Stone Bruises (35 page)

He stumbles into a run towards us as Mathilde kneels beside Gretchen. She’s lying on her back, limbs moving spastically as she blinks up at the sky.

‘Mathilde …?’ It’s a small girl’s voice, lost and confused. ‘Mathilde, I don’t …’

‘Shh, it’s all right, don’t try to speak.’

Mathilde takes hold of one of her hands as Arnaud reaches us. He pauses to rest a hand on Michel, then drops down beside Gretchen.

‘Oh, Jesus! God, no …!’

My mind seems stalled. I stand there helplessly, awkwardly holding Michel. I tell myself that the rifle is too small bore to do much damage, that it’s only lethal for birds and rabbits. But blood is still soaking into Gretchen’s T-shirt, and now she begins to cough black gouts of it.

‘No,’ Mathilde says, as if she’s reproving her. ‘No!’

Gretchen is staring up at her, eyes wide and scared. With her free hand Mathilde presses at the small hole in her chest. Gretchen tries to speak, but then an arterial gush bursts from her mouth and she starts to choke. Her back arches, feet kicking in the dirt as she spasms. For a moment she’s rigid, straining against it. Then all the tension leaves her body, and it’s over.

A stillness seems to descend, a bubble of quiet that neither Michel’s crying nor the boar’s squeals can break. Mathilde half-sits, half-slumps, so that one leg is pinned under her. She’s still holding Gretchen’s hand. She lowers it as Arnaud weeps and strokes his daughter’s face.

‘I’m sorry. She was going to throw him, I had to,’ he keens. ‘Oh God, no, I’m sorry.’

Mathilde stares at her father across Gretchen’s body, then her hand cracks across his face louder than the rifle shot. He doesn’t seem to notice, rocking backwards and forwards with the bloody print on his cheek.

Behind them, the boar hammers at the fence in a frenzy, goaded by the scent of blood. Mathilde gets unsteadily to her feet. She absently tucks her hair behind her ear, but the gesture is broken and automatic, accomplishing nothing except to leave a dark smear. She walks drunkenly to where Arnaud dropped the rifle.

‘Mathilde,’ I say, my voice a croak.

I might as well not have spoken. She picks up the rifle and comes back, no more steadily than before. Her hands and arms have red gloves to her elbows.

‘Mathilde,’ I repeat, struggling to hold onto Michel. But I’m no more than a spectator now. She stands over her father as he kneels by Gretchen. He doesn’t look up when she chambers a round and raises the rifle to her shoulder.

I flinch away as the rifle fires. The report is followed by a shriek from the boar. When I look back Arnaud is still weeping beside his daughter. Mathilde fires again. This time I hear the bullet slap into the boar’s flesh. It roars and spins around, then charges the fence once more. Mathilde calmly works the rifle bolt to reload. She walks closer until she’s firing right down onto the animal’s back. Each shot is accompanied by a frenzied squeal as the boar continues to attack the planking. Its dark-grey hide is black with blood as it shrieks its pain and rage.

Then Mathilde puts the barrel to its ear and pulls the trigger, and the screams are abruptly cut off.

Silence settles, shroud-like, around the pens. Only the soft weeping from Arnaud disturbs it, but gradually other sounds begin to filter in. The pigs’ frightened squeals, Michel’s cries, the rustle of the trees. As the land comes back to life around us, Mathilde lets the rifle drop from her hands. She stares off at nothing while her father kneels over Gretchen’s body, and I stand apart from them both, convinced that this moment will go on for ever.

A MIST-LIKE DRIZZLE
, too light to call rain, blurs the distinction between ground and low grey clouds. The trees by the roadside are displaying their skeletal nature, stark branches showing through the sparse leaves, while what were fields of wheat are now furrows of bare stubble waiting to be ploughed under.

I walk the last kilometre to the farm. After the car has pulled away it occurs to me that, by a vagary of the last few lifts, I’m following the same route as when I first arrived. I stop when I reach the barbed-wire-topped gate, looking past it at the familiar track disappearing into the trees. The mailbox stencilled with
Arnaud
is still nailed to the post. But the white lettering is more faded than I remember, and the rusty padlock that used to bar entry has been replaced by a severe construction of brass and steel. Pinned to the centre of the gate is a subtler form of warning: a printed notice announcing that this is now bank property.

