The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau (10 page)

J
ULIETTE'S PARENTS RAISED THE ALARM
early in the evening when she did not appear for dinner. The night had brought a violent thunderstorm. At first the police were unperturbed. Perhaps the girl had wandered off and sought shelter from the storm. But when she did not turn up in the morning it did not take long for the search party to discover her body. The story was a sensation. Juliette's picture adorned the front pages of every newspaper in the country. Some monster must be at large. Reporters drew parallels with other unsolved murders, but the investigation could establish no connection to any previous cases.

Gorski had been a detective for only two years. His superior, Inspector Ribéry, was on holiday in the Swiss Alps when the story broke and the case landed in the lap of the younger officer. The torrential overnight rain destroyed whatever evidence might have existed at the crime scene. Gorski came in for vicious criticism in the press for failing to raise the alarm sooner. In reality, he had not been informed of the disappearance until the morning after it was reported, as the matter had been dealt with by the duty officer at the station. But Gorski did not think it politic to make this public.

Ribéry returned two days later. He was nearing retirement and had no wish to steal the limelight from his young colleague, especially as his more practised eye could see that, given the lack
of evidence or obvious motive (the post-mortem had revealed no evidence of sexual assault), the case was unlikely to come to a rapid or satisfactory conclusion. Instead, he made it clear to Gorski that justice must be seen to be done. Gorski understood what was implied. He was determined, however, that this, his first prominent case, would not be prematurely prosecuted on account of pressure either from his jaded superior or from the press, who bayed daily for fresh developments.

Gorski pored over the crime scene photographs for hours on end. What accounted for the curious position of the body? It appeared that the girl had been strangled standing up and then thrown to the ground. Had she been walking with her assailant prior to the murder, or had she been followed into the woods? Or was it a crime of opportunism, committed by someone already lurking around the clearing? It was not even possible to state with any certainty that the girl had been killed there. Perhaps she had been done to death elsewhere before being dumped in the woods. This struck Gorski as unlikely since no attempt had been made to conceal the body, but it could not be entirely ruled out. Certainly on one score the press were correct: a monster was at large.

Gorski spent long hours sitting in the clearing where the body had been found. The area had been meticulously searched, but not a scrap of evidence had been discovered. Still he sat in the clearing smoking, listening and looking, as if he expected the trees to somehow reveal their secret. It was a lesson for him: detective work had nothing to do with intuition or inspiration. Mostly it was a matter of slavishly following procedure. The rest was luck.

The luck came two weeks after the murder. Police in a neighbouring district picked up a tramp living rough in some woods. The man, Emile Malou, had a previous conviction for sexually assaulting a minor. Gorski drove to Mulhouse to interview him. Malou was cooperative. He insisted he had never been in the woods at Saint-Louis and had never set eyes on Juliette Hurel. He had no alibi for the day in question and made no attempt to concoct one. He simply said he could not remember where
he had been. It struck Gorski as the response of an innocent man. And while the tramp's previous conviction had been for the attempted rape of a fourteen-year-old girl, there was, Gorski reminded the examining magistrate, no evidence of sexual assault in this case. There was nothing to connect Malou to the crime.

Then a local widow came forward. She said that she had seen a suspicious-looking character in the vicinity of the woods around the time of the murder. She could not remember the exact day, but she picked out Malou, whose picture had already appeared in the papers, at an identity parade. It was enough for the examining magistrate. Malou was charged and found guilty, but Gorski remained unconvinced. He visited Malou in prison and told him he believed that he had been wrongly convicted. The tramp just shrugged and refused to appeal. He appeared content to spend the remainder of his life in the relative comfort of prison. ‘I'm getting too old for living rough,' he told Gorski. ‘In here I get a bed and three meals a days.' Nevertheless Gorski vowed to continue the investigation. Notwithstanding the wrong done to Malou, a killer remained at large. For months Gorski spent his weekends walking in the woods, hoping to come across an overlooked clue, but he knew it was futile and in the end he gave up. When Malou died in jail a few years later, Gorski was the only person to attend his perfunctory committal.

