Bed of Nails Read online

  But that was what had happened.

  As a result, Guérin had added a new layer to the pre-existing hate of his colleagues: the visceral repulsion inspired by perverts, who, when plunged into something everyone else thinks revolting, actually seem to be enjoying themselves.

  Two years earlier, Guérin, aged forty and a top graduate from the Officer Training School, had already had both admirers and enemies. But everyone respected his competence, choosing to ignore certain odd aspects of his behaviour. Then there were the incidents, more and more frequent, outside the usual field of thinking and the classic methods of investigation. The incidents were put down to his Nobel-sized brain, which people hoped was working, even if it was not always easy to follow. But two years later, his career was over, he was personally disliked, and his assistant was universally considered a halfwit.

  After the fall, Guérin had undergone psychological tests. They had tried to find something physically amiss as well, so that he could be fired. But no valid reason for early retirement had been discovered, either physically or mentally. If there was anything like madness in his makeup, it fitted quite easily into the tickboxes for normality. Dr Furet – an independent psychiatrist who had been consulted because of some administrative slip-up – had put a note in Guérin’s file which had inspired some gossip: “The subject, in a perfectly reasoned way, seems to think, just as some people see God as a concept unifying everything else, that the world can only be comprehended and explained, in other words that the subject’s police work can only be accomplished, if the idea is accepted (is that so absurd?) that everything is connected. No event can be understood or conceived in isolation without losing sight of its meaning, causality and effects. The subject is perfectly sane, and fit for police work.”

  Furet had also said to Barnier who was gently pressing him to reconsider his diagnosis: “He may make mistakes, like anyone else, but sack him from the force and if you’re going to be logical, you should resign at the same time. And you could change the Minister of Justice while you’re at it.”

  Guérin had stayed. In Suicides.

  Poised on the edge of a landslide away from objectivity, the little lieutenant was still concentrating on the case of the kamikaze nudist, which seemed more and more suspicious. Looking for support from his junior, and anxiously rubbing his glossy bald head with one hand, he asked the question again.

  “Really, what do you think?”

  Looking up at the ceiling, Lambert spoke slowly.

  “I didn’t hear it rain in the night.”

  Guérin didn’t catch his meaning at first, then looked up too. The pink stain had, indeed, got bigger.

  Their office was on the top floor, under the attics. Or more precisely under the drying room. The roof leaked, and rain tended to seep inside onto the clothes hanging up there, then started dripping, now laden with blood. The rainwater collected in a pool on the wooden floor, and trickled between the planks into the plaster in the ceiling below, where it created a rose-pink stain of variable shape, expanding and shrinking above their heads, depending on the amount of rainfall. Every time the stain shrank, it left a series of concentric tawny rings, like a cross section of amethyst. It had rained that night and into the morning. Heavy rain, announcing that spring was on the way. The pink stain had got bigger, a living amethyst, the mineral pulse of dead victims, whose clothes, stiff with blood, were stored in the attics. Police evidence, which in summer gave off an unbearable stench.

  Guérin looked at the stain in silence. The sound of the waves, Lambert’s trainers, the truck’s wheels skidding on the wet asphalt, the blood-tinted stain on the ceiling, all merged into a kind of three-dimensional and stereophonic idea: modernisation would never be able to do without these large rooms with their crammed shelves. Everything had to have its place.

  He stood up, opened the door to the archives, and walked in between the rows of files. At the end of the room, he pulled down a large box from a shelf, and put the ring-road dossier into it, along with the video cassette. Polishing his head, like a housemaid cleaning a silver soup tureen, he walked away from the murmur of the archives, cellulose sediments whose music he alone could hear.

  He sat back down in the office and, like Lambert, looked up at the stain again. The imperceptible movement of water and blood, spreading slowly as if by capillary action, was accompanied by the regular scraping of their chairs on the ground, as they shifted their buttocks backwards, anticipating the deluge.

  The telephone rang several times before either of them heard it.

  It rang on average about one and a half times a day, with two extremes over the year: the peak was in June and early July, when the sunshine increased social agitation like a chemical reaction affected by heat, and the lowest point was from December to January, when the cold seemed to make life move sluggishly, depriving people of the energy to harm themselves.

  Guérin looked at his watch, answered the telephone and took down the details in his notebook, then the faded yellow raincoat stood up, like a ghost.

  From the doorway he looked back at his junior who was still absorbed in gazing at the ceiling.

  “Coming? We’ve got work to do.”

  Lambert followed Guérin who was rubbing his head again awkwardly.

  “You’ve got to stop showing things from our files to other people. I told you to watch the tape, not to organise a film show. Do you understand?”

  Red-faced, Lambert pulled up the zip of his tracksuit top.

  “Yes, sir.”

  White clouds on a blue-grey background were streaming across the sky, propelled by winds at high altitude but leaving the world below at rest. As he emerged from their isolated staircase, Guérin paid them no attention.

