Significance (48 page)

Silence.

She opened the door, then put it on the latch.

The air outside was wonderfully fresh and still carried some of the day's heat. The street lamps sent pools of warm yellow light onto the darkened streets. Across the road she could make out the evening's diners and drinkers inside La Coquille Bleue. All of them seemed to be settled into little groups, all were with friends or family, only she was alone. She remembered the poster she used to have of Hopper's ‘Nighthawks' where an American diner is populated by four individuals, three men and a lone woman, each trapped within a private reverie. In that painting there was loneliness. Here was companionship. An easy companionship which excluded her.

Marilyn focused her eyes on the figures inside, searching (though she knew it was unlikely) for Scott. She comforted herself with the relief and joy she would feel at finding him. First she would throw herself into his arms, kiss him and say his name, then she would probably punch him on the shoulder. Not that she had hit anyone since grade school and even then it was no doubt pretty feeble and half
-
hearted.

Once she had passed La Coquille Bleue she quickened her pace. She was confident that she knew the route into the centre of town, even though Scott usually drove. There was a tree
-
lined avenue, then a right turn and a beautiful
maison bourgeoise
with its ornate white stonework and tall shuttered windows appeared on the left. Then there was the
Ecole
and the ugly apartment block, then another right turn down a road with houses on one side and a high stone wall on the other. After another turn, they reached the main square where the old men played
boule
under the shade of the cedar trees. At the far end overlooking the patch of green was the Hotel de Ville and next to it, the police station.

She could picture the route in her mind, but at night and on foot everything looked different. She had considered taking the car, but couldn't find the keys.

She set off down the long avenue exactly as they did when in the car, and took a right fork then continued down the nondescript street as before, but there was no sign of the beautiful house she had expected to see rising up suddenly beyond its long manicured lawns.

Confused and a little frightened, she comforted herself with the knowledge that distance contracted as one sped along comfortably in a vehicle. Roads and hills shrank.

Marilyn continued on along the road in the expectation of finding familiar landmarks. She tried by some mathematical process – whereby she figured speeds of somewhere between thirty and forty miles per hour against her own much slower walking speed – to measure the length of time it would take her to reach the place where the white mansion stood. But she did not wear a watch; was always dependent on other timepieces – her computer's clock, Scott, the read
-
out on her electronic radio alarm, or any of those external devices on town halls, in railway stations, in shops and cafés. Time, or rather reports of its progress were usually everywhere you looked, but not now.

In her worried state, she had only the false internal measure of distorted guesswork. This was a compass that she knew was easily set out of kilter. Good time – with its first kisses and birthdays and great sex and seamless, perfect performances of poetry and enthusiastic acceptance letters – always seemed to end all too quickly, while bad time – with its root canal work, its car breakdowns and queues and exams and banishment to bed without supper – stretched out into an infinity of aching, lazily moving seconds.

She therefore followed this one long road for twenty minutes before concluding that it wasn't the one they usually took.

She turned around and walked back the way she had come and after ten minutes came to a fork in the road. Here then, is where I went wrong, she thought. She gazed down the length of this new street and noted how similar it was to the one she had just walked down. Her mistake had been understandable and she swore there was something distinctive about the line of pollarded trees which she recognised.

She walked more briskly now as this road was more or less straight, but even in the darkness she saw that there was no sign of the tall ornate gates that guarded the big house and interrupted the regularity of the smaller houses' neat front gardens and modest fences.

She stopped walking abruptly and gazed around her. Why, she thought, why must Europeans build their streets in such a maze? What was wrong with the good old grid system with its blocks and easy north and south, east and west, and numerical avenues and streets? She knew the answer, knew that these villages and towns developed organically and gradually, following the contours of the land with its rivers and valleys and existing pathways and buildings.

This is just so stupid, she thought, so, so stupid, like something dreamed up by the surrealists, by Magritte or de Chirico. Everything that had happened from the moment they stepped out of the house that morning might have been the enactment of a convoluted Hitchcock plot whereby mistaken identity and concealed knowledge baffled protagonist and audience alike.

Everything unravels. It is all done to drive me mad, as in the film
Gaslight
, as in
Les Diaboliques
.

Marilyn allowed herself these excesses. The old habits of imagination, well
-
stirred and qualified by a liberal arts education. The gift of a mind that can find fire
-
breathing dragons and effervescent cherubs in cloud formations, but can also put the hairy sharp
-
toothed bogeyman under the bed and knows the precise measure of his grasping hands' strength and clamminess, and what it symbolises in Freudian terms.

Marilyn interpreted the world through its likeness to a Coen brothers' film, to a poem by W.H. Auden or Sharon Olds, to Greek myths and film noir classics; danger and pleasure and pain were all subjects. But now she wished only to remove herself from these tangled night streets and find Scott.

A door opened two houses away and a woman in a white nylon tab apron emerged carrying a watering can. Marilyn watched as the woman began to move around the small front garden tending the many flower
-
filled pots and tubs arranged there.

‘Excusez moi! Excusez moi, Madame!
' Marilyn called and hurried towards her.

The woman looked up in surprise, blinking in Marilyn's direction.

‘Ou est le Hotel de Ville si vous plait?'

