I Kill (42 page)

Just as that image flashed through his mind, there was a bend in the road and then, beyond, La Patience. He gave thanks to Jean-Paul Francis and his magic box. If Hulot ever managed to get his
hands on that Robert Fulton record, it would only be fair to return it to Jean-Paul.

His heart was beating hard as he drove towards the farmhouse, which stood out from the mountain as if it were leaning against it.

He drove under a brick archway covered with vines and turned on to the driveway leading to the barn beside the large two-storey house. As he drove up, disappointment slowly overtook the feeling
of triumph that the view of the house had first elicited. The gravel path was overgrown with weeds and all that was left were two tracks made by car wheels. As he drove up, the sound of his car
scraping against the gravel was strangely sinister.

Now that his perspective had changed, he could see that the back of the house was in ruins. The roof had almost completely collapsed and only the front was still standing. Blackened beams rose
towards the sky from what was left of the frame of the house, and the tiles had scattered on the ground. The crumbling walls were encrusted with soot, signs of a devastating fire that had
practically finished off the house, but had left the facade still standing like scenery in a theatre.

It must have happened some time ago if the weeds and vines had been able to regain possession of what had been theirs to begin with. It was as if nature had slowly and patiently stitched a
delicate bandage to cover the wounds inflicted by man.

Hulot left his car in the courtyard and looked around. The view was magnificent. He could see the entire valley, dotted with isolated houses and vineyards alternating with vegetation that grew
sparser as it reached the town. Cassis, beautiful and white, leaned over the coast like a woman on a balcony watching the sea on the horizon. There were the ragged remains of a garden, with rusty
wrought-iron railings that spoke of former splendour. The garden must have been spectacular when it was in bloom. Now it was overgrown with neglected lavender bushes.

The closed shutters, the peeling walls and the weeds that reached into every crevice like a pickpocket into a woman’s purse, gave off a depressing sense of desolation and abandonment.

He saw a van drive up from the road and turn into the drive. Hulot stood in the middle of the courtyard and waited. A yellow Renault Kangoo pulled up next to his Peugeot and two men got out,
both in work clothes. The older man was about sixty and the younger one in his thirties, a thickset type with a hard face and a long, dark beard. The younger man didn’t even bother looking at
him. He went around to open the back of the van and started taking out gardening tools.

The other man gave him instructions. ‘Get started, Bertot. I’ll be right there.’

After making it clear that he was in charge, the man approached Hulot. Up close, his snub-nosed face did not exactly sparkle with intelligence. He looked like a leaner, more seasoned version of
the other man.

‘Hello.’

‘Afternoon.’

Hulot tried to head off any trouble by acting humble right away. He smiled and tried to look innocent.

‘I hope I haven’t done anything wrong, and I’m sorry if I have. I think I got lost, away back there. I kept going, looking for a place to make a U-turn, and ended up here. Then
I saw the ruined house and curiosity got the better of me, so I came over to take a look. I’ll leave right away.’

‘No problem. No trouble. There’s nothing left here worth stealing, aside from the dirt and the weeds. You a tourist?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s what I guessed.’

You guessed, my arse, Gaston-le-beau! You just saw my Monte Carlo plates. Any halfwit could figure that out.

‘Every once in a while someone comes up here.’ The man shrugged modestly. ‘By accident, like you, but mostly out of curiosity. People from Cassis don’t like coming up
here. I’m not thrilled about it either, to tell you the truth. After what happened . . . But a job’s a job after all and you can’t be too picky these days. Anyway, as you can see,
we always come in pairs. So many years have passed, but I still get the chills.’

‘Why? What happened here?’

‘You don’t know the story of La Patience?’

He looked at Hulot as though it were impossible for anyone on the planet not to know the story of La Patience.

Nicolas gave him an opening. ‘No, I don’t think I’ve ever heard about it.’

‘Well, there was a crime here. Actually, a series of crimes. You really never heard about it?’

‘No, never.’ Hulot felt his pulse racing.

