accident in a lonely wood, and now Didier thought we were going to kill them.

The girl's name was Angélique. Didier introduced her in an embarrassed way, as though he thought Angélique was a stupid name. We both shook her hand and she nodded at us, but said nothing. She had a big pale face, with no make-up on it. She wore an ugly dress with a pattern of violets all over it. She said: ‘Vous venez d'Angleterre?'

She annoyed me somehow. It was the way she clung to Didier. I didn't like the thought of someone trying to cling on to Didier-the-Bird. And I could tell she infuriated Alice. When Alice is irritated or angry, a kind of electric current seems to fizz out of her and her arms go pink. She ignored Angélique's question about where we came from and said to Didier: ‘What have you been buying, then?'

Didier didn't even look down at his carrier bag; he just gazed at Alice, his eyes pleading, Don't shoot me, let me live . . . ‘Oh,' he said, ‘provisions. You know . . .'

Alice then told him about our paella. She said, ‘It's a shame. If you had been there on the roof, we could have invited you,' and smiled her most devastating Alice Little smile, and then she took my arm and swept us on without saying anything more. Angélique had begun a sentence about Sergei, saying she thought he was a beautiful dog, but we didn't wait to hear the end of it. We just rudely said goodbye and went past them and straight away Alice said to me that she was thirsty and we had to find a café and have a drink. In the café, she ordered a
demi
and drank it down fast. As she drank, I could see that electric sparks were still exploding on her skin.

I said nothing. Sentences came and went in my mind, but I didn't utter them. I turned away from Alice and focused on some hippies at the next table who were trying to pay for a cup of tea with a credit card.

The first sound we heard when we got back to the apartment was the vacuum cleaner. I thought, either it's Violette or . . .

But it was Mrs Gavrilovich. She had an old scarf tied round her head and she told us she was vacuuming because she couldn't stand the silence.

When we'd put all the food away, we sat down with her in the salon. The vacuum cleaner stood near the door, like a sentry on guard. It was a German make of cleaner, with the most powerful kind of motor you could buy. Violette once said to me: ‘You could suck up the Sahara desert with that machine, Louis.'

Mrs Gavrilovich told us that Inspecteur Carmody had been to see her. He'd called and requested that she went down to the commissariat, but she told him bluntly that if he couldn't be bothered to make the journey to her flat he shouldn't be in charge of the investigation. ‘Carmody,' she said. ‘What kind of name is that? He looks like a Georgian. I don't trust him one bit.'

He'd said he had to verify the ‘interêt de la famille', and when she'd asked him what this meant he'd demanded to know if she would profit financially from Valentina's death. ‘I ask you!' she said. ‘What does he mean? How do I know what is in Valya's will? I said: “The thing I've profited from, Inspecteur, is my daughter's life.”'

He'd asked her for a photograph of Valentina. She said this had broken her heart to give away a picture and to imagine that this beloved picture might be put on to posters in police stations, with the word
disparue
written across it. She couldn't believe these terrible things were happening to her.

I went on with the vacuuming, while Alice started preparing the paella and Mrs Gavrilovich fed Sergei and brushed his coat. She, too, had noticed that he'd begun to smell a bit and I asked her if I should take him to the grooming parlour. She said: ‘I don't think he would be welcome back there. He behaved very badly last time,' and we had a laugh about this, then and there, in the middle of vacuuming and sorrow. Mrs Gavrilovich took the scarf off her head and used it to mop her laughter away.

I decided to fetch the Russian book. I wanted to see if Mrs Gavrilovich knew who
Гρиґoρий Паиии
was. I'd worked out two possibilities: (1) that he was dead by now, so he'd never know that Valentina was snaffling his ideas, or (2) that he was absolutely not dead, but had found out his work was being plundered and was so furious that he'd kidnapped Valentina, to teach her a lesson.

Mrs Gavrilovich put her glasses on when I handed her the book. ‘What do you want to know, Louis?' she said.

‘Who the author is and what the title means.'

‘Grisha,' she said. ‘It's Grisha's book,' and she traced the Russian characters with her finger: G-r-i-g-o-r-y P-a-n-i-n.

‘
La Vie secrète de Catherine la Grande
?'

‘Yes.
Tainaya Zhizn Ekateriny Velikoi
.'

I stared at her. I was remembering the conversation I'd had with Grigory on the way back from the book-signing, when he'd told me that Valentina hadn't let him see any of her new novel, and now I understood why – and why Valentina kept saying that hardly anybody in France would read Grisha's ‘little' book.

