The Returned (11 page)

He sat there looking at her, seemingly straight into her heart. Still silent, still smiling. Julie shook her head, exasperated. ‘Come here, then. I want you to try something on.’

A coat. She’d thought of it after leaving the police station. If nobody was looking for him, there was little need to keep him cooped up indoors all the time. And if he was going to go
outside she needed to dress him better, keep him warm. His hands were always a little cold, she reckoned.

And she would have to get him some toys. Some paper and crayons. Something to do while she was out working, when there was no choice but to leave him in the apartment.

Victor got down from the table. The coat was a good fit. She snipped the price tag off and hung the coat beside her own, liking how the two looked together. She thought about how odd it was,
that she should be so taken by Victor and feel such a bond in so short a time.

When she turned back to him, she gasped. The living-room window was wide open, and Victor was calmly sitting on the windowsill. The apartment was four floors up. He smiled at her, then fell
through the open window, out of sight.

Horrified, she cried out and ran to the window. She looked down. Nothing was there.

She ran down the stairs and out, breathless, still fully expecting to see a small crumpled form lying on the ground before her. But there was nothing. It wasn’t possible. She looked up to
the window of her apartment above and saw him there, watching, smiling. He waved. She stared at him, wondering if she was losing her mind. She waved back cautiously.

Had she even seen him fall? Had she imagined it, while Victor had been inside the whole time?

Confusion swamped her, suddenly one thought foremost. Was Victor even real? Nobody had interacted with him, perhaps he was . . .

Then she thought of Nathalie Payet, and for the only time in her life she was glad her neighbour existed.
She
had seen him. She was the proof. The boy was real, and Julie’s mind
was sound.

More or less.

Thinking of her neighbour reminded her of Monsieur Costa, and of the woman’s comment.
The worst of sins
. Maybe that was all that the vision of Victor falling from the window had
been: suicide on her mind. If she was honest, it had been on her mind for seven years, as an option to consider. And now she’d projected it out of herself, onto someone she’d started to
feel strongly for.

Feel
. It had crept up on her. She’d started to feel strongly for another person. It was something she hadn’t allowed herself since that night in the underpass, when her life
and everything in it had gone to hell.

That evening she and Victor sat watching TV, eating dinner. She talked for both of them; asking questions and then providing the answers as he watched her with adoring eyes. Despite the
strangeness of the situation it was the most normal she’d felt in a long, long time. It was good to have someone there. It was good to stop feeling so alone. So dead to the world around
her.

Come nightfall, with Victor tucked in on the sofa, Julie went to have a shower. She undressed, then looked at herself in the mirror, deliberately examining the patchwork of scars; the ghosts of
the slashes and stabs and incisions she’d suffered that New Year’s Eve, seven years before.

She started to cry. But it wasn’t despair she felt. It was something much rarer, something she almost didn’t recognize. Something that had come to her the moment she’d begun to
think the boy might stay, just for a while.

Hope
.

When the police came to the Lake Pub for Toni, he thought it was the wolf that had brought them.

He had been out at dawn, hunting deer in the woods surrounding the lake, when he’d seen it: a dark shape at the far edge of a large clearing. He thought it was a dog at first. For all the
whispered talk of wolves coming back to the area, he’d never seen one himself. It had probably been eighty years since the animals had had any real presence in this valley.

It had a dark pelt – almost black – and he struggled to make out the shape as it slunk out of the shadows of the trees. It was the striking white flash on the top of the head that
had first caught his attention, but when he noted the length of the legs, he realized what he was looking at. Not a dog; a
wolf
.

Fascinated, he had to get closer. A big man, Toni found it hard to move in silence. His brother Serge had always been the natural hunter, quiet, quick and deadly. Now, though, Toni had no
choice. If he wanted to see the animal better, he had to move. He cursed gently to himself as he made his awkward way, worried that every rustle of clothing or leaves would send the animal
scurrying off, but each time he stopped and looked to where the wolf had been he had a surprise.

The animal was still there.

It was watching him.

It doesn’t see me as a threat
, Toni thought. And he wasn’t really. Hunting a wolf was illegal, whatever the price he could get for the pelt, or the mounted head. Or even a
full animal.

The idea had appeal, of course: taxidermy was something he was good at, a hobby he enjoyed. He’d worked on plenty of foxes in his time, but a wolf would be a challenge. As he got closer,
in his mind he rehearsed how he would go about it.

It stayed where it was, watching him fearlessly, almost aggressively. That wasn’t what he expected at all, and he found it unnerving to have such an animal stand its ground like the beast
of legend.

He’d been brought up on the old superstitions surrounding the area. They were in his blood, put there by his mother and father; mainly by his mother, though. He’d only been four when
his father had died. His brother Serge, three years older, had spent much more time in the man’s company. Which, perhaps, explained how things had turned out.

Those natural fears were bubbling up within him now, as the wolf watched him; but despite his cautiousness, Toni’s feet were bringing him closer, closer. It was a fascinating creature, and
a beautiful one.

And then he knew he’d come too far.

Twenty metres away, the wolf curled its lip. The growl that came from it was deep and slow. Full of intent, and unlike the growl of any dog he’d ever heard. He could feel his bowels rumble
at the noise. Instinct screamed at him to run, yet his blood seemed to chill and thicken in his legs because he found himself unable to move.

The wolf had no such problem. It came for him.

For an instant he was paralysed with fear, seeing the bared teeth and imagining them ripping at his throat. With shaking arms he raised his gun. Then the long years of hunting took over, the
years of Serge’s patient teaching, and he heard his dead brother’s voice in his mind:
Steady, Toni. Steady.

He shot it as it ran, bringing it down in one. It had covered half the distance between them by the time he pulled the trigger, tumbling in a spray of leaves as its momentum carried it almost to
his feet. When it breathed its last, Toni let out a cry of both victory and relief, then suddenly thought of the trouble he could find himself in.

