The Lying Down Room (Serge Morel 1) (22 page)

‘Why do you ask?’

‘It would help us if we knew a little more about Armand, that’s all.’

‘Do you think he’s actually responsible for what happened to those women?’ Amelia Berg asked.

‘At this stage we’re not certain of anything, but that’s why it’s important that we find him. So we can talk to him,’ Morel said.

That seemed to satisfy her. She leaned back in her chair. The cat woke up and stretched. It jumped on her lap and curled in a ball. It looked at Lila through narrowed eyes.

‘Armand’s mother was a difficult woman,’ Amelia Berg said.

‘Difficult how?’ Morel asked.

‘Possessive. Harsh.’

‘Possessive with her son, you mean?’

Amelia Berg nodded.

‘Was she unstable?’

The old woman turned to Lila. ‘Unstable?’

‘I mean did she have problems? Psychologically?’

Amelia Berg laughed. ‘You know nowadays everyone has a psychological problem. In my day when someone acted badly it was put down to meanness of character or a lack of education. We
didn’t feel the need to run to a psychologist the minute it happened.’

‘So would you say his mother was a mean person?’

‘It was hard to warm to her. Though I hate to speak ill of the dead.’

‘Do you know why Armand Le Bellec didn’t bother to return for his mother’s funeral?’

Amelia Berg shrugged. ‘I can’t say. But she was a difficult woman to love. I imagine he was not close to her.’

She said this with a touch of smugness. The cat jumped from her lap and walked past Lila with its tail up in the air, pointedly ignoring her.

‘What sort of child was Armand?’ Lila asked.

‘Solitary, withdrawn.’

‘But he was Charles’s friend.’ It was said as a statement.

‘Yes,’ the old lady replied, as though it was a relief to acknowledge the point. ‘He was Charles’s friend.’

‘Would you have a photo of him, by any chance?’ Morel said.

The old lady thought for a moment. ‘You know, I probably do. Let me get it for you.’

Outside, it looked as though the rain had cleared. But the wind showed no signs of easing off.

‘I might have a little look around the garden,’ Morel told Lila.

‘Absolutely, be my guest,’ Lila said. ‘You know what, I’ll just sit here and have another slice of this delicious pie.’

Lila watched Morel pick his way among the plants, careful not to step over any lovingly tended flowers. His trouser legs were getting wet. She thought about how that would irritate him and tried
not to smile.

‘It must be nice, having your son and his children live so close to you,’ Lila said when Amelia Berg returned to the room. ‘By the way, would you mind terribly if I helped
myself to another slice?’

‘Not at all,’ Amelia Berg said. She handed a photograph to Lila. ‘Here. Armand and Charles. I guess this was taken when they were around fourteen years old.’

Lila looked at the two grinning faces before her. Despite the smile there was a brooding look on Armand’s face. His eyes were on the person taking the picture but his thoughts seemed to be
elsewhere. Charles’s gaze was direct. He seemed to be laughing.

‘Who took the photo?’

‘I think it was me. Armand used to come and play. See the background? That’s the maze I had made in the garden, for the children to play in. Not much of a maze but fun for them to
run around in when they’re little. Charles’s children love it.’ Amelia Berg smiled wistfully and gazed at her garden. ‘It is nice having the little ones near,’ she
said.

‘Your son tells us his wife is away at the moment,’ Lila said.

‘Yes,’ the old woman said. ‘The two of them have had a bit of a tiff, I think. Nothing serious, though.’ Seeing Lila’s face, she faltered. ‘I thought he would
have told you.’

‘He just said she was away for a couple of days. Visiting her sister.’

‘Her sister? Yes, that’s right.’

Lila could see Morel heading back.‘Is there anything more you can tell us about Armand?’ she ventured. ‘Anything at all.’ She remembered something. ‘You told
Commandant Morel on the phone that you were worried about Armand. Why?’

Amelia Berg was quiet for a moment. Then she spoke.

‘He was a good child,’ she said, almost as if she was speaking to herself. ‘But his mother took him out of school for half a year. When he came back he gave the impression that
he was no longer himself, somehow. It’s hard to explain,’ she said, looking at Lila. ‘All I know is that I didn’t feel comfortable around him. I’d run into him
sometimes, after all it’s a small place and you’re always running into people you know. He was so withdrawn. He literally shrank away from me. I noticed he crossed the street a few
times just so he wouldn’t have to say hello. Given how different he’d become, I was glad in a way that he and Charles had stopped being friends.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. I think Armand was dragging him down, somehow.’

