The Lying Down Room (Serge Morel 1) (17 page)

An evening with beautiful, kind-hearted Solange was just what he needed.

At lunchtime Morel’s team watched the midday news in the office. They were joined by Patrick Sergeant, whose team Perrin had assigned to provide support in Morel’s
investigation.

As expected, the faces of the two they were looking for loomed large on the TV screen. It was the lead story. A number flashed across the bottom of the screen for people to call if they had any
useful information to pass on.

‘Let the madness begin,’ Sergeant said. He was referring to the flood of calls they would undoubtedly be getting from every Tom, Dick and Harry who thought they might have seen the
pair or who simply wanted their two minutes of fame, to be part of the story.

Sure enough, the phones started ringing shortly after. A team had been set up to deal with the incoming calls and forward those that seemed genuine and vaguely promising. Every call that
wasn’t put through would still be logged in detail, for Morel’s people to review at the end of each day.

By 6 p.m. they had received 120 calls from people claiming they had sighted the man and the boy shown on television. Several, Morel found out when he checked the log book, were from self-dubbed
mediums who had apparently managed to talk to both Elisabeth Guillou and Isabelle Dufour beyond the grave. Morel had dealt with five callers personally. One seemed promising, a man who claimed to
have met the two evangelists at a Baptist convention in the US state of Louisiana. Morel felt his pulse quicken until the man declared he himself had recently been born again after wandering for
years in the desert. When he finally confided that he was Jesus Christ, Morel thanked him politely and hung up.

By 7 p.m. Morel started packing up. Only Lila was still there, sitting with her feet propped up on the desk. Neither felt much like talking.

‘I’m getting out of here. You should do the same,’ he told Lila.

‘Marie Latour,’ Lila said. ‘She attended the Russia exhibition.’

‘Bingo,’ Morel said softly.

‘I’ll give Guillou’s children a call,’ Lila said. ‘They might be able to tell us whether she attended the exhibition too. You never know. She might have gone with
her son or daughter, or told them about it.’

Morel nodded.

‘Marco is on his way back from Versailles, by the way,’ Morel said. ‘They’ve agreed to be a little bit cooperative. One of their guys will be on night watch.’

‘He’ll be happy to hear it,’ Lila said.

‘And Marie Latour is staying with her daughter for a few days. So I won’t have to rely on our colleagues in Maisons-Laffltte any more.’

‘Good.’

‘Are you OK?’ Morel asked. He couldn’t see Lila’s face but he could tell by her stiff posture that something was on her mind.

‘Fine. Just tired, that’s all.’

‘Go home.’

‘OK, OK.’

Lila grabbed her jacket and headed down the stairs. She found her car and drove it towards Neuilly with her window rolled down. The sun was setting and while the traffic flowed
reasonably well, the footpaths were crowded, mostly, she guessed, with people from out of town. Along the Champs-Élysées, they ambled down the side lanes converted into pedestrian
zones, past luxury shop fronts and cinemas. There was a constant flow of people coming up the steps from the Métro stations and the cafes and restaurants were doing a brisk trade.

If Morel knew where she was heading, he’d have a fit, she thought.

In Neuilly, Lila found Jacques Dufour’s house and parked outside. She rolled a cigarette while she waited. She was sitting outside their home for the second night in a row, waiting for him
to do something. During the first interview with the Dufours, she had watched Jacques closely. He’d been twitchy. She was certain she’d recognized the signs. The way he pinched his
nostrils and wiped at his nose. All his little ticks. The dilated pupils.

The twitchiness, the latent anger. It fit together.

Anne had been equally twitchy during their second interview yesterday, though clearly for different reasons, and Lila hadn’t for a moment believed her when she’d said Jacques would
be away for the week. The previous night, nothing unusual had happened, he had returned from work around eight and not gone out again. Not out with the mistress, then. She was fine with that. But
she knew it was just a question of time before he revealed himself.

She was rolling her second cigarette when his car passed her and turned into the Dufours’ driveway. The gates closed and it went dark and silent again.

