I Kill (9 page)

‘Has it never occurred to you,’ said the inspector, getting up from his chair, ‘that what happened to Harriet might not be your fault?’ He went around the desk and leaned
against it, standing in front of Frank and leaning towards him slightly, for more emphasis. ‘Or at least not entirely?’

Frank turned his head and looked out of the window. His jaw contracted as if he wanted to bite back an answer he’d already given too many times. His silence increased Hulot’s anger
and the inspector raised his voice slightly.

‘God damn it, Frank! You know what happened. You saw it with your own eyes. There’s a murderer out there who has already killed two people and will probably kill again. I don’t
know what exactly you’ve got on your mind, but don’t you think that stopping this maniac might be a way out for you? Think about it – could helping others be a way to help
yourself? Help yourself to
go home?

Frank brought his gaze back to his friend. His look said he felt like a man who could go anywhere and still feel that he did not belong.

‘No.’ That single syllable uttered in such a calm voice erected a wall between them. For a moment, neither of them spoke.

There was a knock at the door and Claude Morelli walked in without waiting for an answer.

‘Inspector . . .’

‘What is it, Morelli?’

‘There’s someone from Radio Monte Carlo outside.’

‘Tell him I’m not talking to reporters now. There’ll be a press conference later, whenever the chief decides.’

‘He’s not a reporter, inspector. He’s a deejay who hosts an evening radio show. He came with the station manager. They read the papers and they say they have some information
on the two crimes at the harbour.’

Hulot did not know how to take the news. Anything useful was like manna from heaven. The thing he was afraid of was a parade of maniacs convinced that they knew everything about the homicides,
or even wanting to confess that they were the killers. But he could not afford to leave any stone unturned.

He blew out his cheeks. ‘Show them in.’

Morelli went out and it seemed like a prearranged signal for Frank, who got up and retreated to the door just as Morelli came back, accompanied by a young man with long, black hair, about
thirty, and an older man, about forty-five. Frank glanced at them and stood aside to let them in, then took advantage of the occasion to slip through the half-open door.

‘Frank,’ called Hulot after him. ‘Sure you don’t want to stay?’ Frank Ottobre left the room without a word and closed the door behind him.

Outside police headquarters, Frank turned left on Rue Suffren Raymond and soon found himself walking down Boulevard Albert Premier, the road that ran along the coast. A crane
moved lazily against the blue sky. The crew was still at work dismantling the Grand Prix bleachers and piling them on to long trucks.

Everything was happening by the rules. Frank crossed the street and stopped on the promenade in front of the harbour to watch the boats coming and going. There was no trace of what had happened
on the wharf. The Beneteau had been towed away somewhere safe so that the police could get to it during the investigation. The
Baglietto
and the other boat that had been rammed were still
there, gently nudging each other’s fenders as the waves brought them close. The police barricades had been removed. There was nothing left to see.

The harbour cafe had resumed its normal activity. What had happened was probably attracting more customers, curiosity seekers who wanted to be at the centre of things. Maybe the young sailor who
had discovered the bodies was there, enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame and recounting what he had seen. Or maybe he was staring silently into a glass, trying to forget.

Frank sat down on a stone bench. A boy sped past on Rollerblades, followed by a younger girl having trouble with her skates and whimpering for him to slow down. A man with a black labrador was
patiently waiting for his dog to finish responding to the call of nature. Then he took out a plastic bag and a little shovel from his pocket and scooped up the evidence, diligently depositing it in
the bin.

Ordinary people. Like everybody else, but with a little more money and happiness, or so it seemed. Maybe it was all just a show and nothing more. A cage was still a cage, even if it was made of
gold, and every person created his own destiny. Everyone built his own life or destroyed it, according to the rules he alone invented. Or rules he refused to make. There was no escape.

A yacht was motoring out of the harbour. From the stern, a blonde woman in a blue swimsuit waved goodbye to someone on the shore. For a moment the sea and its reflections stirred his memory.

