Three Days and a Life Read online

  Some had ventured to add two or three other names to the list of candidates, among them that of Monsieur Danesi, who ran the Scierie du Pont sawmill, but the accusation gained little credence since the source of the information was Roland, an employee Danesi had quarrelled with some weeks previously over some unresolved incident involving a theft. A rumour is a delicate sauce, either it takes or it doesn’t. This one did not take.

  As for Monsieur Desmedt, he was considered an outsider with little credibility. Surly, often brutish and always spoiling for a fight, he was not well-liked, nonetheless he had the undeniable advantage of being from Beauval and therefore a less likely suspect than Monsieur Guénot, who was from Lyon, to say nothing of the hit-and-run driver who might be from anywhere. No-one seriously believed that Monsieur Desmedt could have abducted and murdered his son, why would he do such a thing? Besides, the gendarmes had searched the route to the factory he had taken with Rémi and found nothing. In fact, even those who disliked Roger Desmedt found it difficult to believe he was guilty.

  At the very thought that someone might have killed Rémi – that sweet little boy with his chubby face and his bright, twinkling eyes – conversations would trail off into a queasy silence at this image whose true horror no-one could begin to imagine. Even Antoine could not picture it, because as the afternoon dragged on, his experience of the event had been transformed. He had been the second-last person to see Rémi alive. This fact alone provoked heated discussions. Had Antoine seen Rémi before or after the boy had walked part of the way to work with his father? This was a serious question. It was a matter of minutes and was impossible to determine. And so Antoine was forced to recount the scene over and over. People would gather round him and for the umpteenth time they would listen to him explain how he came out of his house, they would picture little Rémi hunkered by the shed his father had demolished, imagine the rubbish sacks, one of which contained the body of the dog. Antoine himself eventually came to believe this fiction; each time he told it, he could see it, he was there; in his mind and that of those who listened, the story took on the weight and heft of truth.

  Théo Weiser, having lost his starring role, stayed in the background. Antoine watched out of the corner of his eye. Théo, constantly surrounded by school friends, would whisper and give him sidelong glances . . .

  Though Antoine did not know why, he and Théo had never hit it off. He, Émilie and Théo formed a strange, unofficial triangle: Antoine was a bright pupil, he had just graduated from his first term in sixième with excellent marks in almost every subject. Émilie was the sort of average student who, when they reach troisième, is channelled into whatever subjects are fashionable that year. Théo was bottom of his class, but clever enough that he had only once been forced to repeat a year. He was a year older than Antoine and Émilie, and they were not in the same class, he was with Kevin and Paul.

  The fact that they were the only two pupils from Beauval in their class, that they had known each other all their lives and saw each other every day, should have brought Antoine and Émilie closer, but try as he might . . . His last attempt to ask her out up at the tree house had ended in dismal failure. Antoine did not really know how to talk to girls. With Émilie, it was even worse. And yet, before this incident, she had been in all his dreams, all his fantasies . . .

  The divers stopped their work at about 5.00 p.m. and the few remaining onlookers began to head back to Beauval.

  Antoine quickened his step so he could walk with Émilie, who was ahead with a gaggle of girls. He soon noticed that he was not exactly welcome. No-one would look him in the eye, no-one spoke to him. Had he gone too far in telling his story so many times? Did they resent him for attracting so much attention? Unable to bear it any longer, he grabbed Émilie by the arm and took her to one side.

  “It’s Théo,” she said eventually.

  This did not come as a surprise.

  “He’s just jealous.”

  “No, no,” said Émilie. “It’s not that . . .”

  She looked away, but actually she was dying to tell Antoine everything, so he did not have to press her very hard.

  “He’s saying that you were the last person to see Rémi and . . .”

  “And what?”

  Émilie’s tone became grave and anxious:

  “And that Rémi often followed you into the woods . . .”

  A shudder ran through Antoine’s body, he felt suddenly cold, as though frozen stiff.

