The Lying Down Room (Serge Morel 1) (23 page)

The place was a former coaching inn and boasted a four-star restaurant. The woman who showed them their table told them it had seen four generations of innkeepers. The great-grandfather, a horse
lover, had built it and christened it the Grey Horse Inn, in memory of a spirited horse he’d never managed to tame. It was his grandson Matthieu who now held the reins, so to speak, the woman
told them with a smile, revealing a set of teeth badly in need of repair.

Lila ordered an entrecôte and Morel had the
andouille
sausage, which she wrinkled her nose at when it arrived.

‘Why anyone would want to dig into a cow’s intestines is beyond me,’ she said when he urged her to try it.

‘What a Parisian you are. You can barely cope with being somewhere not quite as urbanized for more than five minutes, admit it.’

‘Not
quite
as urbanized. Must be the understatement of the century,’ Lila said, biting into three
frites
at once.

‘The problem with you is that you’re too set in your ways. Not open-minded enough,’ Morel said, shearing off a thick slice of the sausage on his plate.

‘I can live with that,’ she said, before spearing a big chunk of Béarnaise-coated meat and shoving it in her mouth.

After dinner they sat in Lila’s room and again went over what they knew of Armand Le Bellec.

‘Do you mind if I get changed while we talk?’ Lila said.

‘Go ahead. Will you have a small cognac? I will.’

‘Sure.’

She emerged from the bathroom wearing grey cotton pyjama trousers and a faded red sweatshirt. She sat on the bed and folded her long legs beneath her.

‘Here,’ Morel said, handing her a glass. He turned the chair to face her and sat down. ‘OK, so we know that Le Bellec and a boy he adopted in Russia, thought to be somewhere
between fourteen and eighteen years old, visited Isabelle Dufour, Elisabeth Guillou, Marie Latour and Irina Volkoff. They may have visited others but these are the four women we know
about.’

‘If they’d visited others, you’d think we would have heard by now. After we put that composite out. We haven’t received any other reports.’

‘True. Or there may be others who haven’t kept up with the news.’ Morel finished his cognac and got up to pour another. ‘Let me continue. Two of the women were drowned in
their homes and then dressed up and displayed in a ritualistic way. Both with crosses in their hands. Their faces coarsely made up, in contrast to the meticulous way they were dressed and laid out.
Both wearing red wigs.

‘We have good reason to believe Le Bellec is responsible for the killings. He and the boy dropped in on both women some time before they died. The pamphlets are his, presumably. We know
his mother was a strict Catholic. Maybe Le Bellec gets his religiosity from her. We can assume he composed the pamphlets. They don’t make much sense but they’re his way of advertising
his beliefs.’

‘This is the part I don’t get,’ Lila said. ‘Why does he need to advertise them? And where did he meet the widows in the first place?’

‘I’m leaning towards the Holy Russia exhibition. Isabelle Dufour’s daughter-in-law told us the two of them attended it together. We don’t know about Guillou, but we know
that Marie Latour and Irina Volkoff went. It makes sense. Le Bellec has spent time in Russia and is religious. It’s an exhibition he’s interested in. He might also think it’s a
nice thing to do for the boy. So he goes there, and for some reason he marks these women.’

‘Maybe it has something to do with their age,’ Lila said, sipping at her drink. ‘What about the boy? What’s his involvement?’

‘I don’t know. We know he’s with Le Bellec when they make that initial contact. It’s hard to know whether he is there the second time around. When Le Bellec comes back to
drown them.’

‘God. I wonder whether they knew at the orphanage what sort of loon they were handing the boy over to,’ Lila said.

She gulped the remainder of her drink and set the glass on the bedside table.

‘How did he manage that adoption so easily anyway?’ she said. ‘I thought these things took years to process. Our guy was in Russia for less than a year.’

‘That’s something I’m going to try to find out,’ Morel said. He kicked his shoes off and stretched his legs on the bed too so that they ran parallel to hers. ‘We
know something happened to Le Bellec. There is clearly some tension with Charles, something that happened but that Charles and his mother are not telling us. We know Le Bellec ran into trouble in
Russia. With the girl and with this Amir,’ Morel said.

