Theory of Remainders (15 page)

He swallowed and nodded.

Satisfied that their transaction was complete, she gave a last look about the room.

“Do clean this place up, Philip,” she said. “It’s a mess.”

He watched her stride down the hallway toward the stairs, her calves flexing with each step. He felt short of breath.

Philip straightened out the buttons on his shirt, but the results were hardly satisfactory. Each day left him more ruffled than the last, and he’d reached the outer limit of presentability. The lumpy knot in his shoelace didn’t help, nor did the missing button on his jacket sleeve, the scab from yesterday’s shaving accident, or the new Band-Aid repair job on his glasses. Having originally packed for three days, his clothes were on their second wind and in need of laundering. He pried a recommendation from Monsieur Bécot and found a launderer just off the main square, where a chubby, surly woman agreed to take his bundle.

More than clothing, though, he needed a plan, and for that he required coffee and a table. Down the street, a bar-café called the
Tord-boyaux
occupied a wedge-shaped building at the corner of the road. Through the glass door he made out a cluster of men at the bar, served by a bovine woman. A short fellow with a tweed driving cap was chatting with animation, gesturing broadly to the group in illustration of a tale. He drew a quip from a gangly man in a police uniform, and laughter rippled through the roughly attired group—at least until Philip entered. Then all eyes rotated toward him and a hush settled over the group.

The
Tord-boyaux
smelled of beer and body odor. Plywood shelves behind the bar bowed from the weight of bottles. A green and red Pernod clock hung on the wall, the minute hand missing. Aside from a list of beverages pinned to the left of the bar, the only decoration on the walls was a laminated poster of mountains—inexplicably the Rockies rather than the Alps or Pyrenees—imperfectly masking the lumpy plaster where a window had been walled up some years earlier.

“
C’est ouvert?
” Philip asked, though it was a foolish question. The proof stood before him in the form of flesh and blood, in the glasses and cups resting on the zinc counter, or even in the wisps of cigarette smoke floating in flagrant defiance of the no smoking sign.

The
patronne
answered with a reluctant nod, and Philip made his way past the group of mostly unshaven men, taking a small table in the corner.

At the bar, conversation was slow to resume, the fellow with the driving cap speaking in hushed tones. There were sidelong glances in his direction, followed by mutterings.

Monsieur Bécot may have been right that no one wanted him in this town, but Philip wasn’t to be dissuaded. Soon fueled by espresso, he pulled out the blue diary he’d purchased at the supermarket and opened it to two blank pages. On the left side he wrote the heading “Boston,” and on the right “Yvetot.” The first list was short. He needed to keep in touch with Jonas about the office. He had to prevail upon his neighbor to continue feeding Edith. And he wanted Linda to schedule another phone session for him with Melanie Patterson.

The second list was more substantial. Before the meeting with Édouard Morin, he wanted to pick up a digital voice recorder, for it was often useful to listen to conversations more than once. Also, managing communications would be tricky without a cell phone. Last of all, he was running low on cash.

Then there was the item that connected the two pages: the flight back. Today was Wednesday, but it was hard to predict when he’d be ready to leave. It all depended on Morin—on what the man might have to say. This was the one category he had no control over. Philip wrote Édouard Morin on his list, following the name with three question marks.

When he paid for his coffee at the bar, the customers lapsed again into funereal silence, pretending to ignore his presence. The
patronne
slapped his change on the counter, and before the door had fully closed behind him, the murmurings began, one alcohol-raked voice after another. The volume increased.

He started his tasks. At the phone store an acne-covered sales boy sold him a cheap Nokia, activating it for local service. Next he stopped at the ATM by the bank, replenishing his supply of cash.

The voice recorder proved to be a more difficult object to locate in such a small town. He made the rounds of the few shops carrying minor electronics—the tobacconist, the newsagent, the optician—each proprietor unable to produce such a device, or even to suggest where to find one. Their answers to his questions were rapid, clipped.

He got the message. He wasn’t welcome in Yvetot. He would find friction at every turn. The laundry woman had grimaced at his shirts, and at the
Tord-boyaux
they begrudged him even his coffee. Only the boy in the phone shop seemed to have missed the memo.

He had nearly given up his search when he passed the hardware store just off the main square, where a husky young shopkeeper clung high on a ladder, repainting a sign where the old name HESSE was leeching through and haunting the newer name like a ghost. He recalled this store in its earlier incarnation, years ago, as a den of nails and farm implements, run by a gruff and ancient man.

In the display window among assorted gadgets, there lay an old recorder, the size of a pack of cigarettes, still wrapped in cellophane.

“What can I do for you, Monsieur?” the man called down to the top of Philip’s head.

When Philip began to ask about recorders, the salesman stiffened at the American accent. He claimed not to have anything of the sort.

“But you do,” Philip protested, pointing. “Right there. In the window.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t want that. It’s so old! It’s been there for years. Who knows if it even works?”

“I’ll take my chances.”

“Well,” the man started, “I . . . I’m afraid I need to finish this sign right now. Perhaps after lunch . . .”

Philip rolled his eyes. More stonewalling. If he backed down before such pettiness, he’d never get anywhere. There was no one else on the street, so he grabbed a rung of the ladder and gave it a vigorous shake, rattling the bucket of paint.

