Jacquot and the Waterman (3 page)
...
Oh God.
Julie ...
And he wrapped his arms around her, kicked out his
legs and dragged her up with him.
But even before he reached the surface he knew that
there was something wrong, something not as it should be.
There was no swimsuit on the body. Had she taken it off?
And the flesh against his chest, in his arms, shifted like a
puppy's coat, loose on the frame. Swollen. Slippery. Somehow larger and heavier than six-year-old Julie the closer he
came to the surface.
Then, suddenly, he was back in sunlight, water cascading from him, facing out across the lake, then turning to
shore, hauling her with him
. . .
And standing there, thirty metres away, he could
see
.. .
Four of them. On the beach.
Not three. Four. His wife, Ned and Mandy
. . .
and Julie,
their youngest, all of them waving at him. None of them
able to see what he held in his arms.
'She was in the woods,' he heard his wife shout across
the water. 'She's okay, she's here . . . She was back in the
woods.'
Which was when the man knew for certain that the
body in his arms, the body he'd pulled from the depths of
Lac Calade, was not his daughter's.
2
Danie
l Jacquot cupped his hands and splashed water
on his face, gripped the sides of the basin and
looked in the mirror. Long strands of black hair stuck to
his cheeks and water dripped from his chin.
I need a rubber band, he thought to himself, absently,
as if there was nothing else worth thinking about that first
Monday morning in May.
A rubber band. A rubber band. He'd seen one somewhere, he was sure of it. The one he'd used the day before.
But where had he put it? He glanced around the bathroom, a small, angled space set beneath the eaves where
he'd learnt to keep his head low, its single window giving
onto pan tiled roofs, its pastel walls bright with a distant,
shifting sea-glitter from the Vieux Port.
Nothing. He couldn't see one anywhere.
Jacquot dried his face on yesterday's T-shirt and tossed
it into the wicker basket beneath the sink. Rubber band,
rubber band. Sometimes, in emergencies, he used string.
But it never worked as well as a rubber band. That was
what he needed, and he went back into the bedroom to
find one.
Sunlight splashed through the room, the sound of
Monday-morning traffic rising up like a hot murmur from
rue Caisserie. And then, in an instant, his search for a
rubber band was forgotten. There was something wrong,
something out of place. He tried to register what was
different, how the room had changed. And then he realised. He hadn't noticed the night before. She'd taken the
curtains, the length of muslin she'd dyed a cobalt blue and
trailed over the pelmet to fall in folds onto the bare wood
floor. The curtains. She'd taken the curtains.
Jacquot dressed in the clothes he'd worn the day before,
save for the T-shirt that he'd used to dry himself. Pulling
the hair from his collar he looked around for something to
tie it. Nothing here he could use. And nothing in the
bathroom. In the kitchen he slid open drawers, trawled his
fingers through the contents, shifted the containers on the
shelves to see if there was anything suitable, but found
nothing.
Then, beside the kitchen door, wedged under his service Beretta and holster, he saw the mail - a stack of
circulars, bills, a postcard from Boni’s friend Chaume
furloughed in Tahiti - which he'd brought up to the
apartment the night before. All of it bound in a thick
rubber band. He snapped it off, gripped his hair and
wound it round into a ponytail. Then he buckled the gun
to his belt, pulled on a jacket and closed the apartment
door behind him.
Taking the stairs two at a time, fingers brushing the
wood banisters, shoes scuffing the worn stone, Jacquot
swung down two flights to the ground floor, crossed the
tiled hallway to the Widow Foraque’s door and knocked on
the coloured panels of glass.
It opened before his hand had dropped to his side.
Thank you,' he said, handing Madame Foraque the
saucepan she'd left outside his door the night before and
the plate that had covered it.
The old concierge took them both, tipped the plate,
looked into the saucepan and nodded.
'Rabbit,' she said, sweeping her mascaraed eyes up at
him from beneath her black beret, the way she did when
she talked to you. The man at the
tabac.
His son s got a
smallholding over Aubagne someplace.'
'It was good,' Jacquot told her. And it had been. Thick
and meaty. But cold by the time he'd got back. While he'd
walked around the emptied apartment, taking it all in, the
stew had warmed on the stove.
He'd only been away a single night. Not thirty-six hours.
But Boni was gone. Nothing left of her. The clothes in the
wardrobe behind the bedroom door and in the chest of
drawers beneath the windows, her shoes, her toiletries,
her tapes and CDs, pictures, books, the silly little things
she'd bought for their second-floor apartment above the
old cobbler's shop. She'd taken everything. Anything she
could lay claim to, and some things that she couldn't. The
place was empty, as if she'd never been there. Jacquot
wondered how long it had taken her, how long she'd been
planning it. She must have found herself somewhere
without him knowing. All she would have needed was a
couple of trunks in which to pack it all and the apartment
to herself.
'She left in the afternoon,' Madame Foraque began,
telling Jacquot what she knew, whether he wanted to hear
it or not. She'd have told him the night before if he hadn't
got back so late. She gestured to the stairs with the empty
saucepan. 'First I see of it there's men coming up and
down, carrying bags and whatnots. Boxes and the like.
They told me she was moving out. Couldn't have taken
them more than an hour. Loaded everything in a van and
drove away
'Did you see her?' asked Jacquot quietly.
Madame Foraque shook her head. 'Stayed upstairs the
whole time. Just the key, left out here on the table while I
took my nap.'
'Well, thanks for the rabbit,' he said. 'It was kind of you
to think of it.'
'She leave you anything? Was anything left?'
'Not much.' Jacquot tried a smile. 'This and that,' he
said, then turned to go.
