Lost (5 page)

‘Right,’ he said. ‘We’ll deal with it when it happens.’

Gérard looked at him with too much compassion, and Stuart turned and walked towards his office.

‘Good luck,’ Gérard called. ‘By the way. She’s lost her voice.’

Stuart walked on through the secretaries’ room. He paused as Gérard slammed the front door. Then he stepped into his office.

The woman’s back was to him. She did not move as he entered. Her hair was parted in the middle and her scalp shone through, too livid against her dark hair, too human.
The sight made Stuart want to retreat.

The room smelled stale. He walked round his desk and sat down opposite the woman. She was looking down at her hands, lying inert in her lap. He scanned the top sheet of her statement: ARON, Alice.

‘Madame Aron.’ He waited for her to look up, counting her fingers while he waited. They were all there. He would like to have turned off the main light. He preferred the anglepoise on his desk but he knew that this was out of the question. Two bands of straight hair partially veiled her face from him.

‘Madame,’ he said again.

She looked up. Her eyes were swollen almost shut from crying, her mouth seemed smeared and she looked as if she had been hit. He thought of car-crash victims he had seen, their ghoulish surprise. He decided against holding out his hand.

‘My name’s Stuart.’ He was thirsty again. ‘Would you like something to drink?’

She shook her head.

‘What is being done to find my son?’

He had to lean forward to hear the rasping whisper. He could not detect an accent.

‘You don’t believe he’s lost. Or run away?’

Her hand leapt from her lap and hit the table. Stuart pulled back. She snatched a biro from the cup on his desk, knocking it over. Stuart restored it, replacing the contents. She was writing on his blotter, pressing hard. He read: ‘Do something. Please.’

Stuart looked up. She had turned her face towards the open window. The air was perfectly still behind the closed shutters. The cicadas trilled on. Without turning, the woman hissed, ‘It’s night. He’s afraid.’

She held her hand over her mouth and closed her eyes, but the tears came anyway. Stuart watched her crying, locked in behind his desk, unable to move. He saw himself rising to his feet, walking round the desk and kneeling beside her chair.
He saw himself reaching up and gripping her shoulders, holding on to stop her shaking. Instead he looked down at the papers on his desk. Gérard’s writing slanted across the page:

‘What are you going to do?’ Her harsh whisper startled him.

He looked up. ‘We’ll begin the search as soon as it’s light,’ he said. She was wiping her nose with the back of her hand. He opened the drawer in his desk and pulled out the pocket-sized pack of tissues Annie always put there. ‘Here.’

She reached and took them. ‘Then?’ she urged.

Stuart was so appalled by the woman’s tear-stained face that for a moment he did not understand.

‘After the search. Then what?’

‘If we don’t find Sam tomorrow, the prosecutor will nominate an investigative magistrate and we’ll take over the investigation. It will be treated as a kidnapping.’

She stared at him. Stuart was aware that this was not the answer to her question. He did not wish to reveal to her how little she could hope from him; not yet.

‘You’re related to Constance Colonna.’

She blew her nose.

‘My husband was her nephew,’ she whispered.

Stuart stared. He remembered the two fair-haired boys who had come from the mainland every summer. One of these had been her husband. Once every summer Stuart and his sister Beatrice had gone to the Colonna house for lemon cordial and chocolate biscuits. The fair-haired boys would always disappear. As the twenty or thirty village children ran wild in the huge house, slamming doors and spitting out of the attic windows, Stuart would wander along the
corridors
,
opening doors, checking alcoves, hoping to discover them. He had never found their hiding place.

Stuart detached a small colour photograph of the missing child that had been stapled to the woman’s statement. He was blond but otherwise bore no resemblance to either of the boys in his memory. This child was laughing joyously at the camera, the sun in his eyes, a gleeful grin, full of gaps.

‘This is Sam?’ he said, looking up at her.

She nodded. A single vein, thick and obstinate, the pilot-light of her suffering, stood out on her forehead.

‘A circular’s being printed up tonight with his photo and description. Every police station on the island will receive copies.’

