Authors: Deborah Lawrenson
I
n Apt, the seasonal crowds were thinning at last, tempers calming in the supermarkets where the locals had been making their frustration and displeasure known since the second week of July, at the lack of parking spaces and the lines at the checkouts. The tourist surge had been weathered, the money taken.
We shopped quickly, and then headed up to Les Genévriers.
In our absence, paradise had overreached itself. The courtyard was dense with chaotic inflorescence. The fruit was splitting on the fig tree; giant hornets gave full song to their thirst. The earth was warm where summer sun had burned away the grass.
Beyond the courtyard, the statues stood reproachful—lonely spirits stuck in this all too earthly world. Work on the swimming pool looked like any other building site where work had stopped. It was a mess of abandoned digging and plastic wire guides and stones. Hardy grass and wildflowers had sprung up on the piles and banks of exposed soil.
The grapes were almost ripe, the prettiest mauve and purple baubles under the vine’s dry, rustling leaves. Greengages, too, pulpy and darkened on the grass beneath the tree, crusting with a lichen of mold, were being devoured by insects, birds, and small animals. Too high on the tree to pick, too many to eat; the joy of plenty turned to decadence.
T
he key stuck as we tried to open the shutters to the back door, as if the lock had rusted since we left, and we had to walk around to another door to the main house and find our way in from the alleyway between the two main buildings.
Inside, the house was dark and silent and cool. As we passed through each room, we threw open the shutters to the light and felt the stones breathe and familiar shafts of brightness sweep the floors and walls. Pockets of scent stirred the senses: here, old soot and cloves combined in imitation of church incense; there, lavender and citrus.
The wooden monk in the hall had lost his sheen. Our secondhand furniture simply looked used up and shabby. In the music room, spiders scuttled across a floor speckled with dead insects. On the mantelpiece, an untidy slew of leaflets for all the summer concerts we had missed.
By four o’clock in the afternoon, the light receded. In the west, it was gray-yellow over the valley, and by five, a thunderstorm had started. Forks of lightning pitched through the blackened skies. It was warm, too, the warmth building to suffocation point. In the fountain trough, the water was an ominous, toxic green, fronds of algae waving mistily from its floor, clouding like the sky. In the air, an odd, almost ginlike tang.
Dom and I stood together on the covered terrace and watched as white explosions flashed on a hillside below us.
“Look down there,” he said.
Lightning had struck an electric cable, and fire was sparking its way along the wire, from pole to pole.
Then the rain came down, beating emphatically on every surface, cascading off the roof tiles like a sheet fountain.
That evening, when the sky was clear and red, we set a table on the covered terrace, as we had done so many times that first summer, and lit candles. With tangible relief that we had a neutral subject, we discussed the state of the house and what needed attention. Evening breezes took the flames in hand and ripped them down the tall dinner candles in twenty minutes, leaving stalactites of wax in mysterious shapes to drip onto the table and the plate of cheese. But by ten o’clock, another wind had pounced. It picked up the tablecloth and yanked it roughly aside, like a failed trick. A glass tipped over, then the empty wine bottle, and we went inside.
T
he next morning, Severan and his assistant arrived promptly at nine. Sitting astride a kitchen chair, Lieutenant Severan accepted a cup of coffee, as did the woman officer he introduced as Adjutant Grégoire. She was about my age, with hazel eyes that locked onto whatever had her attention. After she finished with us, the oven and the work surfaces came under scrutiny.
“Are you baking?” she asked.
I shook my head.
The adjutant breathed in deeply. “Smells like almond biscuits . . . lovely.”
“It’s . . . this kitchen, I think.”
Severan sniffed but made no comment. Tapping a sheaf of papers on the table for our attention, he got down to business. “We have collated the results of our forensic tests. The first remains to be found were those of a women in her late forties to early fifties. The second set of bones belonged to a young girl between sixteen and twenty. According to our soil specialists, they had both been interred at the same time. The bodies and the blood are too old to be linked to the cases of the missing girls. Both have been in the ground for several decades.”
“Do you know who they are—were?” asked Dom.
I am sure I saw a glance pass between them, a compassionate kind of look that may have held an element of unspoken apology. At least, I like to think so.
“We have a theory, but as yet no actual proof.”
We waited as he took a sip of black coffee.
“We have reason to think that the remains of the older female are those of a woman whose family lived here for generations. Her name was Marthe Lincel.”
“Marthe Lincel!” I couldn’t help it—I gasped.
“You know who she was?”
“Yes . . .”
“No relatives survive, so it is impossible to make any kind of DNA comparison, but what we know of her age and size, last known whereabouts, approximate dates of her last activity, and the length of time her body has been in the ground, all support the theory.”
