I Kill (53 page)

She often wondered why none of the people who associated with her father ever realized how deranged he was. They were important people: congressmen, senators, high-ranking officers, even
presidents. Was it really possible that none of them, listening to the words of General Nathan Parker the war hero, suspected that those words came from the mouth and brain of a madman? Perhaps
there was a simple explanation. Even if the Pentagon or the White House were aware of the unwholesome aspects of the general’s personality, as long as the consequences were confined to his
domestic arrangements, they could be tolerated in exchange for his service to the nation.

After Stuart was born, Parker’s father became possessive of them both in a way that went well beyond his obsessive habits, his unnatural way of loving. Mother and son were not two human
beings, but personal property. They were his possessions. He would have destroyed anyone who threatened this situation, which, in his totally lucid but unbalanced mind, he believed to be completely
legitimate.

That is why he detested Frank. The agent was standing in his way, opposing him with a personality that was just as strong as his. Despite Frank’s past, Parker realized that his strength
was not sickly, but
healthy.
It didn’t come from hell, it came from the world of men. It was in that guise that Frank had firmly opposed him, refusing to help Parker when the general
sought him out – and striking at him when he should have stayed away.

Above all, Frank was
not afraid of him.

Nathan Parker considered Mosse’s release from jail – and the fact that FBI agent Frank Ottobre had been forced to admit he was wrong – as a personal triumph. Now, all he needed
for absolute victory was to catch Arianna Parker’s killer. And Helena had no doubt that he would succeed. In any case, he would try.

Helena thought of poor Arianna. Her stepsister’s life hadn’t been much better than hers. They didn’t have the same mother. Helena hardly knew her own mother, who had died of
leukemia when she was three. Treatment for the disease was not very developed at the time, and she had passed away quickly, despite the family’s wealth. All that was left of her were some
photographs and a super-8 movie, a few images of the slightly awkward movements of a thin blonde woman with a gentle face, smiling into the camera. She was holding a little girl in her arms and
standing next to her husband, and master, in uniform.

Nathan Parker still spoke of his wife’s death as a personal affront. If he could express his feelings about it in one word, he would say it was
intolerable.

Helena had grown up by herself, in the care of a series of governesses who had been replaced with growing frequency as she got older. She had been just a child and hadn’t realized that the
women left of their own accord, despite the excellent salary. As soon as they’d breathed the air of that house and discovered what sort of man General Parker really was, they would close the
door behind them with a sigh of relief.

Then, without warning, Nathan Parker had come back from a long tour of duty in Europe, something involving NATO, with a new wife, Hanneke, as a souvenir. Hanneke was German, a brunette with a
statuesque body and eyes like chips of ice. The general had treated the whole affair in his usual hasty manner. He had introduced Helena to the woman with the smooth, pale skin. A perfect stranger,
her new mother. And that’s the way Hanneke remained, not a mother but a perfect stranger.

Arianna was born soon after.

Engrossed in his flourishing career, Parker had left Hanneke to care for the house, which she did with the same icy coldness that seemed to flow through her veins. Their relationship was
strictly formal. Helena was never allowed to see her sister as a child. Arianna was another stranger who shared the same house, not a companion who could help her grow up and whom she could help in
return. There were governesses, nannies, teachers and private tutors for that.

And when Helena turned into a beautiful adolescent, there was the boy, Andrés. He was the son of Bryan Jeffereau, the landscaper who supervised care of the park around their mansion. In
the summer, during school vacations, Andrés worked with the men to ‘gain experience’, as his father had proudly told Nathan Parker. The general was in agreement and often called
Andrés a ‘good boy’.

Andrés himself was shy and sneaked furtive glances at Helena from under his baseball cap as he dragged lopped-off branches to the pickup truck to be towed away. Helena had noticed his
awkwardness; his embarrassed looks and smiles. She had accepted them without giving anything in exchange, but inside she was aflame. Andrés was not exactly handsome. There were lots of boys
like him, not good-looking but not bad-looking either, with manners that suddenly turned clumsy when she was present.