After he had left the hospital he and Harriet had rented a cottage in an isolated spot on the Georgia coast. It was a wooden house with a red-tile roof built about 100 yards
from the shore, in the middle of the dunes. There was a veranda with large sliding glass doors that opened in the summer, transforming it into a patio.

At night they listened to the wind blowing through the sparse vegetation and the sound of the waves hitting the beach. In bed, he could feel his wife hold him tightly before falling asleep.
Her frantic need to assure herselfofhispresence,asifshecouldnotreallyconvinceherselfthathe was still there with her, alive.

During the day they lay on the beach, sunbathed and swam. The stretch of coastline was practically deserted. People who loved the sea and the life of crowded beaches went elsewhere, to the
‘in’ places, to watch bodybuilders working out or girls with silicon breasts strutting by as if the were auditioning for
Baywatch.
Lying there on the towel, Frank could expose
his thin body to the sun without being ashamed of the red scars or the painful mark of the heart operation where they took out the piece of metal that had nearly killed him.

Sometimes Harriet traced the sensitive flesh of the scars with her fingers, and tears glistened in her eyes. Sometimes silence fell between them, when they both thought the same thing,
remembering the suffering of those last months and the toll it had taken. They did not have the courage to look at each other then. They each looked out at their own piece of ocean until one of
them silently found the strength to turn and embrace the other.

From time to time, they did some shopping in Honesty, a fishing village that was the nearest town and looked more like Scotland than America. It was a peaceful little place, without the
slightest ambition of becoming a tourist resort. The wooden houses all looked more or less alike and were built along a street that ran parallel to the ocean, where a concrete barrier above the
rocks stopped the waves during winter storms.

They ate in a restaurant with large windows across from the pier, built on struts with a wooden floor that echoed with the waiters’ steps. They drank chilled white wine that misted
their glasses, and they ate freshly caught lobster, staining their fingers and splashing their clothes when they tried to crack open the claws. Harriet and Frank laughed like children. They seemed
to be thinking about nothing. They spoke about nothing. Until the phone call.

They were at home and Frank was slicing vegetables for the salad. There was a delicious smell offish and potatoes baking in the oven. The wind outside swirled the sand from the peaks of the
dunes; the ocean was covered with white foam. The sails of a few windsurfers cut swiftly through the air. Harriet was sitting in a cane chair on the veranda the whistling of the wind kept her from
hearing the phone. He had stuck his head out the kitchen door with a large red pepper in his hand.

‘Phone, Harriet. Can you answer? My hands are dirty.’

His wife had gone over to the old wall phone that was ringing with its old-fashioned sound. She had picked up the receiver and he stood there watching her.

‘Hello?’

Her face had changed, the way faces do when they hear bad news. Her smile had faded and she had stood in silence for a moment. Then, she had put down the receiver and looked at Frank with an
intensity that would torment him for a long time.

‘It’s for you. It’s Homer,’ she had said, turning and going back to the veranda without another word. He had gone to the phone and picked up
thereceiver,stillwarmfromhiswife’shand.

‘Yes?’

‘Frank, it’s Homer Woods. How’re you doing?’

‘Fine.’

‘Really fine?’

‘Yes.’

‘We got them.’ Homer spoke as if their last conversation had taken place ten minutes before. If he had noticed Frank’s monosyllabic replies, he had not let on.

‘Who?’

‘The Larkins. We caught them red-handed this time. Without any bombs. There was a gunfight and Jeff Larkin got killed. There was a mountain of drugs and a bigger mountain of cash. And
papers. We have promising new leads. With a little luck, there’s enough material to nail them all.’

‘Fine.’He had repeated the same word, in the same tone of voice, but his boss hadn’t picked up on it this time either. He imagined Homer Woods in his panelled office,
sitting at his desk, phone in hand, his blue eyes framed by gold-rimmed glasses, as immutable as his grey three-piece and blue button-down shirt.

‘Frank, we got to the Larkins mostly because of your work, yours and Cooper’s. Everyone here knows it and I wanted to tell you. When do you think you’re coming
back?’

‘I don’t know, to be honest. Soon.’