G
ORSKI RETURNED TO THE CLEARING
for the first time in several years. He parked as he always had in the lay-by on the D468, which more or less followed the course of the Rhine north. The white paint on the little wooden gate which led into the woods had mostly flaked off and the jamb was rotten. As he made his way along the path towards the clearing, Gorski tried not to think about what it was that had made him return. He had not told anyone where he was going and, were he to bump into anyone, he would be hard pressed to explain his presence. Instead he concentrated his mind on the pleasant sounds of twigs cracking under his shoes and the papery rustle of the leaves in the breeze.

After the murder, Gorski had returned to the clearing on a regular basis. Later, his visits became less frequent. After the trial, he accepted the plaudits of the press for solving the case and kept his thoughts about the safety of Malou's conviction to himself. If his colleagues harboured similar doubts, they too kept them to themselves. He once confessed his misgivings to Céline, but she had been dismissive. The case was closed – why would he want to re-open old wounds? From the start she had found what she called his ‘obsession' with the dead girl distasteful. She complained that he spent more time thinking about a corpse than he did about her.

As the frequency of Gorski's visits to the clearing dwindled, he felt guilty, like a widower who lets his wife's grave become overgrown. At first, his visits were borne of the conviction that something must have been overlooked, that there was some evidence staring him in the face, but after a few months Gorski knew that there were no such clues or, if there had been, they had long since been destroyed. But still he came. He would sit smoking, hoping somehow to gain some insight into the crime. He was embarrassed to admit it, even to himself, but he half hoped to ‘see' the crime. He tried to think himself into the mind of the killer. But nothing ever came. Once he had heard a character in a film say that actions left an imprint on a place, just as a fire leaves a tang of charcoal in the air, but he didn't believe such nonsense. His mind would wander to other topics and he would only be roused from his thoughts when he came to the end of his packet of cigarettes. Certainly, one thing was clear: the killer could not have chosen a more peaceful spot for his deed. In all the times Gorski visited the clearing, he never once encountered another human being.

The clearing had changed little since Gorski's last visit. A few years before, storms had brought down a few trees, which were already blanketed in moss. They resembled peacefully sleeping bodies. Gorski sat on one of these fallen trunks and took his cigarettes from the pocket of his jacket. It was chilly
beneath the foliage. There was no sign of what had occurred twenty years before. Gorski sat smoking in the clearing. He had no real idea why he had returned, although naturally the disappearance of the waitress had revived his memories of the murder of Juliette Hurel. Was it possible that the two events were connected? Both involved teenage girls and had occurred in the same locale, albeit twenty years apart. It was not unheard of for killers to lie dormant for years, however; nor was it out of the question that there were unsolved murders elsewhere that were the work of the same man. But, in all likelihood, the only connection between to two crimes was Gorski himself. In any case, until Adèle Bedeau's body turned up, Gorski could not even be sure that he was dealing with a homicide. Murder was, at this point, merely the most likely of the scenarios he had turned over and over in his head. Without a body, he had nothing to go on, no time or cause of death, no forensic evidence, no motive. So, in lieu of any tangible leads, he had wandered into these woods in the vague hope of a moment of insight. Gorski shook his head and gave a little laugh through his nose. There was nothing to do but wait. He was no more in control of the destiny of this case than he had been all these years before.

He finished his cigarette and got up. He felt weary and the seat of his trousers was damp from the moss. He trudged back along the path to the side road where he had left his car. As he drove back towards the town he passed the cottage the Hurels had rented. He drove back into Saint-Louis and pulled up outside a grocer's. He went inside and bought some fruit and other items. The woman at the till asked him if he had found the waitress yet.

Gorski shook his head. ‘I can't say too much about it,' he said.

The woman gave him a look as if to suggest that Gorski had just taken her into his confidence.

‘Mum's the word,' she said with a meaningful nod.

‘I appreciate your discretion,' said Gorski.

