She Who Was No More (9 page)

He spread out a flap of his raincoat over the seat.

‘Come on, sit down… Surely we’re not going to start quarreling now!’

She did as he said. Some passing women stared at them. No doubt there was something peculiar in their attitude.

‘You know very well that on my side this never was a question of money,’ he went on in a tired voice. ‘Besides—just think for a moment—supposing I did want to play you false, how could I possibly expect to get away with it? You’d only have to come to Enghien and you’d find out the truth in no time.’

She shrugged her shoulders impatiently.

‘Very well, let’s leave the insurance money out of it. Perhaps you lost your nerve and couldn’t go through with it. Perhaps you buried the body instead.’

‘That would have been far more dangerous still. For me. Nobody could then think it was an accident, and I should be the first to come under suspicion. And what would have been the point of my inventing the letter and the visit to Germain’s?’

The day was fading, the lights going on one by one. It was the time of day he had always dreaded as a small boy, the time when playthings had to be put away. It was rather the same now. He had to put away his dreams. He realized he would never escape. Antibes was done for.

‘Surely you can see that, if I did want the insurance money, it was only to… to…’

‘My poor Fernand, you’re too self-absorbed. Instead of doing something you go chasing will-o’-the-wisps of your imagination. I’m quite ready to accept the fact that the body’s disappeared. The thing is: what have you done to find it? Bodies don’t wander about all by themselves.’

‘Germain tells me Mireille was in the habit of running away.’

‘Oh, shut up! What’s the good of talking like that?’

No good at all. He had to admit it was a silly remark. All the same there must be some connection, he felt sure, between that quirk of Mireille’s and her disappearance now. He repeated in detail what Germain had told him, but Lucienne merely shrugged her shoulders once again.

‘All right! She ran away when she was alive. Now she’s dead: that makes a difference. Leaving aside that letter and the visit to Germain’s…’

Leaving aside!
It was one of Lucienne’s expressions. Easily said!

‘…what matters is to find the body. It must be somewhere.’

‘Germain may be an ass, but he’s not mad.’

‘I don’t know about that. And I don’t care. I argue from facts. Mireille’s dead and her body’s gone. Nothing else matters. So the body’s got to be found. If you don’t want to look for it, it only means that you’re no longer interested in our plans. In that case…’

It was clearly implied by her tone that Lucienne would proceed to execute those plans alone. A priest passed, wrapped in a long cloak. The next minute he had disappeared through a little door.

‘If only I’d known,’ sighed Lucienne, ‘I’d have worked things out differently.’

‘Very well. I’ll have another look.’

She stamped her foot.

‘Not like that. Looking half-heartedly won’t get us anywhere, Fernand. You don’t seem to realize that you’re in a tight corner, or very soon will be. It won’t be long now before you have to make up your mind to inform the police.’

‘The police!’ He was quite unnerved at the thought.

‘Yes, the police. When people’s wives disappear they inform the police.’

‘But the letter…’

‘Admittedly there’s the letter. That gives you a pretext to hang on for a day or two. So does Germain’s story about her escapades as a child. But it’s only putting it off. Sooner or later you’ll have to go through with it.’

‘The police!’ he repeated under his breath.

‘That and nothing else! You can’t get out of it. So if you take my advice, Fernand, you’ll stop loafing about waiting for something to turn up, and settle down in earnest to finding that body. Pity I don’t work in Paris. It wouldn’t take me long to get on the track of it.’

She stood up, gathered her coat round her and tucked her bag under her arm with a briskness that indicated clearly that the subject was closed.

‘Time I went. I don’t want to stand the whole way.’

Ravinel dragged himself to his feet. It was clear now: he could no longer count on Lucienne. Before, when they’d had that breakdown on the road, had not her impulse been to leave him to his fate?… But what could you expect?
They had after all never been more than two associates, two accomplices.

‘Of course you’ll let me know how you get on.’

‘Naturally.’

They had spoken of nothing except Mireille, and, now that that subject was exhausted, they had no more to say to each other. They walked in silence up the Rue de Rennes. They were no longer together, no longer a couple. You only had to look at her to know that, whatever happened, she would land on her feet. If the police made trouble, it was he and he alone who would foot the bill. He knew it. He was used to it. Wasn’t it always he who had paid?

