Significance (20 page)

‘I'll send someone through,' Vivier said, before hanging up.

Seconds later Sabine Pelat appeared and ushered the woman away. Jean
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Luc watched through the reinforced glass of the office door as the two women moved deeper into the belly of the building. The light in the corridor had a greenish tint and the walls were painted in washable white gloss paint. It was not a cosy workplace, nor was it designed to be. Once the women had disappeared from view, Jean
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Luc found himself staring morosely down at his hastily abandoned supper inside the bin. The cup had tipped over, disgorging the pale yellow noodles with their flecks of reconstituted meat and fragments of unidentifiable vegetables onto the other rubbish.

Sighing, he made a note of the time in the diary and reported the arrival of a witness. Too late he realised that he should have taken the woman's name. But even as he recognised his mistake, and worried that it was yet another obstacle to a speedy promotion, he felt himself giving up, letting impatience reconstruct itself into a valid and well
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thought
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out decision. Police work did not suit him, it was not as he had imagined, he would resign.

Restless and bored, he reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a playing card he'd found on the street on his way into work. The ace of hearts, like a message to him – not that he was superstitious - but he'd pictured himself passing it to a girl in a bar, his name and phone number on it. Winking. Smiling. Winning. Ace high. Yeah, fat chance while he was stuck here! He flexed it between his thumb and forefingers until of its own accord it jumped into the air and fell somewhere – he neither knew nor cared where.

He yawned, then gazed ruefully down the empty corridor and pictured himself striding importantly along it, out of uniform, (in his imagination he now held Vivier's job) barking orders to his inferiors and on the brink of some vital breakthrough in the case. He'd be the one to find and confront the murderer, there would be a car chase (he loved to drive fast cars) he would rescue a beautiful girl in the nick of time and he would be forced to immobilise and beat the killer with any weapon that came to hand. Jean
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Luc would be a bloodied, but triumphant hero.

If only they'd give him a chance.

He'd sleep on his decision to resign, give it another week.

A month at most.

Lost Property

At the Café de Trois a waiter, while setting out the tables for the day, had noticed a delicate white cardigan draped carefully over the geraniums. Without thinking too much about it, he picked it up, carried it into the café and put it on a shelf in the back room above the washing machine and alongside some of the clean table linen.

People left things behind at the café all the time; umbrellas, hats, sunglasses, keys, mobile phones, half
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empty cigarette packs, paperback novels. Rarely anything of value – such as wallets full of cash. Sometimes they returned the same day within minutes or hours, other times after a day or so.

Some years ago, one lady, a certain chic Parisian, had in the course of a conversation with the patron mentioned a silver bracelet that she'd been very fond of. She hadn't see it for a long time and presumed it was lost forever. It was not an expensive item, but it had been the last gift she'd received from her father. She described it in loving detail recalling the unusual motif of cats and mice which chased each other nose to tail around the chain. She last remembered having it during her previous visit to the area which had been three years before.

Hearing this, the patron clucked his tongue and made a sympathetic moue with his mouth, then excused himself, went up the stairs to the flat above the café where he then lived with his wife and children. He went into his daughter's room and opened her jewellery box, releasing the small plastic figure of a turning ballerina and setting off the slow plinking music of a sluggish Swan Lake. Inside the dusty red velvet interior, amongst paste beads and broken gold chains, a tiny bird's skull and a few foreign coins, he found what he was looking for. Namely a silver bracelet which, after several months in exile in the café's lost property box, his wife had given to his daughter. Not that his daughter had ever seemed to like it particularly, which was why he had no qualms about taking it back.

With the bracelet coiled tightly in his left fist, he hurried back to the dining area and bore down on the Parisian lady utterly unable to temper the broad and quite maniacal grin that had plastered itself to his rather oily face. He was so delighted with the miracle he was about to perform that he quite forgot himself, and instead of politely enquiring if this was the lost item and then respectfully returning it to her, he bent slightly and leaning closer with rather, to the Parisian lady's surprise, too much familiarity, said, ‘Goodness, what's that behind your ear?'

Panicked, as she imagined a hornet, bee or worse, a spider, the Parisian lady froze and allowed this rather peculiar man to touch the side of her head. His thumb grazed her ear and his fingers seemed to play momentarily with her hair and the naked soft skin at the base of her skull.

‘Ah ha!' he said, withdrawing his hand and showing her his closed fist. If it was a spider then she really didn't want to see it, but the fingers were slowly opening and she could not quite avert her gaze.

‘What is it?' she demanded, her voice somewhat shriller than she might have liked.

The patron's grin merely broadened.

‘Little creatures,' he said.

She imagined a thousand baby spiders erupting from a broken egg sac and flowing from his palm, then spilling onto the table, onto her arms, into her clothes and hair. But then his hand fully opened and there, nestled on his damp palm, she saw the beautiful bracelet her papa had given her on her sixteenth birthday.

‘Oh!' she said and her right hand went to her throat – that instinctive gesture that suggested extreme vulnerability. Yet she hesitated to take the bracelet from his outstretched hand, as if she could not quite believe her eyes and the silver ornament must be some sort of mirage.

‘It has been here – what? Three or four years. We never dispose of lost property, Madame; we value our customers too highly.'

It was only a little lie and one that put him in a good light.

‘I can't believe it,' she said, the colour rushing to her cheeks as her eyes began to fill with tears.

He opened the tiny catch and held the bracelet out in readiness.

‘Here, allow me.'

She offered him her arm and fumbling slightly he managed to wrap the bracelet around her wrist and close the tiny hook.

When he looked at her again she was openly weeping.