I was racking my brain trying to remember what I had read about her. It all seemed a long time ago, in another life. “There was a ghostwritten memoir of sorts, that covered her life up to the age of forty or so. Wasn’t it assumed that she retired after that . . . ?”
“That’s the story the Musset boutique puts out,” said Adjutant Grégoire. “Perhaps it suits their dreamy wholesome image of Provence. Perhaps that’s what they were told and they never thought to question it.”
“She must have been a loss for them, though,” I said.
“That’s true . . .”
“Is it possible to tell how they died?” asked Dom.
“The same method in each case,” said Severan. “By a blow to the back of the head with a heavy object. Both skulls were subjected to a brutal assault.”
There was a pause, in which we all seemed to contemplate the possible realities of that.
“How—” I just couldn’t leave it. “How did you come to the conclusion it was Marthe Lincel?”
Severan rubbed his hand over the stubble on his face. “We talked to many people in the village. Her name came up several times. She lived here, after all. The other is as yet unknown.”
“Is that it, then?” Dom wanted to know.
“We will continue making inquiries, but I have to say this will not be a priority.”
“A woman called Sabine Boutin and her mother seem to know more than anyone about the Lincel family,” interjected Adjutant Grégoire.
I had the impression it was she who had been tasked with most of the Lincel line of inquiry, and was proud of a job done well.
“The Boutins were old family friends of the Lincels,” she went on. “They have been trying to discover what happened to Marthe Lincel for many years, and have been extremely helpful. If you want any more information, perhaps you could get in touch with them in the first instance.”
“Perhaps I will,” I said, looking at Dom.
“And naturally if anything else comes to light—in the house or grounds—you will get in touch,” said Severan, standing to go.
“What about the bloodstains?” asked Dom suddenly. “You said you found bloodstains here that could be read like a map.”
“Old, too.”
“Where, though?”
Severan winced, and pointed to a patch of tiled floor not a meter from his boots.
It was the stain I had been scrubbing to no avail since we arrived.
W
hile I was still at the hospital, a distinguished gentleman came to examine my eyes and talk to me. He was Professor Georges Feduzzi of the University of Avignon. It was he who suggested I make these recordings.
He told me, in his warm, clever voice, that it would be a great service to his scientific researches, to the understanding of blindness, and of Charles Bonnet syndrome in particular. When I agreed, he took my hand and squeezed it softly.
It may seem strange, but I actually felt proud.
As you have heard, the stories tumble out of me. Perhaps I could have written it myself, once, with great effort of will. But, for once, I admitted I needed help. I can no longer see the words on the page.
As I have made these recordings, I have become less afraid. As I accustom myself to the idea of blindness, of what will happen to me, of the loss of my reading, I find I miss the prospect of Marthe appearing. With every day, I feel her within me, like the house is around me. You cannot be here, among these stone walls and rocks and paths and gnarled, wind-twisted trees, without being aware of the passage of time and the spirits of the past. I’d felt so alone with only the cloudiness and the scents, first of lavender, then of heliotrope and milky almond woodiness; the scents of Christmas and baking; on warm, stormy nights, the sharp hints of gin from the junipers that grow wild on the scrubby slopes below.
Understanding is all. The visitors come more and more rarely. That is consistent with the syndrome, too. There is a period of intense activity within the brain, and then it subsides. The doctors predicted that, and they have been proved right. The family and all the forgotten strangers only appear regularly in my dreams now. If one of them does come home during the day, I try not to worry. Instead, I make mental notes of what I think I see, and I speak them into these tapes.
And I am happy, in a way, because I know that at last I am fulfilling my ambition. I am passing on learning. My account will be studied and used by doctors and students at the university. I have become a teacher.
W
e steeled ourselves and called Sabine, invited her for a drink that evening.
At six, I set a scented burner on the fireplace, and a light cinnamon trail rose, overlaying the random bursts of diverse scents that had come and gone since our return.
Sabine arrived, intent and eager for information and bringing light footprints of figgy mud over the threshold.
Dom poured some wine, and together we told her the truth about Rachel. The truth that Rachel had been sick and the truth that she had died in a clinic in Switzerland. Not quite the whole truth, but as much of it as necessary.
Sabine shook her head slowly from side to side, seeming to restrain herself from saying what she really thought. “I knew it . . . I knew that something had happened to her . . .”
She threw me a beady glance, as if she thought I was holding back or dissembling. Well, I had been holding back, but only about how little I knew of Dom’s wife, and how uneasy that had begun to make me, and because I felt disloyal to Dom.
I looked over at him now, willing him to dispel her lingering suspicions.