‘But we know from Olivia that he never laid a hand on her. In fact that’s what got him into trouble. She saw Armand fall for Amir and that upset her, because she had a crush on
him,’ Lila pointed out. ‘Yet she also seems certain that despite Armand’s feelings for Amir, nothing actually happened between them. So is Armand gay or not?’

Morel yawned and looked at his watch. ‘Maybe he’s gay and maybe he’s straight, or maybe he doesn’t swing either way.’

‘It would be good to know more about his upbringing. From what Amelia Berg said, Le Bellec’s mother was a piece of work.’

‘There is definitely something there. Le Bellec never returned for her funeral. Then there’s the religious zealotry, his own messed-up version of redemption. He’s all over the
place,’ Morel said.

Lila snorted. ‘Or maybe he’s a very clever, manipulative man who knows how to identify and prey on people who are vulnerable and easily swayed. Religion is just a tool to get a foot
in the door.’

‘Maybe. But why? To what end?’

Lila shrugged. ‘Hopefully we’ll find out more tomorrow.’

He sighed. ‘I should have asked Jean earlier whether he had any luck with the school search. But I’m sure he would have told me if he had any news. Let’s talk to him tomorrow
morning. In the meantime we should probably get some sleep.’

He looked at Lila. ‘Any news from your friend at the Ministry of Education?’

Lila shook her head. ‘Last time I spoke to him, he told me there was no record in their files of anyone called Armand Le Bellec.’

‘OK.’ Morel stood up. ‘Well, I’m going to bed. Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight.’

Back in his room, Morel unscrewed the flask of cognac and poured another drop. It would help him sleep, he told himself. He felt restless and mildly claustrophobic. If only he’d chosen a
room that wasn’t directly under the eaves.

He paced the floor for a few minutes, listening to the sounds of people climbing the stairs. There were only ten rooms in the inn, all on this level. The laughter stopped abruptly, as though
they’d suddenly realized how late it was. There was complete silence after that. The smells of the kitchen below hung in the air, mingling with the odour of air freshener which the cleaning
woman must have sprayed before he’d entered the room. A synthetic smell like nothing in nature, though it probably claimed to be lavender or something similar.

After a while he sat down with the square sheets of paper he’d brought with him. Slowly, in between small sips of cognac, he set about folding, all the while thinking of Mathilde.

Eventually he became so caught up in the structure gradually taking shape before him that he stopped thinking about her.

By the time he finished it was close to 1 a.m. He lay on the bed for a long time, thinking of family holidays. Running along the beach, stumbling across wriggly, worm-like
deposits of sand beneath his feet, thousands of them formed by the ebbing tide. The grey black rocks and salty taste of winkles, which you drew out from their shells with a pin before putting them
in your mouth. Traditional
galettes
filled with ham, cheese and sometimes an egg, followed by chocolate crêpes for dessert. Toffee apples at the fair, which left you with stickiness
in the most unaccountable places, in hair and on shins.

In Roscoff, he’d stayed with his family at the Hôtel Angleterre, listening to the seagulls squabbling for scraps in the morning while his father slept. This was shortly after the
Christmas when Philippe Morel had given him an origami book. He’d sat in bed folding paper, waiting for his father to wake up while his mother and sisters walked along the beach before
breakfast. Such space and quiet were the closest thing to happiness, he felt now. Gingerly he’d sat and folded, discovering the thing he would grow to love in this room with its clean white
lines and simple furnishings.

The family gathered in the dining room every morning for breakfast. The children wolfed down thick slabs of bread spread with salted butter which they dipped into large bowls filled with creamy
hot chocolate.

Regardless of the weather, as long as it didn’t pour with rain, they had played on the beach with their sets of buckets and spades, the girls making castles decorated with shells and
seaweed while Morel dug holes to see how deep he could go. His father had watched and commented that it wasn’t hard to tell which kid was the least creative of the three.

On one beach outing his mother had stepped on a rusty nail. They had driven her to the hospital and waited while she received a tetanus injection. She had emerged, shaken, from the
curtain-enclosed recess where the nurse applied a dressing to her wound. They had gone for ice-cream after that, to lighten everyone’s mood.

Even though he was nowhere near the sea now, Morel went to sleep with the sound of waves in his ears.

