The Apartment (11 page)

“Thank you.”

There's an awkward pause, so I call out, “Your English is very good, madame.”

“I studied one year in London.”

“What did you study?” Steph asks.

“I start with accountancy, but soon I come back here to make art.”

“How long have you been in this building?”

I glance through the doorway at Steph, clattering my spoon to catch her attention. This is starting to sound like a police interview.

But Mireille continues answering the questions obediently, part of this pensive mood she's in tonight. Perhaps her uppers have stopped working. “A long time. This is why I cannot leave so easy. My whole life is here, even though they want me to go.”

“Who? Who wants you to go?”

If Steph keeps grilling Mireille, she'll clam up and we'll never find out the background to this building. I stir the pot one last time and come out and sit down and begin to blabber about our holiday. Everyone likes to hear a visitor praising their city, so I rattle on about how we're enjoying the architecture and the ancient roads and the fresh produce, but Mireille interrupts me. “I now know you. I know about your family, your little girl. Tonight I decide finally. I will leave.”

“Leave where?” Steph asks. “Here you mean?”

“Oui.”

“Why?”

“You cannot run away from your history.” She looks at me as she says this. “It was always with me. I think maybe it will go with the last people.
Mais, non.
Now I must take it with me, or it is with you.”

“It? What—” I say, as Steph overrides my question with her own.

“Enough!” Mireille says. Then, softer, “Like I say, I thought
qu'il était parti,
that it had left—with the last people. They had pain, but not enough, I think. I was wrong. I am sorry for you. I am sorry for your child.”

Okay, this is getting ridiculous and creepy and really spoiling the atmosphere we've managed to create in this place today. This woman's insane, that's all, and we shouldn't have expected any information from her. I stand up and tap Steph on the arm. “A little help in the kitchen, please. Excuse us, madame.”

Steph pushes back from the table and trails me into the kitchen.

“Now it is with you,” I mock, clattering the plates and pasta spoon to disguise my voice. “She's crazy. We're not going to get any information from her.”

“She's struggling to express herself; that's all. Let's just allow her to speak. We can match what she tells us with what the real estate agent says, and then we'll know.”

“Know what? Why is it important? It feels like we're digging in stuff that doesn't concern us. We should just leave it alone.”

“I want to know,” she says, splatting sauce over the portions of pasta.

I shake my head. I'm not going to dissuade Steph, and I don't want to fight, so I'm just going to shut up and drink wine. This dinner party was a stupid mistake. I chop the baguette into chunks and as I lay them on a board with some of the cheese, I hear the grind of the window sash going up. Steph's carrying two plates of pasta through and I hear them thump and clatter as she shouts, “Mireille! Don't!”

There's only time to turn and glance out of the kitchen window, where I see Mireille perched outside, on the window ledge, pushing off against the rusty brackets that once held a window box, saulting up and gracefully diving headfirst. The floral dress ripples luminously as she goes.

I was within lunging distance of Mireille when she threw herself out of the window, but I didn't hear her body crumpling onto the cobblestoned courtyard below. Or maybe I did and I've blocked out the memory. White noise filled my ears; the plates I was carrying crashed to the floor; I was dimly aware that my legs buckled. But I didn't scream—I'm sure of that.

“Steph, Steph, what's she done?” Mark shouted. Still I couldn't move. I felt him bash against my shoulder as he ran for the window and looked down. “Oh fuck,” he said. “Oh shit, oh Jesus.” He turned to face me. “She's alive. She's trying to move, Steph. She's breathing.”

A jolt of adrenaline as swift and vicious as an electric shock rocked through me, and I came back to myself. “Call an ambulance, Mark. Call the police.” I sounded absolutely calm. I
felt
absolutely calm. I knew this wasn't rational. By rights I should have been a mess—witnessing Mireille's suicide attempt should have reignited the PTSD that festered inside me after the home invasion.

“What's the number?
Fuck…
”

“Google it, Mark.”

“Okay…good. Yes.”

I stepped over the pasta mess on the floor, collected a cushion and the throw from the couch, and made for the door.

“Steph—what are you doing?”

“Getting to Mireille. She needs help.”

“Wait. I'll come with, just let me—”

“No time, Mark.” And then I left the room.

There was very little blood. She'd thrown herself out headfirst, but she must have twisted as she fell, and she lay on her side, her left arm cruelly angled beneath her, her shoulder dislocated. The left side of her face was pressed into the cobbles, but her right eye was open. Her floral dress was rucked up, revealing pasty, scarred thighs furred with dark hair.

I dropped to my haunches next to her and gently covered her with the throw. “Mireille.”

She was breathing in short, whistling gasps.
“Huh, huh, huh, huh.”

“Mireille. Don't move, okay? Help is on its way.”

“Uh.”

Tiny white flecks haloed her head.
Tooth shards, those are tooth shards,
I thought with that same chilling calm. Her right eye flitted crazily in its socket.

