The Lying Down Room (Serge Morel 1) (33 page)

He stood in the courtyard puffing away. Since she’d turned up at his house, Morel had tried his best to forget Mathilde, but now he felt the full impact of her words all over again.

You need to let it go
, Morel told himself. Surely, the person he still loved no longer existed. How could he possibly claim to know the woman who had walked into his kitchen the night
before, demanding to be left alone? They had each gone their own way and lived separate lives over two decades. He knew nothing about her except in the most superficial terms.

Morel finished his cigarette and dropped the stub on the ground. He looked up. There were still lights on in the building. There was always someone working late.

He checked the time on his watch. Ten hours before they had to let Le Bellec go. Unless there was enough evidence to convince the prosecutor that he needed to be detained longer. Morel
wasn’t sure there was. No fingerprints, no witnesses at the crime scenes who might be able to tie Le Bellec to the murders. All they had was the fact that Le Bellec had visited the three
widows at some stage before they were killed.

Morel took another deep drag of his cigarette and felt his chest constrict. He needed something more if he was going to detain Le Bellec longer. And time was running out.

While he watched the smoke drift upwards, he thought about the man they had locked up. The main thing you could say about Armand Le Bellec was that he was unimpressive. Morel had expected
something more. A slick salesman, a con artist with the sort of oily charm that might make him popular with the ladies and help him gain their trust. A man with a degree of charisma. He was none of
these things. Not bad-looking, but overall pretty ordinary. Le Bellec was a man who seemed, if anything, lost. Throughout the interview Morel had observed him. At times, Le Bellec’s moist
eyes had met his and held his gaze. It was the sort of look you’d expect from a spaniel waiting to be reprimanded.

Lila had found him repellent. Morel did not find Le Bellec repellent. He found him incomplete, the sort of person you met and erased from your memory without difficulty.

As Morel plodded back up the stairs he found Akil running down to meet him.

‘Irina Volkoff,’ was all he managed to say.

‘They’re on their way to the hospital now, Volkoff and Marco. Looks like someone came in and attacked them. The neighbours heard her screaming and called it in.
Versailles police turned up and found Volkoff and Marco unconscious. They called an ambulance.’

‘Shit. What the hell was Marco doing there still?’

‘Someone from the Versailles station was supposed to relieve him at eight. They never turned up.’

‘Fuck.’

He would pursue this, Morel thought. Those bastards had been uncooperative from the start.

‘Did they say where they were taking them? Which hospital?’

‘André Mignot,’ Akil said, naming the hospital in Versailles.

‘Right, I’m heading there now,’ Morel said. ‘I want you to stay here with Le Bellec, Akil. Until I come back.’

‘Sure. Shall I give Lila a call?’

‘No. She’s probably just got home. Let her catch up on some sleep before we get her back here. I’ll call her myself once I know what the hell is going on.’

Morel drove over the speed limit all the way to Versailles and parked outside the hospital. He was trying to concentrate but his mind was in a whirl. Once he got inside he
headed straight to the reception. He held up his police card.

‘I’m looking for a woman called Irina Volkoff, and for a colleague. They would have been brought in half an hour ago or so.’

‘She’s being looked after. She’s going to be OK, I think,’ he heard a voice behind him say. When he turned round he saw Marco standing before him. His face was a mess.
One eye was completely closed up and blood was oozing from a head wound above his left ear. There was a deep gash in his upper lip and he looked like he might have a broken nose. He swayed as he
faced his boss. Morel gripped his arm to prevent him from falling.

‘Bloody hell, Marco. What do you think you’re doing here?’ he said, before calling out to the woman at reception. ‘I need some help for my colleague here. Now.’

The woman at the desk picked up the phone and Morel turned back to Marco.

‘I wanted to catch you first,’ the young detective said. ‘I’m sorry I screwed up.’

‘Never mind that. What happened?’

‘I don’t know. One minute I was watching TV. The old woman had gone to bed. The next I was whacked in the face with something. I didn’t even have time to see who it
was.’

Without warning, Marco turned pale and lost his footing. Morel caught the weight of his body as the boy collapsed against him.

