Authors: Deborah Lawrenson
“R
achel left this with me,” said Sabine.
She passed a flash drive across the table. “I don’t read English so well. I’m not sure exactly what the files contain but I need to know. She gave it to me before she left and said it was important. She was acting a bit strange, told me to keep it safe, she’d be back when she could to pick up where she’d left off. So I did what she asked. But then she never came back for it, never asked me to send it on to her.”
“She was acting strangely in what way?”
“She seemed . . . evasive, angry maybe. She went in a hurry—looking terrible I might add, as if she hadn’t been sleeping.”
“Didn’t you ask, if you were worried about her?”
“She said she was pregnant, and that unfortunately it wasn’t agreeing with her.”
“And you thought that was strange?”
“I didn’t think anything much about it,” said Sabine, as if wanting to close down that line of conversation and attend to her own agenda. “Only that I have been trying to contact her for a long time, but I can never reach her. Then I saw her husband with you at the Durands’ house.”
Her husband.
I picked up the flash drive and turned it over. “You want me to look at what she was researching? To translate it for you?” I asked. I hadn’t yet made it clear how I felt about her using Rachel to unsettle Dom and me, how angry I had been to be drawn into her game.
“I think it needs to be done.”
“But, now . . . with everything else that’s going on? I’m sorry but I really think—” I was dumbfounded by her insensitivity.
“No,” said Sabine. “It might be to do with what’s been found and why the police are at your house. You’re not letting yourself understand what I’m telling you.”
A pause.
“Dominic knows,” said Sabine. “And I’m doing my best to help you.”
It was the way she said it, the curious emphasis that made it clear she intended more meaning than was explicit. That was the crossing of the line, the tacit acknowledgment that we both knew something was wrong.
I
inserted the flash drive into my laptop and downloaded the files.
Most were dated October 2008. That squared with what Sabine told me, that Rachel gave it to her for safekeeping at the end of that month. As I worked my way through the list, one title sprang out:
LUMIÈRES—MISSING GIRL
.
I clicked it open with trembling hands.
It’s 8 A.M. The dust and gravel village square at Lumières howls and seems exposed now the bus has left.
On the autoroute north from Marseille the overhead warning signs were flashing, ever more bossily: AVERTISSEMENT: VENT VIOLENT.
WARNING: STRONG WIND.
“Soyez prudent,” warns the woman in the bakery where I buy myself breakfast. Outside trees are bending and loose leaves ride on air down the sloping street. The wind is getting higher.
I have every intention of being careful, not only when I am out in the mistral, but when I’m asking the questions I have come to ask in the places I have come to find.
For this is where the girl set off, the last time she went home.
Her face is on the poster in the bakery window. Another is on a plane tree where the bus pulled in, though how long it will be before some powerful gust pulls it free is anyone’s guess. It is already tattered.
Missing for more than a month now.
Lumières is not even a proper village. It is a kind of anteroom to the much larger Goult just up the hill.
The girl’s name is Marine Gavet. She is a student, nineteen years old. This is her family home, where she grew up with an engineer father and a mother who is a part-time secretary. In the picture on the posters she is smiling and pretty, but sensible and serious-looking as well. Her face has become familiar throughout this northwestern corner of Provence, gazing out from posters tacked up in cafés and shops and on lampposts, trees, bus stops.
She had been visiting a boyfriend, though she had reportedly ended the relationship the day before her disappearance. It had ended badly. So badly that the young man, Christophe LeBrun, became the prime suspect despite his protestations of innocence and fury at the waste of police time when they could have been finding her.
The last confirmed sighting of Marine Gavet was at the bus stop in the square, boarding the bus for Apt, about sixteen kilometers east along the N100, the main route between Avignon and Forcalquier. Christophe had last seen her at 11.30
P.M.
the previous night when she walked out of a party in Bonnieux. Other guests saw and heard the argument, and gave statements to the effect that he remained at the party, drinking steadily for a further two hours.
She was due back at university for the start of her second year ten days ago. She was popular and hardworking. Not the sort of girl to take off without telling her family and friends.
Hope is still strong, of course, that she will not be found dead, as so many are in such circumstances. What is the best outcome when this happens? Before it happens to you, it’s tempting to think that perhaps it is better not to know, and to go on in the hope she is alive and happy in the new life that has overwritten the one she was supposed to live. But according to the family, what they are seeking, every day, is certainty and closure.
Not far from Lumières, on the road to Avignon, is the castle at Lacoste that once belonged to the Marquis de Sade. Already notorious when the Marquis arrived to claim it, it was the scene of the rape, torture, and murder of three hundred members of the heretical sect of the Vaudois. From his prison cell in later years, the Marquis made it the setting for the literary flowering of his own notoriety in
Justine
and
One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom
. These days, it is owned by the veteran designer Pierre Cardin and is the centerpiece of a summer music festival.
That does not mean that a dark underbelly no longer exists in this glorious countryside. Of course it does, no less than in other places of beauty.
In Avignon, high summer has gone, and with it the troupes of festival players, the gilded steam-driven fairground ride and the bunting flags, the music and indulgence in the warm evening air. Soon the plane trees lining the boulevards will point gnarled witches’ fingers up into the blackness above the city.