I considered lifting her head to slot the cushion beneath it, but I didn't dare risk further injury. I stared up at the window. She shouldn't have been able to fit through it so easily. A shadow appeared behind the frame.

“Mark!”

“They're on their way,” he called. “I'm coming down.”

I turned back to Mireille and took her right hand in mine. It was freezing and limp and peppered with blue oil paint. Rain began to fall, and I gently wiped away the drops that threatened to run into her eyes.

She groaned, drawing in a rattling, broken breath. She was trying to lift her head.

“No. Don't move, Mireille. The ambulance is coming. You're going to be fine.”

She was trying to speak.

I looked into her eye but could detect no sign that she knew who I was or understood what was happening to her. “Shh. Try and keep calm. They'll be here soon.”

“Je…Je pense…”

I had to strain to hear her. “Shh.”

And then she hissed, as clear as day,
“Je suis désolée.”
An apology, but it somehow sounded like a threat.

I dropped her hand and skittered away from her on my haunches. Something sharp dug into my palm—a fleck of broken tooth. I scrambled to my feet, rubbing my hands on my jeans to dislodge it. Seconds later I heard the slap of running feet, and then voices and light filled the courtyard. Mark took me to one side as a trio of overalled paramedics fussed around Mireille.

The calm clarity receded then. It had done its job. I started to shake. My memories of the next couple of hours are fragmented, but this I know for sure: Mark and I were there when a young paramedic with a tattoo of a star on his wrist pronounced her dead. It was 8:45 exactly.

While Mark took a pair of grim-faced gendarmes up to the apartment, I waited next to the mailboxes, my back turned to the courtyard. When he returned, a polite but serious policewoman asked us to collect our identity documents and then drove us to the nearest police station. After handing over our passports and numbly giving our statements separately to uniformed officers, we were ushered into an anonymous room that smelled of coffee and paint. The French cops I'd seen wandering around the city had intimidated me with their automatic weapons and steely demeanors, but without exception everyone we encountered that night was sympathetic and spoke good English.

Mark held tightly to my hand throughout. It was his turn to take over. I don't know how long we were left in that room, but it felt like hours. We barely spoke. Every so often, when he sensed I needed reassurance, he squeezed my fingers.

Finally, a slender woman with tiny hands and pronounced crow's-feet clomped her way into the room and gave us a tired smile. “I am very sorry for keeping you waiting. I am Capitaine Claire Miske. You must be very tired. We have informed the consulate of your country of the events tonight, which is necessary when a foreign national is involved in a suspicious death.”

“It wasn't suspicious,” I blurted. “We told you, she jumped.”

The policewoman nodded. Her eyes were bloodshot and her nails were bitten to the quick. “I know this. But it is still, ah, known as suspicious. That is the terminology.”

“Sorry.”

“It is no problem. I know that you have had a shock. It is bad for your holiday,
non
?”

Mark shot me a glance. The understatement of the year.

“Is the South African embassy going to send someone to assist us?” he asked.

“
Ce n'est pas nécessaire, monsieur.
We have assured them that we will not detain you for much longer. It is likely in this circumstance that the
procureur
will ask for a full investigation, but we are satisfy that—”

A uniformed officer stuck his head through the door, glanced at us, and then said something in French to the policewoman.

“Ah,” she said to us. “Excuse me. I will not be long. I can bring you some
café
? Water?”

“Thank you,” Mark said.

A fresh ribbon of anxiety coiled through my gut. “What if there's an inquest and they want us to stay here in Paris, Mark?…Christ, what if they think we had something to do with her death?”

“They don't. It won't come to that.”

“How do you know?”

“That captain seemed nice, didn't she? And if we were in any trouble, someone from the embassy would have turned up, I'm sure of it.”

“Yeah?”

“Really, Steph.”

“Did you tell them what Mireille said to us before she jumped? All that crazy stuff she was babbling about?”

“I told them she was talking nonsense,” he said, cutting me off. “I said we had no warning that she was about to do what she did. I said we hardly knew her at all.”

“Do you think she might have overheard us—”

“I told the police everything they needed to know, Steph.” His voice turned cold. “She was out of her mind. You mustn't dwell on anything she said. We didn't know her at all. And she didn't know us. It's the truth. Why complicate it?”

A pretty, dark-haired woman appeared then and handed us each a plastic cup of surprisingly good black coffee.

When she left, Mark sighed and took my hand again. “I'm sorry if I sounded harsh. It'll be fine, Steph. We've been through worse.”

I let my head droop onto Mark's shoulder. I dozed, but I didn't dream.

The captain with the crinkly eyes finally returned, apologizing again for keeping us waiting. I was relieved to see our passports were in the file she placed on the table in front of her. “
D'accord.
I think I should tell you that the woman who you know as Mireille is known to us. She has a history.”

