The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau (8 page)

Afterwards, Gorski knocked on the doors of the neighbouring apartments. No one had ever done more than greet Adèle in passing. They had never seen her bring anyone back to the apartment or heard voices from inside.

‘Is she in some sort of trouble?' a grey-haired woman, two doors along the landing, had asked.

People often asked this, their glee poorly disguised as concern. Gorski had no doubt the old woman would be quite delighted to be told that her neighbour had been brutally raped and done to death.

Gorski's train of thought was interrupted by Yves taking a fresh glass of wine to the man in the shabby suit. The workmen who had been standing by the bar had gone, but he had not even noticed them leave. Perhaps it was not so unlikely that Manfred Baumann had seen nothing on the night of Adèle's disappearance.

As Yves placed the glass on the man's table, he looked up from his newspaper and caught Gorski's eye. He pretended that it had not happened and immediately lowered his gaze. Gorski remembered him. He was a schoolteacher who had left the profession after a male pupil made some unsavoury allegations. Gorski had conducted a cursory investigation, but the pupil's
claims had proved malicious. Nevertheless, as happens in such cases, a cloud hangs over the accused and the man resigned his position. Gorski would have liked to convey with a cordial look that he did not regard him as guilty, but the former teacher had not given him the opportunity to do so. Most likely, the man did not wish to be reminded of an unpleasant episode in his past.

Gorski ordered a second beer. Yves brought it over and wordlessly removed his paper plate and napkin. The man finished his drink and left without looking in Gorski's direction. Now that the bar was empty, Gorski felt vaguely ridiculous. The proprietor studiedly busied himself polishing glasses and wiping down the surfaces behind the bar. There was a telephone on the wall next to the door to the WC. Gorski thought of phoning the station to check on the progress of the investigation, but it would be impossible to do so without being overheard. There was nothing else for it but to return to the station. He drank his beer, paid at the counter and left.

He passed the rest of the afternoon in his office, typing a report on the investigation for the examining magistrate. Why, even in this official document, did he feel the need to present matters in a positive light? The men he had despatched to question residents in the area about further sightings of Adèle or the young man on the scooter, had not turned up anything. It was frustrating. Having dismissed the idea that the waitress had disappeared of her own accord, Gorski was left with three further possibilities: she had met with an accident, committed suicide, or she had been murdered. The first of these could also be dismissed. Nobody answering Adèle's description had been admitted to a hospital in the vicinity of Saint-Louis and if she had met with a fatal accident, her body would have been discovered by this time. Suicide could not be entirely dismissed. Had she thrown herself into the Rhine – the preferred method of suicide in the area – it was possible that her body would not be recovered for days or even weeks. However, nothing in her behaviour leading up to her disappearance suggested that she intended to
do away with herself. Which left homicide, but without a body there could be no murder investigation. It was all speculation and Gorski did not like speculation. He liked to proceed with solid, logical steps built on concrete evidence. In his twenty or so years as a detective he had trained himself to extend the same attention to whatever scraps of information were connected to a case, no matter how insignificant they might appear. His credo was to eliminate intuition, what his colleagues liked to call ‘hunches'. And for the time being there was only one lead, the boy on a scooter. Until the young man was identified or Adèle's body was discovered, there was little chance of progressing the investigation. Already, Gorski had the familiar sinking feeling in his stomach that the case was going cold.

At half past six he went home, resisting the temptation to stop off in a bar on the way. At seven o'clock Gorski's wife, Céline, placed a dish of baked fish and potatoes on the table. Gorski uncorked the bottle of wine they had opened the previous evening and poured each of them a glass. His daughter, Clémence, was seated at the table, a paperback flattened on her dinner plate. She was sixteen and had inherited her mother's fine features and chestnut hair. She had retained a boyish figure, something Gorski found unaccountably reassuring. Clémence closed her book and pushed her glass forward. Gorski poured the remains of the wine into it.

Céline dished out the food. There was barely enough to go around. She was not much of a cook. Gorski sometimes wondered if her frugal helpings accounted for Clémence's lack of physical development. Céline herself was half a head taller than Gorski, willowy, with small breasts and slim hips. It was a miracle she had ever borne a child and, after Clémence, she had sworn it was not an experience she intended to repeat.

Gorski rarely spoke about his work with Céline, and especially not over the dinner table, but the disappearance of Adèle Bedeau was big news. Clémence was fascinated, but Gorski had nothing new to tell her. ‘Without a body, it's all in limbo,' he said.

He took a mouthful of fish. It was tasteless. Céline refused to have salt in the kitchen, maintaining that it was nothing more than a road to high blood pressure.

Clémence looked disappointed. ‘But you still think she was murdered?'

