Trespass (26 page)

Then she heard a movement behind her, turned and gaped as she saw Lunel, a few metres from her, pointing a shotgun at her.

She raised her arms, thinking as she did so: Now I’m going to die because of Anthony Verey. There’s no end to the things he asks of the world.
No end.

‘Monsieur Lunel . . .’ she began.

He kept the gun held high, but Kitty saw that his hands which held it were trembling. And he was out of breath, his thin chest rising and falling behind the stock of the gun. He could kill her by accident in the next few seconds.

She summoned a voice to ask him calmly in French to put the gun away, but he didn’t move it. He told her he was defending his property, defending it night and day. It was only when she said the word ‘Verey’ that she saw his expression change. Slowly, he lowered the gun.

‘Verey?’ he said. ‘The Englishman?’

‘Yes,’ said Kitty. ‘I came with him to visit your house.’

‘His sister. That it? You’re his sister?’

‘No. I’m only – a friend. But I just came to ask you—’

‘Missing, they say he is. Have they found him?’

‘No.’

‘Why are you here? He never came back here. He came the one time, when you were all there. Ask the agents. The agents can verify it: he came here just that once.’

Kitty nodded. ‘Thank you,’ she said politely. ‘That’s all we were wondering; whether anyone else had seen him on Tuesday. We knew he was very interested in your house, so we thought—’

‘Come inside. Use my telephone. You can call Madame Besson. I’m not lying. I never saw Verey again. I would have been willing to sell him this place on very good terms. I wouldn’t have been greedy. Look at me. You can tell I’m not a greedy man. And I was talking to my sister about what was to be done with the bungalow . . .’

‘Yes. Did you get anywhere with this? Has your sister agreed to sell the bungalow?’

‘Not yet. But she will agree. I wanted to tell Verey that – that it could all get sorted out. I expected him to come back, but he never did.’

‘You’re absolutely sure about that? He didn’t come here on Tuesday afternoon?’

Lunel shook his head. ‘He never came back,’ he said. ‘I swear it on my life.’

Kitty now realised that the sweat on her was making her cold. She walked away from the shadow of the house, into the sunshine.

‘I’m very sorry, Monsieur Lunel,’ she said, ‘for disturbing you. I had no right to walk onto your property, but I expect you can understand that we’re very very worried . . .’

‘He crashed his car, Madame,’ said Lunel. ‘That’s what I think. You English drive on the wrong side of the road. So how do you know which way to steer?’

Kitty smiled. But even in the sun, she was shivering. She longed, now, for the heat of her car, longed to be miles from here. She knew that Private Detective Kitty Meadows would have found a way to look round the house – to see if any clues were buried inside it. But she didn’t feel capable of going with Lunel into that darkness. She only wanted to be gone.

She held out her hand and Lunel hefted the gun over his shoulder and took it. She said goodbye and Lunel opened his mouth, as though to say something else, but closed it again, and walked away from Kitty, in the direction from which he’d appeared. Kitty watched him go, then went fast towards the car. She wished she had a bottle of vodka in it. She was in shock and knew she shouldn’t be driving until she recovered.

As she opened the car door, she reassured herself that she could stop in La Callune. There would be a café there. She would sit quietly and sip a vodka and tonic until she felt ready for the long drive home. She tumbled gratefully into the driver’s seat. She was about to close the car door when she saw something glinting in the grass underneath it. She looked down at this and saw that what she’d thought was a shard of glass was in fact a piece of cellophane. She stared at it. Then, realising what it was, she picked it up. It was a sandwich wrapper from the roadside stall,
La Bonne Baguette.
Kitty closed the car door, glad of the warmth which spread round her, and slowly examined the wrapper. Just visible on its label were the words
fromage/tomate.

Kitty put the sandwich wrapper into her glove box and started the car.

It took her three turns to manoeuvre it round. The sweat on her hands made the hot steering wheel sticky. She’d drawn level with the bungalow before she realised that she was driving on the wrong side of the road.

She swerved and corrected. Her eye was caught by the sight of a solitary flowered overall, pegged to the bungalow’s washing line and moving gently in the rising breeze. Mistral, she thought. It’ll come soon, the wind that dries the rivers and yellows the leaves before their time, and lingers . . .

Audrun didn’t know why, but all her dreams during this time were happy.

Was it because the thing she’d been waiting for was over? She didn’t think so, because it
wasn’t
over – not yet, not quite. It was now inevitable, but there was still one more act to be played out. And then, it would be over: it would be at an end.

Here they were, anyway, these dreams of past happiness: of going on a bus to the seaside with Bernadette, singing songs all the way, eating oysters from a tin plate on the quayside, seeing the immensity of the ocean.

And the best dream of all: her dream about the day – just the one in all those years – when Raoul Molezon had been waiting for her when she came out of the underwear factory. She’d almost walked right by him because she never expected him to be there, but he called her name and she stopped. He took her to a café and bought
sirop de pêche
for her and beer for himself. He said to her: ‘I’ve been noticing something, Audrun: you’re becoming a beauty. Your mother must have looked just like you look now when she was young.’

She’d felt like crying. Perhaps she had cried. Cried over her
sirop de pêche
in the cheap café because Raoul Molezon had said a wonderful thing.

Then, she told him that the factory was poisoning people. The underwear was made of rayon. As you stitched, you had to pull and stretch the rayon, like skin, and in this skin was a chemical called carbon disulphide which had a bad smell and which could give you eczema and boils or even make you go blind.

And Raoul Molezon had said it was a tragedy that she should be working in such a place, but Audrun could never remember what she’d replied; it seemed to her that there was nothing she could have said, then or ever.