‘And you must take care of your health.’

‘Oh, you know…’

‘I mean it. I’m not joking.’

That was true enough. She never joked. When had he ever seen her relaxed, smiling, confident? She was always looking ahead—months and months ahead. She clung to the future as others do to the past. What did she expect from it? He had never asked that question, prevented by a sort of superstitious fear. For he wasn’t at all sure of occupying an important place in it.

‘I’m rather concerned about what you told me just now,’ she went on.

He understood at once what she was referring to, and, lowering his voice, he answered:

‘All the same, it would explain everything… If people could come back…’

She took his arm and pressed it against her.

‘You thought you got a letter, didn’t you? Yes, darling, you thought you did, and I was quite wrong to get angry about it.
I understand perfectly now. One ought
always
to look at things with the eyes of a doctor. There are no such things as liars—just ill people. For a moment I thought you were playing a double game, but I can see it clearly now—the whole thing’s been too much for you… And with that long drive on top of it all.’

‘But what about Germain?’

‘Leave Germain out of it. I wouldn’t place any credence whatever in his evidence. Nor would you in a calmer moment. You ought to see a psychiatrist. I think I’ll send you to Brichet.’

‘Suppose I told him everything?’

Lucienne looked up sharply.

‘Very well, I’ll have a go at you myself as soon as we can manage it. And I assure you you’ll see no more ghosts when I’m through with you. Meanwhile I’ll give you a prescription.’

She scribbled one then and there, standing under a lamp ost. Ravinel wasn’t really taken in. In a confused sort of way he felt that they were acting a scene that was altogether unconvincing. Lucienne was trying to reassure him. But no doubt at the back of her mind the resolve was already forming not to come back, never to see him again. He was to be left to face the music alone…

‘There you are. Nothing much in it except some sedatives. The best thing you can do is to get a good night’s rest. You’ve been living on your nerves for the last five days and if you go on like that you’ll crack up altogether.’

They reached the station. Second by second Lucienne was becoming more and more of a stranger to him. She bought an armful of magazines. So she could read, could she?

‘Suppose I came with you…’

‘Are you mad, Fernand? You’ve got a job to do.’

And to crown it all she came out with the astonishing remark:

‘After all, Mireille was your wife.’

She seemed to have no sense of guilt whatsoever. He had wanted to get rid of his wife. She had given him technical assistance in return for a half share in the spoils. Her responsibilities went no further. It was his affair and he must see it through. And the remark which flashed into his mind was hardly less astonishing than hers: she was leaving them high and dry. Them. Mireille and him.

He took a platform ticket and followed her to the train.

‘You’ll go back to Enghien now, I suppose. That’s the best thing to do. Tomorrow you’ll have a good hunt, once and for all.’

‘Once and for all,’ he repeated with aching irony.

They passed several nearly empty coaches.

‘Get in touch with your firm. Ask them for a holiday. They can’t very well refuse. And study the papers. You might learn something from them…’

Said to console him, all that. Just empty words, spoken to fill up the silence, to keep between them one last bridge open, though in a few minutes it would go crashing down into an infinite abyss. But he fell in with the game, making it a point of honor to keep up appearances to the last. He found her a seat in a new compartment which smelled of varnish. And Lucienne remained on the platform as long as possible, only leaving it when the guard made her a signal to get in. She kissed Ravinel with a vigor that took him by surprise.

‘Good luck, darling! Keep your chin up. And call me up soon.’

The train moved, slowly, smoothly. Lucienne’s face at the window grew smaller, till it was no more than a pale shape.
Other faces passed, looking out of other windows, and each in turn stared at Ravinel. He turned up his collar. He felt ill. The train melted away into a sky that was full of signal lights. Not till it was out of sight did he turn round and walk slowly away.

Before going to sleep, Ravinel turned Lucienne’s words over and over in his mind.