This story had been told to the waiter during the first week of his employment. The patron had a habit of embarking on long
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winded tales which were illustrative of his ethics and habits in the workplace. As long as the lecture took place when the waiter should have been polishing glasses or sweeping the floor or doing some other onerous and oft
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repeated duty, then he didn't mind too much, but the patron, early on, had a habit of launching into these stories just as the waiter was finishing his shift. Listening patiently on the patron's time was one thing, on his own it was quite another.

On first hearing the story of the Parisian lady and her absurd cat and mouse bracelet, the waiter had disbelieved it. He was reminded of those moral tales told him in childhood where good behaviour was rewarded and bad punished, but last year to his surprise, the same woman returned. She was slightly less elegant, less beautiful and at least fifteen years older than the impression he'd got from the patron. She nonetheless wore the bracelet and happily allowed all and sundry: the chef, the pot boy, the waiting staff and a few regular customers, to inspect it and hear the all too familiar story from her perspective.

So. Lost property.

Not that, on idly picking up the cardigan, the waiter imagined his own tale of happy restitution, rather it had become an ingrained habit, like replacing dirty ashtrays, or wiping down tables, and once he had collected the cardigan from the geraniums and placed it on the shelf in the back room, he promptly forgot about it. Forgetting even to inform the patron of his find. Forgetting in part, because of the commotion of the sirens which had begun to fill the air around mid morning, followed by rumours of an unexplained death that filtered through in fits and starts, much of it wildly inaccurate.

One of the older waiters told him, for example, that another woman had been killed. In his mind he conflated ‘another woman' with ‘another prostitute' and so when others mentioned a dead woman, he tended to ask a question which took the form of a statement, ‘She was a prostitute, wasn't she?' And in this way speculation became fact and half the town was convinced that the unnamed dead girl was a known prostitute.

Lucy Locket Lost her Pocket

Lucy, even while she lay dead; caught precariously on a stout root above the run
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off ditch from a factory, nonetheless lived on stubbornly, resolutely and vividly in the minds of all those who knew her. Her lover, Dr Thom McKay, thought he knew by her sudden and wilful silence that he had, in her mind at least, committed some crime and was now being punished. He knew too, that eventually she would answer her phone, that they would meet, the particulars of his crime would at last be revealed and he would have the chance to defend himself; to disabuse her of her notions of his suspected infidelities, his sins of omission, his lack of consideration. A careless word or look of his would be brought under the scrutiny of her judgement, analysed, contextualised, explained. He would be reminded of her sensitivities, her vulnerability, the stories of her past life.

Lucy was, for him, a sort of representation of everything that was light and joyous and exquisitely girlish. He loved her sense of fun, her lithe body, her curiosity, her wonderful lateral thinking. But he did not like the dark turns her mind took, the way her facility for invention could elaborate on a small detail – a phone call not returned, a misplaced word, a forgotten anniversary. Yet she had, over the years, come to recognise that her mind was capable of this trickery, that she had a tendency to succumb to paranoia, but as Lucy herself often said, laughing lightly, gaily at her own folly, ‘Even paranoids have enemies.'

It had been ten or twelve days since they last spoke. She had been edgy and brittle on the phone saying she felt like an interloper in her own life. Thom had misunderstood the earnestness of that comment, had made a rather sorry quip, the substance of which he had instantly forgotten, but she had gone silent.

Or not quite completely silent, and he had pictured her face at the other end of the line, tight
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lipped and frowning as she stubbornly responded to all his subsequent questions, apologies and statements with the merest and meanest of sighs, grunts and grudging mm
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hms. It was as if she was suddenly transformed into her namesake, that mute and naked Lucy whose effigy stood implausibly in the Museum of Natural Science. Australopithecus Afarensis Lucy was named, during an evening of campfire celebration when the song was repeatedly played, after the Beatles' ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'.
That
Lucy was found in an arid gulley in Ethiopia and had breathed her last over three million years ago.

The dead are instantly removed from the living. Time is irrelevant; three millennia or three days do not make an iota of difference, except in the memories of those who knew them, and Thom McKay, who did not yet know that Lucy was dead, was still confidently conjuring conversations with her in his mind. He was making plans for their trip to Goa in the New Year. He was also still trying to ring her. He only got the answer phone when he tried her landline and until six days ago had not left a message, and he had repeatedly tried her mobile, but it was switched off. And he knew what that meant.

He had no sense of fear, no premonition of disaster, no intimation of a sudden loss. He watched a single magpie flit amongst the trees outside his office window and paid it no heed. Why should he? Blackbirds, robins, sparrows, crows, pigeons all appeared at one time or another; it was hardly a rarity to see a single magpie. Or a black cat. Or, with all the renovation work being done around the campus, to find oneself having to walk under ladders.

Yet afterwards, long afterwards, when the truth was revealed, he felt a combination of puzzlement and guilt at his utter lack of premonition or sensation of loss.

‘I should have known,' he said ruefully to friends and family for years after. ‘I should have known,' but no one, not even Thom McKay really understood quite what it was he should have known, nor why there could be any expectation of prior or concurrent knowledge.

And there was so much that was unexplained about Lucy's disappearance and death: the secret trip to France, the bleached blonde hair, the pastel
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coloured summer dresses, all of it completely out of character and overtly, fussily feminine, so much so that Thom was convinced that the French police had somehow confused Lucy's belongings with another woman's. If Lucy had died in the course of her ‘real life', Thom often thought, if she had been killed (whether accidentally or at the hands of some lunatic) with her hair still its natural colour, wearing her moss
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green tights and the brown woollen dress he'd bought her from Wallis, if she had been on her way home from a lecture, then he might find it easier to accept.