The woman covered her face with her hands. Stuart leaned closer but could not hear what she was saying. He looked at the long fingers.

‘Have you got a car?’ he said. ‘Did you drive here?’

She took her hands from her face.

‘The gendarmerie brought me.’

‘I’ll take you back to Santarosa. I can’t do much at night, but you can show me where your son was.’

She was looking at him. She was no longer sobbing, but tears still seeped from her eyes, which were very dark. They seemed to be taking him in for the first time. He looked down at the papers on his desk.

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she whispered.

‘No.’

‘Your boss doesn’t believe he’s been kidnapped.’ She was holding her face up to him and he found it discomforting to look at her. ‘I spent four hours answering the same questions. He had such … he showed no respect.’

‘He’s not my boss,’ Stuart said, glancing up. ‘I’m the commissaire.’

She wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand like a child.

‘I see.’

Stuart could not help looking for the meaning behind her words. He felt an unfamiliar feeling of engagement in the conversation. He stood up as though to shrug it off.

‘Will you wait for me next door? I have to make a call. I’ll be quick.’

‘What call?’ she asked, facing him.

‘To the prosecutor,’ he said.

‘He’s a fool,’ she whispered.

Stuart smiled sadly at her.

‘Yes. But he won’t be involved any more.’

‘Who’s the investigating magistrate?’ There it was, the trace of an accent. ‘Is he experienced?’ she asked.

‘She. Her name’s Christine Lasserre. There’s no one here who’s experienced in kidnapping. But she’s good.’ A new alertness had come over the woman. Straight answers seemed to calm her. ‘She was in finance. She has a good brain and she’s calm. She’s lucid, I mean.’ He was rambling.

‘My husband was a lawyer,’ she whispered. ‘He disliked investigative magistrates. He said they were cowboys, that they shot from the hip.’

‘Your husband was right. In most cases. Lasserre isn’t a cowboy. I think that was what I was trying to say.’

The woman stared up at him from her chair. Stuart stood there sustaining her scrutiny with a growing awareness that he was not what she hoped for in a commissaire. He folded his arms across his chest.

‘I’ll take you up to Santarosa,’ he said. I’ll stay at the house tonight. From now on someone will always be in the house with you in case of a call. If he’s been taken, they’ll call and we’ll try and trace it.’

‘Have they called?’ she whispered. ‘Will they have called?’

Stuart did not wish to look at her. He picked up the biro on his desk and looked at that instead.

‘No. Not yet, it’s too soon.’

He began to gather the sheets covered with Gérard’s meticulous writing. He put the papers with the woman’s
statement in his drawer. The woman stood up and made for the door. ‘Your bag,’ he said. He walked round his desk and picked up her handbag from beside her chair. He held it out to her and watched her hook the strap over her shoulder with that movement women made, and he thought of its contents, the bric-à-brac that they carried about with them. He walked her into the secretaries’ office and held out his arm towards Annie’s chair. She sat, her back to him.

He looked at the back of her head, tilted forward slightly. He felt comfortable watching her from behind. If only his interrogations could be conducted from this perspective. He could tell more from the back of a person’s head than from their face, which usually confused him. He closed the door.

He dialled Van Ruytens’ number and hoped he was waking him. Stuart imagined him patting the bedside table for his glasses. The man’s tone was always sycophantic, no matter how much he disliked you.

‘Ah, Stuart. Yes. You were unreachable. I told Gérard it would be prudent at this stage to believe the worst. Let’s hope we’re wrong. After talking to Madame Aron, though, I think she has good grounds.’

‘Grounds for what?’

Van Ruytens hesitated.

‘For what?’ Stuart said again.

‘For believing this is a kidnapping.’

Stuart kept silent. The prosecutor persevered.

‘She’s very distressed. She feels time has been wasted.’

Stuart waited.

‘This is a first, I understand. The Movement hasn’t gone in for kidnapping in the past.’

‘It’s only happened once and it was done by outsiders. It involved an adult, not a child,’ Stuart said.

‘So the Movement wouldn’t be involved in a kidnapping.’