Lila thought it interesting that Amelia Berg had so much to say about someone her son claimed not to have known that well or for very long.

‘You don’t know anything about this boy he adopted in Russia?’

‘No.’ She looked concerned. ‘I know nothing about that.’

Morel slid the door open and stepped in, rubbing his feet on the doormat before entering the room.

‘You really are a remarkable gardener, Madame Berg,’ he said.

The old lady beamed with pleasure. Then she looked at Morel as if she’d suddenly remembered something.

‘You know, there’s someone you should talk to,’ she said. ‘He taught Charles and Armand. It’s a long time ago, but maybe he’ll be able to help.’

They walked back to the car in silence. Lila scoffed.

‘“You really are a remarkable gardener, Madame Berg,”’ she said.

‘Very funny.’

‘No, I’m impressed with your seductive skills. She loved you.’

‘I was trying to compensate for my colleague, sitting there pigging out on the old woman’s food.’

‘A different form of flattery. I was paying homage to her culinary skills.’

As they got into the car, Lila grew thoughtful. ‘Why do I get the feeling no one is telling us the important stuff?’

‘My little stroll in the garden was interesting,’ Morel said.

‘Was it?’

He pulled something from his pocket and showed it to Lila. It was a photograph of Charles and his family.

‘Where did that come from?’ she said, surprised.

‘It was in Amelia Berg’s garden, in the bushes where she said Armand was hiding.’

‘But—’

‘I noticed when we were at Charles’s place that one of the frames on the bookshelves was missing a photograph. I didn’t think anything of it at the time but now . . . Le Bellec
must have dropped it when he ran out of here.’

‘So Armand did visit Charles, not just Charles’s mother,’ Lila said.

‘It seems likely.’

‘I knew the bastard wasn’t telling the truth.’

‘How about a drink?’

‘Don’t you want to drop in at Charles’s place first? Ask him when he noticed the photo went missing, and whether maybe he’d like to stop lying to us?’

‘I’m thirsty.’

‘Oh well, in that case,’ Lila said.

As they walked towards the village bar, the sun emerged timidly from behind the clouds.

The bar was a five-minute walk from Amelia Berg’s house. In fact, it was probably a five-minute walk from most houses in the village, Lila thought as she opened the door
and Morel held it back, waiting for her to enter first. She tried to picture what life would be like in a place where everyone knew each other. You wouldn’t be able to walk down the street
without stopping every few minutes to talk to someone who knew you. People would make up stories about you out of sheer boredom. Your life would be constantly under scrutiny: whether you went to
church, whether your marriage was a happy one, whether your children did well at school, whether you cooked and cleaned and prayed as well as you should.

Hell.

While Lila went to the toilet, Morel took a look around the place. The bartender was pouring
pastis
into glasses for a pair of crusty-looking individuals who looked like they’d
had a few already. They sat at the bar with raw hands clutching their drinks. Morel ordered a glass of red wine and for Lila a glass of cider, as requested. When the drinks arrived he noticed the
glasses had an unwashed, oily sheen about them. He tried not to mind and sipped at the wine. It was the sort that would scour your insides as effectively as bleach, but it would do.

Over on the other side of the room a jukebox played a lambada. Every time the tune ended one of the men shuffled over to put another coin in the box and play it again.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, there was no one else around.

Lila returned and sat opposite Morel. Just then his phone rang. Morel looked at it to see who the caller was.

‘It’s Jean,’ he told Lila.

While he listened his expression darkened.

‘Well, thanks for letting me know,’ he said after several minutes. He hung up and looked at Lila. ‘Jean managed to track Amir down.’

‘Great,’ she said.

‘Yes, well, it would be, in different circumstances. Amir died in a car crash five years ago.’

‘Shit.’

They sat in silence, mulling over this latest piece of news. After the inconclusive interviews they’d just had with Charles and his mother, it seemed like another step backwards.

‘This is cosy,’ Morel finally said, looking around the room.

