The Accident on the A35 Read online

  He contemplated postponing the task until morning—it was close to midnight—but the lateness of the hour provided no excuse. Gorski would have had no qualms about disturbing a family in the shabby apartment blocks around Place de la Gare at any hour of his choosing. It was, furthermore, possible that in the interim the Barthelme family might hear the news from another source.

  Gorski walked up the drive, his feet crunching on the gravel. He felt, as he always did when approaching such houses, like he was trespassing. If challenged, he would no doubt make some apologetic remark before bringing out the ID card that authorised his intrusion. He recalled the panic that ensued in his childhood home when a visitor called unannounced. His parents would exchange alarmed glances. His mother would cast her eyes around the room and hastily straighten the cushions and antimacassars before opening the door. His father would put on his jacket and stand to attention, as if ashamed to be caught relaxing in his own home. One evening when Gorski was seven or eight years old, two young Mormons who had recently taken up residence in the town called at the apartment above his father’s pawnshop. Gorski heard them explain the nature of their visit in broken French. His mother invited them into the little parlour. Albert Gorski stood behind his chair as if awaiting the appearance of the mayor himself. Gorski was sitting beneath the window, turning the pages of an illustrated book. To his child’s eyes, the two Americans were identical; tall and blond, with closely cropped hair and wearing tight-fitting navy blue suits. They stood in the doorway until Mme Gorski directed them to the chairs around the table at which the family took their meals. They did not appear in the least ill at ease. Mme Gorski offered them coffee, which they did not refuse. While she busied herself in the kitchenette, they introduced themselves to M. Gorski, who merely nodded and resumed his seat. The two men then made some remarks about how pleasant they found Saint-Louis. As Gorski’s father made no response, a silence ensued, which lasted until Mme Gorski returned from the kitchen with a tray bearing a pot, the good china cups and a plate of madeleines. She wittered away while serving the visitors, but it was apparent that they understood little of her monologue. The Gorskis did not normally take coffee in the evening. Once these formalities were complete, the young man on the left, after casting his eyes meaningfully around the room, gestured towards the mezuzah fixed to the doorpost.

  ‘I see you are of the Jewish persuasion,’ he said, ‘but my colleague and I would very much like to share with you the message of our faith.’

  It was the first time Gorski had heard his parents referred to in this way. Religion was never mentioned in the Gorski household, far less practised. The little box on the doorpost was merely one of the many knick-knacks arrayed around the room that his mother dusted on a weekly basis. It held no particular significance, or if it did, Gorski was not aware of it. He was not even sure what the phrase ‘of the Jewish persuasion’ meant, other than signifying that they—the Gorskis—were different. Gorski was affronted that these strangers would talk to his father in this way. He remembered little else of the conversation, only that when the Americans had eaten his mother’s biscuits, his father had accepted the literature they pressed into his hands and assured them that he would give it careful consideration. The young men seemed delighted by this response and said that they would be happy to call again. They then thanked Mme Gorski for her hospitality and left. Their coffee had been left untouched. Mme Gorski made a remark to the effect that they seemed like pleasant young men. M. Gorski perused the leaflets the Americans had left for half an hour or so, as if it would have been discourteous to immediately cast them aside. After his father’s death, Gorski found them in the wooden box under the window sill in which papers deemed to be of a certain importance were kept.

  Gorski was about to ring the bell of the house on Rue des Bois for a second time when a light went on in the vestibule and he heard the rattling of keys in the lock. The door was opened by a stout woman in her early sixties. Her grey hair was tied in a bun at the back of her head. She was wearing a dark blue serge dress, tight around her figure. Around her neck she wore a pair of spectacles on a leather string, and a small cross, which nestled in the cleft of her bosom. She had thick, manly ankles and wore brown brogues. She did not appear to have hurriedly dressed to answer the door. Perhaps her duties did not end until the master of the house had returned. Gorski imagined her sitting in her quarters, slowly turning the cards of a game of patience and letting a cigarette burn out in an ashtray by her elbow. She looked at Gorski with the expression of vague distaste to which he was quite accustomed and which he no longer allowed to offend him.

