Lost (4 page)

‘It’s all right. We’re nearly there.’

When they reached the entrance to the grounds, Alice put Dan down and stopped for a moment to catch her breath. Dan stood there looking at her, plucking nervously at his hands. She picked him up again and passed through the entrance to the property marked by two stone pillars. She
began to run along the gravel path that wound through a cluster of pine trees and scrub oaks to a circle of lawn at the front of the house. She put Dan down on the lawn and ran across to the flight of stone steps that led up to the main door. She tugged at the bell but heard no sound. She called out once, but no one came. Gathering Dan into her arms again, she went round to the side and climbed the steps to the broad terrace that ran the full length of the house and overlooked the sea in the distance.

Babette appeared at the far end of the terrace. She was carrying a bunch of orange gladioli with purple stalks that she set down on the stone parapet. She came towards them smiling, her arms open for Dan. Alice handed him to her.

‘Is Sam here?’

Babette looked fondly at Dan. He was her favourite.

‘He’s grown,’ she said.

‘I’ve lost Sam,’ Alice said, wiping away her tears. Babette looked up and saw her distress for the first time. ‘He was in the square. We can’t find him anywhere.’ Her voice was trembling.

‘Have you tried the café? They’ve got computer games there now. Kids love that.’

Alice stared at Babette.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No I haven’t.’ She held out her arms for Dan.

Babette kissed Dan on the cheek.

‘I’ll go. You stay here. You’re exhausted.’

‘No, no. I’d rather go.’

‘We’ll telephone. Come inside.’

Alice followed Babette along the terrace to the back door filled with glass panes that gave on to a narrow passage leading to the kitchen. The telephone was an old black model that hung on the wall beside the cooker. Babette set Dan down on a chair beside a long wooden table covered with empty jam jars, gleaming in the sunlight. Dan kept his eyes on his mother. Alice felt the cold feeling in her chest spreading, settling in.

‘Bettie?’ Babette spoke loudly into the phone. Alice could see that Babette was speaking but she could no longer hear her. There was a silence beginning to fill her head. Her mind’s eye was now moving like a breeze in the empty village, around the tree trunks and in the leaves, looking down on to the deserted square. And up the hill, past the church and into the graveyard she knew was there but had never seen. She knew where to go and where to look. All of the places seemed to stare back at her. You see, they said. Empty. No tricks. ‘Thanks, Bettie. Call us if you see him.’

Alice turned on Dan.

‘Where is he, Dan? Dan, did you see him outside in the square?’ Dan seemed to pull back. ‘Dan. Did you see him at all? Answer me!’ She caught sight of his expression and touched her boy’s face. ‘Please, Dan.’ Babette stepped forward. ‘Did you see Sam?’

He shook his head. ‘He wasn’t there.’

‘Have something to drink,’ Babette said. ‘Sit down a moment. He’s probably found a friend in the village. I’ll go and look for him. I can ask everyone.’

Alice felt a wave of calm like an anaesthetic. She heard Babette’s voice fade as though she were being carried rapidly away from her. ‘Do you want to come with me, find your brother?’ she was saying to Dan.

Then she was out of the room and running back along the terrace. The feeling of calm had gone and her heart was a crazed, unhelpful mechanism banging in her chest. Her eyes and nose streamed as she ran down the steps and along the path towards the gate. At the gate she stopped, gasping for breath.

Samuel. Little boy. Where are you?

She clutched her stomach, her eyes searching the woods around her, the tree trunks poking through the emptiness. She closed her eyes and saw his face, his lips closed, curved upwards at the edges, his round eyes, their perpetual enquiry. She looked about her. The woods were still there,
the path, the grassy clearing and the bench made of concrete masquerading as wood, a bench for lovers needful of sea views. In her mind she was calling her husband, begging him to forgive her.

A wave of sickness overcame her and she threw up an acid shower, spattering the ground. She wiped her mouth with her hand and looked past the bench to the thorny precipice. Beyond, between two mauve hills, metallic and scintillating, was the inevitable triangle of sea. She looked up and saw the perfect curve of a vapour trail cutting through the thick blue sky. The tears had dried on her cheeks, leaving a film. The coldness in her chest had grown hard as plaster. She watched the vapour trail swelling and beginning to disintegrate. As though she could see the world reflected in the sky, she knew he had gone. She drew breath and shouted her son’s name into the unyielding heat, once and with such force that her voice cracked and broke.