  While his assistant started the staff car, he thought once more about the T.V. programmes he had watched the night before, in an effort to relax. He racked his brains to try to find the link, because he knew there was one, between the vanished civilisation of Easter Island and trout fishing in Montana. A little exercise to distract him from his lack of desire to look at the dull eyes of a corpse.

  Lambert started whistling “Le petit vin blanc”. He liked driving, feeling the engine doing all the work while he made no effort.

  As they drove along the bank of the Seine, Guérin wondered if the inhabitants of Easter Island – since thousands of them must have been employed in carving those stones as high as houses to please their chiefs – had perhaps fished the local waters so much that they ended up starving to death. It made sense, since there was no longer a tree left on the island to produce so much as a single nut, once they had finished putting up their statues. The last of them, since there was no more wood to transport them, had even remained in the quarries. Deforestation, soil erosion, overpopulation, running out of food, over-fishing the sea and you were back to square one: zero population. As for the fishermen in Montana, they were complaining about the cutting down of forests, land degradation and the pollution of the rivers from copper mining. The trout were dying out, decimated by parasites that flourished in waters where the ecological balance had been disturbed, and now young people were emigrating from the state because there was no work for them on unproductive farms without crops. So the link was the trees. The cause in one case was the carving of great rock sculptures, in the other the timber and mining companies. And the result: the end of an outdoor sport, and the wiping out of a whole civilisation.

  Besides, when the giant sculptures had appeared on television, Churchill had cackled with laughter. He never missed a chance to mock humans whenever they deserved it. In conclusion, Guérin told himself, nowadays it was no more reasonable to swim in the sea than to dig the ground, since Man, an unbalanced species, had already buried countless pieces of evidence of his crimes in the earth. More even than were left on the surface.

  *

  The young woman was twenty-four years old, a literature student. On her bedside table was an empty tube of powerful barbiturates, no doubt prescribed
by a doctor who had irresponsibly handed out sleeping pills to an oversensitive student with insomnia. Since she had left no note, which seemed unusual for someone of a literary bent, Guérin concluded that this was a suicide attempt that had got out of hand and succeeded better than intended. The telephone, still grasped in the hand of the young woman on the bed, was the clincher. Category: “cry for help”, subcategory “unintentional irreparable damage”.

  The small apartment was full of whispers, sobs and choking sounds. The police did their work in silence. Cries of “No, no!”, or “It can’t be!” were heard, tearing into people’s consciences. They came from the mother, whom the father was clasping tightly in his arms, to stop the poor woman entering the room. Her daughter, white-faced, with purple lips and eyes already clouded with postmortem cataracts, could hear her no more.

  Guérin sometimes found it hard to express his sympathy with suffering families. Such awkward and belated displays of concern made him uneasy.

  Lambert – as happened every time the suicide was a pretty young woman – was in tears alongside the parents. Lieutenant Guérin, embarrassed himself, silently thanked him for it.

  The police might hate letting their emotions show, but the public didn’t mind at all. Families adored Lambert. Guérin had always needed a man who could cry somewhere in his life. He had found one, two years earlier, his sleepy branch of coral, in a cramped office with blood on the ceiling.

  Faced with what was clearly a suicide, Guérin was required to ask the parents the usual questions. If you couldn’t do compassion, professionalism was usually appreciated by civilians in shock. He checked the things he had to: statements from the neighbours, timing, state of the apartment, make of pills, level of alcohol required to make them lethal, state of the body, and so on.

  Standing there in the bedroom, he wondered distractedly what was wrong with his Easter Island theory. He sat down to think, and after a moment, slapped his forehead. Churchill had laughed when he saw the American anglers too, and yet they were genuinely sad people … This wasn’t his usual behaviour. When the pathologist arrived to write the death certificate, he stood at some distance looking surprised and troubled. Guérin greeted him at first without thinking. He smiled, before realising that he was sitting on the bed, alongside the corpse of the literature student who was holding a telephone out to him. A wave of shame swept over him and he sprang up from the bed.

  As the hot blood flooded out of his face, he felt a great chill all over his body, followed by an immense fatigue. It was the responsibility weighing down on him despite his shame. The intimate responsibility of having to explain underground forces, violent and hypocritically denied. Invisible forces which sometimes emerged – passing through parents whose innocence was doubtful, and coming to the surface as a show of power – in the shape of the dead body of an unfortunate young woman. Guérin had realised, as he saw himself sitting on the bed occupied with distant theories, that he was becoming a habitual and willing plaything of these forces, a fragile rationality in a murmuring flood. The young woman’s stomach gave a grotesque gurgle. Her body was losing liquid substances which had nothing to do with the eternal flow of the soul.

  The pathologist, sickened, stood back to let Guérin leave.