  ‘Madame,’ he began, ‘Chief Inspector Georges Gorski of the Saint-Louis police.’ He proffered the ID he had been holding in readiness.

  ‘Madame Barthelme has retired for the night,’ the woman replied. ‘Perhaps you would be so good as to call at a more sociable hour.’

  Gorski resisted the urge to apologise for the imposition. ‘This is not a social call,’ he said.

  The woman widened her eyes and shook her head a little, drawing in her breath as she did so. Then she raised her glasses to her eyes and asked to see Gorski’s identification. ‘What sort of time is this to be calling on a decent household?’

  Gorski already felt a healthy loathing for this self-important busybody. She clearly believed that her status as gatekeeper to the household endowed her with great authority. He reminded himself that she was no more than a servant.

  ‘It’s the sort of time,’ he said, ‘which would suggest that I have called on a matter of some importance. Now, if you would be so good as to—’

  The housekeeper stepped back from the door and grudgingly invited him into a cavernous wood-panelled hallway. The oak doors of the rooms on the first floor opened onto a landing, bounded by a carved balustrade. She ascended the stairs, leaning heavily on the banister, and entered a doorway on the left. Gorski waited in the semi-darkness of the hallway. The house was silent. A pale sliver of light emanated from a closed door on the right of the landing. A few moments later the housekeeper reappeared and made her way back down the stairs. She moved with an uneven gait, throwing her right leg out to the side as if troubled by her hip.

  Mme Barthelme, she told him, would receive him in her room. Gorski had assumed that the mistress of the house would receive him downstairs. The idea of informing a woman of her husband’s death in her bedroom struck him as vaguely indecent. But there was nothing else for it. He followed the housekeeper upstairs. She gestured towards the door and followed him in.

  On account of the age of the victim, Gorski had expected to find a more elderly woman propped up on a pile of embroidered pillows. According to his driving licence, Barthelme was fifty-nine years old, but even from the cursory inspection Gorski had made, he had seemed older. His beard was thick and grey, and the cut and fabric of his three-piece suit old-fashioned. Mme Barthelme, by contrast, could not have been much more than forty, perhaps even younger. A mass of light brown hair was piled haphazardly on her head, as if it had been hastily arranged. Ringlets framed her heart-shaped face. On her shoulders was a light shawl, which she had likely donned for the sake of modesty, but her nightdress hung loosely around her chest and Gorski had to consciously avert his eyes. The room was entirely feminine. There was an ornate dressing table and a chaise longue strewn with clothes. The bedside table was arrayed with little brown bottles of pills. There was an absence of masculine articles or garments. The couple, clearly, kept separate rooms. Mme Barthelme smiled sweetly and apologised for receiving Gorski in bed.

  ‘I’m afraid I was feeling rather—’ She allowed her sentence to trail off with a vague gesture of her hand, which caused her breasts to shift beneath the linen of her nightdress.

  For a moment Gorski forgot the purpose of his visit.

  ‘Madame Thérèse did not tell me your name,’ she said.

  ‘Gorski,’ he said, ‘Chief Inspector Gorski.’ He almost added that his forename was Georges.

 
‘Is there enough crime in Saint-Louis to merit a Chief Inspector?’ she said.

  ‘Just about.’ Normally, Gorski would have been offended by such a remark, but Mme Barthelme managed to make it sound like flattery.

  He was standing midway between the door and the bed. There was a chair by the dressing table, but it was not appropriate to sit to deliver such grave news. The housekeeper loitered by the doorway. There was no reason she should not be present, so it was only to assert his authority that Gorski turned to her and said: ‘If you wouldn’t mind giving us some privacy, Thérèse.’

  The housekeeper made no attempt to conceal her affront, but after making a show of straightening the cushions on the chaise longue, she complied.

  ‘And close the door behind you,’ Gorski added.

  He paused for a few moments, adopting the solemn expression he wore for such occasions. ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news, Madame Barthelme.’

