The Stone Boy (20 page)

A fit of dementia, a psychotic episode…

Had she attacked someone?

He hit the steering wheel with his fist. Dr. Préau didn’t have very much faith in himself. Growing up without a father limits your self-confidence. At that moment, he felt like he was going through all of his exams, naked, in a lecture hall, with all his classmates pointing. A carer with no balls. Martin hadn’t had the courage to commit his mother to being hospitalized. To occupy his mind, as he did after each visit he made to 6 Rue des Lilas, he listed off the care facilities in the region with the best conditions. Martin reached the neighborhood near the train station before finishing up his list. Two ambulances were double-parked on Rue des Lilas. A police car was blocking off the road. The doctor parked his car along the railway line, turned off the ignition, and grabbed his bag, which he had thrown in the backseat in haste. The slam of the car door startled him. He walked briskly to the fieldstone house with the slate roof that stood taller than the other houses, insolent. He was stopped in his tracks by a policeman, who changed his mind when Martin identified himself as a doctor. He crossed a second barrier that ran down the street, made up of a dozen neighbors. He got the feeling that among the older ones, some were staring at him, hostile. Among them, Isabelle, freezing in a shawl, stood clutching her husband.

Martin reached the first ambulance. One of the back doors of the vehicle was open. With some apprehension, he ventured a glance, looking for the frail silhouette of an old woman on a stretcher, but two paramedics were in the way.

“Excuse me, I’m Dr. Préau. I think my mother had an accident…”

The nurse turned to him and looked him over quickly before pointing with her head.

“You should go down there.”

Furtively, Martin glanced at a boy and a little girl lying in the ambulance, aged between three and six, he guessed, oxygen masks on their faces. He felt like he was looking at Bastien again, in intensive care in the hospital at Montfermeil.

“Sorry!”

The doctor stepped back, the door narrowly missing closing on his nose. The siren filled the street with its grim cry. What had happened to the kids he had seen in the ambulance?

What you took for a delusion is unfortunately only the truth.

Martin put the collar of his coat up and walked in the direction he had been shown, toward the fieldstone house. The shutters on the ground floor were open like the housekeeper had said. No sign of life. It was across the road that the forces of order were at work behind a concrete fence, a family home that his mother suspected of being a place of abuse. Martin stopped in the middle of the street.

Could it be that she had been right?

Dr. Mamnoue has been aware of it for several weeks. I have also alerted social services, and I made an official statement to the police on Friday.

The screech of the fire engine siren startled him. The emergency vehicle was going down the one-way road in the wrong direction.

“Sir, you can’t stay there.”

The policeman came up to him nervously. Martin identified himself.

“You’re the son of the woman who lives across the road?”

“Yes.”

The officer grabbed his radio. The conversation was brief.

“Stay here, please, sir. We’ll come back to you.”

“What happened? Is my mother in that house?”

“I can’t tell you anything. You have to wait here.”

The iron gate swung open sharply to allow a stretcher through. The officer forced Martin to move back on the path. Under the shock blanket was an unknown blonde woman between thirty-five and forty, her face half-covered by a mask. The doctor shuddered.

Supported by two police officers, a stocky man of about the same age appeared framed by the gate. He had one arm in a sling, and his green sweatshirt was stained with blood. Pale under the lamp, he looked at the stretcher as it moved away.

The doctor felt a tingling in his fingertips.

He pressed his back against the wall.

Again, forgive me for causing you all this torment.

Damn it!

What kind of shit storm had she got herself into?

Sitting on a chair with a frayed cobalt-blue fabric back, the man watched his hands. Usually soft and warm regardless of the season—a physical characteristic appreciated by his patients and Audrette—they were particularly damp and cool. His fingers shook in spite of his efforts to control his nerves.

Martin pulled up the wrist of his right shirtsleeve. His watch read nine o’clock. Lieutenant Sevran was with a colleague. Their voices spilled through the open office door to him in the hallway. Sevran had found an indication of proceedings against one Elsa Préau on a list of people interviewed as part of a criminal investigation. He had asked for whatever might be pulled up from the archives for the case, which dated back to 1997. And then a policeman stopped in to see him, the one he was chatting with in the corridor.

Knees together, shoulders hunched, Martin ignored the nagging hunger in stomach. But he was cold without his duffel coat—despite the prevailing heat in the police station. Through habit, rather than through fear of saying too much, he kept his teeth clenched. Seeing his mother lying on the floor in a pool of blood with three guys over her, trying to revive her, had made him tense.

People think doctors can take anything.

They didn’t bother with the kid gloves when they painted the picture for him.

Pelvic fracture, major internal injuries with bilateral damage to the lobes of the lungs, and a concussion. And then there was the neighbor, the mass of ninety kilograms in a sweatshirt spotted earlier, he had reduced Martin’s dear mum to mush: in the fall, her head struck the edge of the kitchen countertop. They kept the most vital prognosis for last. Martin’s mother was in a coma. This just rekindled old memories. Only this time, she might not come back.

His phone vibrated in his coat pocket. Audrette sent a text message to her husband to comfort him. She missed Martin. He missed her arms, her breasts pressed around his skull, cutting off any morbid thoughts. He imagined the house, a glass of Bordeaux in hand, standing in front of the bay window overlooking the sloping garden. The view across the hills above the city, a panorama they hadn’t grown tired of four years later. A house bought on credit, too big for the two of them, and which they tried in vain to fill with the unbearable screaming of a baby whose young parents would adore it as an affirmation of life. Martin had quickly phoned Audrette from the police car to tell her what had just happened, foreseeing that he’d be late returning home.