He took the carcass back to the old stone cottage, the house where he had grown up. For four years after Serge’s death he and his mother had continued to live there together, Toni
suffering his mother’s acrimony. When she’d died he’d moved to the town, keeping the old house mainly as a hunting base, high above the lake and surrounded by pristine wilderness.
The home where his mother had died, where his brother had breathed his last. Rather than be buried in the town’s cemetery beside her husband, she’d wanted to be buried beside her
beloved son. Beside Serge, with a view of the valley.

By the time Toni got to the Lake Pub to open up he’d already called a few contacts, enquiring how easy it would be to find black-market buyers for a wolf. Not hard, it turned out. Within
two hours he had a firm offer for the pelt and another for the head, mounted. Satisfied with his morning, he had a cheerful day.

Right up until the police walked in.

His first thought was that the buyers had really been part of a police operation, and he’d walked straight into it. But the police would tell him nothing. A few questions down at the
station they said, that was all.

When they got there, Toni was put in a room where he sat and waited, hoping the worst they could do was slap him with a fine. He could explain that it was self-defence, of course, given that the
wolf had been about to attack him; but there was a risk they would see it as a cynical lie, making them even less sympathetic.

Then the interview began, and he realized he’d got it all completely wrong. It was nothing to do with the wolf. It was much, much worse.

The initial questions about Lucy made him think she was the one the police were targeting. He knew what people said about her, and about the men she brought up to the room above the Lake Pub.
He’d always turned a blind eye to it, but perhaps it was inevitable the police would take an interest sooner or later.

Then they’d mentioned the charges of murder and attempted murder they’d thrown at him seven years before, and followed it up with the photographs of Lucy’s horrifying injuries.
All he could do was stare. Lucy, attacked in exactly the same way the women had been back then.

It wasn’t
possible
.

Because Toni knew who had killed those two women, and who had attacked the third. It was knowledge that he’d buried deep up on the mountain, something the police had come close to
unearthing when they’d put Toni’s life under a microscope seven years ago.

It had been Serge. And Serge was dead.

After seeing the photographs he didn’t hear much of what the female officer shouted at him. He was lost in a world of memories, of blood and death. The police left him for a few minutes,
the captain and a different officer returning to complete the questioning. Toni gave a dazed account of the night before.

Soon enough he was taken back to the Lake Pub. He wasn’t sure if they believed him or simply had their hands tied without evidence. He fervently hoped it was the former. The last time,
people eventually seemed to accept that he’d had nothing to do with it and moved on, but he couldn’t go through all that again.

And now a copycat killer had taken a liking for Serge’s old hobby.

Toni found he couldn’t concentrate at the pub, though. He left early, putting Samuel in charge for the rest of the day. He tried to put Lucy’s attack out of his mind as much as he
could. He had the wolf to deal with, and it would distract him.

He prayed for Lucy to live. It was partly a selfish prayer, he knew, because although he liked the girl and hoped she would pull through for her own sake, if she
did
survive she would
identify the attacker. The previous attacks would be blamed on whoever it was too, Toni’s name truly cleared at last. And there would be no chance of his life going under the microscope
again, no risk of old secrets being dug up at last.

He drove back to the cottage. As he approached the door, he could feel that something was wrong. Then he saw that the door was slightly ajar. He was sure he’d locked it when he left. He
took the hatchet from the woodpile, brandishing it as he went inside.

For a moment he wondered if the police had come here while he was in custody, taking the opportunity to poke around while he was out of the way. There was a spare key hidden around the back of
the house, not that hard to find. The thought enraged him: a violation of his privacy, and the knowledge that if they found the wolf
now
, they would come down on him as hard as they damn
well could.

But he didn’t think the police would have been able to carry out a search without much stronger justification; and they certainly wouldn’t have released him so soon. If not the
police, though, then who?

The idea of vagrants came to him, and his grip on the hatchet tightened. His mother had always had an obsession with the idea of people living rough in the forest and turning up at the house,
something that – as far as Toni knew – had never happened, but it had been burned into his mind all his life.

‘There are crazy people who live deep in the woods,’ she told him more than once. ‘Crazy people with crazy ideas. Kill you, soon as look at you.’ It was the kind of
paranoia that had bred a distrust of everyone outside the immediate family; and which, perhaps, had bred a far greater darkness in the heart of his brother.

Cautiously, Toni went through to the back of the house where he kept his hunting trophies. Two dozen stuffed animals glared his way with glassy eyes. Some were his favourites, and he liked them
too much to part with. The others were a little ropey, early efforts that he wouldn’t ever try to sell. Too much sentimental value, anyway; he could look at each one and remember exactly the
circumstances of the hunt, remember the laughter he and Serge had shared. And he remembered the love, too: brothers finding adventure among the trees, looking out for each other.

Yes
, thought Toni.
It’s possible to love monsters.

Everything in the room seemed untouched. The wolf was still hanging from the wooden beams, trussed, a hook through the rope that bound its feet. This room was always cold, so he would have
plenty of time over the rest of the day to do what needed doing before there was any risk of the carcass starting to spoil. First, though, he had to check all over the house and see if anything had
been disturbed or stolen by whoever had broken in.

He went up into the attic. There were still boxes and boxes of his mother’s possessions packed away carefully up there. He had kept everything, unable to part with any of her belongings
when she’d died, or any of Serge’s – but he had wanted it out of his sight. Not in the house as a constant reminder of what he’d done, that terrible betrayal. His
mother’s bedroom was the one exception. That, he’d left untouched.

He went down from the attic and made a room-by-room check until he was in the kitchen. And there it was, the only other sign of activity besides the unlocked door.