‘Someone give me a hand here,’ he bellowed. A couple of nurses came running towards him. One of them was pulling a trolley bed. Morel helped them stretch Marco out on it and watched
as they wheeled him into a room.

A wave of regret washed over Morel. Perhaps he’d been too tough on the lad.

‘Make sure he’s looked after,’ Morel said. But by then he was standing alone in the corridor and there was no one to hear him.

By 2 a.m. he’d been told that Marco would be OK and that Irina Volkoff was out of danger. She’d been knocked on the head with a blunt instrument but luckily was
suffering from nothing more than concussion.

‘At her age, though, this sort of thing needs watching. I’d like to keep her here for a day or two,’ the doctor said. He looked about twenty-five years old. Morel suddenly felt
his age.

‘Can I talk to her?’

‘Five minutes,’ the doctor said.

When Morel entered the room Irina Volkoff was lying with her eyes closed. He waited by her side until she opened them. He had a suspicion that she had been awake all along.

‘I’m glad you are all right,’ he said.

‘I am glad too,’ she said. ‘How is the young man?’

‘He’ll be fine. They had to stitch up his head. He’s going to be sore for a while but he’s OK.’

‘Good.’

‘Did you see who it was that attacked you?’

Irina Volkoff shook her head. ‘No. It happened very fast.’

Morel’s heart sank.

‘But I know,’ she said.

Morel waited to hear what she would say next.

‘I saw it in his eyes from the start,’ she said.

‘What did you see?’ Morel asked. He could hear his heart thumping hard against his chest, as though straining to get out.

‘I have seen that kind of suffering before. The kind that can’t be repaired.’ Irina Volkoff closed her eyes. ‘When it’s like that, there is nothing you can do. The
damage is too great.’

Morel nodded. He watched her for a while before turning back down the corridor and moving out into the darkness.

He sat in the car for a while without turning the engine on. A thought formed in his mind. He needed the answer now.

‘Ivan, sorry to bother you at this ungodly hour but I need something from you now. It’s urgent.’

He heard the Russian groan at the other end of the line. ‘You French never sleep, is that it?’

‘Sorry. I wouldn’t do this if it wasn’t important. You mentioned that this Nina, she spent time with the boy. Can you ask her what she did with him? Did she ever play music for
him, for example?’

‘That’s your question?’

‘Yes. And Ivan?’

‘What now?’

‘If she did, can you ask her what? What music she played for him?’

‘Sure.’

‘It’s important. I need you to wake her up and ask her now. I’m sitting in my car waiting for you to call back, OK? Please call me as soon as you find out.’

‘OK. I will call her now.’

It took Ivan five minutes to call back. It felt like an hour.

‘Yes?’ Morel could feel his heart beating erratically again. This time he pressed his hand against his chest and willed himself to keep calm.

‘Her man was not too happy to be woken up. I got the feeling he never knew I’d been talking to her. I really had to insist for him to wake her.’

‘What did she say?’ Morel asked, resisting the urge to hurry Ivan along.

‘She played music to him sometimes. On her CD player.’

‘What CD?’ Morel asked, knowing the answer now but needing to hear it.

‘
Requiem
by Gabriel Fauré. A French composer! Why not a Russian composer, I asked her. We have plenty of those.’ There was a pause while the Russian waited for a
response from Morel. ‘Is that it?’ he said finally.

‘No. There’s one more thing,’ Morel said. ‘What does she look like, this Nina?’

‘Why, you want to meet her? She is quite good-looking. Big eyes and a nice smile. But I have never been much into redheads.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Her hair. It is bright red, like a traffic light. Not my style. I much prefer blondes.’

Morel wasn’t listening any more. He dropped the phone on the seat next to him and got out of the car.

He needed to breathe.

Nine-thirty a.m. Morel looked at his watch for the tenth time and out at the building where he’d dropped his father off an hour earlier for a doctor’s
appointment.

He was so tired he was beginning to see double. He considered seriously whether to leave the car here and get a taxi back to work. But then the thought of abandoning his precious Volvo was too
daunting. He would surely get back to find a scratch or a dent in it.