  “He says that instead of dragging the pond, they’d be better off searching up by Saint-Eustache . . .”

  This was a disaster.

  Émilie stared at him for a long while, head tilted slightly, trying to unravel the truth from the lies. Antoine stood, unable to move, shocked by this revelation. Théo truly was a spiteful, vindictive bastard, he was a bully; it did not occur to Antoine that, unwittingly, Théo had hit upon the truth.

  It was Émilie’s questioning look that prompted him to act.

  Without giving a thought to the situation or the possible consequences, he set off at a run towards the group ahead. As he ran, he stretched out both arms and hit Théo in the back, shoving him hard and sending him sprawling. The girls started screaming. Antoine leaped on Théo, straddled his chest and began pounding his face with both fists. It made a sound that none of them had ever heard, muffled, visceral . . . Théo was bigger and stronger than Antoine, but the attack had caught him off guard. By the time he managed to throw off his attacker, his face was streaming blood. Antoine landed heavily on his side, he saw Théo struggling to get up, but he was faster. In an instant he was on his feet, frantically looking around for a stone. He bent to grab a large branch and, as Théo staggered towards him, he raised it in both hands and brought it crashing down on his face.

  The branch was about forty centimetres long and quite thick, but it was completely rotted through.

  It broke against Théo’s skull with a spongy sound. Antoine found himself holding a length of jagged wood the colour of a mushroom.

  The little group was so shocked by the incident that no-one noticed how preposterous it was. Though it had ended in a pathetic farce, Antoine had just launched an attack on an authority that had never before been challenged.

  Several adults rushed over to separate the boys. Shouting and fretting, they reached for handkerchiefs and cleaned up the blood. Thankfully it was nothing serious, only a split lip.

  The crowd moved off again, trudging back to Beauval.

  The teenagers spontaneously split into two groups. More of them sided with Antoine than with Théo.

  Antoine nervously ran his fingers through his hair, flustered, he was unsettled by the troubling similarity . . . Twice in the past two days he had lashed out and hit a boy with a stick. The first boy, the one who did not deserve it, was dead.

  Was he going to becoming one of the vicious, indiscriminate bullies he had seen so often in the school playground?

  He noticed Émilie was walking beside him. Though he could not have said why, this fact did little to reassure him. This obsession girls had with thugs . . .

  Shortly before 5.00 p.m., the police van drove Bernadette Desmedt home. The sight of this woman crushed by grief was heart-wrenching.

  While he waited for his mother to come home, Antoine turned on the television and watched the news report about the worrying disappearance of little Rémi Desmedt. There was footage of Beauval, first came the church, then the mairie. Then came the main street. In a rather pathetic attempt to dramatise the situation – since the reporter on location had nothing to say – the camera panned through the town centre and out towards little Rémi’s house.

  Antoine felt a lump in his throat as he watched the main street flash past, the town square, the grocer’s shop, the school . . .

  The camera was closing in, not on Rémi’s house, but on his own. It was not searching for the child, but for him.

  Now the footage showed his street, the Mouchottes’ house with its shutters painted Bri
tish racing green, then the garden of the Desmedts’ house. In order to dramatise and accentuate the void left by the little boy’s disappearance, the camera slowly swung around, lingering on the abandoned swing, on the garden gate the boy would have pushed when he left . . .

  The camera pulled back, the wide shot taking in a section of the Courtins’ garden, and Antoine waited, expecting it to scan the façade, to gradually zoom in and end on a close-up of his face: “And this is the boy who killed Rémi Desmedt and buried his body in the woods at Saint-Eustache, where it will be discovered by the gendarmerie tomorrow morning.”

  Antoine could not help himself, he quickly retreated and ran upstairs to hide out in his bedroom.

  Madame Courtin eventually came back from doing the shopping, it had taken three times longer than usual. Antoine could hear her bustling around in the kitchen before she came upstairs to his room. She looked distraught.

  “It’s not one of the teachers at the school they’ve arrested . . .”