Homeless North Africans are already huddled in dark doorways, shivering like the litter that stirs in the wind, features flattened by sodium lighting from the windows of Galeries Lafayette. The shop dummies, too, are harbingers of winter, blank-faced in their jackets trimmed with fake fur.
Marine had a week to go before she was meant to be traveling to Avignon, with a ticket booked to Lyon, heading back to university. That should have been her route.
Instead she was seen—for the last time by a witness who was prepared to come forward and give a statement—climbing into a bus bound east, not west.
According to the police, the last person officially to see her was
Mme.
Christiane Rascas, the baker’s wife who has just sold me my croissant and warned me about the wind.
“Soyez vraiment prudente,”
she tells me again when I tell her I intend to walk up to Goult. “Be really careful.”
I’m not sure whether it is just the wind she means.
H
e had traveled from Sault to Coustellet, and then on down the valley, calling at all the hill villages until he reached us. He had walked and taken rides on farm carts all around the area, and once he had delivered a secondhand bicycle from Roussillon to Saint-Saturnin at the request of the buyer, which proved useful for everyone, as he had work waiting at the other end. Now, if only he could get word out somehow that he was reliable and available for transport deliveries, that would suit him very well as an itinerant worker, he said wistfully.
He was a nice-looking boy—young man, rather. An air of innocence and idealism made him seem younger than he was. That was what drew us to him. Dark hair; eyes that glistened like black olives in oil and held our gaze reassuringly as we spoke; arms muscled like tree branches, testament to the drive with which he worked; a gentle manner. We couldn’t have dreamed up such a paragon.
When he had finished patching the roof, taking some trouble to match the old tiles from the stacks in the undercroft, he insisted on holding the ladder while I climbed up over the edge to check his work. “There are some who would do a botched job thinking that two women would never know,” he said.
The work was done well, I was relieved to report to Maman. “The tiles he’s replaced are on firmly—I prodded them hard with a stick—and you can’t even tell where the hole used to be!”
André smiled. “What else can I do for you? If you let me stay here tonight, there’ll be no charge for the first job tomorrow.”
He joined us at the kitchen table for a chickpea stew and a little cheese, and ate with relish what we could offer. I had the feeling he hadn’t eaten much except for what he had foraged from the hedges and orchards for many days. In return for supper, he stacked a good pile of logs in the wood store.
That night he slept in the old Poidevin cottage. We made him up a bed in the room where Arielle and I used to share secrets.
F
or the next few weeks, we developed a routine. When he had finished one job, André always asked what his next would be. “We can’t pay you much, but we can offer you a little food and wine, and somewhere to sleep,” Maman would say.
“I accept your terms,” he’d reply.
It was unsaid, but we knew he was very grateful.
There was nobility about him. To me, as I came to know him, André was like one of those universal figures of Provençal folklore: the shepherd, the farmer and his hired hands, the priest, the mayor, the knife-grinder, the miller, the troubadour, the baker. He was hewn from the long history of the struggle to survive in isolated homesteads, across the barren hills and plateaus, in the perched upland villages.
M
arine Gavet was the first girl to go missing. Why had Rachel chosen to write about her? I would have to go down to Apt and check at the Internet café, but I was sure that at the time Rachel was writing this, none of the other girls had yet disappeared.
I stared blankly at my laptop screen. This was Rachel’s second article about a person who was absent, missing. First, there was the interview with Francis Tully, in which he justified his nonappearance at his own prestigious retrospective exhibition; the visual tricks he played with in his work. Or was I straining to find connections where none existed?
The other files on the flash drive were all titled
LINCEL
. I only looked briefly to check, but they concerned Marthe Lincel, her work as a perfumer and her blindness.
Marine Gavet. Francis Tully. Marthe Lincel. There was no connection, unless I thought of Rachel herself, who seemed to have vanished into the ether. Disappearance in the abstract. Different kinds of disappearance. Various kinds of silence.
Rachel herself. Was this a theme; was it coincidence—or a prefiguring of her own situation?
I had no idea.
I
would have liked to relay all this to Dom, to show him her research, but how could I? Doing so would have meant admitting I had been fretting about Rachel and talking about her with Sabine. Even though the atmosphere seemed calm on the surface these days, he could still be distant and quick to anger. The waiting while the police completed their work was unbearable. We both felt it. But Dom seemed determined we should suffer it separately.
It was that distance between us that unsettled me. No matter how I tried to tell myself I was overreacting, I could not shake off the sense that Dom had not been completely honest with me.
When I did go into the music room with two mugs of coffee, he gave me an odd look before he spoke.
“Was that you, earlier?”
“Me what?”
“Singing.”
“No.”
A pause.
“What kind of singing?”
“Just . . . nothing. Forget it.”
It might have been the trees, I suggested. Perhaps it was.
But he had already cut me off, waved me away, and I was adrift from him again. I went outside and listened closely, but heard nothing.
T
hat afternoon, Severan announced that forensic analysis of the bones confirmed they were the remains of a woman aged around fifty.
“And you still cannot tell me who she was, the woman I saw hanging around the site?” he asked.
I could not.
It was hard to tell whether he believed me.