But was Grisha lying? Had he somehow got access to Valentina's text and seen exactly what she was trying to do? Grisha's career as a writer was probably the only hopeful thing in his life. To discover that Valentina was just taking and using whatever she liked from the only book of his that had been translated outside Russia could have driven Grisha into a fury so great he could have lured her – on some research pretext? – to a deserted horrible place in the
banlieue
and strangled her. He was a strong man. He could have dug a deep hole and buried her. Then he could have gone to a public toilet and washed the dirt off his hands and shoes, found a taxi and caught his plane for Moscow. It could still be several days or even weeks before her body was found . . .

‘What's the matter, Louis?' Mrs Gavrilovich asked. And I realised she was watching my face and that my mouth had been hanging goofily open while I tried to work all this out.

‘Nothing,' I said.

Then I remembered the hospital appointment. If Valentina really had kept her appointment, which could have lasted till, say, four-thirty, Grisha would barely have had time to do all this strangling and grave-digging
and
catch an early-evening plane back to Russia.

‘When you rang the hospital,' I said to Mrs Gavrilovich, ‘were they absolutely one hundred per cent certain that Valentina arrived for her appointment?'

‘Yes. That woman said she saw her.'

‘And her appointment was at ten past four. Do you think Grisha was with her?'

‘Why would Grisha be with her, Louis?'

‘To keep her company . . .'

‘Well, she didn't say. They wouldn't remember if someone was with her necessarily. In hospitals, they don't remember anything. She admired Valya's dress, that's all.'

‘Did you tell Carmody about her hospital appointment?'

‘That Carmody! I told him nothing. He wanted to see my passport. He treated me like someone illegal. I told him, “Inspector, I and my husband were working in France, in that stinking abattoir at La Villette, before you were born!”'

‘Perhaps we should tell him about the hospital. The hospital is the last place where Valentina was seen.'

‘OK. Well, we'll tell him that. He can go down there and deport a few nurses and doctors . . .'

I didn't show Mrs Gavrilovich all the notes and markings in Grisha's book. I decided the next important thing to be done was to read the book in the French edition, and find out exactly how much stuff Valentina had taken from it.

The apartment began to smell of steaming mussels and garlic. Quite often when I was hungry these days, I got this image in my mind of the battle for Caen and hundreds of people living under floorboards or in cold cellars, with nothing to eat.

We invited Mrs Gavrilovich to share the paella. She said we were good people. She said, ‘The English are cold, but good.' Alice poured us all some white wine and we sat in the salon, waiting for the paella to be ready and watching the light at the windows deepen to blue. Alice reminded Mrs Gavrilovich briskly that she wasn't English at all.

Just as we were going to start the paella, the doorbell rang. We all had the same thought: we believed it was Carmody.

Neither of the women moved, so I got up and answered the door. It wasn't Carmody; it was Moinel. He said: ‘Louis, can I talk to you?'

We went out on to the landing. Moinel was wearing a seersucker shirt and baggy trousers made of sailcloth. His tangerine hair looked mussed, as though he'd just got out of bed. ‘Is she back?' he whispered.

I didn't know why we had to whisper, but I assumed there was a reason, so I said quietly: ‘No, she isn't.'

Then he put a hand into one of the pockets of his sailcloth trousers and he brought out a thin gold chain. He let it rest on the palm of his hand. ‘I found this,' he whispered. ‘I was walking home last evening, about eight o'clock, and I stopped by the scaffolding on the corner of the building, to get my key out. I looked down and I saw this chain on the pavement, almost under one of the scaffolding poles, almost hidden, and I wondered if it might be hers, if it might be a clue . . .'

I recognised the chain. It was Alice's. It had been a Christmas or birthday present to her from Hugh. I took it from Moinel's palm and said calmly: ‘I think it belongs to my mother, Moinel.'

‘Ah,' he said. ‘Oh well. Good. Then I'm glad I found it.'

Moinel went into his apartment and closed the door, but I didn't move. I put Alice's gold chain into my pocket and thought, I'll let her search for it; I'll let her search and search and never find it.

The following day, Babba turned up. I was standing on the balcony and I saw her coming slowly along the street. I waved to her, but she didn't see me. Babba always walked along looking at the ground – unlike Grisha who looked at the sky. Perhaps only a few nationalities of people are able to stand their surroundings well enough to take them in as they pass by?