Morel looked at his watch again. The prosecutor had granted a twenty-four-hour extension, which meant they didn’t need to let Le Bellec go. Morel had argued that without Le Bellec they
would never find the boy.

The boy was the key to everything.

In the past twenty-four hours Le Bellec hadn’t given them a thing. But Morel felt that he might just get through to him now. He saw quite clearly where his weakness lay.

The technicians were going over Irina Volkoff’s place taking blood samples and lifting prints. Meanwhile the woman in Russia, Nina, still refused to speak to him. And Ivan was being
stubborn about respecting her wishes. It was infuriating but there was nothing Morel could do.

He needed to find the boy. And the only way to do that was through Armand. He had failed so far to get him to talk. Even though there had been a connection there, at one point. The man had
definitely responded to him. He’d looked like he might want to unburden himself. But once the boy was mentioned things had changed.

He is protecting him
, Morel thought.

Halfway through the night, he had returned to the Quai des Orfèvres and told Le Bellec about Irina Volkoff.

‘Your boy is alone and scared. He is losing it. With you in here, there is no one there to keep him together,’ Morel had said.

He’d watched the other man’s face for any change in expression. For the first time, Le Bellec had looked unsettled.

‘How long do you think you can protect him for?’ he’d asked Le Bellec. ‘What’s your plan? Do you think you can walk out of here and hide him away somehow? What
happens when someone else dies?’

Nothing. It was like banging his head against a brick wall.

He looked up at the building where his father was seeing the doctor. Adèle was right, he should have left it to her to sort this out. He had too much on his plate at the moment. But he
felt he owed it to Morel Senior to do this.

On the phone Morel had told the doctor about his father’s more frequent bouts of forgetfulness. The way he seemed to lose his words, to mix things up. In order to get his father to see the
doctor, he had told him Roland insisted on giving him a general check-up and making sure everything was in order. Philippe had been surprisingly docile about it all.

The appointment was taking a great deal longer than Morel had expected. Jean had called twice already and Lila once, to ask when he would be in. Akil had gone home for a couple of hours, to
sleep.

Morel rubbed his eyes and yawned loudly. Just then he saw his father emerge from the building. He was about to open his car door and get out but something in his father’s manner made him
pause. He had stopped on the footpath and seemed to be examining his feet, as though checking whether his shoelaces were untied. He took a few slow steps, pausing and looking at the ground before
him, like a man who’s lost something. Morel took a sharp breath. His father looked like a stranger to him.

After what seemed like an eternity, his father came towards him, dragging his feet.

Morel got out of the car and opened the door on the passenger side.

‘There you are,’ his father said.

Morel waited till he was seated and closed the door. Then he got in on his side.

Maybe it was the extreme tiredness. He felt like he was about to cry.

The pastor couldn’t sleep. It was a nuisance, the way these days he couldn’t just doze off as he used to. Often he found himself lying awake, thinking about the
events that had led to his collapse.

The woman with the pram had called an ambulance. When he’d woken up in hospital they’d told him he’d had a mild heart attack. It hadn’t felt mild. It had felt like he was
dying.

Either way he took it as a warning that he should take it easy.

The boy and his father had left the faculty. The pastor wondered now whether the child had been telling lies. The more he thought about it, the more he felt he had been led up the garden path.
But the things he’d read on that piece of paper, the horrors the boy had written down, continued to bug him. Which was why he found himself brooding in the middle of the night. Nowadays he
lay in bed with his Bible, taking comfort from a number of well-loved passages – Isaiah was his absolute favourite – until exhaustion took over.

Earlier tonight, he’d found the lines which he knew would help alleviate his sense of foreboding:
Your sun will never set; your moon will not go down. For the Lord will be your
everlasting light. Your days of mourning will come to an end.

He had finally gone to sleep with this mantra in his head. Now it was 3 a.m. and he was wide awake again. With a heavy sigh, he got up and made himself a cup of peppermint tea.

It was so warm in the room. Suddenly he decided he needed to get out and breathe some fresh air. He put on his dressing-gown and slippers and walked down into the courtyard. There he sat on a
bench with his drink.