A Love Like Blood (13 page)

Interestingly
.

Every time I read that word, I wanted to march into the offices of the paper, cause some terrible atrocity, and ask them if they found it interesting. Why is it, I wanted to ask them, why is it that with some dreadful crime, a brutal killing like this, that the newspapers feel they need to make every explicit detail a thing of public record? Why not leave these things unspoken, why not leave them to the bereaved, these things that should remain private? Something vaguely connected in my mind: reading these gruesome details, I felt as I had when I stood in the operating theatre in Trumpington Street; as if I was seeing something I shouldn’t see. Blood, like the physical act of love, like murder.

So why expose these things? The answer, I can see now, is money, but at the time I was too full of rage to see so clearly and it made me want to storm their offices.

But I didn’t, of course, and anyway, I knew where the source of my anger really lay. It lay in Avignon.

In Paris, I considered going to the Sûreté with what I knew, but I hesitated, because, after all, what did I know? Nothing, really. A name, and with that name a link to an act of horror I’d seen during a time of general horror. I would be throwing wild accusations around, and I knew it. I wondered if I was doing the right thing, but I must have walked past a half-dozen police stations in Paris that day, and entered none of them.

I stood at Marian’s grave, and I wept angry tears, and found that it did not help to do so. I stared at the earth, trying to stop myself from picturing what was underneath, and wondered if that was why Marian’s father, rich though he was, had not wanted to bring her body home. What was there, in that dark soil, that was worth bringing home? I imagined that was what he’d said to Margery. I imagined them arguing about it, and in the end the grieving mother must have done all she could just to get him to pay for a respectable headstone in a corner of Montmartre.

As I stood at her grave, terrible images surged into my mind, unbidden and unwelcome, as I saw him attacking her, cutting her, biting her, ruining her. I tried to force them out, tried to find peace by remembering Marian’s face as I had known her, but though I attempted to paint a picture of her, I could not manage to do so. I knew I had constructed no more than a caricature of her; that I couldn’t really see her any more in my mind; that she’d gone. In her place was only the evidence of my eyes – the letters cut in the stone in front of me.

That evening, the evening before I left Paris for the south, I ate in a small bistro just down from the cemetery. I ordered almost without thinking, some food, some wine. I sat in a corner and watched the customers come and go, watched the two young waiters and one waitress go about their evening’s work quickly and professionally. My waiter brought my food; I ordered some more wine, watching a little performance between the waitress and two old Parisian gentlemen. I watched, not even really able to hear the words, the ritual they enacted. The bringing of the food, the noises of delight and gratitude from the men. The waitress, inclining her head, do you need anything else? The glance between the men, old friends presumably, no, nothing, thank you. We have everything we need. The smallest curtsey from the waitress, thank you gentlemen.

It struck me as a small mime show, one that would be repeated this evening in Paris alone many thousands of times.

But there was something further that interested me, and it was a story even older than that of food: it was one of lust. I saw the way the old men looked at the girl when she wasn’t looking. As her eyes turned to one man, his friend would take his chance to stare at her. She was pretty enough, perhaps that was why they gazed. Then I realised that she wasn’t pretty, not really. What she was, was young, a thing so often mistaken for beauty. Her skin was pale and smooth, her eyes bright, her lips red, and her hair was, in fairness, spectacular, a mass of blonde curls.

Perhaps it was just habit that made these men in their seventies look at her cleavage, and at her bottom when she left them. Perhaps they genuinely harboured desire for her. As she returned to enquire how their food was, I saw one of them take his chance to steal another look at her, but this time he looked not at her breasts, but at her neck. The carotid, I noticed, pulsed slightly, and the man had seen this. She turned to him and he smiled into her eyes instead.

She smiled back, and was gone again.

I stayed a long time in the restaurant, picking slowly at my food, drinking more wine than I should have. Eventually, the waitress came over to me and looked at my plate.

‘
Ce n’est pas bon?
’ she asked, seriously concerned.

‘
Si, si, c’est très bon. Mais je n’ai pas faim.
’

I smiled, but I could see she wasn’t convinced, and I felt the need to offer her, and therefore the unseen chef, some further encouragement. In stuttering French I tried to explain that it was very delicious, and that I liked the sauce in particular. Only now did I notice what I was eating: coq au vin.

Now she smiled, broadly, and I knew I had done the right thing. ‘
Oh, c’est le sang qui donne ce bon goût à la sauce; il la rend beaucoup plus riche. C’est le secret du chef.
’

She winked at me as if to show that this was a secret she regularly shared, and I kept the smile on my face until she’d gone, then pushed the plate away from me.

Le sang
? It was the blood that made the sauce rich. What little hunger I’d had vanished. I quickly swallowed a lot of wine and staggered into the hot night.

So the following day, when I arrived in Avignon, my mind was already cloudy with dark thoughts, with words from the article about Marian’s death, which I continued to play in my head like a tape recording with the accounts of the two other murders in the district around the same time, all presumed to be the work of the same hand.

I had booked a hotel with a travel agent in Paris. I took a taxi from the station, and found myself being driven across the river, out of the city. My hotel turned out to be across the Rhône, in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, not the city itself, but a small town directly facing it.

The Hôtel du Rhône was a crammed and squalid place; the room was tiny and didn’t look at the river but at a train line and a brick wall. It was unbearably hot, with a window that barely opened, so as soon as I’d dumped my old holdall on the bed, I set out for the city itself.