Gorski shrugged. ‘People disappear all the time.'

He picked a fishbone from between his teeth and placed it on the edge of his plate.

‘
I
think she was murdered,' said Clémence. She ignored a look from her mother.

‘What about the motive?' he asked.

‘A crime of passion, of course. Most murders are committed by a person known to the victim.'

‘That's true,' said Gorski. He enjoyed playing along with Clémence's theories. ‘But if that were the case, where's the body? It's unlikely that a murder committed in the heat of the moment could be covered up.'

‘I think it was the fat butcher on Avenue de Bâle. He killed her, chopped her up and put her in his sausages.'

Céline finally intervened. ‘Can't we discuss something more suitable for the dinner table?'

Gorski and Clémence exchanged a conspiratorial look. The rest of the meal was passed in silence.

Céline ran a fashion boutique in town. The shop had never done better than break even. The stock was too upmarket for Saint-Louis, but Céline insisted that the women of the town needed to be educated. In spring and autumn she held a reception to present her latest collection, as she liked to call it. She hired models, served champagne and canapés and invited what great-and-good Saint-Louis had to offer. Céline insisted that Gorski attend these gatherings. She encouraged the ladies to bring their husbands, since, she maintained, it would be they who would be opening their chequebooks at the end of the evening. Gorski spent these evenings with the other reluctant husbands loitering close to the table where the drinks were served. These occasions
were less about the success of Céline's business, than establishing ‘the Gorskis' as part of the Good Society of the town. Céline made no attempt to conceal her belief that her husband's job was an impediment to such status. When they were first married, she had encouraged him to give up the police to study law. After his promotion to inspector her aspiration switched to moving to a proper town, perhaps even Paris – somewhere her business could thrive and where she could mix in what she called ‘sympathetic society'. But, Gorski explained, it wasn't easy for a provincial cop to get a move to a big city. Once, he had put in for a transfer to Strasbourg, but when it was turned down he did not pursue it. Gorski sympathised with his wife's desire to move to somewhere less dreary than Saint-Louis, but over the years he had convinced himself that it was not viable. It was not that he had grown fonder of Saint-Louis. The truth was that he was privately convinced that he had found his level.

D
URING THE SUMMER AFTER
the death of his mother, Manfred's principle activity was to walk in the woods behind the Paliard house. He had never enjoyed hot weather and even on the warmest days it remained tolerably cool on the forest floor.

One day Manfred was lying on his back in a small clearing, his head resting on a soft mound of moss at the base of a tree. His shirt lay in a crumpled heap by his side. His eyes were closed but he was not asleep. He was listening to the papery rustle of the leaves in the breeze. It sounded like a distant stream. He breathed evenly and deliberately. The ground was bone dry and scattered with twigs that smelled like kindling. Manfred imagined a fire raging across the forest floor like a tidal wave. He pictured his body engulfed by flames and turned to blackened cinders which would float high on currents of air above the tree-tops.

Manfred opened his eyes suddenly. A girl was standing a few feet from where he lay. He had not heard her approach.

‘How long have you been there?' he said.

‘A while,' said the girl.

She was wearing a yellow cotton dress printed with orange flowers. She had leather sandals on her feet. Her hair was blonde and secured with a yellow bandana. She had large blue eyes, which she kept fixed on Manfred. She did not appear in the least embarrassed. She had a boyish figure and stick-thin arms.
She was perhaps fifteen years old, although her childish outfit suggested she might be younger.

‘Who are you?' Manfred asked as if he was a landowner discovering a trespasser.

The girl shrugged and smiled a little. ‘No one,' she said. ‘Just a girl. Who are you?'

Manfred was impressed by the girl's reply. He could think of no better response.

‘Just a boy,' he said. But he had a sudden urge to tell her everything about himself, how his father had run the Restaurant de la Cloche, how his mother had died, how he now lived with his grandparents, how he sometimes stared at his bedroom ceiling for a whole day without noticing the time pass.

The girl sat down next to Manfred, smoothing her dress underneath her as she did so. She sat with her arms around her knees, not saying anything. She was the most beautiful girl Manfred had ever seen. Right there and then he wanted to marry her and be with her every moment of his life until he died. He was suddenly embarrassed by his skinny, naked torso. He untangled his shirt and put it on.

The girl just sat there. Manfred couldn't think of anything to say that wouldn't sound stilted or phoney. The hem of the girl's dress fluttered slightly in the breeze. Downy blonde hair grew down the nape of her neck. Eventually she turned her head and looked at him.

‘Not much of a talker, are you?'

Manfred felt himself blushing. If he didn't say something now, she would get up and leave and he would never see her again.