‘Bodies don’t wander about all by themselves.’ The next morning, after the first sluggish moments of regaining consciousness, he was suddenly struck by a detail which had hitherto escaped him. He lay quite still, his features drawn, his brain in a whirl. Yet it was quite a simple little detail. Mireille’s identity card was in her bag, which was still there in the house at Enghien. That meant that, if she were found, there would be no means of identifying the body. Supposing the thieves had dumped it somewhere. That was the point—where do they take unidentified bodies?

To the Morgue, of course.

Ravinel washed and dressed perfunctorily, then rang up the Boulevard Magenta to ask for a few days off. No difficulty. Then he looked in the telephone directory for the address of the Morgue. Unable to find it, he remembered that its official name was now the Institut Médico-Légal. And there it was—Place Mazas, that is to say at the end of the Quai de la Rapée, just opposite the Pont d’Austerlitz. Good! He could find out something at any rate.

He hadn’t gone back to Enghien, but had spent the night at the Hotel de Bretagne, by the Gare Montparnasse. When he left it, he had some difficulty in finding his bearings.
Paris was once again immersed in a greenish fog, which made everything look as though it were at the bottom of the sea. The Café Dupont was like a liner that had gone down with all its lights burning. He had to walk cautiously, and it took him quite a time to reach it. He drank a cup of coffee standing at the bar beside a railwayman who was explaining to the barman that all the trains were at least an hour late and that the express from Le Mans had been derailed near Versailles.

‘And the forecast says it’ll last for several days. In London it seems people are crawling about with flashlights.’

Ravinel was seized by a gnawing uneasiness. Why this fog? And why should it have come on this particular day? A day on which it was more than ever necessary to distinguish the living from the dead!… That was absurd, of course. He knew it. But how could he prevent the fog’s penetrating him and mounting to his head like opium smoke? It made everything real and unreal by turns.

He paid and ventured out into the street. As he walked, the lights of the café soon faded behind him: the thick sticky void stretched out in front, pierced occasionally by headlights like unseeing eyes, pierced too by the sound of steps, many steps, but no one could tell whose they were.

An empty taxi passed close to the curb and he pounced on it. But where should he tell the driver to take him? To the Morgue? No, he couldn’t bring himself to say that. He hesitated, then mumbled some incoherent directions which the man listened to contemptuously.

‘Better make up your mind, hadn’t you?’

‘Quai de la Rapée, then.’

The taxi started off with such a jerk that he was flung back onto the seat. He already regretted his impulse. What was he going to do at the Morgue? What would he say when he got there? Wasn’t he simply walking into a trap? For there was a trap somewhere—there must be—a sort of booby trap concealed under the body.

Traps. His mind went off at a tangent to the strange and varied devices made of steel and wire for snaring animals or fish which figured among the articles he traded in, and which it was his business to demonstrate.

‘You bait it here with a bit of meat or chicken giblets… You lay it in the water with the end upstream. The fish doesn’t even know it’s caught…’

Yes, there was a trap somewhere.

The brakes jammed on abruptly. This time Ravinel was flung forward. The driver swore volubly at some invisible pedestrian, then drove on again. Sometimes he wiped the interior of the windshield with the back of his hand, muttering all the time. Ravinel had no idea what part of Paris they were going through. Perhaps the taxi itself was all part of the trap. For Lucienne was quite right: a body doesn’t go about all alone. There must be someone else in the picture. Always from Lucienne’s point of view of course. The possibility of Mireille’s being able to appear and disappear at will was a matter between him and Mireille alone.

Either way there was a threat. It might come from Mireille or from her body. Why not from both at once? That would be worse still, but it was a possibility that couldn’t be ignored.

A row of smudgy lights. Ah! That might be the Gare d’Austerlitz. Yes, it certainly was. The taxi turned and dived
into a sort of cotton against which the headlights were impotent. The Seine must be close at hand, but there was nothing to be seen out of the window but a stagnant cloud. The taxi stopped and he got out to find himself enveloped in a silence in which he could just hear the engine ticking, a silence like that of a cellar, a silence which seemed to be warning him.