“What are you doing, Monsieur!” the man howled, his brush tumbling.

“I said I would like to make a purchase.”

“But I told you—”

Philip cut him off with another shake of the ladder, ignoring the cries until he heard the sound of boots descending the rungs.

Ten minutes later he left the hardware store, the recorder clutched in his fist like a trophy.

That afternoon he called Roger in Fécamp to let him know about the meeting, declining his brother-in-law’s offer to accompany him. No, he repeated: this visit he would do alone.

In his hotel room, he laid open the blue diary and took notes, attempting to anticipate the turns the conversation with Morin might take. The most likely scenario was that he would refuse to speak about Sophie directly. If Philip could guide the conversation along the perimeter of the issue, he might spot truths stirring inside, just as one glimpses wildlife deep in a forest while strolling along its edge.

But such delicate control usually required a profound understanding of the other person, and Philip didn’t know this man. Mostly he remembered the boy’s eyes, large and bulging under the shock of black hair, as if they could scarcely bear what they had beheld, shifting their focus in a skittish gaze that touched upon objects fleetingly. In the past, Morin would rarely meet the eyes of others—especially when the person in question was the father of his victim, and particularly when this father sat across from him in the same chamber, such as the day when a black-robed judge named Tremblay uttered the word
non-lieu
that formalized the dismissal.

Nevertheless, even through the mask of detachment, Morin’s stark intelligence had been evident. Philip would now be venturing onto Morin’s territory, as in a game where the opponent holds all the advantages, including the most powerful option of them all: the simple refusal to engage. In chess, Philip would familiarize himself with his opponent over the course of several games. Here he’d have only one chance.

Toward the end of the day he wandered through the streets, taking it slowly in the heat of early summer, mulling over possibilities. Yvetot was a weary town. A few storefronts were empty, and several buildings cried for repair. Stucco crumbled from walls, revealing more primitive construction underneath. Even the roads were cracked and full of potholes.

Outside Saint-Pierre Church a rotund priest wearing a white chasuble scurried about, chasing away a pack of children who had clambered up the wall near the entrance. While the priest scolded one boy, another crept up from behind and yanked on his robe, making him whirl about like a black top.

He hiked all the way out to the Aubert home, dark and shuttered now that the clan had dispersed. Probably Yvonne would soon put it on the market, and that would be the end of it. He walked on, past the park, and eventually rounded back toward the town center. The great canopy of an oak rose before him: Saint-Louis cemetery.

The dislocations of jet lag had altogether departed, French flowed more fluidly from his lips, and the labyrinth of streets less frequently surprised him. He had his bearings. He was ready.

Nine

The psychiatric facility lay several kilometers to the south of Rouen, toward the top of a broad hill. As he walked up from the parking lot, Philip surmised that it dated from the turn of the century and had probably first served as a sanitarium for respiratory ailments. A two-story wing unfurled from each side of the central administrative block, with a score of high windows interrupting great stretches of wheat-colored stucco. A frieze flecked with
art nouveau
motifs ran in a band beneath the ledge of zinc roofing, conferring upon the structure a kind of pleasantness, the decorative feel of a large but modest hotel—one with bars on most of the windows.

He’d arrived early, and Suardet’s assistant parked him in the empty waiting room while final preparations were made.

The oddness of the situation rattled him. He’d seen plenty of Édouard Morin fifteen years earlier, usually at a distance. At one point, in a hallway outside the judge’s chambers, he had sat almost within reach of the rapist, filled with the urge to lunge for him, to wrap his fingers around the prominent Adam’s apple of that delicate neck, killing Morin before the guard could pry him away. Philip had had his medical training, and he knew exactly where to collapse the larynx. A few minutes later the opportunity to kill Édouard Morin had slipped away. A bailiff led them into the chambers of the investigating judge, and the elderly gentleman explained his decision. Despite Morin’s confession, he would not stand trial and he would not face incarceration. He would instead become a ward of the state with
extended medical care
, until such care was deemed unnecessary. That’s when he pronounced the dismissal, the
non-lieu
.

Professionally Philip had understood, expected, and even agreed with this outcome. The specifics of Morin’s diagnosis were not part of the public record, but he’d seen enough of the young man to have a good idea of the circumstances. Institutionalization was the obvious solution, and had Philip been called in as an expert witness on such a case, where someone else’s daughter had been murdered, this was precisely the opinion he would have rendered.

But it was not someone else’s daughter. And instead of serving as an expert, Philip played the role of the father. He’d found it hard to tear his gaze away from Morin during the proceedings, studying the boy’s eyes, his thin fingers, his slender neck.

France no longer practiced capital punishment, but until a dozen years before Sophie’s murder the official instrument of death had remained the guillotine. Philip had caressed this image in his mind. Part of him—the larger part—wanted to slay Édouard Morin.
Slay
. He had uttered that single syllable again and again, savoring the slide between the S and the L, the sound itself enacting the slicing and severing he dreamed of.

Now, in the waiting room, he checked his watch. Suardet was running late. His gaze settled on the window overlooking the hills.