I rub my hand along the gate’s weathered grain, but make no attempt to climb over. Now I’m here I’m reluctant to go any further. I wait for a lone car to flash past before throwing my rucksack onto the other side and clambering across the corroded wire. The once-dusty track is puddled and muddy, and without the cover of leaves I can soon make out the farmhouse through the trees. Then the track emerges in the courtyard, revealing the changes a few months have made.

The place is abandoned. No hens scurry about as I cross the cobbles, and the van and trailer have been removed. But the stable block’s dead clock still stands at twenty to nothing, and the ancient tractor remains; too broken and decrepit to move from its long-time home. The house is closed and shuttered, more dilapidated than ever under its rusting scaffold. The section of wall I repaired looks smaller than I remember, a cosmetic repair that doesn’t conceal the fundamental rot.

I’ve been apprehensive about coming back. Now I’m here, though, I don’t feel very much at all. The changed season and bleak landscape are too different from my memory, robbing the once familiar surroundings of their potency. Seeing them again feels surreal and strange, like revisiting a fever-dream.

In the days after Arnaud put a bullet into his youngest daughter’s heart, I went through my story countless times with the French police. Eventually, once they were satisfied I’d told them everything I knew, I was allowed to return to the UK. I’d given my assurance that I’d return for the trial, which was true as far as it went.

I just didn’t mention that the decision wouldn’t be mine to make.

London seemed grey and dirty after the green lushness of the farm. The world had continued to turn in my absence: the streets still seethed, the traffic still crawled, and the Thames still flowed. My return was momentous only to me. I’d expected to find myself a wanted man, that there would be a warrant out for my arrest at the very least. The reality was less dramatic.

In my guilty imaginings I’d always assumed that the police would know what had happened in Docklands; that I’d killed a man and run away. It never occurred to me that the only person who could tell them might have chosen not to. Rather than draw that sort of attention to himself, Lenny had simply left Jules’s body lying in the gutter, where it lay undiscovered until later that morning. Given the nature of his injuries, it was blamed on a hit and run, and with no evidence or witnesses his death had remained unsolved.

It might have stayed that way if I hadn’t given myself up.

Of course, I knew that wouldn’t be the end of it. There was still the threat of Lenny, and what he might do once he found out I was back. But by now Jules’s former business partner had problems of his own. I learned from a coffee-breathed CID sergeant that the big man was in custody himself after being caught in a drugs raid. Lenny was facing ten years in prison, on charges that included assaulting police officers as well as supplying and distributing class A drugs.

I kept my expression neutral when I heard that.

There was another surprise to come. I’d taken it for granted that I’d be held in custody myself, at least until it was decided what I was going to be charged with. Instead, at the end of the interview I was told I was being released on bail. ‘You came back from France to hand yourself in,’ the CID officer shrugged. ‘I don’t think you’re much of a flight risk.’

For want of anywhere else to go, I headed back to my old flat. I expected to find someone else living there, my belongings long since thrown away. But my keys still worked, and when I let myself in everything was as I’d left it. If not for the dust and accumulated post piled behind the door, I might never have been away. As indifferent to my absence as everything else, the rent had automatically continued to be taken from my bank account, eating up the money I’d been saving to go to France. The irony wasn’t lost on me. Still, it meant I had somewhere to stay until my case came to trial.

There was no point thinking further ahead than that.

And so I stepped back into the husk of my old life. I even returned to my old job at the Zed, after a contrite conversation with Sergei. I needed the money, but it was a bizarre feeling, as though the events of that summer had never happened. That was brought home to me when I bumped into Callum one day.

‘Hey, Sean,’ he said. ‘Not seen you around lately. What’ve you been doing with yourself?’

It dawned on me that he’d no idea I’d even been away. People have their own lives, and it’s vanity to think we play anything other than a bit-part in them.

‘Got your tickets yet for the New Wave season at the Barbican?’ Callum asked.