Andrés was the only boy Helena knew. He was her first crush. Andrés smiled at her, blushing, and she smiled back, blushing too. And that was it. One day, Andrés had found
the courage to leave her a note hidden in the leaves of a magnolia tree, tied to a branch with green plastic-coated wire. She had found it and stuck it in the pocket of her jodhpurs. Later, in bed,
she had taken out the paper and read it, her heart racing.

Now, so many years later, she could not remember the exact words of Andrés Jeffereau’s declaration of love, just the warmth she had felt at the sight of his shaky handwriting. They
were the innocuous words of a seventeen-year-old boy with a teenage crush on the girl he saw as the
princess of the manor.

Hanneke, her stepmother, who certainly did not live by the rules she set, had walked in suddenly without knocking. Helena had hidden the note under her blanket a little too quickly.

‘Give it to me.’ Her stepmother had come over to the bed and held out her hand.

‘But I . . .’

Hanneke raised her eyebrows, a cold stare directed at her stepdaughter. Helena’s cheeks had turned red.

‘Helena Parker, I just gave you an order.’

She had pulled out the note and given it to her. Hanneke had read it without the slightest change of expression. Then she had folded it and put it in the pocket of her sweater set. ‘All
right, I think this should remain our little secret. We wouldn’t want to cause your father any grief.’

That had been her only remark. Helena had felt an enormous sense of relief and did not realize that the woman was lying, simply because she enjoyed manipulating people’s emotions.

She had seen Andrés the next day. They were alone in the stables where Helena went every day to care for Mister Marlin, her horse. The boy was either there by chance or because he had
managed to find an excuse, knowing that she would come by. He had approached her with his face bright red with excitement and confusion. Helena had never noticed the freckles on his cheeks
before.

‘Did you read my note?’

It was the first time they had spoken.

‘Yes, I did.’

‘What did you think?’

She hadn’t known what to answer.

‘It . . . it was lovely.’

Suddenly, plucking up his courage, Andrés had bent over and kissed her cheek.

Helena had turned around and felt like dying. Her father was standing there, framed by the stable door, watching them.

He had come down on the boy in a fury and slapped him so violently that his mouth and nose started to bleed. Then, he had lifted him up off the ground and hurled him like a twig against Mister
Marlin’s stall. The horse had backed off with a whinny of fright. Andrés’s nose was dripping blood on to his shirt. Parker had grabbed him by the collar and pulled him up.

‘Come with me, you little bastard.’

He had dragged Andrés to the house and thrown him at Bryan Jeffereau’s feet like an empty sack. His father had stood there with his mouth open and a pair of gardening clippers in
his hand.

‘Take your sex maniac son and leave my house immediately. And be grateful that you’re getting away so easily without being charged with attempted rape.’

There was no answer to Nathan Parker’s fury and Jeffereau knew him too well to try. In silence, he had taken his son, his men and his equipment and left for good. Helena never saw
Andrés Jeffereau again.

Nathan Parker’s
attentions
to her had started not long afterwards.

Helena crossed the bedroom that looked out on to the balcony. The bed was cut in two by a ray of light and she noticed that the half bathed in sunlight was the side that Frank had slept on.
Frank – the only person in the world to whom she had had the courage to confess her shame.

She left the room and went downstairs.

The happy memory of those few moments spent with Frank were not enough to erase her other memories, long past but still vivid enough to wound her as if it had all happened yesterday.

The world was full of Nathan Parkers. Helena knew it. And she was equally sure that the world was full of women like her, poor frightened girls who cried tears of humiliation
and disgust on sheets covered with blood and the very semen that had conceived them.

Her hatred knew no bounds. Hatred of her father and of herself for not being able to rebel when she still could have. Now she had Stuart, the son she loved as much as she hated her father. The
son she once would have paid any price to have lost and whom she now refused to lose at any price. But who was he? As hard as she tried, she could find no alibi for her weakness in the face of her
father’s violence.