  Antoine looked up from his Transformers and stared at his mother.

  “It’s Monsieur Kowalski.”

  7

  Madame Courtin and her son were both shaken by this arrest. Though he felt wretched at the idea, Antoine could not help but think that if Monsieur Kowalski were found guilty – he did not trouble to wonder how such a verdict might be possible – it would bother him less than if it were someone else. His mother had always hated working for the man, he had a terrible reputation in the town, he even looked evil. The fruitless searches, the pond that had been dragged to no avail, and now the arrest of Frankenstein . . . Antoine had begun to believe that the nightmare might be ending, that he might be safe, but that was to forget Théo, whose spiteful innuendos might lead the police to him. How far might Théo go? What if he told his father? What if he told the gendarmes?

  Antoine was furious with himself for giving in to his anger, for attacking Théo, he should have left things as they were, he had been stupid.

  “Monsieur Kowalski . . .” Madame Courtin muttered. “Well I never . . .”

  She was clearly troubled by the news.

  “What do you care?” said Antoine, “You never liked him.”

  “Well, no, but even so . . . It’s different when you know someone personally.”

  She stood for a moment in silence. Antoine assumed she was considering the impact of this arrest on her life, on her work, she was obviously worried.

  “You can get a job somewhere else. You were always complaining about him, you never wanted to go to work.”

  “Really? I suppose you think it’s easy to just find another job?”

  She was angry now.

  “Try telling that to the factory workers Monsieur Weiser is planning to lay off in the New Year . . .!”

  Rumours of forthcoming redundancies had been doing the rounds in Beauval for weeks now. Whenever he was asked about it, Monsieur Weiser was cagey. He did not know yet, it would depend on a number of factors, he would have to wait for the quarterly accounts . . . The workers had noticed that orders had increased over the past two months, but this was something that happened every year in the run-up to Christmas. Monsieur Weiser had been forced to rehire staff he had laid off three months earlier, though on a part-time basis, for a few hours a week. Even Monsieur Mouchotte had gone back to work for several weeks. But was the upturn enough to make up for a disastrous autumn, when the order books had been empty? No-one knew.

  Antoine often wondered whether his mother really needed to work. She railed against Monsieur Kowalski, all the years she’d been working for him, and for what? Antoine did not know, but it was obviously not much, were they really so poor? Madame Courtin had never complained about the maintenance her ex-husband paid. “I can’t fault him on that score, at least . . .” she would sometimes say, leaving Antoine to wonder on what other scores she could fault him.

  “Right, well, we can’t just sit around here,” she said finally, “You need to get yourself ready.”

  She was preoccupied by something else.

  Christmas Mass, which rotated among the surrounding towns each year, was to take place in Beauval. This year, Midnight Mass was scheduled for 7.30 p.m., since the parish priest had to criss-cross the département to give six Masses one after another.

  Madame Courtin’s relationship with religion was sensible and pragmatic. She had sent Antoine to Sunday School as a precaution, but when he did not want to go anymore, she had not insisted. She went to church when she needed help. God was a distant neighbour it was pleasant to bump into occasionally, someone you felt you could ask a small favour of from time to time. She went to Mass at Christmas in the way some people might visit an elderly aunt. Her utilitarian approach to religion was largely a matter of conformism.

  Madame Courtin had been born here, she had been raised and still lived in a small town where everybody knew everybody else’s business, where what the neighbours thought was a crushing weight. In everything, Madame Courtin did what ought to be done, simply because it was what everyone around her did. She cared about her reputation the same way she cared about her home and probably as much as she cared about life itself, since she was the sort of person who was quite capable of dying from a lack of respectability. To Antoine, Midnight Mass was just one more of the duties he had to submit to each year so that his mother – at least in her own eyes – could continue to seem like a fine, upstanding woman.

  As everywhere else, the faithful in Beauval were not as numerous as they had once been. If the Sunday Masses throughout the year managed to attract a sizeable congregation it was thanks to those who flocked from Marmont, Montjoue, from Fuzelières, from Varennes as well as those from Beauval itself.