I didn’t feel like I was in France any longer, it felt far too sultry and southern to me, as if I’d crossed the border into Spain, though I had never been there either. It was dusk. A strong and hot wind blew into my face as I crossed the river towards the city, so warm and dry it almost made me gag.

The city seemed to have an almost perfectly intact wall, medieval I supposed, and the whole skyline inside was dominated by the crenellations of some large castle or palace, the towers of a cathedral.

The sun set behind me as I crossed by a new suspension bridge, seeing to my left a massive old fortified bridge that ran halfway across the river, then stopped, and I knew it must be the one from the nursery rhyme I’d sung as a boy.

L’on y danse tous en rond . . .

Everyone dances in circles. I had never understood why, what that meant, until that point. The bridge, or half of it, must have collapsed or been destroyed at some time, making it a road that went nowhere, only to the seemingly furious waters of the Rhône below, leaving its passengers to dance in circles. Maybe I was imagining all that, but I could see them anyway, figures dancing, swaying, swinging perilously near to the waters.

I reached the end of my bridge, and stopped.

For a brief moment, I wondered what on earth I was doing. It was no longer a fantasy, finding this man. It had become real, here and now, in Avignon, and I was about to enter the city where I believed him to be hiding. If I had any second thoughts, now was the time to pay them heed. But that only lasted for a second, because I knew what I was doing, and why; I had no second thoughts.

I was going to find Marian’s killer.

It was the how that worried me, not the why.

Not then.

Chapter 5

That first evening in Avignon overwhelmed me.

I have tried to work out what it was about the city that disturbed me so, but right from the very start, as I passed through the old walls, I felt unsettled. It sounds melodramatic to say I felt as if I was entering a giant beast of some kind, but that is the first impression I had – of walking into a living, breathing monster, one that had streets for veins and buildings for organs. I think, too, that I had the immediate sense that I did not belong. That I was a transgressor. Not just because I was English, and pale, when almost everyone around me was speaking French and bore tanned skin. It was something more than that; it was because I could not understand why I was the only one who seemed to feel the oppression and imminent violence of the place. I couldn’t understand why everyone else was strolling, smiling, eating, joking, flirting and enjoying themselves, when it seemed apparent that a storm would break at any moment.

I entered the walls by the gate at the Place Crillon, and, without the breeze that had scoured me raw outside the city, the heat grew worse. The square was crowded, heaving with people on all sides, and everyone seemed to be in couples or groups. I felt very exposed, as if everyone was looking at me, though at the same time I felt utterly invisible. Everyone was hurrying somewhere, or just standing and chatting, or walking arm in arm to a restaurant. It felt very different to Paris, in a way that I could only pinpoint with one simple word: danger.

I crossed the square and took a small street that led from the far corner. Within five minutes I was lost as I found myself in a network of twisting alleyways and small cobbled roads that turned around and in on themselves, cutting between high blank walls of stone with only occasional windows, which were frequently barred.

A strange fear crept into me that first evening, and it never left me. There was something about the city I could not place, some oppression, some terror.

I don’t know how much of it was my state of mind. I was tired, very tired from the journey. I had not eaten much. The sudden, more intense heat of the south, that hot wind, was blowing in my eyes, across my lips, and all the while, the thought lingering at the back of my mind of what I was doing there, and why.

But maybe there was more to it than that. The city did have an air about it. It felt alive, it felt dangerous. It felt old, somehow older than Paris, somehow more primitive, despite the various grand buildings I saw.

I passed out of the network of alleys and stumbled into a large open square, at the far end of which I saw a building I took to be the Palais des Papes; beyond it, the Cathedral.

Again I found myself a paradox, both invisible and terribly exposed all at once, and I ducked down another small street, trying to look like I knew where I was going, avoiding eye contact with everyone.

The walls around me grew higher, leaning in towards each other at the top, almost touching. They turned about and I found myself taking dead ends, having to retrace my steps. It seemed as if no path ran straight for more than twenty paces, and the hot and foetid air from kitchen doorways blew on to me, again making me want to retch.

My mind began to dissolve.

The city had become the entrails of the animal that I’d entered, through which I was walking, or struggling to walk. I heard footsteps behind me and quickened my pace, taking turns at random until I suddenly realised I was in a small street I’d been in five minutes before. I stopped, and made my way to look in a jeweller’s window, dark and barred now, and with nothing on view. Feeling foolish, I turned, and bumped into someone.

He cursed at me but walked on and I mumbled an apology to his back, in English. By the time I managed to turn it into French, he was gone.

I found myself hurrying down more alleys whose walls were black with age and covered with obscene graffiti, images of rampant penises and hanging breasts. In red paint were scrawled words that I could not understand, and which I took to be dialect, or curses.

At one moment I was jostling for room past thronging crowds, and the next I was alone in a long narrow street that curved gently like the back of a bow, with high blind walls, making me feel as if I was walking through a canyon.

I stopped, my breath heavy, my feet sore, and tried to decide what to do.

A figure stepped into view in a pool of lamplight at the end of my street, a thin woman. She walked quickly down the street towards me, staying on the opposite side, and I thought she was coming for me, but she gave me no more than a glance as she passed me by, a look that told me not to look back at her.

So I began a retreat to my hotel, eventually finding my way to the city wall. As soon as I stepped outside the old town I felt better. I felt in less danger and there was that breeze again, which had at last cooled enough to provide a little relief. Tracing the wall round to the river, I found the bridge by which I’d crossed the Rhône, and hurried back to my hotel, my head bowed into the wind.

I snatched my key from the night porter and locked myself in my room, where I fell asleep almost immediately.