“I should have said, before now. I’m sorry,” he said.
There was a charged pause.
Silently, I urged him on.
“She didn’t know either—not at first,” he said, meaning me. He put his hand over mine. He began with a stutter, then continued. “This has been a difficult time for me. Perhaps I shouldn’t have come back here. But can you begin to understand why I did not want to talk about my wife’s death?”
Sabine put her head on one side. “Of course. Of course I can . . . but—”
“And Rachel . . . she wasn’t well, she used to say things she didn’t mean,” I said. I looked steadily at Sabine, trying to communicate what, in particular, Rachel had not meant.
Neither of us was going to say it.
“I’m sorry if I appeared to mislead you,” I said. “I overreacted and . . .”
“It wasn’t her fault,” said Dom firmly.
From the way she raised the side of her mouth, it seemed that Sabine was about to air some other discrepancy, but she let it go.
“Lieutenant Severan and Adjutant Grégoire were here this morning,” I said, changing the subject to one I knew would interest her. “I gather there’s a new theory as to the identity of at least one of the bodies here.”
S
abine was keen to tell us her own stories. More wine was poured, and she explained how her family and Marthe Lincel’s had been intertwined for generations.
“My grandmother Arielle was a childhood friend of Bénédicte Lincel, the younger sister. Her family, the Poidevins, were tenant farmers here at Les Genévriers. Well, as you probably know, the farm gradually failed, the tenants all left, the son of the family left, Marthe was in Paris with her perfumes. Then there was only one old lady living here. That was Bénédicte.
“She was on the point of ruin. She was advised to sell off some land, but selling the farm was the only way forward for her. Much land had already been sold, or let to another farmer for his goats.”
I thought of the fields below, owned now by the village’s most prosperous farming family, a clan destined for success from the moment the third son was born, and then, almost excessively, blessed by the births of the fourth and fifth. The view from the back of the cottages is now another neighbor’s wheat field, and his vigorous golden crops roll right up to our chins, or so it feels. All that came with the hamlet were the scrubby woods, the garden, and the steep orchard terraces.
“Bénédicte needed Marthe’s help, and urgently. But the sisters had gone their separate ways, or rather, many years before, Marthe had cut Bénédicte out of her life after some argument. So we tried to contact her on Bénédicte’s behalf, and got nowhere. Everywhere we tried ended in a dead end.” Sabine laughed drily and took a sip from her glass.
“So,” I said, suddenly understanding, “when a talented journalist came looking for local stories, you put her onto Marthe and gave her all the help you could. You even encouraged me to take up where she left off.”
Sabine smiled. “We all wanted to know what happened to Marthe. Bénédicte made us promise to find out what happened to her sister, where she was if she was still alive. It was always possible a fresh mind would turn up some fact we hadn’t found, see the story from a different viewpoint.”
We all seemed to think about that one.
“When the police ran forensic tests on the bodies, and announced the age the woman would have been when she died, and the length of time she had been in the ground, they came around to everyone in the village, asking if anyone had any clues as to who she was. My grandmother, my mother, and I dug out old diaries and with those and what we could piece together from memory . . . It turned out that the woman was the age Marthe Lincel would have been when she was last known to be here, which also fit approximately with the time when Bénédicte last saw her.”
“And Bénédicte is dead—the police said there were no relatives,” said Dom.
“She died in 2007. She had been living with us for some years by then. She couldn’t stay here alone.”
“So they can’t be sure it is Marthe Lincel.”
“No. It’s all circumstantial evidence.”
“Who was the other girl, the young one?” I asked.
“No one knows, poor soul.”
A noise against the window made us all jump. It was a hornet, so big it clunked its head against the glass trying to reach the light inside.
“What do you do about these?” asked Dom.
“Find the nest,” said Sabine.
“The police found bloodstains here in the kitchen,” I told her. “They thought they were relatively recent, but it turns out they must have been here for decades. If they’d only asked I would have told them.”
“Dark stains on the floor tiles—and then some like droplets?”
We nodded.
“I tried to scrub them,” I said. “I never had any idea they were . . .”
“It’s not a happy story,” said Sabine. “You may not want to know.”
Of course we did.
“Bénédicte and Marthe . . . their father shot himself. It was the first act in the family’s downfall.”
W
e showed her to the door and she was gracious. She might even become a friend, I felt, at some stage, if we decided to stay.
I remembered, just as she was leaving, standing in the open doorway. Raindrops threaded through basil and lemon verbena in the pots at the top of the steps, making an infusion of pungent leaves.
“If you would still like me to, I will translate the research Rachel left with you on the flash drive for safekeeping,” I said. “If that’s okay with Dom.”