  On the whole, religious worship was a seasonal affair. Most of the faithful came to church only when the harvest was poor, when the price of livestock plummeted or when local factories were planning lay-offs. The church offered a service, and the congregation behaved like consumers. Even important cyclical events like Christmas, Easter or the Assumption were a factor in this utilitarian approach. They were a means for the customers to pay their subscription so that, during the year, they could make use of the service as necessary. As a result, Midnight Mass at Christmas was always a roaring success.

  Shortly after 7.00 p.m., the residents of Beauval began to assemble at the town square. They should have been pleased to see the church so thronged, but any pleasure was spoiled by the fact that many of the congregation were not from Beauval.

  The women went into the church as soon as they arrived, while the men loitered for a few minutes in the churchyard, smoking a cigarette, shaking hands, making small talk, bumping into clients they had not seen in an age, women they used to sleep with, even a few old friends from whom, over time, they had become a little estranged.

  The disappearance of Rémi Desmedt had stoked a certain curiosity which went some way to explaining the swelling crowds. They had all seen Beauval on the nightly news bulletin, and in coming here, those who did not live in the town were attempting to square two very different images: the familiar humdrum town where nothing ever happened, and the news of this terrible incident that, with each passing hour, loomed more like a tragedy.

  Thirty hours had elapsed, and the disappearance of little Rémi was now considered deeply disturbing.

  Everyone was speculating about what would happen.

  When would he be found? And what exactly would they find?

  On the steps of the church, this was all anyone could talk about as conversations gradually drifted towards the arrest of Monsieur Kowalski. Madame Mouchotte was listening, wide-eyed, to Claudine who had just happened to be in Kowalski’s shop when the gendarmes arrived.

  “It was all over in the space of five minutes, and that’s God’s honest truth. And Kowalski didn’t look too cocky, let me tell you . . .”

  Madame Courtin said:

  “But . . . what exactly is he being accused of?”

  Something about an alibi. Som
eone had heard someone else say that Kowalski’s van had been spotted parked on the edge of the woods on the outskirts of Beauval.

  “So where exactly was that filthy animal when it happened?” asked another in the group.

  “It’s not exactly what you might call proof!” said Madame Courtin. “Not that I’m making excuses for him, obviously not, but even so . . . If a man can’t even drive his car without being accused of abducting a child, well, I don’t know . . .”

  “That’s not the point!” said Madame Antonetti.

  She spoke in a strident tone, enunciating every syllable as though it were her last, which gave a clipped, peremptory tone to her pronouncements that many found persuasive. Everyone immediately turned to her.

  “The simple fact is that this man Kowalski (I’ve never set foot in that shop of his, perish the thought!), he can’t account for his whereabouts during the period when the child disappeared! His van was sighted, but Kowalski claims he can’t remember what he was doing . . .”

  She said this with such conviction that no-one would have thought to ask where she had come by this information. Especially as she was the primary and usually the best source of gossip in Beauval, and was therefore entitled to conclude ominously:

  “You have to admit it’s all very peculiar, no?”

  Madame Courtin nodded, yes, it is peculiar, it seems almost suspicious . . . But she did not seem entirely convinced.

  Antoine left his mother and ran to catch up with a pack of school friends in their Sunday best who had been forced to come to Mass too. Émilie was wearing a flower-print dress that looked as though it had been cut from a curtain roll, she seemed somehow more frizzy-haired, more blonde, more animated than usual, as pretty as a princess, a fact confirmed by the calculated indifference of all the boys present. Her parents, the most faithful of the faithful, never missed Mass, they had sent Émilie to Sunday School since she was a little girl. Madame Mouchotte was capable of going to Mass three times in one day, her husband was the only man who sang in the choir where he shamelessly drowned out everyone with a booming voice that communicated the fervour of his faith. Émilie did not believe in God, but was so devoted to her mother that she would have become a nun if she had been asked.