The Stone Boy (21 page)

“The policeman mentioned in the paper is our captain. He thinks that he saw your mother when she came in to file her report for our logbook last Monday. Our social worker had taken Madame Préau’s statement very seriously, you know… The captain remembered her face, but hadn’t made the connection with the trial.”

He put a flabby hand to his chin.

“Ten years ago… I was a sergeant in Nantes…”

The officer turned the screen back around on its pedestal.

“Let’s look further back…”

Martin’s voice rose over the clacking of the keyboard.

“Have you had any news about the children?”

“Not yet.”

“And the parents? What about the father? Did my mother hurt him badly?”

“Mr. Desmoulins is in custody. He’s being considered as part of the investigation.” The officer sighed. “Ah!
Voilà!
‘Killer grandmother judged not responsible: accused is acquitted.’ That’s why there’s no record of a conviction on the system.”

The screen rotated a second time. Martin went back to looking at his shoes.

There was no reason for him to read it.

He remembered perfectly the reports of the trial that appeared in the press, describing his mother as a wild-looking woman, detached from the world around her.

He could still hear them reading out the charge.

“I have never seen distress or despair register on your face, madam. I don’t understand you. I don’t understand what makes you tick.”

The lawyer then started in on an interminable and confusing monologue, painting a picture of an “abominable act” committed by an “egotistical, egocentric” woman, returning constantly to his failure to understand the crime and its motive. Why would he deny the despair that brought a grandmother to murder her grandson? A despair that drove her to lunacy, fed by the recent loss of her father from cancer, despair about which all the experts agreed. Why deny Bastien’s troubles and physical injuries that were worrying his grandmother when they were real? No. He took it out on the retired schoolteacher.

“Truly diabolical!”

When the prosecutor mocked Martin by reducing him to the level of “a little boy at his Mommy’s apron strings,” and basically accused him of perjury, the doctor was then sunk into guilt.

Guilty of having prescribed the Tranxene, which she had hidden in the cake designed to kill her and Bastien alike.

Ashamed to bear a name never to be corrupted.

Five hundred pills, reduced to a powder.

And she survived after ten days in a coma.

An irritated cough shook Martin from his thoughts. The lieutenant was watching him, his arms crossed.

“There’s one thing that I’m having trouble understanding, Doctor,” he said softly. “After what your mother did to you, how could you continue to see her? Is it possible to forgive someone for killing your son, even if it is your mother?”

Martin looked up at the lieutenant.

“People always imagine that for a doctor, it’s easier to accept a serious illness in your family, that your experience will protect you from the power of your emotions. It’s nothing like that. It’s not written in any manual how to tell your mother that her grandson is suffering from leukemia and that his fever, the paleness of his skin, and the bruises on his body are the effects of a relapse.”

“You hid the fact that your son had cancer from your mother?”

Martin smiled bitterly.

“No one in the family knew other than Audrette and me. Bastien thought we were giving him a treatment to supplement the calcium in his bones. After his chemo, we went to Corsica for three months to wait for his hair to grow back. We still believed in a cure. Then he got worse… Do you know what the likelihood of survival is in a child whose acute lymphoblastic leukemia has relapsed?”

The lieutenant shook his head, thrown. The doctor’s eyes shone with tears.

“Thirty percent. In Bastien’s case, with a serious case of the disease, the prognosis dropped to fifteen percent. Six weeks, two months at the absolute max. He was already suffering. Without knowing it, my mother spared him the relentlessness of the medics and the ordeal that awaited him.”

Sevran shook his head and looked up at the wall where a child’s drawing was taped.

Martin guessed exactly what the man must be thinking.

If it were my son, I would have bet on the fifteen percent.

One night, at the onset of his illness, Bastien woke his parents up, screaming. A cry of terror that Martin would never forget. In his nightmare, a witch was pulling out his hair. He was holding his head, crippled with pain. His hair fell out two days later.

In keeping quiet the reasons for Bastien’s deteriorating health, Martin and Audrette had planted a seed in the already fragile mind of his Granny Elsa, and her psychosis swelled to the breaking point. Like a castaway lost in the middle of the ocean grasping a life jacket, Martin still held on to the idea that he had saved his son from the worst.

Audrette was sleeping on her side, her head half-buried in the pillow held tightly in her arms.

Like every night, she woke up at two in the morning. After shuffling to the toilet and drinking a few sips of water from the tap, she returned to bed, pressing her chest against her husband’s bare back in the hope that the contact would give her better dreams.

Martin looked at her face in the light of day. In the duvet, her waist cut a valley dominated by the voluptuous curves of her hips. Her shoulder-length hair, coiled at the neck, reflected glints of amber.

He desired his wife as much as always, with the same fervor, the same addiction. But Martin doubted that Audrette still wanted him.

Since the return of Madame Préau after ten years in a nursing home in Hyères, Audrette resented the relationship that his mother had renewed with her son. Their relationship was strained. The last memory she had of her mother-in-law was that of a woman sitting in the dock, saying softly to the court: “My daughter-in-law is completely ignorant of the evil she carries in her. That is why I am so indulgent of her.” The tragedy of Martin. Who was to blame? In 1988, hadn’t he played a dirty trick on his mother by coming back from Montreal with a little surprise—a foreigner with a ridiculous name? How could you commit such a blunder as the only son of a divorced mother? She wasn’t best pleased that Martin had been seeing his girlfriend since university, that she was an agricultural engineer and very pretty.

The birth of Bastien had signaled an end to hostilities. Granny Elsa, struck dumb with happiness, would even have smoked the peace pipe and had lunch at McDonald’s with her daughter-in-law if asked.