  ‘Please call me Lucette. You make me feel like an old maid,’ she said. The first part of his statement seemed to have made no impression on her.

  Gorski nodded. ‘There has been an accident,’ he said. He never saw any sense in dragging things out. ‘Your husband is dead.’

  ‘Dead?’

  They all said that. Gorski did not read anything into people’s reactions on hearing such news. Were he to receive a visit from a policeman at an unsociable hour, it would be clear that he was to receive bad news. But such thoughts did not seem to occur to civilians, and their first response was generally one of disbelief.

  ‘His car left the A35 and hit a tree. He was killed instantly. It happened an hour or so ago.’

  Mme Barthelme emitted a listless sigh.

  ‘It appears from the initial inspection that the most likely scenario is that he fell asleep at the wheel. Naturally, a full investigation will be carried out.’

  Mme Barthelme’s expression barely changed. Her eyes drifted away from Gorski. They were pale blue, almost grey. Her reaction was not unusual. People did not cry out in anguish, faint or fly into a rage. Still, there was something curious in her subdued response. His eyes wandered to the array of bottles by the bedside. Perhaps she had taken a Valium or some other tranquiliser. Gorski allowed a few moments to pass. Then she started slightly, as if she had forgotten he was there.

  ‘I see,’ she said. She raised her hands to her head and started to tidy the ringlets around her face. She was quite charming.

  ‘Would you like a glass of water?’ he asked. ‘Or perhaps some brandy?’

  She smiled, exactly as she had when he entered the room. Gorski began to wonder if she had understood what he had told her.

  ‘No, thank you. You’ve been very kind.’

  Gorski nodded. ‘Is there anyone else at home, besides the housekeeper?’

  ‘Just our son, Raymond,’ she said. ‘He’s in his room.’

  ‘Would you like me to inform him?’

  Mme Barthelme looked surprised at this offer. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that would be very kind.’

  Gorski nodded. He had not expected to have to go through the business twice. His mind had already drifted to the beer he planned to drink in Le Pot. He resisted the urge to glance at his watch. He hoped Yves would not have closed up by the time he got there. He bowed his head slightly and explained the need for a formal identification of the body. ‘We’ll send a car in the morning,’ he said.

  Mme Barthelme nodded. She directed him to her son’s room. And that was that.

  The housekeeper was sitting on an ottoman outside the door. Gorski assumed she had heard every word.

  Two

  Raymond Barthelme was sitting on a straight-backed chair in the middle of his bedroom reading The Age of Reason. The only light in the room came from the anglepoise lamp on the desk by the window. Aside from the bed, there was a worn velvet sofa, but Raymond preferred the wooden chair. If he tried to read somewhere more comfortable, he found his attention drifting from the words on the page. Besides, his friend Stéphane had told him that Sartre himself always sat on a straight-backed chair to read. He had returned to the chapter in which Ivich and Mathieu slash their hands at the Sumatra nightclub. Raymond was enthralled by the idea of a woman who would, for no apparent reason, draw a knife across the palm of her hand. He read for the umpteenth time: The flesh was laid open from the ball of the thumb to the root of the little finger, and the blood was oozing slowly from the wound. And her friend’s reaction was not to rush to her aid, but instead to take the knife and impale his own hand to the table. What was most striking about the scene, however, was not the bloodletting itself, but the sentence that followed it:

  The waiter had seen many such incidents.

  Afterwards, when the couple went to the restroom, the attendant simply bandaged their hands and sent them on their way. So what if they had mutilated themselves? Raymond longed to be in a place like the Sumatra, among the sort of people who impaled their hands to the table. Such an establishment could certainly not be found in a backwater like Saint-Louis, with its respectable cafés where you were served by middle-aged women who asked after your parents, and to whom Raymond always behaved with perfect courtesy. Raymond was not sure what to make of the scene. He had discussed it at length with Yvette and Stéphane in their booth at the Café des Vosges. Stéphane had been matter-of-fact (he had an answer for everything): ‘It’s an acte gratuit, old man,’ he had said with a shrug. ‘It’s meaningless. That’s the point.’ Yvette had disagreed: it wasn’t meaningless. It was an act of rebellion against the bourgeois manners represented by the woman in the fur coat at the next table. Raymond had nodded earnestly, not wishing to contradict his friends, but neither interpretation satisfied him. Neither explained the frisson he got from reading the scene, a frisson not dissimilar to that which he experienced when he passed close enough to certain girls in the school corridors to inhale their scent. Perhaps the point was not to reduce the scene to a meaning—to explain it—but simply to experience it as a kind of spectacle.

