The Stone Boy (23 page)

“Morning, love.”

“Not now.”

“I just want to be inside you… just a bit… like that…”

“It’s barely seven o’clock.”

“I promise, we won’t make love.”

Audrette sighed, then, gradually, once her nightdress was around her waist, she arched her back. She stiffened, grumbled, and let her husband in. Pleasure made its way along the twists and turns of her sleepy body. She pushed back the sheet, Martin threw the duvet to the bottom of the bed with a kick, and they finished in orgasm, almost surprised.

An instant later, Audrette was taking a shower without having kissed her husband, who was supine, stretched out across the mattress.

The night had been short, consumed by a bedtime argument. An exhausting game of unanswered questions, unfeasible plans, built-up frustration, a stream of blame. Audrette longed for a bit of fantasy, a different man than this unshorn, sallow-skinned being that had been haunting the house for ten days, bundled up in a dirty, worn tracksuit, nails bitten to the quick. She was hoping for a dinner in Paris, two tickets to the opera, a drink with friends, to enjoy scallops and tagliatelle in a truffle sauce with old wine; she demanded some kind of lightness, even a little superficiality, a fucking bunch of flowers without the pretext of a celebration, a useless piece of jewelry, a bloody hair clip, a toilet deodorizer wrapped up in tissue paper. She turned back around and hit the pillow with her fist, trying in vain to give it the shape she wanted.

“What do you want, Martin? What are you really looking for at the end of the day?”

Martin wanted nothing like all that. Old wine gave him a headache, friends hadn’t been on the agenda for ages, his mother was dying—what was he going to do at the opera, surrounded by old money and bourgeois idiots with bad facelifts?

“Right. So that’s what culture means to you…”

“I’m tired, Audrette.”

“Unless you want to fuck.”

“You’re complaining?”

“You’re an asshole.”

“That’s it.”

“Bastard.”

“Bitch.”

At about eight o’clock, they made breakfast in the kitchen, each passing the other what they needed: mug, butter, toast, like two children setting the table to please their parents. On France Info, they were reporting on the launch of the vaccination campaign against swine flu. The vaccine had been the number one concern of the French, except the dairy farmers, who were too busy setting up roadblocks outside milk processing factories in the western Loire. Martin ate alone, letting his coffee go cold in the cup. Audrette had already gone back to her office on the first floor and had turned on her computer, which was logged into the Agreenium site, the official agronomic and veterinary research organization that she had put together in her role as a teacher and researcher over the last three years at AgroParisTech. Unlike her husband, Audrette was making a good career for herself. Her strength of character protected her against drama, like a life insurance policy inherited at birth. Martin envied his wife, or rather admired her, drawing an unhoped-for power from her. He knew she could do anything. Even renting
La Traviata
on DVD, throwing his tracksuit in the garbage, shaving him against his will, and inviting Jean-Hugues and Marine—with their two children—over for a raclette party, all at the same time.

He regretted having called her a bitch.

But she’d deserved it.

He threw the rest of the cold coffee down the sink. He was about to go up for a shower when the doorbell rang.

“Martin, are you expecting someone?” Audrette’s voice came down the stairs.

He responded in the negative. Registered letter? A gardener? A pain-in-the-ass real estate agent? Martin went to the front door and picked up the entry phone. A bluish image appeared on the screen. He recognized the man standing outside his gate immediately.

“Dr. Préau?”

“Good morning, Lieutenant.”

“Morning!”

He could see Sevran’s breath. The outside temperature on the screen read two degrees centigrade.

“Your mobile is going straight to voice mail! Sorry to bother you, but I must speak with you.”

Martin knew he’d be late going into his surgery. And for the first time in his life, he was going to have a cup of coffee with a policeman while wearing his slippers.

“Let me get the sugar.”

Audrette’s perfume smelled good, with a hint of vanilla. She went from the living room to the kitchen wearing jeans and a sweater, carrying cups and biscuits. The graceful swing of her hips below her belt always had an immediate effect on guests. The lieutenant was no exception to the rule. With his leather aviator jacket, woolen hat, and an orange scarf tied under his neck, sitting on the edge of his seat on the white sofa, he looked like the Grinch discovering Snow White.

“Thank you very much, madam.”

He turned to Martin, his eyes keen.

“What does she do for a living, your wife?”

“Modeling.”

“Oh, really?”

“She’s an agricultural engineer, actually.”

“Ah.”

Audrette came back with the sugar bowl.

“Is that all right for you, Inspector?”

“Uh, yes, thank you… Not inspector—lieutenant, madam.”

“Sorry!”

Audrette slipped out of the room, and the lieutenant took off his hat and scarf. The moment had come to move on to more serious matters. He threw a sugar cube into his coffee and stirred it with a little spoon.

“So, we went ahead with a search of your mother’s house yesterday morning.”

He put down the spoon, leaned over for his coffee, took a sip, and put it back on the coffee table. Too hot.

“Doctor, if you could rate your mother’s mental instability between one and ten, what would you say?”

His legs and arms crossed on the sofa, Martin raised his eyebrows, perplexed.

“I’m a GP, not an expert psychiatrist.”

“I know. Okay, let me be clearer.” The officer rooted around inside his jacket and took out an iPhone, which he showed Martin with a hint of malice. “This is the record of the search. I have all of it in there.”

He pulled a pair of glasses from the other pocket with a dramatic gesture, and then shook them open sharply and slid them over his ears.

“So, naturally, we found the boxes from the sleeping tablets that were used to poison the madeleines, the tart, and the cider. They were empty, in the kitchen garbage can.” His fingers skimmed over the screen of the telephone, which reflected in his glasses.