What Armand missed most while he was in Russia was the sea and the rugged, untamed coastline back home. Not that he’d grown up near it, and his mother had rarely let him
out of her sight. But from Rennes it was an easy train trip to Quimper or Saint-Malo. Once he enrolled at university and moved out of his mother’s grasp he took to solitary trips to the
coast. It didn’t matter what time of year it was. He could sit on a beach for hours on end, looking at the dark waves rising over the jagged outline of rock, surging from the shallow waters
near shore. A savagery that kept him hypnotized until he became numb from the cold wind and had to shake himself free.

In Moscow, as the seasons changed, his nostalgia came in waves too, like the sea-sickness he had experienced on the fishing trip with the Berg family. That was the weekend they had offered to
take Armand with them to Île de Ré, and Armand’s mother, by some strange miracle, had agreed to let him go. That was the weekend that changed everything.

The Russian winter was spectacular, blinding and imperious. Then spring came along and the ugliness showed. People emerged pale and unsmiling from their overheated homes and left dirty
footprints everywhere. The melting snow revealed the squalor beneath, the dispiriting neglect and uniformity of concrete blocks. A broken swing; a vandalized car; a bike cannibalized for its parts,
even the seat eviscerated for reasons too obscure to contemplate.

Armand got on with things. He prepared his lessons and marked essays. In class they talked about Nietzsche’s
Übermensch
and Sartre’s existentialism. They talked about
Kant’s daily routine and Wittgenstein’s introverted nature as though they knew these men. They also discussed spirituality. What it meant to different people. His students were
surprising, eager and attentive, absorbing knowledge like sponges.

When the head called him in he didn’t think it was anything serious. But it proved to be worse than he ever could have imagined. Olivia’s parents had called the school to complain
that she had developed an unhealthy relationship with her teacher. They were worried about her. She was losing weight and not communicating. The head teacher laid a hand on Armand’s arm. She
was fond of him, she said, and appreciated the work he did. She didn’t believe for a moment that he had done anything unethical. But the school could not afford to anger people like
Olivia’s parents. She told him he could finish the school year, since there were only three weeks left, but he would not be able to stay on.

Three days later, he received a telegram informing him that his mother had died. She’d suffered an aneurism, it said.

As the snow thawed and the first buds of spring appeared, Armand withdrew from his students. He kept away from Olivia and avoided Amir’s eyes in class. Each lesson became agonizing; he
returned home at the end of the day with a pounding headache.

Over the next week, he spent time with Volodya. The professor, who taught history at Moscow University, was grateful for his company, with his girlfriend Nina working at the orphanage and
spending several nights a week there. The two of them talked about Russian literature and art, and about the role of religion in Russian life.

When Nina was home one evening the two of them invited Armand over for a meal and he asked questions about where she worked. He noticed she was a lot younger than the professor. Small and
frail-looking, like a mouse, with wide brown eyes set beneath a fringe. But judging by what she told him, she must have been a lot tougher than she appeared.

She told him about the children who were abandoned by their mothers at birth, urged on by the doctors who warned them of the stigma attached to a disability. Even though the disability might be
nothing more than a club foot or a hare lip. Even when sometimes there was no handicap at all, but the parents were alcoholics and the doctors said there was most likely some brain damage. Maybe
the infant was quiet at birth. It could be anything and nothing. The doctors prey on the mothers’ fears, and every mother is scared, Nina said, rubbing her tired eyes.

She told him about the toys, donated and then locked away. And the lying-down room where the children were left in cots all day, some of them tethered and heavily sedated, all of them deprived
of touch and stimulation. Not even a soft toy to cuddle up to for comfort. Until the children eventually shrivelled up. They might not have had anything wrong with them to start with, she said, but
they sure as hell did after a stint in the lying-down room.

Armand looked at Nina’s red-rimmed eyes and wondered how she coped.

All this talk of abandoned children, deprived of love. Armand returned to his flat and thought with horror of the lying-down room. The images it evoked merged in his head with memories of what
his mother had done, though he fought to keep those at bay. At night he lay in bed with a sadness in his heart that ballooned until there was room for nothing else. Despite everything, he missed
his mother, though he knew that he really shouldn’t. But without her he was quite alone in the world.