An hour later the gates opened and Dufour drove his car out again. He turned in the opposite direction from the one he’d come from earlier, and turned left onto Avenue de Neuilly before
heading towards the motorway.

‘You’re making it too easy for me, Jacques,’ Lila said.

For all she knew, he could be heading out for a game of bowling with some work mates. But if he had anything to conceal, she would find out what it was and shove it in his face at the earliest
opportunity.

Morel lay naked on his back, enjoying the feel of Solange’s fingers against his chest. He had no intention of moving for the next seven hours or so.

When his phone rang, he looked to see who it was. He recognized the number as police headquarters and answered.

‘I’ve got a woman on the phone, says she has something to share regarding the two suspects,’ the duty officer said.

‘Put her on, then,’ Morel said, too tired to argue that the call was probably a waste of time.

‘Morel speaking.’

‘Hello?’

‘Yes. Who is this?’

‘My name is Amelia Berg. I have something to tell you regarding the man whose portrait you broadcast on television. I would have called earlier but I only saw it just now. By chance, in
fact, as I don’t watch the news every day.’

‘What is it you want to tell me, madame?’ Morel prompted, thinking that otherwise it would be a while before she got to the point.

‘It’s an incredible likeness. Whoever drew the picture has a real gift. Anyway, he and my son went to school together.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Armand Le Bellec,’ she said.

‘Where does he live?’ Morel said, gesturing to Solange to get him something he could write with. He watched her step across the room naked and return with pen and paper.

‘I’m not sure. But I can tell you he was just here, in my garden.’

Morel frowned. ‘Where are you calling from?’

She named a village in Brittany Morel had never heard of.

‘Listen to me carefully, Madame Berg. I need you to hang up and call the gendarmes,’ Morel said.

To his amazement, he heard the woman laugh. ‘For what? I’ve known Armand since he was a child. I have nothing to be afraid of.’

He was about to speak when she continued. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m more worried about
him
.’

Morel looked at his watch. ‘Would you mind leaving me your details? I’d like to be able to call you back. We’re going to have some questions.’

‘Certainly.’ She gave him her address and phone number and told him she would be home all week.

After he hung up, Morel turned to Solange. He hugged her and tenderly kissed each of her breasts.

‘I’m sorry but I have to go,’ he said.

‘Somehow I knew you were going to say that,’ she said.

When they said Russia, at first he baulked. He had never travelled outside France. First the village, then university in Rennes, only an hour from home. He was expected to
catch the bus back every Friday afternoon and spend the weekends with his mother. There was no money to do anything else, in any case. He knew so little of life. Russia seemed like a place where he
might get lost and never be found.

But he had to get away.

He packed one suitcase. He had so few belongings. His books stayed behind, with his mother. He gave his notice at the dorm where he lived during the week and on the last night took his mother
out for dinner. She’d wanted to cook for him but he felt more comfortable going out somewhere where she couldn’t make a fuss. When the time came to leave the restaurant, she offered to
put him up for the night. They could drive back to the village together, and she would drive him back in the next day, in time for his flight. Wouldn’t that be nicer than to spend the night
before his departure alone in town? He could see she was hurt by his response, could feel it as he walked away from her. But he knew he couldn’t face the house and his old room.

There was no one else to say goodbye to. He flew Air France days after the airline ended its strike. Normally he didn’t drink but on the plane he had two small bottles of
wine. It was a mistake. Afterwards he had to throw up in the toilet. He spent the rest of the flight in a stupor, staring at the picture on the screen of a toy plane drawing a line
across a map of Europe.

As the plane circled Sheremetyevo airport he heard the hostess say the temperature was minus twenty on the ground. Minus twenty! He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what that was like. All
he could picture was a pointless immensity, a silence you could drown in.

How dreadfully anxious he’d been, during those first, wintry months! How tempting, to take the first flight back and bury himself in a small town somewhere. But he didn’t. And after
a couple of weeks it became a lot easier than he’d imagined. He found that he was a good teacher and that his students liked him. They weren’t a bad lot. Precocious for the most part,
privileged and pampered, but also a hell of a lot more mature than kids that age back home, the ones he’d gone to school with.