‘It’s not the FNL.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘It’s not the Movement, as you call it. They wouldn’t survive it.’

‘Why, what’s your view?’

‘I don’t have a view.’

Stuart let the silence vibrate a little.

‘Of course, this must be kept away from the press,’ Van Ruytens added.

Stuart lowered his voice.

‘A child is missing. Children are sacred on this island. Tomorrow morning a search involving over a hundred men will set out from a village that has always made it its business to know everything at all times. If the press doesn’t know yet, I can guarantee they will by tomorrow.’

‘This island …’ Van Ruytens stopped himself.

‘Another thing, Prosecutor. Putting Mesguish on the front of this case is a mistake.’

‘No one’s said anything about putting Mesguish on the front …’

‘If they put mainlanders on the front of this case the whole place will close down. We’ll get no help and we’ll become the enemy. This island doesn’t tolerate crimes against children. For once they might help us. Don’t confuse them by sending in outsiders.’

There was a pause. Stuart felt elated. His ears were burning. It had been a long time since he had cared enough about anything to get angry.

‘I take your point, Stuart. But Mesguish is reinforcement. Nothing more.’

‘I hope so.’

When Stuart hung up he held the receiver firmly in its cradle. Then he went and opened the window to let the air in through the shutters and turned on the fan. He stood by the door for a moment watching the fan turning above him. The secretaries had always wanted fans and for years he had fought Central Office on the matter. Only a week before, when he had long given up, they had installed them. That
day the women had given him their sweetest smiles. Inès had said, as though he’d done himself a great favour, ‘I’ll be able to wear my hair down now.’ Stuart felt that nothing scared him any more – not his loneliness, or the fact that he was losing his job, or that he could feel himself skidding towards death. Only women, with their expectations, scared him.

He opened the door and found her standing beside the window, her arms folded, her senseless bag hanging from her shoulder.

‘We can go now,’ he said.

As he led the way past the secretaries’ desks to the hall, he felt grateful that she had come in the middle of the night when there was no one to see them, for he worried that the presence of other people made him look worse.

He held open the door of his car and watched her climb in. She was wearing a blue dress with small white buttons down the front. When she had put it on that morning she had still had her son. He pressed the remote control for the compound gates. As they opened, he glanced at her. She was clasping her bag in her lap. He saw her knees glowing in the compound lights.

They drove out into the quiet streets. Stuart started when the woman spoke. Her whisper was too close in the car. He wanted to open the window.

‘Everyone keeps telling me kidnapping doesn’t happen here.’

‘Not usually.’

‘Has it ever?’

‘No. Yes. There was an attempt. Once. But it was between foreigners. Italians. And it was somebody’s wife.’

‘No children.’

‘Never.’

She did not move but stared straight ahead, her eyes fixed on the disappearing road, as though her lost child might at any moment step out from a side street into the headlights.

‘He has been kidnapped,’ she whispered. ‘I can feel it.’

‘I’m not ruling it out.’ He wished he could find a more appropriate way of talking to her.

Avoiding the night crowds in the centre of town, he drove through deserted residential streets towards the docks. He wound down the window, letting in the breeze from the bay. They passed the biggest housing estate on the island, where Stuart had lived when he had first returned from the mainland. It was called Les Mimosas, after the three mimosas that had grown defiantly out of stony ground and bloomed every February, in spite of their torture by malevolent children and the knife graffiti of junkies who would shoot up in their shade. The mimosa trees had gone and the junkies had retreated into the dark utility rooms.

‘Who knew you were coming?’

‘Just the housekeeper.’

‘Babette?’

She nodded.

‘You didn’t plan to stay at the hotel?’

‘I couldn’t get the car up the alley to the big house. Dan was asleep and Sam was tired and upset …’

‘Why?’

She shook her head. ‘It was nothing. His fish died.’

‘Did you telephone Babette to tell her you weren’t coming?’

‘I’ve been through this. Yes, I did.’ She looked at him. ‘Listen, I’ve thought of everything. I’ve thought the worst, that some madman’s taken him.’ She stopped. ‘He’s not dead.’