The telephone stopped ringing while Stuart was unlocking the door to his flat. Only Gérard rang him at home. Poor Gérard, who watched the gradual transfer of authority from Stuart to Mesguish, unable to fight for what was due to him after twenty-five years as an inspector in all the worst postings Central Office could find. When they finally pushed Stuart out and put Mesguish in his place, he would plead for Gérard, but he wouldn’t get anywhere. Gérard would be transferred off the island and so would he.

He stepped into the dark room and bolted the door from the inside. He had stayed on the beach until the sand had cooled and the first stars appeared. The large window at the far end of the room was now a rectangle of purple sky. He did not turn on the light, because he had a headache, but went straight to the fridge. Inside was a jar of milky gherkins, a saucepan full of last night’s spaghetti in tomato sauce and six small cartons of chocolate milk with straws attached. He took one and drank it without pausing. Then he took off his shoes and, with sand still stuck to his feet, lay face down on his narrow bed.

It was his mother who had made him sleep on his stomach. As a child his hair had been matted at the back and the other children had found in this one of the many things to tease him about. She had tried combing olive oil into it at night and even made him sleep with a rubber bonnet to flatten it. Then she had died, but it had pained her, his hair, and she had tried to help him, but nothing had worked. He remembered the sound his mother had made as she walked: a gentle swishing sound like wind in barley. Now he knew it was her big thighs in nylon tights rubbing together. He remembered
her voice calling him in the village when he went missing, patiently and insistently repeating his first name – Antoine – a name no one used any more. He liked listening to her calling him. He would crouch in his hiding place between the church and the graveyard, a narrow passageway full of stones, barred by a blackberry bush with a tunnel through it, and listen to his mother’s voice. She was twice the size of his father and several times his worth as a human being. He would have gone on loving his mother if she had not died. As for his father, there was a great hole where his feelings for him should have been. And his sister Beatrice – he was afraid of her and always had been.

His body jolted him out of sleep. He rose from his bed to go and find food. The spaghetti in the fridge would do. He leaned against the sink, eating it cold from the saucepan and listening to himself chewing. In the background, the house was improbably quiet. He spoke aloud, his mouth full. ‘We just keep sliding off him, don’t we, Titi?’ He consoled himself with the thought that Coco had looked rattled when he had talked about his fictional conversation with Father Pierre. And he had got the seats of his Saab wet.

Stuart felt a wave of self-disgust. He put down his spaghetti and inwardly apologised. To his mother, to his sister and to Titi, his brother; almost his brother, for he and Titi had been born the same week and had both been breast-fed by the same woman, Stuart’s mother. In spite of this, Titi’s life was so to outshine his own that he had become a local god and now, years after his death, not a week went by without someone in the village mentioning his name. Titi’s own mother was fifteen when she gave birth to him. She had the body of a sick child and no milk in her, and no love either as far as Stuart could remember. So Titi fed from Stuart’s mother, took what he needed and thrived. He grew tall. His eyes were full of light and everybody loved him. He played the best football Santarosa had ever seen and when he ran his dark curls bounced on his shoulders. At night the girls slept
with their bedroom windows open and their hair spread out on their pillows, just in case he should climb the drainpipe.

Titi was the only person besides his mother who had looked for Stuart when he went missing. Titi had tried to help him by putting him in goal, but it had not worked; Stuart could not remember why. It was as if the other kids could smell his weakness. Soon Titi was rising too fast to notice him. He had begun to take trips into the mountains on his own that would last longer and longer. At first he had left for a few days, then a month, then the whole summer. Stuart would follow him up the path to the edge of the woods and watch his thin, dusty legs sticking out from beneath his rucksack. Then, without turning round, Titi would disappear into the trees. When he was sixteen he had left for good.