At first he was afraid of them. These kids who smoked in the snowbound courtyard before the bell rang, whose life experiences surpassed his in unimaginable ways. Some days he walked into the
classroom with a strong sense of paranoia, imagining that behind his back they were sniggering at him, the provincial boy, the country bumpkin. Kids were good at digging out the very thing you
wanted to keep buried. Just because he was older than them didn’t give him an advantage. It wasn’t even much of an age difference. Many of the kids were also taller than him. At one
metre sixty-five, he was hardly imposing.

But however hard he searched for evidence that they ridiculed him, he couldn’t find it. After a while he relaxed and began to look forward to the classes. It gave him a kick, to see how
far he had come. If his mother could see him now! Commanding respect. When he spoke, they listened. When classes ended there were always a couple of them hanging back, waiting with a question. It
wasn’t always about school work either. Often they just wanted to chat. For the first time in his life, he felt like someone.

Other things were less gratifying. Even he was sheltered, of course, compared with the average Russian. Unlike them he was just passing through and whatever discomforts he experienced were
temporary. But still, he struggled with the place where he lived. While his students went back to their sheltered surroundings, the embassy kids and the ones whose parents worked for corporations,
every day he encountered squalor. The door to his building needed fixing and the entrance always smelled of piss and cabbage. You could never be sure whether the lift would make it to your floor.
Armand would have taken the stairs but he was afraid of what he might find there. Sometimes his heart sank when he walked through the door to his flat and saw the brown carpet and cheap furniture,
the kitchen with its peeling brown linoleum floor that was always sticky beneath his feet, so that he took to keeping his socks on all the time. In winter the flat was overheated and stuffy.
Outside his window, a factory belched smoke and a thousand empty sockets stared back at him, rows of windows in grey concrete blocks just like the one he lived in.

He became used to his new life. One of his colleagues put him in touch with a local, middle-aged woman who gave Russian lessons. He was a good student and learned quickly. In winter he found it
was easy to lose all sense of perspective. Lines became blurred, then non-existent. He walked through the city like a blind man. But rather than mourn the loss of familiarity, he celebrated it,
finding freedom in the absence of recognizable signposts.

He was lonely, of course. He could have done what some of his younger colleagues did, those who like him were teaching overseas as an alternative to military service. Get himself a Russian
girlfriend (or two at a time, like the maths teacher Gilles, who appeared at school the next day looking smug, dying to tell his story), or he could socialize with the teenagers, invite them to his
home. Armand tried the former. He came home one night with a girl who moaned and writhed under him with such intensity, his longing evaporated. They drank vodka together until she pulled a syringe
from her bag and asked him to inject it into her breasts. He found himself contemplating this obscene act for a moment, before shoving her out of the apartment. He spent the night tossing and
turning in self-disgust, both excited and repelled by the memory.

As for the parties with the kids he taught, Armand couldn’t bring himself to take part. He remained friendly with them at school but turned down the invitations from colleagues and pupils
alike. It wasn’t that he cared whether it was appropriate or not. In that setting he worried that he might stand out.

He didn’t go entirely unnoticed. That year, two students attached themselves to him. Like him, they were singular, quiet. The girl was taller than Armand, with lustrous black skin and
long, muscled legs. Puberty had reached her long before the other girls in the class. Armand noticed that this seemed to give her a comfortable edge over them. Without trying, she summoned envy.
The boys, too, were mesmerized. Because he didn’t desire her, Armand did not find her intimidating. He found it easy to talk to her. They became friends, in a sense. She was a natural at
philosophy, her mind embraced the concept of an open-ended world where a single question might reveal a dozen different truths. In the mornings before school they sat sometimes in his box-shaped
Lada and argued about Heidegger and Kierkegaard, the heater turned up high. Their intimacy was the closest he had come to anyone since Charles.