The man pulled out a packet of tobacco and skilfully rolled a cigarette with papers fished from his waistcoat pocket. As always happens with people who realize they are in possession of an
interesting story, he savoured every moment of his narration.

‘I don’t know every last detail because I wasn’t living in Cassis at the time. But apparently the guy who lived here killed his son and the housekeeper before burning the house
down and shooting himself in the head.’

‘Good heavens!’

‘You said it. But in town they say he was half-crazy anyway and that in the twenty years he lived here they hadn’t seen him and his son more than a couple of dozen times. The
housekeeper went to town to buy groceries but she didn’t talk to anyone. Hello and goodbye and that was it. He didn’t even farm the land any more, and he had quite a bit of it. Gave it
over to the estate-agency people to run and they rented it out to local winemakers. He lived like a hermit on top of this mountain. In the long run, I think he blew a fuse and that’s what
made him do what he did.’

‘Three people dead, you say?’

‘Yeah. Two of them, the man and the woman, were completely burned up. But the boy’s body was still intact when they put out the fire. Good thing they stopped the fire in time,
because it could have burned away half the mountain.’

He pointed to the younger man with him. ‘Bertot’s father was with the fire service. He told me that when they reached the house, after they doused the flames, they found the
boy’s body in an awful state. So bad that he would have been better off burned to a crisp, like the other two. The father’s body was so badly burned that the bullet he used to blow his
brains out had fused with his skull.’

‘The boy’s body . . . what do you mean, “in an awful state”?’

‘Well, Bertot’s father told me he had no face left, if you know what I mean. It was as if they had scraped off the face. So tell me the old guy wasn’t crazy.’

Hulot felt his guts crawl inside his stomach, like the ivy on those crumbing walls.
Dear God, the boy had no face left as if they had scraped it away.
Like a slideshow from hell, a series
of skinned faces passed before his eyes. Jochen Welder and Arianna Parker. Allen Yoshida. Gregor Yatzimin. He saw their lidless eyes staring into nothingness like an endless damnation of the man
who had killed them and of those who had been unable to stop him. He thought he could hear a distorted voice whispering into both his ears in a sickening stereo effect.

I kill . . .

Despite the warm summer air, he shivered in his unlined cotton jacket. A trickle of sweat ran down from his right armpit to his belt.

‘Then what happened?’ he asked in a suddenly different tone.

The man didn’t notice, or else he must have thought it was the normal reaction of a squeamish tourist who gagged at the sight of blood.

‘Well, it was pretty obvious what had happened, so after excluding any other possible options, it went down as a double murder-suicide. Not good publicity for La Patience.’

‘Any heirs?’

‘I was getting to that. No heirs, so the farm went to the town council. It was put up for sale, but who’d want to buy it after what happened? I wouldn’t take it if they paid
me. The council handed it over to the same estate agency and they rent out the land. They get maintenance costs out of it and so forth. I come up once in a while to keep the weeds from taking over
what’s left of the house.’

‘Where are the victims buried?’

Hulot tried to make his questions sound like those of a normal, curious person, but he needn’t have bothered. The man was so keen to tell the story that he probably would have finished it
even if Hulot had walked off in mid-sentence.

‘In the cemetery down in town, I think. The one on the hill. You must’ve seen it if you’ve been down around there.’

Hulot vaguely recalled a cemetery near the car park where he had stopped earlier.

‘And what was their name, the people who lived here, I mean?’

‘I don’t remember exactly. Something with Le . . . Legrand or Le Normand, something like that.’

Hulot made a point of looking at his watch.

‘Goodness, it’s late. Time sure does fly when you’re hearing a good story. My friends will be wondering what happened to me. Thanks for telling me about it.’

‘You’re welcome. My pleasure. Have a good holiday.’

The man turned around and went to let Bertot benefit from his expertise. As he was getting into the car, Hulot heard him call out, ‘Hey, listen, if you want to eat some really good fish,
take your friends to La Coquille d’Or down at the wharf. If you get ripped off somewhere else, don’t blame me. Remember, La Coquille d’Or. It’s my brother-in-law’s
place. Tell him Gaston sent you. He’ll take good care of you.’