“You’re her guardian! Shit! You know what she’s capable of. Why you did not have her put in care? Do you realize what the consequences of this could be? If the children and their mother don’t come out of this, how do you think it will go?”

The first reaction of his wife was violent and had crushed him. When Audrette called in tears, vowing that if her mother-in-law was doing it a second time, it would drive her to the madhouse, he regained a bit of courage.

His mother, his burden.

If there were a single reason that Martin had returned from Canada, disregarding his education and a great career that awaited him there in the cardiac department headed by his father, it was his mum. Only for his mum. The letters that he received from France were miserable. With no brother or sister, her mother dead, her father terminally ill with cancer, she had only him left, her son. Miserable letters, but entertaining ones. Her letters covered her reading, her bizarre diets, her students’ imaginings, and the unlikely animals she collected in her garden, but also French social policy, the problems created by globalization and ecological disasters. More recently, in a letter dated 6 January 2006, commenting on the work of an economist, she was already foreseeing a stock market crash in the United States, the repercussions of which would be global. Of her solitude, however, she said nothing, or very little, quoting a line about the melancholy that seized at dusk, after her schooldays filled with screaming children. So the young man, his heart shriveled up by remorse, guilty of having neglected his mother to reach the father who had abandoned him on the other side of the world, returned to France. A hiatus of eight years, in the middle of which, Audrette blossomed like a flower.

Martin surveyed the narrow, cluttered room: on the lower cabinet, a SWAT helmet resting on a stack of files, and safes, similar to those found in the hotel room, set the tone. Hung on the wall were a coat, a child’s drawing, and a photograph of four smiling men, their arms around each other’s necks—Lieutenant Sevran’s team. So you could be happy in the police department, have a few beers, and be chummy for the camera. The child’s drawing brought back memories of two police sergeants standing in his doctor’s surgery. One of the officers, who had a cold, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to clear his sinuses, drowning out the announcement of Bastien and Granny Elsa’s “accident” in a tissue.

Back then, there were also children’s drawings on the walls of his surgery.

Bastien’s drawings.

All this came back to him now.

“I have nothing to add, sir,” his mother had whispered before the guards took her. The “diabolical grandmother” would make the front page of the
Parisien
again.

A dangerous grandmother—but is she crazy?

Psychiatrists have it out at the trial of Elsa Préau,

accused of killing her grandson, age 7.

Georges Milhau

Special correspondent

A question haunts the court. A key issue. Should Elsa Préau, who has been on trial for the past three days, be in a courtroom? Was she or was she not accountable when, on 6 June 1997, she led her grandson Bastien into the town park, sat down with him under a tree, and administered to him a dose of sedatives sufficient to kill him? The three experts who examined her do not agree. The case, which is already complicated, is awash in confusion. For Dr. Valente, the accused is paranoid, suffering from delusions and an obsessive fixation on Bastien, but the delirium does not affect other areas of her mind. In this state of “mental precariousness, she has become progressively convinced of the torture inflicted on Bastien by his mother.” For him, Elsa Préau’s responsibility is moderately diminished. But for Dr. Dupin, Elsa Préau suffered a paranoid psychotic break. His conclusion is unequivocal: “This crime is not judicable and does not warrant a criminal verdict.” According to the third expert, Dr. Texier, we are dealing with a paranoid personality, a pathological one, with a “hypertrophied ego” and a quasi-symbiotic relationship with Bastien. The total effect “impaired her judgement and took control of her actions at the time in question,” but it did not render the accused responsible.

The jurors are lost, particularly since the accused absolutely insists on being tried and convicted, and doesn’t want to hear a word said about mental illness. She insists on “appearing before Martin (her son) to answer for her heinous act.” Dr. Texier has taken this reaction to be a further sign of Elsa Préau’s paranoia.

With so many uncertainties, what followed the parade of witnesses yesterday seemed quite preposterous. We heard that Elsa Préau, 62 years old today, has had an exceptional life. Her intelligence and unrivaled tenacity propelled her from her position as a schoolteacher to headmistress, where she became known by reputation all the way up to the Ministry of Education for creating the first “nature and garden” class in 1991. It was also heard that she had loved her son Martin too much, and that her descent into paranoia began when she discovered bruises on Bastien’s body, and especially when her daughter-in-law Audrette forbade her from seeing her grandson on the advice of a juvenile court judge. Elsa Préau then tried to alert numerous people around her, convinced that her grandson was a victim of abuse. She even sent a letter to the director of the County Council that runs social services. But no one believed her.

Then the police officer who interrogated her in custody entered. He had allowed her to “confess,” which had lasted all night. “She imagined Bastien to be suffering so.” She did not think she would be capable of living without her grandson. Denied visits with Bastien, she wanted to die, but could not bring herself to leave the child alone with his mother. “She administered what was a fatal dose to Bastien, but insufficient for herself. She failed.” Finally, the officer stated that until that point, “nobody had listened to her,” not even her son Martin, whose refusal to listen she did not understand. “So she turned herself in.”

Closing remarks from both sides and the verdict are expected today.

The lieutenant turned his computer screen so that the man in front of him could read the article he had found online.

“Does that refresh your memory at all, Doctor?”

Martin grimaced. He needed more time. It was all happening too fast. Barely four hours had passed since the assault, and his mother had already gone from victim to the guilty party. Lieutenant Sevran took on a contrite air.