“But we also discovered other, more surprising things…”

The two phone sockets in the house had been carefully wrapped in aluminium foil. One of the kitchen cupboards had been filled with fifty or so jam jars containing small dusty pebbles. Each jar was labeled, sorted by the week it was collected. In the lieutenant’s opinion, this unusual collection confirmed the claims made by the housekeeper and the psychoanalyst regarding the stress on the victim of the building work going on in the neighborhood. The refrigerator was similarly stocked with jars, but with different contents: kohlrabi, carrots, potatoes, beetroot, radishes, celeriac, root vegetables of all kinds fermenting in brine. The crisper held other surprises: a baffling deflated ball stuffed with soil, along with another jar, both wrapped in plastic bags.

“A jar of pebbles covered in dried blood,” specified the officer.

This unusual jar confirmed for the second time the housekeeper’s statement, in which she had spoken of there being red gravel on one of the windowsills, gravel that the lieutenant had sent off for analysis.

“She was following a strange diet, your mum,” he joked.

Martin didn’t react. His left foot bobbed nervously at the end of his leg.

“On the first and second floors, we noticed that all the plumbing—the sink, shower, bidet—were blocked up with corks and reinforced with old rags. So your mother must have been washing herself in basins of water, which she was then emptying down the toilets.”

Sevran straightened his glasses and continued. “We unblocked them. The smell that came out of the pipes was rotten. We had to break the padlocks on the bathroom window to be able to breathe. I was there—it stank. Is there a problem with the septic tank, Doctor? Has your mother had it emptied recently?”

Martin was evasive in his answer. He had also noticed the bad small that sometimes overwhelmed the house without really knowing the reason for it.

“It’s possible that some vermin died in it… Anyway. In your mother’s room, we found a pair of binoculars; she was using them no doubt to spy on the neighbors. In the drawer of the little inlaid table, there were several completely blurry photos—taken from the window there—that were unusable. We also noticed quite a few small bits of dried fruit on the carpet… Ah! Let’s get to the bed: under the blankets, we came upon a big bar of soap.”

“That’s one of my grandmother’s things. It’s supposed to help with the circulation in your legs.”

“Oh. Does it work?”

“If you believe it does, yes.”

“How about a roll’s worth of aluminium foil spread out under the mattress; is that one of your grandmother’s home remedies, too? Does it cure corns on your feet, maybe?”

Martin sighed. He had spent hours next to that bed. How had he not seen anything?

“Right, I’ll carry on… On the second-story landing, we counted ninety mousetraps, a sorry sight: hardened Gruyère rinds everywhere and not one single catch.”

“My mother had been hearing noises in her attic.”

“That’s just it, Doctor,” chuckled the bespectacled lieutenant. “Was it really mice that your mother was hearing?”

“I don’t know. It’s an old house. Like all old homes, it settles, the pipes make noise—”

“I agree with you, but that isn’t what your mother thought. Guess what we found in the utility room, and again in the different rooms in the basement? Twice as many mousetraps. One hundred and ninety-four, to be exact. Why a hundred and ninety-four and not two hundred?”

“The hardware shop had sold out.”

“You could get a job in the police, you could.”

“I’d rather chase germs.”

The officer coughed into his fist, smiling.

“So, we’ve got one hundred and ninety-four mousetraps, and guess what, Doctor?”

“Not a single dead mouse.”

The lieutenant raised his eyebrows, pleased.

“In fact, there were. But dead ones like these, Doctor, you don’t see every day. Our two crime scene colleagues can’t get over it.”

Martin uncrossed his legs and put his slippers flat on the floor, trying to channel the stress that the officer was putting him under. He stared at the man, masking his anxiety with a smile.

“Had my mother been collecting something other than stones?”

Lieutenant Sevran took off his glasses and goggled at him with his bright blue eyes.

“Bingo! A collection worthy of the compressions of César!”
¹

He turned his mobile around to Martin and showed him three photographs: Martin recognized the freezer in the utility room, and what looked like shriveled animal skins.

“What is that?”

“Cats. Cats that had been put through the wash.”

Martin looked at the snapshots more closely: their fur looked like salt cod.

“My mother did that?”

“Oh, your mother was washing more than just her whites.”

Sevran couldn’t hold back a snigger.

“Sorry. Moving along. So, in the middle of all the flattened kitties, we also spotted that.”

With a pointed gesture, Sevran lightly touched the screen of his phone and pulled up another photo.

“The remains of a mobile phone, victim of a ninety-degree eco whites cycle, having been previously smashed to smithereens with a hammer. A Nokia.”

“Shit!” blurted Martin. “My phone…”

“That’s what we call a total bug sweep.”

The lieutenant burst into laughter and closed down the window on his electronic toy with his thumb. Martin froze. His mother must be the laughingstock of the whole station. She’ll be a poster girl for white goods! Elsa Préau says, “Washing machines live longer with Calgon”! Sevran put the warm iPhone back in his jacket and reached over to try his coffee. It was just right.

“So, Doctor, let me ask you again: if you had to rate your mother’s mental instability from one to ten, what would you give her?”

Martin wiped a limp hand over his face and felt the rasp of his beard.

“A hundred and ninety-four?”

“Seriously.”

“What do you want me to say? That my mother’s nuts? Lock her up? People like her, with an underlying mental condition and no treatment, don’t get better, and France has hundreds of thousands of them! Do you think that the capacity of psychiatric hospitals in this country can be increased? Can you imagine how much it would cost our society to feed, care for, and process hundreds of thousands of patients? You think what, in the police, that the mentally ill are all psychopaths? That by throwing people practically naked into rooms with no furniture or windows and feeding them meds, that they might somehow have a chance of being cured?”