Trespass (37 page)

So much of her life had been like this: waiting in darkness, without moving. She was practised in this submission.

But waiting for what, this time? Except for the strangely scented air she was being forced to breathe, there didn’t seem to be any clues about what was going to happen.

She began searching her memory.

Had the handsome detective come back and arrested her? Had the poor traumatised child, Mélodie Hartmann, or even Jeanne Viala, remembered something and whispered it in his ear – something nobody else knew?

Or had he himself, Inspecteur Travier, seen what remained hidden to everybody else – in the way that his movie counterparts so often glimpsed with their sky-blue eyes the obscure pathway to the truth?

Audrun had no recollection of any arrest. The last thing she could remember was standing near the road with Marianne and seeing fires in the hills and being told the
canadairs
were coming to put them out. But what had happened next? Had the planes arrived? Did the water come cascading down onto the trees? Did she walk back to her bungalow and close her door and sit down in her chair? And then?

Did he say these words? They sounded familiar. Did he arrive with the same constable, the note-taker?

He’d been so nice, so polite. But it was the violent, angry things you remembered in your heart and in your body, not the conversation of gentle people.

To be confined in a prison: Audrun thought that there would be nothing more terrible. She wanted to remind the charming detective, in case he didn’t know: ‘I already lived through that, when I was young. From the age of fifteen to the age of thirty – through all the “best” years of my life – I understood what it was to be in prison. Two prisons, in fact. The underwear factory, breathing carbon disulphide; my room, stinking of my brother and my father. All I wanted was to die.’

She’d be driven away in a police van and thrown into a cell. And there she’d remain, for ever, with the stink of strangers all around her, just like at the factory – as though, after all, she’d never escaped from that.

She began to cry. She had difficulty catching her breath. Her tears were hot on her skin and made runnels into her hair. Then a voice in the darkness said: ‘Hey, shut up, will you? People need their sleep in here.’

‘Where am I?’ said Audrun. But no one answered.

Light came.

Light above her, not from any window, but from harsh fluorescent rods, suspended from a high ceiling. And she felt some movement at her side. She turned her head and saw a young nurse standing by her, holding her wrist to check her pulse. Behind the nurse, a green curtain hung lifeless, shrouding whatever lay beyond it.

A hospital.

The nurse was Armenian. Or Algerian. Her hand was warm.

‘What happened?’ Audrun said to the pretty Algerian nurse, but she just smiled and laid Audrun’s wrist down and went away, drawing the green curtain behind her.

A male orderly with a kind old face brought her breakfast – a cup of coffee and a stale croissant and a tiny blob of jam. The orderly helped her to sit up in the hospital bed so that she could eat it.

‘What happened to me?’ said Audrun.

‘You’re all right,’ said the orderly. ‘You’re going to be all right. Want some sugar in your coffee?’

She tried to eat and drink. She found swallowing difficult. She thought that if she got a bit stronger, she might remember what had happened.

She slept and woke, slept and woke. Pissed in a bed-pan, holding on to the nurse. Slept again, her chest tight and aching. The light above her never changed.

Then she saw Marianne at her bedside. Marianne looked pale and tired and wore a cross expression on her face.

‘How are you?’ Marianne asked in a flat voice.

‘I don’t know,’ said Audrun. ‘My chest hurts. I don’t know what happened. Did the
canadairs
arrive?’

Marianne half turned away, seeming to draw in a long breath. Then she looked at Audrun and said: ‘It’s gone. I had to come and tell you. Someone had to tell you straight to your face. It’s gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know what you mean, Marianne.’

‘The Mas Lunel. The fire took it. Parts of the walls are still standing, but they’re black, absolutely blackened. It seemed to split open in the middle. I’ve never witnessed anything like that in my life! The heat made the stones just . . .
explode.
’

Audrun said nothing. She closed her eyes. In her mind, now, she saw something new: Raoul Molezon running, running towards the dog pound, calling out that he was going to save the dogs. And she was following him, she was trying to run, too. But she didn’t follow Raoul to the pound; she opened the damaged front door of the mas and went inside and stood in the kitchen, which was dark, with all the shutters bolted against the heat.

She laid her arms across Bernadette’s oak table, which she’d been trying so hard to return to bare wood, to scour to perfect whiteness. Then, she began tugging and pushing at the heavy table. Her arms and back ached.

She knew she was too light to lift up this ancient piece of furniture, too weakened by time. But she wasn’t going to give up. She was Audrun Lunel. She was going to save what remained of her mother – all the things Aramon had tried to despoil, but which now belonged to her; she was going to bring everything out before the fire came. She remembered that she could hear shouting in the hills above and the barking and wailing of the dogs, but she took no notice of these sounds . . .

‘You were very lucky,’ said Marianne curtly. ‘Raoul Molezon risked his life to get you out.’

‘Risked his life?’

‘Yes, he did. You’d wedged the front door shut somehow. Raoul slammed at it with his shoulder, but it wouldn’t move. The fire was terribly near and jumping from tree to tree. The firemen told him to come away, but he wouldn’t. He helped one of the fire-fighters tear the door off its hinges. He carried you out.’

Audrun looked at Marianne, whose expression was still stern, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care at all. She couldn’t prevent a smile from spreading across her face at the thought that Raoul Molezon had risked death to save her.

‘He was always a good man,’ she said. ‘Always.’