‘I…' He hoped that if he started a sentence, something would tumble out, the way that when he recited a poem under his breath, the words just came. But nothing followed. He started again.

‘Do you live near here?' It was so banal he wished he'd kept quiet. ‘I've never seen you before,' he added by way of explanation.

‘My parents have rented a house on the other side of the woods,' she said.

‘You're on holiday?'

‘I suppose,' said the girl.

Manfred knew that he should now ask where she was from. But he didn't want to know. All that mattered was that they were both here at this place at this moment. He didn't want to think of her in some far-off town or city where he didn't live, going to a school he didn't attend, talking to boys that weren't him.

‘And you?' said the girl.

‘Me?'

‘Do you live round here?'

‘I live with my grandparents on the outskirts of Saint-Louis,' he said.

‘With your grandparents?'

‘My parents are dead.' He had said it to gain the girl's sympathy, so that even if she didn't like him she might take pity on him. Perhaps she would take his hand.

‘How thrilling,' she said, ‘to be alone and make your own way in the world.'

‘I'm not alone,' said Manfred. ‘I'm with you.'

The girl got up and said she had to go. Her parents would be expecting her. She was not wearing a watch. Manfred felt his stomach tingle.

‘Will I see you again?' he said.

The girl widened her eyes a little and made a little popping sound with her lips.

‘Will you come here again tomorrow?' he asked.

‘Maybe,' she said. ‘It depends on my parents.'

‘I'll be here,' said Manfred.

Then she disappeared into the forest.

Manfred returned to the clearing where he had met the girl for the next three days. He arrived ever earlier, the second and third days bringing himself a supply of water and fruit to get him through the day. He also brought books and a rug from
the cupboard under the stairs. He selected the books carefully. The girl was clearly no dummy, so any pulp or
policiers
were out of the question. Camus, Sartre, Hemmingway were clearly too mannish to make a positive impression on a frail girl in a yellow dress. Over-familiar classics would make Manfred seem a tyro – he should surely have read such key works already. In the end he chose two novels by Zola from his grandfather's bookshelf. He had previously, without having read a word, dismissed Zola as incurably dull and reactionary – all that stuff about fate flew in the face of his beloved existentialists – but from the very first pages of Zola's preface to
Thérèse Raquin
, Manfred was enthralled. One day, he too would write a book that would scandalise society and be wilfully misunderstood, only for history to prove him right. He would fearlessly expose hypocrisy, cant and sentimentality. And through his years of vilification, the girl in the yellow dress would be by his side.

Zola's description of his characters, trapped by temperament and lacking free will, felt like a release to Manfred. A burden was lifted from his shoulders. He too was a prisoner of the forces that had shaped him: the awkward, unsociable nature that made everyone ill at ease in his company; his dismal situation as an imposter in his grandparent's house; his uncertainty at what path to take when he left school. He was no longer in control of his own destiny. What, after all, had lead him to meet the girl in the yellow dress? Not free will, but fate.

She appeared on the fourth day, as Manfred knew she would.

‘Hello,' she said as she stepped into the little clearing.

‘Hello,' said Manfred. On the rug he had laid out a brown paper bag of cherries and the flask of apple juice he had brought in his satchel. Manfred lay on his side, his head propped on his hand, his book open in front of him. The girl sat down as she had before, her arms clasped around her knees, her back to Manfred. She was wearing the same dress as before.

‘How long have you been here?' she asked.

‘All day,' said Manfred.

‘Were you waiting for me?'

‘Yes,' he said. He liked the fact that the girl did not look at him when she spoke.

‘What if I hadn't come?'

‘I'd have come back tomorrow,' he said.

‘That's nice.'

‘I wanted to see you again.'

‘I wanted to see you too,' said the girl.

‘It's strange, don't you think that we met the way we did,' said Manfred. ‘I mean, if I hadn't been in this clearing at the exact moment that you came by, if you had taken a different turning, if you hadn't been on holiday here, if I had been born somewhere else…'

The girl did not look round, but she shrugged her shoulders.

‘You might as well say that whenever two people meet it's strange. Our meeting is no stranger than any other meeting between two people who don't know each other.'

‘But we didn't plan to meet, did we?' said Manfred.

‘How could two strangers plan to meet?' said the girl. ‘If they had intended to meet, they wouldn't be strangers.'

Manfred was silent for a moment.

‘What I mean is,' Manfred went on, feeling like he was leaping off a cliff without knowing how deep the water below was, ‘that neither of us has exerted any will of our own. And yet, because of this happenstance, something – maybe everything – has changed.'

The girl looked over her shoulder at Manfred for the first time. ‘Yes,' she said, ‘I feel it too.'