  Raymond wore his hair to his shoulders. He had a pronounced Roman nose, inherited from his father, and his mother’s long-lashed grey-blue eyes. His lips were thin and his mouth wide, so that when he smiled (which was not often) he looked quite charming. His skin was smooth, and if he had started shaving it was for form’s sake only. The growth he removed was no more than an embarrassing soft down. His body was slim and lithe. His mother liked to tell him that he looked like a girl. Sometimes in the evening when he visited her room, she would have him sit on the edge of the bed and brush his hair. Raymond did not take exception to his mother’s feminine view of him and even cultivated a certain girlishness in his mannerisms, if only to aggravate his father.

  He had recently removed all the posters from the walls of his room and thrown away a good deal of his possessions. He had painted the walls white, so that the room now resembled a well-appointed cell. Against the wall to the right of the door was a bookcase, culled of its more childish volumes, and now home to a record player with forty or fifty LPs, these carefully selected to create the right impression on anyone entering his room. He was seventeen years old.

  For the last fifteen minutes or so, Raymond’s mind had not been on his book. An hour ago, he had heard the tyres of a car on the gravel of the drive, before the front door opened and he heard his mother ascend the stairs. Even without the sound of her heels on the floorboards, her steps were easily distinguished from the heavy tread of his father. Since then the house had been silent. Normally by this hour, Raymond would have expected to hear his father returning home and briefly look in on his wife, before retiring to his study to read or look over some papers. Raymond’s father always kept the door of his study ajar. This was less as an invitation to drop in than a way of monitoring the movements of the other members of the household. Raymond’s room was next to the study and if he needed to use the bathroom or wanted to go downstairs to the kitchen to get a bite to eat, he could not do so without passing his father’s door. Raym
ond often moved around the house in stocking-feet to avoid detection, but he always had the feeling that his father knew exactly where he was and what he was doing. Every night, when the housekeeper retired to her quarters on the second floor, Raymond would hear his father say in a stage whisper: ‘Is that you, Madame Thérèse?’

  The house was so quiet there was no need to shout.

  ‘Yes, Maître,’ she would reply from the landing. ‘Do you need anything?’

  Maître Barthelme would reply that he did not, and they would wish each other goodnight. The exchange never ceased to irritate Raymond.

  The fact that Maître Barthelme had not returned home was unusual in itself. But when Raymond heard the doorbell at 23:47 (he had checked the time on the digital clock his mother had given him for his sixteenth birthday), he knew something out of the ordinary had occurred. People rarely called at the house at any time of day. The only conceivable visitor at such an hour was a policeman. And the only reason for a policeman to call was to deliver bad news. The arrival of a policeman and his father’s failure to return could not, Raymond surmised, be unconnected. At the very least there must have been an accident. But would a mere accident bring a policeman to the house at this hour? Surely a telephone call would have sufficed.

  When he heard Mme Thérèse make her way down the stairs and open the front door, Raymond strained to hear the conversation. He was unable to make out more than a murmur of voices. It was at the point when Thérèse climbed the stairs and knocked lightly on the door of his mother’s room that Raymond got up from his chair and stood with his ear pressed to his own door. If any confirmation that the caller was a policeman was required, this was it. Thérèse was by nature suspicious and mistrustful and would never have left any other person unsupervised in the hallway. She assumed that all tradesmen were thieves who had to be watched over at all times and constantly claimed that shopkeepers had diddled her. When she returned from her marketing, she routinely weighed out the items she had bought to check that she had not been sold short.