After his mother had died Stuart hid even more. When she could still sit on the fountain with the other women and talk about him, about his appetite and his bowel movements, praise him or complain about him, she was defending his place in the village. When she had died he had become an urchin, without status. His father had gone into the dark recesses of Santarosa’s bar and drunk pastis until he was half-blind and half-deaf and could hardly remember he had any children. Titi’s mother, who had become fatter but no more loving, had come in every day to cook and wash until his sister Beatrice was ten and old enough to do it herself.

The telephone rang again. Stuart stared at it. On the fourth ring he made his way over to the table beneath the window and picked up the receiver. He listened to Gérard’s fat man’s tenor.

There was a woman crying in his office.

‘I’ve been calling since six. I sent someone to Enrico’s … The child disappeared at midday. In your village,’ Gérard said.

His village. The idea was amusing. Santarosa, for the whole island, was the place where Coco Santini came from.

‘How old?’ Stuart asked.

‘Seven.’ Gérard paused for Stuart’s questions but none came. ‘The gendarmerie came in at two,’ he went on. ‘They ran their checks and came up with nothing. They called the prosecutor at six.’

The thought of Van Ruytens, the prosecutor, wearied Stuart. The man was an indolent bourgeois from the mainland who had chosen the island because he liked to sail. His previous posting had been in Brest and Stuart could not forgive him for his interminable lectures about the Breton character, about its courage, its rigour and its industry. The man had no lessons to give anyone. After five in the afternoon, calls to his office were often rerouted to his portable because he was on his yacht.

Stuart wondered why Van Ruytens had called them in so soon. The judiciary police was rarely called in until the prosecutor had established sufficient grounds for an investigation.

‘Why did he take the gendarmes off so fast? They haven’t had time to do anything.’

‘It was the woman. She insisted.

‘Who is she?’

‘Her name’s Aron. She’s English. The wife of Mathieu Aron.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘Aron of “Machines Aron”. Textiles.’ Stuart had never heard of that either. ‘He’s from the island.’

‘The name isn’t,’ Stuart said.

‘He’s a Colonna, on his mother’s side. Was – he died three years ago.’

‘The Colonnas as in Constance Colonna?’

‘Yes.’

Stuart remembered how the old woman had frightened him as a child. He remembered her horse’s teeth and the translucent skin of her hands.

‘The mother managed to convince Van Ruytens over the phone that her child’s been lifted,’ Gérard said.

‘You could convince him of anything. What do you think?’

‘I think she’s completely hysterical. The kid disappeared in the main square in broad daylight.’

‘Midday’s quiet in Santarosa. It can be dead at lunchtime.’

‘Stuart.’ He had lowered his voice. ‘She’s been here for four hours.’

‘Where is she?’

‘Next door, in your office. I’m on Annie’s phone.’

‘What about the search? When is it?’

‘Five-thirty at the
mairie
in Santarosa. She’s a mess,’ Gérard whispered. ‘She thinks we’re in Colombia. It’s Van Ruytens’ fault. She got him all excited. Some old friend of her brother-in-law’s rang him from the Ministry. So he called us in to cover himself. I told her kidnapping just doesn’t happen here.’

‘She doesn’t want to hear that,’ Stuart said. ‘All she wants to hear is that it’s not a paedophile. What is it, a boy or a girl?’

‘Boy.’

‘Where’s Santini? With his wife, or with Evelyne?’

‘No idea.’

‘Find out, will you? I’ll be there in twenty minutes.’

Stuart drove fast through the centre of town. The first tourists, as always too scantily clad for the island, were wandering inelegantly along the seafront sucking on morsels of fast food. They looked livid and ugly in the new globe lamps that lit the promenade. As he approached the main port, the traffic thickened. Stuart turned on the siren but he had lost his rotating light, so the drivers could not identify the origin of the noise and braked in confusion. Stuart pulled on to the wide stone pavement beside the docks and accelerated. When he was clear of the dock he turned off the siren and drove back on to the road. He wound up the window to shut out the fumes of his own diesel engine. He thought of Santini’s Saab, with its purified exhaust, and recalled Santini’s first Mercedes and the crowds it had drawn when he had brought it back to the island. Coco had returned triumphant from the mainland with a fortune made in slot machines and found Titi barring his way. By then Titi had been head of the FNL for five years. He had stopped coming down from the
maquis
and people said he had stayed pure as the air up there. He had become a hero even beyond the island, but no journalist had ever managed to interview him. People had started to talk about him as a saint.