She sometimes wondered if the same sick love that existed in the mind of Nathan Parker also existed like a cancer in her own. Did she continue to submit to the torture because she was his
daughter, with the same blood and the same perversion running through her veins? She had asked herself that question time and time again. Strangely enough, there was only one thing that kept her
from going insane: the knowledge that she had never found pleasure in what she had been forced to endure, only pain and self-disgust.

Hanneke must have suspected something but Helena never knew for sure. What had happened afterwards was probably just the result of the fire she kept hidden beneath her glacial, formal exterior,
a fire that no one had ever noticed, perhaps not even Hanneke herself. In a banal, undramatic manner, simply leaving a letter that Helena had only learned of years later, Hanneke had run off with
the family’s riding master, abandoning her husband and daughters. She had taken with her a very large amount of money, the icing on the cake.

The only thing that Nathan Parker had cared about in the whole affair was the discretion with which it was handled. Hanneke had probably been some kind of high-class whore, but she wasn’t
stupid. If she had publicly humiliated her husband, the consequences would have been devastating. The man would have followed her to the ends of the earth to get his revenge.

The letter, which Helena had never read, had probably offered an exchange for what the woman knew or suspected about her husband’s behaviour with his daughter. Her freedom and silence in
exchange for the very same freedom and silence. The pact had been tacitly accepted. Meanwhile, lawyers for both sides had arranged a hasty divorce to set things straight.

And, as they say, no one was hurt.

Certainly not Nathan Parker, whose lack of interest in his wife had become absolute, like his power over Helena. Certainly not Hanneke, who could now enjoy her money and riding masters wherever
she felt like it.

Helena and Arianna, hostages of fate, had been left to pay the consequences of mistakes they had not made. As soon as she was of age, Arianna had left home. After roaming around for a while, she
had ended up living in Boston. Her fights with her father had escalated as she grew older. On the one hand, Helena was terrified that the same thing would happen to Arianna that had happened to
her. Sometimes she examined Arianna’s face when their father spoke to her, to see whether or not the fear appeared in her eyes. On the other hand, and she
cursed
herself for the
thought, she prayed that it would happen so that she would no longer hear her father’s step as he approached her bedroom in the middle of the night, or feel his hand raising the sheets and
the weight of his body in her bed, or . . .

She closed her eyes and shuddered. Now that she knew Frank and understood what two people could
really
share when they were intimate, she was even more horrified and disgusted by what she
had experienced in those years. Frank was the second man she had ever slept with, and the first with whom she had ever made love.

The ground floor of the house was flooded with light. Somewhere, in that city, Frank was living in the same light and feeling the same emptiness. Helena walked down the hallway leading to the
garden doors, passing in front of the room in which the telephones were locked. She stopped at the doorway where she and Frank had exchanged a long look on the night that Ryan had been arrested.
That was when she had understood. Had it been the same for him? There had been no trace of emotion in his eyes but her woman’s intuition said that everything between them had started right
then.

More than anything else, she wanted him there so she could ask him.

She pulled a mobile phone from her pocket. Frank had brought it to her the second night they had spent together, when he had had to rush off to tell Céline that her husband was dead. She
reflected a moment on the enormity of the situation that had required her to hide the phone, something the entire world considered an everyday object.

No, please, Frank, don’t run away from me now. I don’t know how much time I have left. I’m dying at the thought of not being able to see you, and at least if we could speak
. . .

She pressed another button, the one for police headquarters.

The switchboard operator answered. ‘Sûreté Publique.
Bonjour
.’

‘Do you speak English?’ Helena asked apprehensively.

‘Of course, madame. How may I help you?’

Helena took a deep breath. At least she was spared from stuttering in a foreign language. Hanneke had taught, or rather forced, her and Arianna to speak German. Her father’s second wife
hated French, which she called the language of homosexuals.