  2

  On the steps of the church, two slices of history were warming their bones in the sun. With their fading eyesight and bent backs, they stood gazing at the springtime leaves and the village facades whose cracks they had watched expanding over the years. The view before them contained trees, flowerpots, the town hall, Mme Bertrand’s general store, the post office, Michaud’s bakery, the Bar des Sports, and the main road cutting through the middle of the village.

  Under his bronze helmet, the metallic eye of a World War II soldier leaning on his rifle seemed to cast doubt on the durability of the plasterwork on the houses.

  The old men, cloth caps pulled down over their heads, their outlines as angular as the twisted arms of sundials, projected onto the steps shadows of a timeless rural existence. The church clock struck the half-hour, a single dull note. Reminded of the passing of time, the old men shrank a little more inside themselves.

  The stones were warming up, the wooden shutters made cracking sounds and in the bar three glasses were saluting the sun by clinking. In the priory garden, under the gentle shade, a woodpecker was terrorising a colony of insects with its beak. The village stood quite still, representing nothing but France, on a day like any other.

  A little breeze sprang up from the west, fluttering the flag on the town hall, and the tender leaves on the trees, carrying all the sounds away with it. Silence fell on the square for a moment. The bronze eye projected its mute enquiry to the horizon, the village waited, and some of its reason for existing went into that wait.

  A new sound, distant and raucous, came to rescue the two old men from boredom. They straightened up and listened, their rheumy eyes dilated with curiosity.

  Up the little road from the valley – along which they had already witnessed the arrival of electricity, two or three wars, family-planning clinics and the odd guitar-playing hippy – came the sound of a car with a faulty exhaust.

  “Oh, ah. The American.”

  “Hadn’t seen him for a bit, had we?”

  They waited, eyes fixed at the place where the road entered the village, to see the car arrive. Their excitement mounted.

  “Reminds me when the Yanks come marching in, in ’44. Remember?”

  “Do I! Fritzes going that way, Yanks coming this way. And their teeth! White as anything.”

  “Mme Bertrand, she chucked her geraniums out the window.”

  “And old Michaud, he come out with his bugle an’ all.”

  “Hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him all the war, had we?”

  The caps turned towards the bakery.

  “Him and his rotten flour, six feet under now, and good riddance.”

  Two disapproving faces dispatched further disgust in the general direction of Michaud’s tomb. The racket from the car grew louder as it passed the cemetery.

  “Here he comes.”

  With a popping of its exhaust, the rusty little white Renault van passed in front of a hoarding, braked and rolled to a halt in front of the post office. The two old men immediately became absorbed in gazing up at the cloudless sky.

  The American extracted himself from the van, carrying a shopping bag, and waved to them. They replied with an imperceptible nod from each cap, then, as the tall foreigner turned away, they riveted their eyes on him until he vanished inside the grocery. He closed the door behind him.

  “Oh, ah, here comes André.”

  Attracted by fresh blood, another old man was approaching, leaning on a stick with a rubber tip, bringing the number of sentinels on duty to three.

  André looked across at the Renault. The other two, with a tilt of their heads, indicated the grocery.

  “He’s on his own, just got here now.”

  Ten minutes later, the American emerged from the shop. He crossed the square on his long legs and entered the baker’s. The sound of its bell tinkled across the square.

  “André, remember old Michaud and his bugle in ’44?”

  André turned towards the church’s Romanesque doorway and spat carefully, so as not to dislodge his dentures.

  “The priest, he was holding up the music for him and all, his eyes as dry as the Pope’s balls, oh he was happy, no bother.”

  “We all had a good time with the Yanks.”

  “That’s right, we all did.”

  “Washed our hands in wine an’ all.”

  “Communion wine!”

  From his granite plinth above the twenty or more engraved names, the bronze soldier from 1940 affected not to hear.

  “Funny to see him here, though, the American.”

  Silence fell once more on the square.

  A milk lorry went slowly past. The three old men followed it with their eyes until it disappeared down the road from which the
van had come.

  André pushed at the gravel with the rubber tip of his walking stick.

  “Eh, oh! Where’s he gone now?”

  The baker’s shop was empty.

  “Morning, messieurs!”

  The American, appearing from an unexpected angle, came up to them with a smile. The three caps jumped, shuffled closer together and tipped down towards the ground, mumbling inaudible greetings.

  The American now went into the post office, emerging a couple of minutes later with a parcel under his arm, got back in the van and drove off again back down the valley. As he disappeared, the sharp reports from the exhaust echoed through the streets.

  The three sentinels redeployed in a straight line, each one seeking a place in the sun.

  “Always in a rush he is. Never even stops for a chat.”

  “Matthieu said he saw him up the dam only yesterday, with his bow and arrow.”

  “He don’t fish, he just shoots.”

  “But what does he shoot if he ain’t fishing?”

  “Matthieu didn’t say he was fishing, he said he was walking.”

  “With a bow and arrow? And anyway I know what he said, seeing he said it to me, didn’t he?”