Aramon Lunel was incarcerated in a prison above Ruasse while he waited for his case to come to trial. He knew that the trial was far away in time and that its outcome could be foretold, so he seldom thought about it.

He attempted to live his life one day at a time.

The prison buildings had once housed a regiment of the French Foreign Legion. They were cold in winter, but strongly built of stone. Aramon had been allocated his own cell. It was prison policy to keep murderers and sex-offenders separated from petty felons. It had been stated by the governor that men who had taken lives, or blighted lives for ever, should be made to endure a certain degree of loneliness. But Aramon was impervious to this. He knew that he’d been lonely for thirty years.

The walls of his cell were painted white. The room had a small window, protected by an ironwork grille. Through the criss-cross of the grille bars, Aramon could see down the steep valley to the roofs of the town: the tilting, red-grey tiled roofs and boxy chimney flues of old Ruasse, the blank corrugations of the retail sheds, the water towers and TV masts of the high-rise blocks in the cheaply constructed 1970s suburbs they still called ‘new’.

In one of these blocks, the girl Fatima had lived and died, and Aramon sometimes found himself thinking about her: the way she’d draped scarves over her lampshades, the better to conceal the shabbiness of her room; the way she tried to turn him on by rotating her belly. From time to time, he wondered whether – after all – he
had
killed her. Killed her for her fat, gyrating stomach. Killed her for not being the person he loved.

Fatima, the belly-dancing whore. He had no recollection of slitting open her body from sternum to pelvis. None. But then, he had no recollection of shooting Anthony Verey in the gut, either. He’d thought at first that it would all come back to him, that moment by the river. It would come streaming into his mind like a motion picture and then he would
feel it
, feel in his being that he’d taken a life. But time went on and this didn’t happen. There was no motion picture, no feeling: only fog and darkness.

It had been suggested to him by his lawyer, Maître de Bladis, that his mind had ‘blanked out’ the terrible things that he’d done. Some killers, de Bladis had opined, found their feelings of horror and guilt ‘too terrible to be borne’. They managed to achieve ‘absolute mental suppression of their crime’ – and he was almost certainly one of them. He was subsequently informed that he had the right to psychiatric help, if he should request it.

His cell was four metres long by two and a half metres wide. It contained a wooden bed, narrow and low to the ground. The single pillow was surprisingly soft. Under the window, stood a wooden table and chair.

In the corner of the cell nearest the door were a lavatory and a washbasin, both cracked and stained, but serviceable. And in the night, when he needed to empty his bladder, Aramon often thought how convenient – how almost
enjoyable
– it was to have this WC just a few paces from his bed.

Sometimes, he didn’t even bother to stand up, but just crawled to the toilet bowl (which was also set low to the ground) on his knees. Then he’d go back to his bunk and listen for the dawn outside the window and often sink into dreams of being a boy again, toiling along the onion rows before the sun came up behind the hills of La Callune.

When he’d first arrived at the prison, they’d put him into the hospital, because he couldn’t keep his food down. He told the prison doctors that he thought he had stomach cancer. They showed towards him a surprising degree of sympathy and kindness. His body was scanned. He was informed that there was no cancer, only two bleeding ulcers.

‘That figures,’ Aramon said. ‘I could feel that,
pardi
: that bleeding inside. I think that’s been going on a long time.’

He was put on a special alkaline diet. His cigarettes were taken away for a while. And when he came out of the prison hospital, he felt almost well again, well enough to stand up straight, well enough to crack a few jokes at mealtimes or in the exercise yard or in the wood shop where he worked making pallets.

He made friends with another murderer, an old Somali man called Yusuf, who had an infectious, high-pitched laugh. Yusuf claimed he couldn’t remember his crime, either. The police had told him there was more than one, but he’d long forgotten what they were or why he might have committed them. He said to Aramon: ‘It doesn’t matter what they were. I may have been wicked a long time ago, I may even have slit a man’s throat, or the throats of more than one man, but God has forgiven me. He has given me rest from toil. He has given me shelter in my old age. And now He’s giving it to you, too.’

This thought made Aramon smile. It also made him take a certain pride in his cell. He cleaned it with care. At the Mas Lunel, he’d allowed everything to go to hell, not caring – not really noticing – if the place stank, until it all got too disgusting and too complicated to be endured and he’d had to send for Audrun to sort it out.

Here in prison, he disinfected his lavatory bowl three times a week. He stretched the bed-sheets tight. He wished he had pictures or photographs to tape to the walls: views of places where he’d never been and never would go and which would therefore ask nothing of him. Niagara Falls. Mount Etna. The Great Wall of China. Venice. A lake in Somalia, where, Yusuf told him, men fished for eels under a crimson sunset. These pictures, he thought, would give his mind a resting place: somewhere to dwell.

Many of the inmates of the prison were young men – Caucasian French, Somalis and North Africans, staying mainly in their own ethnic groups.

At mealtimes and in the yard, all the groups strutted and bragged and cursed. Sometimes, there were bloody fights and these amused Aramon. He could remember what it was like to be twenty years old and full of fury. But he admitted to Yusuf: ‘I wouldn’t want to be young again. It’s too exhausting.’

One day, a group of young white men gathered around Aramon in the exercise yard and one of them, a boy called Michou, said to him: ‘We heard you’re the guy who wiped out that
rosbif
. The one in the newspapers, who went missing. Is that true?’