As she drew closer Marilyn saw that the woman was older than she had at first thought, though her body was as trim and straight as a much younger woman's. Marilyn repeated her question looking earnestly at the old woman's face, half of which was alive and mobile, while the other drooped down as if it had melted, and its eye had a deadness about it.

The woman said something in a drowned distorted French which Marilyn could not understand.

Marilyn mimed a body language of being lost, looking up the street, then down the street, shaking her head and raising her palms towards heaven.

The woman watched her uncomprehending, as if she were tired by the endless japery of Marcel Marceau and Jacques Tati. They did not amuse her, she was too old for humour and she had thirsty plants to water.

‘Si vous plait, si vous plait,'
Marilyn tried again, sensing she was losing the woman's attention. Then she pointed down the road in the direction she had been going.
‘Hotel de Ville?'

Slowly the woman's one good eye seemed to widen as if at last she understood, then aping Marilyn she pointed down the road and nodded.

‘Merci Madame! Merci beaucoup! Bon nuit!'
This last called out cheerfully as Marilyn broke into a trot heading confidently on down the road.

The Lamb

At 8.45 they'd led Scott down a narrow corridor to the phone. He had begun by dialing Marilyn back at the house, but by the time it had rung twice, he'd changed his mind. One phone call only, so it had to count. There was the Canadian embassy in Paris, or alternatively, a lawyer friend in Toronto who might be able to advise him, even at long distance, but who might easily take everything Scott said as an elaborate joke, because that is what they'd done for a long time now, since High School in fact – mount elaborate hoaxes on one another. Scott could ring his father of course, but his parents would panic and flap and get the wrong end of the stick and would thus cause more confusion. If he rang Marilyn she could contact the embassy, get a good lawyer's number and, if need be, ring his parents.

He dialled the house again. It was engaged.

The young policeman looked at him sternly.

‘Engaged,' Scott said. He understood what had happened back at the house, that his hesitant first call had brought Marilyn to the phone and that while it had stopped ringing she had probably still picked up.

‘Try later,' the policeman said, taking Scott's elbow and guiding him back down the hallway to a holding cell.

‘When?'

‘Ten minutes.'

Scott nodded. Sat on the edge of the thin mattress that covered a metal shelf as the cell door was swung shut and locked.

Ten minutes. But they'd taken his watch from him. Also his keys, wallet, loose change, cell phone and belt.

In his wallet there was a photo
-
booth snapshot of Marilyn. He would have liked to look at it at that moment – to remember her grace and comfort and honesty. Her milky skin, her clear eyes, the red Pre
-
Raphaelite hair which in public slightly embarrassed him for its wild hippy connotations, but which in private, he adored.

He was such a damn hypocrite, he thought. So excessively hypocritical about so many things you would almost think he had two personalities locked together in one body – a Dr Jekyll and a Mr Hyde each unaware of the other's existence. Or aware only vaguely of strange half
-
remembered dreams, as when he recalled the murderous night in Aaron's nursery. As in the memories of his words and actions of a couple of days ago – his meeting with the English girl, his mood which had been unreasonable, gruff and sarcastic. Because?

Because? Now he hardly knew why he had acted that way. He hadn't been drunk, merely uninhibited enough to say things he would never have said were he completely sober and, he realised, were he not in a foreign country, a stranger talking to another stranger. And, damn it, she had been coming on to him, was throwing herself at him. She had followed him for God's sake! But the come
-
on was hardly a well
-
polished performance, beneath the make
-
up and blonde hair and bold words he had sensed vulnerability and sweetness, a fragility which he had been attracted to. That was why he had been so aggressive, it was to drive her off, swat her away, make her decide he was a nasty piece of work, an arrogant jerk who would screw her over.

He thought about her carefully, focusing his attention on the character of the young woman. She was beautiful. She was dressed in such a way that one could not fail to notice her, not because it was provocative or overly sexy but because it was girlish, almost virginal, the summery look of a girl from the nineteen
-
fifties.

If she had acted so oddly towards him (following him all the way from the house for example) she was capable of acting in a similarly provocative way towards other men. British and American women (and therefore also Canadians who got carried along in their wake) had reputations in Europe for being easy, for being sexually available. Or so he understood, though perhaps his data was outdated and inaccurate. He saw how the murdered woman might easily have gone like a lamb to the slaughter. Driven not by desire or lust, but sheer aching loneliness.

That was it. He saw it suddenly – she had, despite the bold front, been painfully lonely. Lonely and lost.

A perfect victim.

Half an hour later Scott was taken to the phone again. He rang and rang, but no one answered.

On the Road to Calvary

‘None of these men did it,' Sabine said. She was half sitting, half leaning on a desk, her arms folded over her chest, one ankle hooked around her lower leg.

Vivier looked up and met her eyes.

‘You could be right.'

‘I know I'm right.'

‘No. You don't know that. You're talking about instinct.'

‘So what's your instinct, Inspector? Or do you have none? Is it only women who go by intuition?'

‘Don't let's get into that.'

‘Into what?'

‘Gender. Sexual politics. Don't muddy the waters, Sabine.'

‘Then be honest, sir.'

Vivier sighed. ‘The black kid was terrified, which might suggest guilt, but I don't buy it. He saw someone lose a cardigan, he tried to give it back, failed and put it in clear sight where it might be reclaimed. It was only chance that someone saw him.'

‘And that someone jumped to ridiculous conclusions because he was black,' Sabine added.