But now she was dreaming, not about the factory or the spots that broke out on her hands and round her nose from the carbon disulphide in the rayon, but only about that moment when Raoul called her a beauty.

Dreams like that refreshed you. You woke in the mornings, not aware of the weight of everything that was wrong, but on the contrary, feeling hospitable towards the day, curious to see what it would bring. And this feeling of optimism could last well into the afternoon; last, sometimes, until the daylight began to fade.

And then, somehow, it vanished. Audrun would look up at the darkening sky behind her wood and feel her hopes for the future flying away.

She’d try to distract herself with the TV. She loved old American crime movies, with terrifying soundtracks. She loved hospital dramas. But best of all, she loved programmes imported from Japan, where people did the strangest things: they rode horses backwards, they somersaulted through rings of fire, they ate tarantulas, they walked on stilts through snow. Or sometimes they just lay on the ground, not moving, looking up at millions of cherry trees in bloom. And then Audrun would remember Aramon once cutting a branch of white blossom and putting it into her arms and kissing her cheek when she said: ‘I’m a princess now. Am I?’

Days passed and the river fell. No rain came.

Below La Callune, where the river calmed, the campsites began to fill up. Lessons in kayaking were offered. Tourists put on yellow life jackets, yelping as the frail kayaks bounced and swivelled in the eddies. Barbecue smoke tainted the evening air. Loud music came and went on the ever-changing winds.

Sometimes, Audrun wondered whether the surveyor would re-appear, but there was no sign of him, and she didn’t care now, because all of that – the question of boundaries and markers – was irrelevant, or would be soon.

For the time being, she avoided Aramon. Sometimes, she glimpsed him trudging off to work on the wrecked vine terraces, noted how he staggered, how his health was failing, day by day. But she didn’t go up to the house.

She saw a Dutch family arrive with Madame Besson to look round the Mas Lunel, but they didn’t stay long. Their children were terrified of the dogs and kept screaming. The family drove by her bungalow with their faces pointing straight ahead and never turning to look back. And an article in
Ruasse Libre
informed her that property prices were now beginning to fall. ‘You see?’ she said in her mind to Aramon. ‘Those sums of money were daydreams.’

Then, Aramon arrived at her door one evening – at that time of day when the beneficial effect of her dreams was running out – and he was pale and could hardly speak. She told him he looked as though he’d seen a ghost and he said: ‘I
have
seen a ghost. Come and look in the barn.’

She followed him there. He went ahead, trying to make little galloping steps that soon got him out of breath. She understood that his heart and lungs wouldn’t let him run any more.

The heavy doors of the barn were open and they went in. It was dark in there, with the daylight going, but Aramon picked up a flashlight from a shelf and shone it onto the chaos which had accumulated in the huge barn over all the years.

‘Look!’ he said. ‘Look there!’

Something stood there. It was a big, bulky shape, draped with sacking, half concealed by a clutter of old farm utensils, crates, boxes, cement bags and broken domestic tools which had been piled on top of it.

‘What’s
that
?’ said Aramon. ‘How did
that
get here?’

Audrun stared blankly.

‘There!’ Aramon yelled. ‘There! Are you blind?’

He walked forwards and lifted some of the sacking so that Audrun could see what was underneath. It was a car.

She moved silently towards it. Aramon watched her reach out, as if about to touch the metal of the bonnet, but then she withdrew her hand. She turned her face towards Aramon and said: ‘Whose car is it?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know . . .’ but then he began to snivel. ‘I don’t know how it got there, Audrun. I swear. And I swear on my life that I never hurt anybody . . .’

‘What d’you mean?’ said Audrun. ‘What are you talking about?’

He broke down into tears of anguish. He came to her and it was as if he was asking her to put her arms round him and console him, but she held herself apart and said: ‘Tell me what you’ve done.’

‘I don’t
know
!’ he cried. ‘I get these blackouts. I wake up in different places. I swear this is the first I’ve seen of this car, but it could be his, couldn’t it? How do I know? I’ve never laid eyes on his fucking car! I thought they came in the agent’s car, didn’t they? Didn’t they?’

‘The first time,’ said Audrun. ‘The agent brought them the first time, but then, the second time, who knows . . .’

‘How did a
car
get into my barn? Jesus Christ! I’m going mad. You have to help me, Audrun. You have to help me!’

Out of her overall pocket, Audrun took a handkerchief (one that had belonged to Bernadette) and gave it to Aramon. He buried his face in it.

‘I suppose you killed him, did you?’ said Audrun. ‘You got in one of your rages and you killed the foreigner because he wouldn’t buy the mas, like you killed that whore in Alès long ago?’

‘No!’ sobbed Aramon. ‘Why would I do that? I only saw him that one solitary time . . .’

‘You know that’s not the truth,’ said Audrun.

‘It
is
the truth! I called Besson. She confirmed it. She said he only came here once.’

‘Once with her. And then the second time . . . on his own. I saw you with him.’

‘No! He never came back. I would have remembered. Mary Mother of God, I would have remembered!’

She let him cry. She went boldly to the car and uncovered more of it and they both saw that the bodywork of the car was black.

‘God forgive you, Aramon,’ she said. ‘You killed that poor man. You shot him and tried to hide the car in all this clutter.’

‘No!’ he sobbed. ‘No!’

Aramon let himself fall down. He just collapsed and lay in the dust of the barn floor with his face in his hands. His legs swivelled, like the legs of a baby, trying to crawl.

Audrun stood over him and said: ‘Is the body inside?’

‘I don’t know . . .’ he keened. ‘Take this away from me! Tell me this isn’t happening! Take this away!’