famished of sleep for a century: he slept so hard he didn’t dream, at first, but then something in the darkness of his subconscious disturbed him and he woke with a vague but ungraspable sense of panic.
For a few moments he lay there, perplexed, collating his wits. He didn’t know what time it was. Dawn maybe. The thin filter of blue light, through the slats of the shutters, pierced the darkness of the room.
Then he stared. Hard.
Something was hanging from the door. Three metres away.
He wished he was dreaming; but he was awake.
This was something truly and purely terrible, something beyond hellish.
Jake’s mind swarmed with the horror.
Please No.
Chapter 10
The French policemen arrived at Annika’s cottage an hour later. The sleek Peugeot oiled into the drive with an authoritative scrunch; red and blue police lights flashed exotically across the dark and drizzly wastes of the Cham.
The Belgian woman was needed to identify the body; Julia immediately offered to accompany her friend for this grisly task – though Annika’s composure was so superb, Julia wondered if any help was truly required.
The same blue and red lights shone briefly on Annika’s impassive face as she climbed into the back of the police car, and sat, almost rigid, staring ahead. Julia followed; the car started; they drove the moorland miles up onto the Causse, heading for Mende.
Ghislaine Quoinelles had lived in a large isolated villa near Marvejols – but his body had already been moved.
Annika shared a few words in French with the fifty-something officer, his hair brindled grey. Officer Rouvier had arrived with a suitably dignified demeanour, and a junior officer behind the steering wheel, for the sombre task of escorting them to the morgue at Mende hospital. After a few minutes, Julia added her own halting comment to the conversation.
Her interruption silenced the car. The officer turned in the front passenger seat, and briefly smiled at Julia. And then he said in perfect and very educated English, his words punctuated by the melancholy percussion of the windscreen wipers:
‘You are from Quebec?’
Julia groaned, inwardly. She answered, in English:
‘I talk like a lumberjack from Chicoutimi, don’t I?’
‘Please. Your French is . . .’ The smile persisted. ‘Charming. But I speak very good English. So it is not remotely necessary. But thankyou.’
Julia sat back and was quiet, trying not to be insulted, trying not to feel anything selfish: she was in the middle of Annika’s shock and horror. But that was the problem of being an only child: the selfish reaction, it was conditioned and immediate, and Julia was always on the watch for it, in herself.
She gazed at the metronomic smearing of the rain on the windscreen, and the brief glimpses of other cars, shooting past them on the narrow country roads. It was only fifty kilometres to Mende but the drive would take an hour, in this weather, on these circuitous roads.
A memory returned, importunate, like a meek child knocking timidly at the door: a memory of herself and her father and mother, driving in the rain, the snow and rain of Ontario: watching lonely snowflakes settling on the car window, trusting her father’s driving, absorbed by the way the flakes were beaten and crushed by the wipers, dissolved.
Julia recalled the way she felt safe and privileged yet sad: the only child, alone in the too-big back-seat of her parents’ SUV; it was a family vehicle, all the seats were meant to be filled, but she had no brother to argue with, no sister to play with. So she sat upright in the middle of the empty space. Importantly. Talking to the adults. Precocious and garrulous and selfish, like so many only children.
And also lonely.
The Peugeot was quiet now, this was truly a morbid business. Yet Julia felt the urge to converse. She found silence – when she was on her own – quite soothing and enriching; but silence between people she could not bear. It made her feel lonely, again.
A question recurred. Why was Annika going to identify the body? She and Ghislaine were not married, they were just friends – and ex lovers. Surely he had someone else, someone related? Hadn’t there been a mention of children, or siblings? Nephews maybe?
Julia knew it might be an insensitive inquiry, but she couldn’t help it: she was intrigued as well as horrified by the whole scenario.
‘Annika?’
The Belgian woman didn’t even turn to face her questioner. But she answered, coldly:
‘Oui?’
‘Ghislaine has no other family?’
‘No.’ Annika’s reply was curt, and barely softened by her continuance: ‘There is a sister but she is in America. No one else.’
‘But I thought . . . I thought he had kids from a –’
‘No children!’ Annika’s composure had fractured, momentarily; and now she turned: ‘Nothing like that. He was alone.’
Then the studied calmness returned, like the older woman had neatly zipped her unwanted emotions into a bag, and dropped this bag disdainfully in a bin. Julia noted that Rouvier, in the front passenger seat, had turned to observe this female exchange. His frown was not unhappy, it was the frown of curiosity. Professional and clever.
Julia guessed he was very senior in the Lozère police force: because she likewise surmised there weren’t many murders, out here on the moors and the steppes of France’s loneliest departement. So any such crime would attract the most senior policeman.
The lights of suburban Mende glowed fizzydrink orange on the rain blurred horizon. Rouvier spoke quickly and quietly with Annika. Julia tried to listen in, even as she tried to pretend she was not listening out of politeness; she definitely caught the phrase – prepare yourself.
For what? How had he died? Who murdered him?
The shock of the situation kicked in, once again, or maybe for the first time properly. Julia felt a shiver of fear run through her. Murdered.
Now they were in Mende the car was actually speeding up: emancipated by these empty urban motorways, which were virtually deserted at this time of night – and in this type of weather. They slashed through rainy Mende, jumping amber lights, their police siren howling in a satisfying way.
She watched the sights of her adopted and temporary hometown flee past the windows. The cathedral, the museum, the Hotel Lion d’Or. Why did every French town have a Hotel Lion d’Or?
And then the hospital. Julia had never visited Mende hospital before, but it was just like any hospital. It could have been a hospital in Toronto.
‘Par là . . . je connais bien la route.’
Doors opened, nurses passed, old people lay on trolleys, staring grimly at nothing: people cuckolded by their own bodies, betrayed.
The