The taxi went off, instantly swallowed up by the fog. Presently Ravinel was conscious of the sound of water dripping from the roof, and trickling along the gutters. He thought of the
lavoir
and his hand instinctively felt for his revolver. It was the only thing hard and substantial in a decomposing, deliquescent universe.

Groping, he came to a parapet. The fog lay so thick round his legs that he instinctively lifted his feet to step over it. Suddenly a building rose up in front of him. Was this the Morgue? He went up some steps. It was.

A large hall. At the far end a stretcher on rubber-tired wheels. On the right an office. He pushed open the door.

Filing cabinets. A green-shaded lamp which threw a circle of light onto the floor. A radiator with a saucepan of water on it to keep the air from getting too dry. Quite unnecessary, as the fog made everything damp in any case. Here it was mixed with tobacco smoke, beneath which was a faint smell of disinfectant.

At a desk sat a man with a silver-badged uniform cap tilted on the back of his head. Another man was pretending to warm himself at the radiator. He wore a shiny, threadbare overcoat, but his shoes were so new that they squeaked every time he moved. Both studied Ravinel as he advanced cautiously.

‘What is it?’ asked the man at the desk.

What Ravinel didn’t like was to feel the other man behind him. And the squeaking of his shoes grated on his nerves.

‘It’s about my wife. I’ve been traveling, and, when I got back, she wasn’t at home. I’m beginning to be worried about her.’

The two men exchanged glances, and Ravinel had the impression they were trying not to laugh.

‘Have you informed the police?… Where do you live?’

‘At Enghien. No. I haven’t reported it to anybody yet.’

‘You should have.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’ll know better next time.’

Disconcerted, Ravinel turned to the other man, who stood with his back to the radiator holding out his hands towards it and who gazed vacantly before him. He was fat with bags under his eyes and a waxen complexion. His double chin almost completely concealed his collar.

‘When did you return home?’ continued the man at the desk.

‘Saturday.’

‘Is this the first time your wife’s gone off without telling you?’

‘Yes… At least since I’ve known her. It seems she used to run away from home as a child… But that’s so long ago that…’

‘What are you afraid of? Suicide?’

‘I… I really don’t know.’

‘What’s your name?’

It sounded more and more like a cross-examination. Ravinel was tempted to put the chap in his place. It wasn’t merely what he said, but the way he calmly inspected Ravinel from head to foot, meanwhile running his tongue over his teeth.

‘Ravinel. Fernand Ravinel.’

If the man’s attitude was rude, it nevertheless had to be put up with. The important thing was to find out.

‘What’s your wife like?… To start with, what age?’

‘Twenty-nine.’

‘Height?’

‘Medium. About five foot two.’

‘Fair or dark?’

‘Fair.’

The man was leaning back with his chair tilted, holding on to the edge of his desk. His nails were bitten to the quick.

‘What is she wearing?’

‘A blue tailored suit. At least I suppose so.’

That must have been a mistake, for the man glanced at the other as though calling his attention to it.

‘You can’t say for certain how she’s dressed?’

‘No. But most likely her blue suit. Though she might well have a fur-trimmed coat over it.’

‘You might have checked up on her clothes. Then you’d have known.’

He lifted his cap, scratched his head, then put the cap on again.

‘There’s the one that was drowned by the Pont de Bercy,’ he said. ‘I can’t think of any other.’

‘Ah! So you’ve found a—’

‘The papers were full of it on Saturday. Don’t you read the papers?’

Ravinel had the feeling the man behind him was staring at him now.

‘Wait a minute.’

The man swiveled round on one leg of his chair, got up, and went out through the door. Ravinel didn’t dare move. The other man was still studying him—he felt sure of it. Occasionally one of his shoes squeaked faintly.

The wait was horrible. Ravinel pictured rows and rows of bodies all laid out on shelves. The man with the silver cap-badge must be running his eye over them like a butler who has gone down to the cellar for a bottle of Haut-Brion 1939.

At last he came back.

‘If you’ll come this way.’

They went along a passage and into a room with a tiled floor and white enameled walls which was cut in two by a huge sheet of glass. The slightest sound echoed and re-echoed. From the ceiling came a crude glare of light. Somehow the place reminded Ravinel of a fish market after hours, when it had been cleaned up. He wouldn’t have been a bit surprised to see a bit of ice or a strand of seaweed that had been overlooked. Through the glass a porter came into view wheeling a stretcher.