That evening Manfred chatted merrily with his grandparents over the evening meal. He could see them exchanging bemused glances as he solicitously asked if they had had a pleasant day. The fug that normally surrounded him had lifted. Everything was light. Afterwards he helped clear away the dishes and joined his grandfather in his workshop and helped him bevel the edges of a chest of drawers he was making.

In bed that night, the dark, gloomy world of Zola no longer held any appeal. The desperate animal lust of Thérèse Raquin and her lover no longer attracted him. He lay instead in a reverie in which the girl was the protagonist and he her unworthy suitor. Unlike the dark fantasies he entertained about other girls, he had no lustful thoughts about the girl in the yellow dress. His love (he had no reservation about using this word) for her was on an altogether more elevated plain. When they parted, she had kissed him lightly on the cheek and they had clasped each other's fingers for a few seconds.

The following days were the happiest of Manfred's life. Even as he was experiencing them, he felt that it was not possible to be happier – for him or for anyone. He knew too that the girl felt the same. They had invented love. Until the moment the girl had stepped into the clearing, love had existed only as a word, an abstract concept that no other person had actually experienced.

They met every day. Manfred brought the rug to sit on and stuffed his satchel with bread, pâté and fruit from his grandparents' larder. They ate lunch, feeling less like teenagers than a contented aging couple. Juliette came from Troyes. Her father was a lawyer who expected her to follow him into the profession. He was a taciturn man of iron will. Her mother was a docile woman whom Juliette had never once seen stand up to her father. She was a mere extension of her husband, who spent her days lunching with other such wives, shopping or having her hair done. But she was always home in time to dress for the evening meal. Juliette despised her. She had no interest in law, but she felt unable to resist her father's strictures. She was not blessed with a rebellious nature. These illicit meetings with Manfred were the greatest transgressions of her life. She envied Manfred's freedom and wished her own parents dead.

Yet despite her view of herself as meek and compliant, Manfred found Juliette quite unique and possessed of a self-confidence he envied. She was not at all like the superficial, giggling girls he observed at school, with their twin manias for clothes and the
very stupidest boys. Juliette had a sense of herself that did not require the affirmation of others. She was beautiful without ever giving the impression of thinking twice about her appearance.

Manfred encouraged her to stand up to her father, to follow her own course in life, whatever that might be. Juliette reminded Manfred of the speech he had delivered on the subject of Zola's preface to
Thérèse Raquin
. If he really believed what he had said, weren't we all like rats on a wheel scurrying in a predetermined direction, unable to change course? But Manfred was full of plans for the two of them. They would elope to Paris, or further afield, to Amsterdam, London or New York. Manfred would write a great novel, an epic series, like Zola's
Rougon-Macquart
cycle, and they would be fêted among the artists and writers of Europe. Years later, Juliette's father would appear unexpectedly at their door. He would break down, admitting that his dictatorial ways had driven his daughter from the family and that it was only now in old age that he realised this. He would be proud that his daughter had made her own way in the world. Then Manfred and his father-in-law would sit up into the small hours, drinking whisky and reflecting on the paths their lives had taken.

Juliette smiled indulgently at Manfred's fantasy. ‘You haven't met my father,' she said. ‘In any case, would I not then just be following your dream instead of my father's?'

On the final day of Juliette's holiday, the lovers met in the clearing as usual. Manfred felt melancholy. The thought of not seeing his beloved for days or weeks was too much to bear. He could not, knowing now that there was an alternative, return to his old life of torpor.

Juliette had brought two bottles of rough cider from the cellar of the cottage.

‘If my father finds out, he'll kill me,' she laughed.

Manfred was disturbed that she could be so light-hearted on this black day, but he determined not to spoil their last hours together by reverting to his gloomy ways. They popped the stone stopper of the first bottle and passed it back and forth.
They talked animatedly of how they would write to each other every day, sending their letters poste restante under outrageous pseudonyms. At weekends Manfred would travel to Troyes and sleep rough in the railway station just for the chance to snatch a few minutes with his beloved. They would smuggle notes to each other with dramatic entreaties:
Do not fail me! I am forever yours! My love, I am pining for you!

Yet Manfred was preoccupied. Thus far their relationship had been consummated by no more than goodbye kisses and holding hands. As they sat side by side now on the blanket, Juliette held Manfred's fingers gently between her hands. But with the prospect of days or weeks without seeing one another, Manfred felt that they must mark the time they had spent together in some way. They must give their bodies to each other as a statement that they now belonged together and that their lives would from that moment be intertwined. As Manfred had contemplated this the previous evening, he had not thought of it as a sexual act (the practicalities of such a thing terrified him), but rather, although he considered himself an atheist, as something spiritual. He could think of no other way to describe it.