Mark disengaged his hand from mine. I hadn't realized how sweaty it had become. “What do you mean ‘the woman who you know as Mireille'? Is Mireille not her real name?”

“
Oui,
my apologies. It is just, ah, my turn of phrase. This woman has been in many institutions. We are trying to contact her family, but we have spoken to her doctor, and he say she was often talking of ending her life and has tried this before. It seems this time she succeeded.”

“Shame,” I breathed, although to be honest, I was too drained to feel pity for Mireille right then. Mark took my hand again.

The policewoman picked through the file. “I have read, of course, your statements. You say that it was she who invited herself to come to dinner at the place where you stay?”

“Yes.”

“And you saw no sign before that she was, ah, intent on hurting herself?”

“No,” Mark said. “Like I said, we hardly knew her. I'd run into her on the stairs a couple of times, and I'd only really thought she was eccentric. Harmless.”

She nodded. “
D'accord.
Yet it seems this was her plan. To die in front of you. To jump from the window.”

I felt Mark tense next to me. He was the one who'd opened that window. He was the one who'd obsessively hacked at the shutters. If he hadn't opened it, would she still be alive, or would she have found another way to do it?

I found my voice. “Why us? We were strangers.”

“Who can say? This woman. She was…ah, how you say…damaged. She was sick. We are still investigating, but we think that she was living in the building illegally. She was not renting her studio.”

“She was squatting?”

“Oui.”

“Will we have to return for an inquest?”

“If the
procureur
want a full investigation, it can take many months to complete. We will be in contact with the embassy in your country and inform you if it is
nécessaire.
We have all your details. For now, we are satisfy that you have no part in this situation.”

“We can go?”

“
Oui.
We are trying to contact the owners of your apartment to inform them of what has occurred.”

“Good luck with that,” Mark murmured.

“Pardon?”

“They're not the most communicative of people.” Mark briefly filled her in about our dealings with the Petits: their no-show at our house; the cryptic email they'd eventually sent us.

“Ah. I see. But for now, my boss, he say it is fine for you to return there.”

I started. “Wait—
what
? Isn't it a crime scene?”

“We have what we need from there. Of course, if you prefer to stay at an
hôtel,
that is your choice.”

“We…that's not an option,” Mark said.

“Do you need help to return to your apartment?”

“Non, merci.”

She handed us our passports and accompanied us to the door. With a brisk handshake, she strode away.

“I can't go back there, Mark,” I said the second she was out of earshot.

“I know. Of course not.”

“We can't stay there,” I said again. “I
won't
stay there. I want to go home, Mark. I want to go home
today.
”

He put his arm around me and kissed my hair. “I know. Come on. Let's get out of here and we'll make a plan.”

It was sunny when we stepped outside. We'd been at the station for more than ten hours, but I'd assumed it would still be dark and rainy when we left, as if time had stopped for us. My body was beginning to ache as if I had the flu, ravaged by lack of sleep and the aftereffects of the anxiety and adrenaline. And I was cold. Freezing. Carla's coat was draped over the couch back in the apartment. I hadn't thought to collect it before we were ferried to the police station. I tugged my cardigan around my body, feeling naked compared to the tourists and commuters swathed in their wool and fleece, and let Mark steer me toward a Métro station. I clung to him, not caring what anyone thought, as he shepherded us onto a train, through a bewildering warren of Métro tunnels, and then out onto the familiar boulevard and along to our Starbucks. Again I was grateful for its bland warmth.

Mark bought us cappuccinos and a couple of croissants (which neither of us touched), and we discussed our options. First prize was changing our tickets. I sipped at my coffee, barely tasting it, as Mark dialed the Air France helpline and was passed from consultant to consultant.

He hung up and sighed. “Unless we buy a new ticket, which is out of the question, the best they can do is put us on standby tomorrow night.”

“I don't want to leave tomorrow. I want to leave now.”

“I know.” He sighed again. “I tried my best, Steph.”

“Sorry. I know you did. Okay. Clearly we don't have enough cash for a hotel. Shouldn't we go to the South African embassy, tell them we're in trouble and need help?”

Mark gave me a half smile. “We've got somewhere to stay, Steph. Our embassy of all embassies is unlikely to shell out for a hotel room. Do you think your parents could wire us some money or book us a room for the duration?”

A lurch—I hadn't thought about Hayden for hours. “I don't want to worry them. And besides, they bought our air tickets; they must be strapped.”

Mark nodded in agreement. “Okay. I'm going to ask Carla. She can book us something online. We can pay her back when we get home.”

Great, Carla to the rescue. She'd love that. But he was right. There was no one else.

While he called Carla, I headed into the ladies'. I was reluctant to glance in the mirror, but in fact I didn't look too bad. My mascara was still intact, and the skin around my eyes was only slightly puffy. I didn't look like I'd had a terrible shock at all.