He asked for two packets of Gitanes and stuffed them into the pocket of his jacket. He decided to walk the ten minutes to Rue des Trois Rois. His father's pawnshop was now a florist's. After his father's death, Gorski had not had the will to have it cleared out and it had lain empty for years.. For some reason he was glad it had become a flower shop. The owner, Mme Beck, was a cheerful sort who made a habit of looking in on his mother, who still lived in the maisonette above the premises. The florist often brought Mme Gorski off-cuts from bouquets to spruce up her living room. The apartment was still accessed through the back of the shop and the brass bell which rang when Gorski pushed open the door was one of the few remnants of his father's shop. Mme Beck was busy with a customer when he entered. Gorski gestured towards the stairs behind the counter and made his way up to the apartment. The florist mouthed a greeting and waved him through.

In his childhood, the shop stayed open until seven in the evening and after school Gorski would sit on a stool doing his homework on his lap, while his father, in his brown store-coat, a pencil behind his ear, leaned on the counter. In the backroom, Gorski's mother sat at a rickety desk, updating the huge leather-bound ledger in which the transactions were recorded. Her handwriting was an elegant copperplate. At six o'clock Madame Gorski went upstairs to prepare the evening meal. At this point it fell to the young Gorski to record any further business in the ledger. He treated this task with great solemnity and would hunch over the great book, tongue peeping from the corner of his mouth, aware that his parents' livelihood depended upon the accuracy of his entries.

The shop was a trove of jewellery, string-less musical instruments, bric-a-brac, furniture, military paraphernalia, silverware, books and taxidermy. It was Monsieur Gorski's policy to offer a price on every item brought into the shop, no matter how worthless. ‘You never know,' he liked to say, ‘what a customer may bring in next time.' The shop smelt fusty. The windows
were piled so high with goods that little natural light entered the premises and Monsieur Gorski kept the lighting inside dim. ‘Respectable people are ashamed of entering a pawnbroker's,' he would say. ‘They do not wish to be illuminated when they do so.'

At precisely seven o'clock Monsieur Gorski would step out from behind the counter and wordlessly turn round the sign that hung on a string on the door. He would then remove his store-coat, hang it on the hook behind the counter, put on his suit jacket and, carefully adjusting the cuffs of his shirt, ascend the stairs for the evening meal. The Gorskis never took a holiday.

Gorski knocked lightly on the door of the apartment. He visited once or twice a week, but his mother always behaved as if it was a tremendous surprise to see him. Sure enough, she greeted him with a delighted ‘Georges!' when she opened the door and kissed him warmly both cheeks.

‘I brought you a few things,' Gorski said, setting the brown paper bag of groceries on the counter in the kitchenette.

‘Georges! I've told you, you mustn't,' she said.

Mme Gorski was in her eighties, but aside from the arthritis that made it impossible for her to leave the apartment, she was in excellent health. Her mental faculties showed no sign of waning. She refused to countenance any suggestion that she might be happier in a nursing home. Nor would she consider moving in with her son.

‘I don't want to be a burden,' she would say. ‘In any case, this is my home.'

Gorski never pressed her. The thought of his mother cooped up in the little apartment saddened him, but the idea of his mother and Céline living under one roof was absurd. He had never even broached the subject with his wife.

Mme Gorski chatted merrily to him as he set about preparing a salad and some tinned sardines he had bought. He laid everything out on the table in the living room and they sat down to eat. He poured each of them a small glass of the sweet white wine his mother liked to drink.

Monsieur and Madame Gorski would speak little during the working day. On the rare occasion that a particularly interesting item was brought into the shop, it was only over the evening meal that it would be discussed. It was not businesslike to show enthusiasm or even interest in the presence of customers. Monsieur Gorski had perfected a tone of complete monotony, which he used whether making an offer on a valuable painting or a worthless piece of costume jewellery. After dinner, he would peruse the day's newspaper for half an hour, before leaving the house for the Restaurant de la Cloche, where he would drink two or three glasses of red wine and perhaps take part in a game of cards with some of the other local shopkeepers.