‘Okay, I don’t want to pressure you. But remember what I said.’

‘Okay, Homer. Thanks.’ He had hung up and gone out to look for Harriet. She was sitting on the veranda watching the two kids dismantle their sailboards and load them on to their
jeep.

He had sat down in silence next to her on the wooden bench. They had watched the beach until the jeep was gone. It was as if that outside presence, though far away, had kept them from
speaking.

‘He wants to know when you’re coming back to work, doesn’t he?’ Harriet had asked, breaking the silence.

‘Yes.’ There had never been lies between them and Frank had no intention of starting now.

‘Do you want to?’

‘Harriet,’ Frank had said, ‘I’m a policeman.’ He had turned to her but Harriet had carefully avoided meeting his gaze. He, too, had gone back to watching the
ocean; the waves chasing each other in the wind, white with foam. I didn’t choose this life because I had to. I like it. I’ve always wanted to do what I do and I don’t know if I
could adjust to doing anything else. I don’t even think I’d know how. As my grandfather always said, you can’t fit a square peg into a round hole.’ He had stood up and put a
hand on his wife’s shoulder, now slightly stiff. ‘Harriet, I don’t know whether I’m square or round. But I don’t want to change.’

He had gone back into the house and when he had come out a while later to look for her, she had disappeared. Her footprints on the sand in front of the house went in the direction of the
dunes. He had seen her walking in the distance by the shore, a tiny figure with hair flying in the wind. He had followed her with his gaze until two other dunes had hidden her from view. He thought
she wanted to be alone and that it was only right. He had gone back into the house and sat down at the table, in front of food he would never want to eat.

Suddenly, he had not felt so sure about what he’d said earlier. Maybe there was another life for the two of them. Maybe someone who was born square couldn’t become round, but he
could try to round off the edges so that nobody would be hurt. Especially those he loved. He had decided to give himself a night to think it over. He would talk to her about it the next morning. He
was sure that together they could find a solution.

There was never to be a next morning for the two of them.

He had waited until late afternoon for Harriet to return. As the sun set and the shadows of the dunes lengthened over the beach like dark fingers, he had seen two figures walking slowly along
the shore. The reflection of the fiery sunset had made him narrow his eyes. They were still too far away for him to make them out clearly. Watching through the open window, Frank could see the
footprints they left with every step, a trail that started from the dunes on the horizon. Their jackets flapped in the breeze, their silhouettes shimmering in the sea air. When they were near
enough for him to see them clearly, Frank realized that one of them was the sheriff from Honesty.

He had felt the anxiety rise up inside him as he finally came face-to-face with the man who he considered more an accountant than a policeman. But Frank’s worst fears were about to
become a reality as, holding his hat in his hand and trying to avoid Frank’s eyes as much as possible, the sheriff had told him what had happened.

A couple of hours earlier, some fishermen had been sailing a few hundred yards from the coast and they had seen a woman fitting Harriet’s description. She was standing at the top of a
cliff, strangely jutting out above the coastal dunes. She was alone and looking out to sea. When they were just about opposite her, she had jumped. Not seeing her emerge from the water, the
fishermen had immediately turned their boat around to go to the rescue. One of them had dived into the ocean right where she had jumped but they could not find her. They had called the police right
away and started searching. So far they had found nothing.

The ocean had returned Harriet’s body two days later, when the current had carried it to an inlet a couple of miles south of the coast.

When he had identified her body, Frank had felt like an assassin before his victim. He had looked at the face of his wife lying on the mortuary slab and, nodding, confirmed both
Harriet’s identity and his own lie sentence. There had been no inquest thanks to the fishermen’s testimony, but that did not help to free Frank of the remorse consuming him. He had been
so busy taking care of himself that he had not noticed Harriet’s deep depression. No one had noticed it. But that was no excuse. He should have noticed his wife s agitation. He was
supposed
to understand. All the signals had been there, but in his own delirium of self-pity, he had ignored them. And their conversation after Homer’s phone call had been the last straw.
When you got right down to it, he was neither square nor round. Just blind.