‘Come closer. Don’t be afraid.’

Ravinel leaned against the sheet of plate glass. The body glided towards him, and he had the impression he was watching Mireille emerging from the bathtub, her hair plastered down, her wet clothes clinging to her limbs. He smothered a sort of gurgle, his hands spread out on the glass which grew misty from his agitated breathing.

‘Well?’ asked the man in the cap blandly. ‘Is that any use to you?’

No. It wasn’t Mireille. Not that that made it any less dreadful. If anything, more.

‘Recognize her?’

‘No.’

The man made a sign and the porter wheeled the thing away. Ravinel wiped the sweat from his face.

‘It does give you a bit of a shock. The first time. But since it’s not your wife…’

He took Ravinel back to the office and resumed his seat at his desk.

‘I’m sorry… That is… Well, you see what I mean… If anything turns up, we’ll let you know. What’s your address?’

‘Gai Logis. Enghien.’

The pen scratched. The other was still standing motionless by the radiator.

‘But, you know, you really ought to report it to the police.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Oh, that’s what we’re here for.’

And Ravinel found himself outside, his legs weak, his ears humming. The fog was as thick as ever, and he decided to take the Métro. He knew pretty accurately where the entrance to the nearest station was, and, after calculating a moment, set course for it. By this time the traffic had come to a complete standstill, but there were other sounds, some near, some far, and he had the impression of being escorted by invisible presences in a sort of funeral, solemn and secret.

So Mireille wasn’t at the Morgue. What would Lucienne say to that? And the insurance people? Ought he to notify them?… He stopped. The fog was almost choking him. And, standing still, he was aware of the sound of squeaking shoes. He coughed: the squeaking stopped. It was impossible to say from just which direction it had come.

He moved on, and the squeaking shoes moved too. It was clear now where the sound came from—just a few paces behind him.

Hadn’t he known it was a trap? A pretty cunning one too. They had sized him up perfectly and had counted on his coming to the Morgue… No. That was nonsense. They couldn’t possibly have known… And yet…

Ravinel stumbled over the curb. For a second he caught sight of a shadowy figure, but it had instantly disappeared again in the fog. The entrance to the Métro couldn’t be far off now. He broke into a run, almost bumping into people whose faces appeared suddenly, as though by some act of creation, and then melted away into nothingness. The squeaking was still audible. Was the man intending to kill him? Would he suddenly see the gleam of a knife, feel an excruciating pain, then nothing?

But why? Ravinel had no enemies. Unless, of course, you should call Mireille one. And he wasn’t ready to admit that possibility for a minute. How could Mireille…

The Métro. Suddenly everything became visible. He was surrounded by real people now, all of them covered with tiny droplets—on their coats, their hair, their eyebrows. At the bottom of the steps, he waited for the man. And, sure enough, he came into view: first his shoes, then the shabby overcoat, whose pockets were bulging.

When Ravinel reached the platform, the man was still on his heels. Perhaps he was the chap that had whisked away the body and this was the time he had chosen to come forward and dictate his terms.

Ravinel got in right at the head of the train. The other got in too, but two doors farther down. At Ravinel’s elbow a
policeman was reading
L’Équipe
. Perhaps he ought to pluck him by the sleeve and say:

‘Look here! Someone’s following me. I’m in danger.’

The policeman would most likely laugh in his face. If he took it seriously, it might be even worse. He might start asking a lot of questions… Better leave him out of it.

The stations went by with their enormous posters. Should Ravinel try to give his pursuer the slip? No. That demanded altogether too much effort. To begin with he’d have to think hard. Better wait and see. Was life all that wonderful? Was it worth putting up a frantic struggle for?

He got out at the Gare du Nord. There was no need to turn round to make sure: the man was still there all right. The shoes told him that. Funny to wear shoes like that when you’re following someone. But perhaps that was the whole idea: the squeaking was to get him down, break his nerve. Certainly the other didn’t attempt to avoid being seen.