He looked surprised when I told him I hadn’t even known about it. At one time I would have rushed to book, but now the news left me unmoved. Thinking about it, I realized I’d not been to the cinema or watched a film since my return. It wasn’t even a conscious decision; I’d just had more important things to do.

Chloe would have appreciated that.

My trial was held in a busy courtroom, just one in a long line of proceedings held that day. After all my anxiety it was almost an anticlimax. For a while there was talk of charging me with involuntary manslaughter, but that had been quietly dropped. Jules’s own history of drug dealing and violence, as well as his treatment of Chloe, weighed in my favour. Even the fact that I’d technically stolen his car was considered too much of a grey area to bother with. While it counted against me that I’d fled the country, my lawyer argued that I’d been acting in self-defence and justifiably scared for my life. And if it had taken me longer than it should have to turn myself in … Well, there were extenuating circumstances.

I was found guilty of failing to report an accident and of leaving the scene. The sentence was six months in prison, suspended for two years.

I was a free man.

I stayed in London long enough to hand in my notice and say a few goodbyes, then I left. There was nothing to keep me there, and I still had unfinished business to attend to.

And now here I am.

Slipping a little on the wet cobbles, I go over to the house. The storeroom door is closed. Water drips onto me from the scaffold as I stand outside, suddenly certain that it’ll be locked. But it isn’t: there’s nothing in there anyone would want to steal. The warped door creaks open reluctantly. Inside seems darker than ever, the grey daylight from the courtyard barely illuminating the windowless room. The red overalls are missing, but everything else looks untouched since I left it. I go over to where the bags of sand are stacked. One of them is set a little apart from the others, though not so much that anyone would notice. Putting down my rucksack, I roll up my sleeve and push my hand and arm up to the elbow into the damp sand. I dig around slowly at first, then more urgently when I can’t find anything. I plunge my arm deeper, spilling sand onto the floor. Just when I’m convinced there’s nothing there my fingers encounter something hard. I pull it out.

The plastic-wrapped package looks just as it did when I hid it here, on the afternoon after the gendarmes’ visit. I’d made no mention of it when I’d recounted my story to either the French or UK police, an omission of which I’m not particularly proud. But given everything else I had to tell them it would have been an unnecessary complication. Even if they’d believed I was unaware of what was in the boot of Jules’s car, I’d be hard pressed to explain why I’d kept it.

I’m not sure I know myself.

The storeroom seemed a good hiding place at the time, but I’d not anticipated the package would be left for so long. Since then barely a day has gone by that I haven’t fretted it would be found, that the storeroom would be searched or cleared out. But I needn’t have worried.

Mathilde kept my secret, just as I kept hers.

News of Louis’s murder and Gretchen’s death was met with predictable outrage in the town. But while the facts surrounding the tragedy were soon widely known, the truth behind them was another matter. Before I left the farm to call for the police and an ambulance on the night of the shooting, Mathilde had begged me not to reveal that she was Gretchen’s mother.

‘Promise me!’ she’d insisted, her face etched with grief. ‘Promise me you won’t tell them!’

I hadn’t wanted to listen. I couldn’t see what could be gained by further silence, and the idea of protecting Arnaud was repugnant. But Mathilde clutched my arm, grey eyes burning with intensity.

‘It’s not for me, it’s for Michel.
Please!
’

I understood then. In everything she’d done, her first priority had always been her children. It would be hard enough for her son to grow up with his mother and grandfather branded as murderers, without having to endure an even worse stigma. I couldn’t blame her for wanting to spare him that. And I thought there might also be another reason for her reticence. If the truth about Gretchen’s parentage were to come out, it might easily raise questions about Michel’s. Mathilde had told me he was Louis’s son, but I wasn’t sure she’d want that claim put to the test.

Some stones are better left unturned.

So I kept my silence, and Mathilde’s secret. The only other person who might have thrown more light on the farm’s murky history was Georges, and for a while I wondered how much the old pig handler might really know. But not even the police could breach his indifference. He maintained that in all the years he’d worked at the farm he’d seen nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing. The only emotion he displayed came when the interview was over.

‘What about the sanglochons?’ he asked.