‘Yeah, if you like a dive in the middle of nowhere populated by a bunch of losers,’ she said. ‘Did you notice how they all stopped and stared when we walked in? It was like
being in a western.’

‘Except no one tried to shoot us.’

‘They’re too drunk.’

‘It reminds me of when I was younger,’ Morel said.

‘Really?’

‘My father was from Brittany. We used to come here once a year, over the summer.’

‘You mean this kind of summer?’ Lila said, pulling her jacket closer.

‘It was great. We loved it, as kids.’

They drank in silence for a while, listening to the rain. Morel thought about one of the holidays he and his family had spent in Roscoff. Once, his father had gone missing for a couple of hours.
Looking back now, he realized his parents must have had a fight. His mother had sat behind the steering-wheel with tears running down her face while they drove at a snail’s pace through the
narrow streets, looking for him. For once the children did not have to be told to be quiet. They huddled together in complete silence, staring at the darkness around them.

They’d finally found Morel Senior in a bar much like this one. It was Maly, calm and collected, who had gone in and convinced him to come home with them.

The next day he had been back to his usual immaculate self. Not a trace of the tantrum he’d thrown the previous night.

While he sat and drank his wine, Morel thought of his father’s recent erratic moods, the episodes where he seemed to become confused or forgetful. Perhaps some of it had been there
already. The moodiness and sudden emotional outbursts. From a man who prided himself on his composure and who intellectualized everything. Maybe that was why. He was like a pressure cooker: at some
point, there was a need for release.

‘Will you have another?’ Lila said.

‘Yes.’

‘Me too, I’ll get this round,’ she said, pushing her chair back and standing up. The lambada was finishing for the umpteenth time. ‘If someone plays that tune once more I
swear I’ll kick them in the balls.’

She stood by the old men at the bar and ordered drinks. Morel saw her give them a dark look while she waited. He hoped for their sake that they’d run out of coins for the jukebox.

His sisters had come back from Brittany with boxes inlaid with seashells, bright, dazzling things which they forgot to fill and simply admired. Morel’s most treasured possession was a tiny
ship captured in a bottle. Though it was explained to him time and time again, he never quite understood how it was done and to him it remained a magic trick.

When she returned to their table with the drinks, Lila said, ‘There’s something fishy about Charles. For one thing, how is it his wife is away while the kids are still in the house?
They’re obviously around, judging by the mess.’

‘Maybe the two of them had a tiff, like his mother said.’

‘Then why didn’t
he
say so?’

‘Most people don’t like to air their dirty laundry in public.’

‘He was airing plenty of that when we visited.’

‘You know what I mean.’

Morel started on his second glass. He was beginning to relax. The bar seemed cheerier than when they had first walked in.

‘What about the lies? Why didn’t he tell us that he’d seen Armand earlier, before Armand went over to his mother’s house and hid in her garden?’

‘That’s what we’re going to find out,’ Morel said. ‘We’ll drop in on him in the morning. Before he leaves with the kids to take them to school. Then
we’ll visit the schoolteacher, the one Amelia Berg told us about.’

Morel reminded himself of what they knew about Le Bellec so far. He was sure they were on the right track now. But what eluded him still was the motive. If Le Bellec was their man, why had he
targeted two old widows? He thought of what Amelia Berg had said. Armand hadn’t come back for his mother’s funeral.

‘Maybe the schoolteacher can tell us something about Le Bellec’s mother,’ Morel said.

‘OK. Then we head back to Paris, right?’ Lila said.

‘Yes. Hopefully Jean will have some news for us. Maybe he’ll get lucky and track Armand Le Bellec down, teaching at one of the schools.’

‘Maybe. Either way it’ll be good to get back.’ Lila took a gulp of her cider and looked around the bar. ‘What a shit-hole,’ she said.

When they emerged from the bar an hour later, the temperature had dropped by several degrees. The light had faded to a muted grey. There was absolutely no one about.

‘We’re not spending the night here, right?’ Lila said.

The place where Morel had booked rooms was halfway between the village and Rennes. So many places were closed in August that he’d had to make a few calls before finding a place that
wasn’t too expensive or out of the way. They reached it twenty minutes after leaving the bar, with Lila managing to complain several times along the way that she was starving.