Santini had got a kid from Marseilles to kill him. No islander would have dared, they were too superstitious. The kid from Marseilles had stalked Titi for three months, and then shot him with a crossbow in his sleep. Stuart had been in the middle of a law degree at Massaccio in preparation to join the FNL. He had felt he would be of more use as a jurist than as a soldier. When Titi died he took Stuart’s vocation with him. He had dropped the law and left for the mainland. He had become a policeman because he couldn’t think of anything else to do: he could not be on the same side as Santini. It had taken Coco only one year to gain control of the FNL. Now, only twenty years later, no one even mentioned the word independence any more.

Stuart pressed the remote control and watched the gates to the compound open. If Santini had stooped to kidnapping, the island would not forgive him. As he drove in, Stuart smiled at the thought that Coco might have made his first mistake.

Stuart met Gérard in the hall. He was wearing the mackintosh he always wore, even in summer, a khaki raincoat with epaulettes and a belt he never used. Draped over his bulk, he said the coat made him feel less like a slob and more like a general.

‘The beeper didn’t respond,’ Gérard said.

Stuart had left it at home where it had been for months, lying in the chalky green deposit that grew in his bathroom cabinet.

‘Go home,’ he said. ‘You look tired.’

Gérard took a handkerchief from the pocket of his raincoat and wiped the perspiration from his forehead.

‘I’ll wait for you. I’m fine. She’s in your office.’

This was the difference between them: Gérard liked the
job. It still made Stuart feel dirty; it was only that he had grown used to the feeling. Stuart was struck by Gérard’s capacity to remain so intact, so resolutely good-natured in spite of everything. He thought only children were so stubbornly blind to ugliness.

Gérard inspected his handkerchief and returned it to his pocket. ‘Get some Kleenex, I would, before you go in there.’

Stuart was in no hurry.

‘What about the search?’ he asked. ‘What have we got?’

Gérard leaned against the table covered with union pamphlets that Annie conscientiously put on display, like freshly cut flowers, each time Central Office sent new ones.

‘A hundred men,’ he said. ‘With the gendarmerie and the CRS.
*
The gendarmes have a helicopter and we’ve got two dogs, one from the CRS and the other from Civil Protection. The prosecutor’s coming to the
mairie
first thing. He says he wants you to call him, whatever time it is.’

‘She must be a woman of influence.’

‘She knows about procedure,’ Gérard said.

‘How come?’

‘Her husband was a lawyer.’

‘I thought he was in textiles.’

‘That’s the family business, run by the elder brother, David Aron. It looks like he’s the one with the money.’

‘How much is she worth?’ Stuart asked.

‘She’s not clear on that. She says she owns twenty-nine per cent of the business; then she says she’s hardly worth anything.’

‘How did the husband die?’

‘Skiing accident.’

Skiing seemed to Stuart like a particularly humiliating way to go. He noticed that his headache had lifted.

‘I’m thirsty,’ he said.

He pushed open the swing doors that led into the
ground-floor
corridor and pressed the time-switch for the light. It clicked like a detonator. ‘Did you find Santini?’ he asked, holding the door for Gérard.

‘He’s at Evelyne’s,’ Gérard said, following him to the kitchen.

‘So he broke his summer rule,’ Stuart said, turning on the light. The room smelled of Annie’s bizarre microwave dishes. He took a glass from the draining board. Water spurted from the tap, hitting the steel sink and spraying his trousers. Stuart gulped back his water, which tasted of bleach.

‘This isn’t Coco, Stuart. If it’s anything, it’s foreigners.’

Stuart rinsed the glass and put it back on the draining board.

‘Maybe,’ he said.

Gérard followed him back into the hall.

‘You go home,’ Stuart told him. He watched his deputy pat his pockets. ‘What is it?’

Gérard contemplated his keys.

‘The prosecutor’s called in Mesguish,’ he said, without looking up. He began working the keys with his tapering fingers.

‘Right,’ Stuart said. ‘When’s he coming?’

‘Tomorrow morning.’

‘What time?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is he bringing his men?’

‘Six of them.’

Stuart let the anger rise and then fall.