Nothing could happen to Bastien.

There should not be bruises on his skin.

Granny Elsa had succumbed to panic. She needed a scapegoat. A scapegoat not related to her by blood.

After Bastien’s death, Audrette had gone back to be with her family in Canada—a desperate fugue, a penance. Her return to France years later was accompanied by a requirement: that Martin cut all ties with his mother. Of this, he was not capable.

The couple’s long separation, however, had helped to heal some of Martin’s wounds. He gave up his one-night stands, his addiction to alcohol and Xanax. He gained enough courage to rebuild his clientele, strangely thin on the ground after his mother’s trial, left the family home where he had seen fit to take refuge after Audrette’s departure, and ordered a plane ticket to Montreal online.

Martin could not live without this woman’s love. He didn’t flinch when they found themselves face to face, in Beijing, a small Szechuan restaurant in Chinatown with large colored windows that contrasted with the chalky white drifts heaped on the footpaths. In this welcoming room where burning hot plates overflowed with Singapore noodles, he confessed that Bastien deserved better from his parents. Neither should ever forget him, they who must obey his dearest wish: that Bastien should become a big brother. After two ice-cold beers, their fingers intertwined again. A little more time was needed before they could shed their modesty. Nevertheless, ever since their first attempted reunion Audrette’s belly refused to oblige. As the days passed, making love became a source of anxiety and apprehension. Each month, Audrette lived through a day of “menstrual mourning.” And although Martin desired his wife constantly, sex became rare. Recent events had not been brought to any conclusion.

Martin closed his eyes to still his pathetic impulse.

He kissed the oval of her shoulder, stroked his sleeping wife’s hair, and went down to the kitchen to drop a capsule into the espresso machine, failing to listen to the France Info news.

Before going to his office, he would visit his mother in the hospital as he had taken to doing over the past week. For fifteen minutes, he contemplated a bruised body supported by a shell, her neck set in a disproportionately large collar, the mouthpiece of a respirator filling her lips. In his hands, his mother’s felt sometimes warm, and sometimes cold. Madame Préau was still holding back in the face of death, plunged into an irreversible coma.

Martin knew all about the power of the prosecution. His mother had bitter experience of it. It was because of a judge’s stubbornness that Madame Préau had to sit in the dock, even though according to the initial psychiatric assessments from the beginning of the case, it was clear that it was no place for her.

“You have to understand,” said Sevran, nodding as if to apologize. “A history like this is just fodder to the prosecutor. He has it in his head that the law won’t make the same mistake twice.”

A smell of stale cigarette smoke emanated from a leather jacket hanging on a peg on the wall. The officer sat behind his desk, looking exhausted as if it were the morning after a drunken night. Between his fingers, an odd mug bearing the image of Chupa Chups lollipops turned slowly. His hair, styled in spikes, formed a small, glossy, light brown brush, which narrowed toward the top of his face. His purplish rectangular-framed glasses matched his shirt, worn under a black-and-white jacquard sweater, and advertised his nonconformist nature. The lieutenant looked more like a holiday resort rep and ex-fan of Madness and the Specials than one of those narrow-minded cops that abound on TV series.

“The law didn’t make a mistake,” said Martin.

“Each to their own. I’m not taking sides.”

“Is this is why you called me in this morning? Because I have my first appointment in less than half an hour…”

“I called you in, Doctor, regarding the logbook entry that reports suspected abuse—which is in the book of evidence for the case. This is a line of inquiry that we need to explore, even though it is a priori closed.”

“Excuse me?”

The officer pushed the mug against the mouse pad on his computer. The pad was a questionable gray, covered in coffee stains.

“I mean that despite the psychiatric profile of the victim and her past, the assumption is that there’s no smoke without fire. Also, we conducted a required interview with a number of people…”

Lieutenant Sevran threw a folder in front of him and turned its pages rapidly with the weariness of a notary.

“Among them were two social workers, the teacher of the Blaise Pascal School whom your mother visited, her psychiatrist Dr. Mamnoue… Do you know him?”

“Yes. He’s been taking care of my mother for years.”

“That’s what he said to us. We also interviewed the housekeeper, the home care nurse, and her nearest neighbors on Rue des Lilas. The Desmoulins children…”

“How are they?”

“They’re well. Their mother has also pulled through.”

Martin tore a bit of the nail off his right thumb. His nails had become seriously shorter over the last ten days, and now he was attacking his cuticles. Elsewhere, a beard was beginning to eat up his cheeks.

“Good.” He sighed.

“They were lucky.”

“Yes.”

“And your mother, too, I mean…”

“Yes. It’s lucky she didn’t kill anyone.”

“This is it. So, the Desmoulins children and their mother have also been interviewed in the course of the inquiry.”

The dossier closed in a single movement. The lieutenant placed his elbows on it and joined his hands together.

“All the witnesses agree on one point, Doctor: your mother suspected that something wasn’t right at her neighbors’ place, and she tried to warn people about a case of maltreatment, and no one believed her.”

“I didn’t believe her, either.”

“She talked to you about it?”

“Very briefly.”

“When was that?”

“Sunday, the twenty-fifth of October, I think. She called me because she wasn’t well. She was overcome. My mother said that it was ‘a question of life or death.’ I left my house in a state. And when I arrived, she had calmed down.”

“Why the change of mood?”

Martin tensed.

“I think she’d taken a Stilnox.”

“The sleeping pills found in the madeleines. Did you prescribe it for her?”

“Yes.” Martin sighed. “You already asked me that question the night of the assault. She was taking it because she was having trouble sleeping.”