My, my Gaston. Gaston-le-beau. How about that – I guessed right. Today’s my lucky day.

As he drove excitedly back to Cassis to visit the local cemetery, Nicolas Hulot knew that he would need a great deal more luck if he really wanted to settle the score.

Nicolas Hulot pulled the ticket out of the machine at the entrance to the Parking de la Viguerie and put his car back in the same spot where he had parked it before. From there
he could see, a little further up, a tiny cemetery surrounded by cypress trees. He left his car, walked out of the garage, and started up the road that seemed to be a continuation of the one he had
walked down earlier. Just before the cemetery, he saw a cement playground with a tennis and basketball court. A group of boys were dribbling a ball, intent on a half-court game.

Strange, he thought, that there would be a basketball court right next to a cemetery. Strange in a good way. It wasn’t a lack of respect, but rather the simple, natural juxtaposition of
life and death, without fear or false modesty. If he believed in ghosts, he would say it was a way for the living to share a little life with those who no longer had any.

He reached the long perimeter wall of the cemetery. A blue street sign hanging from a lamp told him that he was on Allée du Souvenir Français. Another sign on a wall built into the
hillside said the same thing. He walked a few hundred feet to a dirt road leading to a gate under an archway. Next to the gate, another sign hanging from a weather-beaten notice board said that the
caretaker was there from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the winter months and to dusk in the summer.

Hulot passed beneath the archway and into the cemetery, the gravel crunching beneath his shoes. Otherwise, the cemetery was in total silence. It made no difference that those boys were playing
ball not far away, or that the town was full of tourists in the heat of summer and cars coming and going on the road. The wall seemed to have some special sound-absorbing property that did not
remove the noise, but altered it so that it became part of the silence that reigned inside.

He walked slowly along the path among the graves.

The excitement from his meagre progress in the investigation had worn off somewhat during the short drive from La Patience. Now was the time for rational thought. Now he had to remind himself
that someone’s life depended on him and what he might find out.

The cemetery was very small. A series of paths forming a checkerboard pattern. There was a flight of steps on the right, built to make better use of the little available space. It led up to a
series of terraces with other graves, dug into the hillside that continued beyond the fence. An enormous cypress rose into the clear sky at the centre of the cemetery. To the right and left were
two small brick buildings with red tile roofs. Judging from the cross on top, the one on the right was a chapel of rest. The other was probably a toolshed. As he stood looking at it, the wooden
door opened and a man came out.

Hulot walked towards him, wondering how he should introduce himself. As actors and policemen – both masters of deception – often do, he decided to go with the moment and improvise.
He approached the man, who had now seen him as well.

‘Good afternoon.’

‘Evening, sir.’

Hulot looked at the sun moving towards a triumphant sunset and realized that he hadn’t even noticed how much time had passed.

‘Heavens, is it that late? I’m sorry.’ He stood there for a moment and then decided to play the curious tourist. He tried again to act the innocent. ‘Are you the
caretaker?’

‘Iam.’

‘Listen, someone in town just told me a horrible story, something that happened here a while ago, at—’

‘You mean La Patience?’ the caretaker interrupted.

‘That’s right. I was wondering, just out of curiosity, if I could see the graves.’

‘You a cop?’

Nicolas stared at him, speechless. From his expression, the other man could tell that he was right and he smiled.

‘Don’t worry. It’s not written all over your face. Just that I used to be a delinquent sort of kid and got in a lot of trouble with the police, so I can always recognize a cop
a mile off.’ Hulot neither confirmed nor denied it. ‘You want to see the Legrand graves, right? Come with me.’

Hulot asked no questions. If the man had a troubled past and had come to live in a small town where some people want to know everything and some prefer to know nothing, it was pretty clear which
side he was on.

Hulot followed him to the steps leading to the terraces. They climbed a few steps and the caretaker turned left at the first landing. He stopped in front of a few graves grouped together. Hulot
let his gaze run over the headstones. Each had a very simple epitaph, a name and date chiselled in the stone.