Still he remained silent. Enjoying, she was sure, watching her panic. Before finally he said, ‘Your father doesn’t take a telling, does he?’ And now she could hear the latent violence in his voice. Anger, and something else that she feared even more. ‘Doesn’t seem to believe that we’ll kill you if he doesn’t give it up.’
‘Or maybe he just knows that if you kill me you lose any power over him.’ Defiance came from that same panic.
‘Yeah, but how would he ever know?’ And now she heard the smile in his voice and watched in horror as he peeled his mask back over his head to reveal the face of a man in his early thirties, unshaven, a smile dimpling his cheeks. Dark eyes twinkling. In any other circumstance she might have thought him good-looking. But here, and now, all she could see was her executioner. Why else would he have revealed himself? And he knew that she knew it. He said, ‘Enjoy your meal. Because this one, the next... today, tomorrow, who knows? One of them is going to be your last.’ He grinned. ‘And I’ll take real pleasure in seeing to that.’
He stepped out into the hall and slammed the door shut behind him. She heard all the dead bolts slot into place, and sank to the floor on trembling legs. She needed her fear now, to motivate her, to kick-start her brain. She could no longer accept her incarceration like some passive prisoner awaiting her fate. They were going to kill her. And she would not go gentle into that good night.
She looked around, panic still rising in her throat. She had to get out. She had to. But how? She looked at her tray. Yoghurt, an apple, a piece of cheese. Some bread. A mug of coffee with the spoon still standing in it, two paper-wrapped cubes of sugar. And an idea born of desperation began to clot among the panicked thoughts free-falling through her mind. She lifted the spoon from the mug, ignoring how it burned her hand as she closed it around the hot metal, and she held it to her breast. Everything would depend on them not noticing it was gone.
Chapter thirty-five
Anne-Laure was not so welcoming this time. She held the door to her apartment half open and peered suspiciously out into the hall at Dominique. ‘I’ve told you everything I know,’ she said. And tried to shut the door.
Dominique stopped it with her foot and pushed the door wide, forcing Anne-Laure back into her apartment. ‘No, you haven’t.’
‘You can’t come in here like this!’
Dominique reached for her old gendarme’s ID and thrust it quickly in Anne-Laure’s face. ‘I can do anything I damn well like. So either we do this the easy way or the hard way.’ Which caused Anne-Laure to step back, and her pale face lost what little colour it had.
‘You never said you were cops!’
‘You never asked.’ And Dominique noticed for the first time that Anne-Laure wore a little make-up this morning. Gone were the jog pants and the pink hoodie, to be replaced by a black skirt and white blouse. A coat lay draped over the back of the settee.
‘Going somewhere, were you?’
‘None of your business!’
‘To see Alice, maybe?’
Which brought the older woman’s defiance to an abrupt end. She wilted, almost visibly.
‘Where is she?’
Anne-Laure avoided her eye, averting her gaze like a truculent child to look at the floor.
‘Where is she, Anne-Laure? You know you’re going to have to tell me sooner or later. One way or another. Sooner would be better, and this way would be easier.’
The woman turned resentful eyes on Dominique. ‘You fucking people,’ she said. ‘You just never let us alone.’ She looked at the wall, the floor again, then out of the window towards the ugly, painted concrete blocks that were her view of the world. Then finally back at Dominique, and the former gendarme saw resentment turn to resignation. ‘She’s in a special residential clinic. In the commune of Gradignan, just south of the city. Been there most of her life.’ She controlled her breathing. ‘They take care of her. She’d have been dead a long time ago without them.’
Dominique stared at her. ‘That’s twenty-four-hour care. How can you afford that?’
‘I can’t.’
‘Who pays for it, then?’
Anne-Laure shrugged. Sulking now, surly-faced. ‘I don’t know.’
‘How can you not know? It must be costing a fortune.’
‘I’m sure it is.’ She was wrestling with some inner resistance that was telling her not to say any more. But she knew there was no point in hiding it now. ‘About a week after Régis was sent down, the head of the clinic in Gradignan came to see me and Alice. He was a nice man. So good with Alice, too. He said they could offer her specialised care, but that she would have to live in.’ She sighed. ‘It wasn’t funny, but I laughed. I told him there was no way on this earth that I could afford to pay for that. And he said that I didn’t have to. That it was all taken care of.’
‘Who by?’
‘I don’t know.’
Dominique didn’t believe her. ‘You never asked?’
And a little of Anne-Laure’s earlier defiance returned. ‘No, I didn’t. I didn’t want to know. And I was afraid to ask in case it all turned out to be some terrible mistake and they would send her home again. To die.’ Dominique was shocked to see tears welling in her eyes. ‘I’ve visited her every other day for twenty-three years. Years she would never otherwise have had. And I wasn’t about to do anything to risk that. Then or now.’
The Clinique des Cèdres stood discreetly behind trees off the Cours du Général de Gaulle, opposite a retirement home and a new-built block of apartments. An old stone mansion house had been home to the original clinic. But over the years it had been extended at the side and back, and rose three storeys into a grey, sultry autumn sky.
Dominique parked in the forecourt, and she and Anne-Laure waded through fallen leaves blowing in gentle eddies across the tarmac in a soft wind. Up stone steps and into a tiled reception area, where Anne-Laure was greeted like an old friend by uniformed nurses.
‘Warm today, but I think it’s going to rain,’ one of them said with a shrug of her shoulders.
Anne-Laure’s smile was strained. ‘I have a visitor for Alice.’
The nurse smiled. ‘Of course.’
They rode up in an elevator to the first floor and stepped out into a brightly lit corridor of green linoleum and yellow walls. Alice’s room was halfway along it. A viewing window to the right of the door allowed them to see in without entering. Dominique was startled.
A young woman with spun gold hair splashed across a pillow lay on a hospital bed hooked up by wires and tubes to machinery and drips. Lights winked red and yellow. A green phosphor screen displayed a graph that followed the beating of her heart. A desk strewn with papers and books stood in a bay window. An artist’s easel leaned against the far wall, and the walls themselves were plastered with paintings and drawings. Some, beautifully childlike. Others, extraordinary landscapes and portraits, in watercolour or pastel crayon. A comfortable, well-worn armchair sat beneath a wall-mounted television set, and was surrounded by books piled untidily on the floor.
On the bed, a threadbare toy panda lay close to her side, one of her hands crooked around it. But her eyes were shut and her breathing seemed shallow. Her skin was ivory white, painfully thin hands and arms stretched out above the sheets.
‘Welcome to Alice’s world,’ Anne-Laure said. ‘Apart from short outings with me to the cinema or the park, she has spent nearly all of her life in this room. They say she’ll be dead in a matter of weeks.’
Dominique glanced at the girl’s mother and saw a kind of stoic dignity in her face as she gazed at her dying daughter.
‘In the early years they were able to keep her mostly healthy. Then in 2006 they started using a new drug from America. Enzyme replacement therapy. And that extended her life by another few years. Though there was always going to be a limit.’ She turned to look at Dominique. ‘But it’s been a life worth living, don’t ever doubt that. She has revelled in it, lived it fully, in ways her father and I never could. Her disease has been both a blessing and a curse. The curse being confined to this room. The blessing being the happiness she brought to everyone who knew her. I’ve never known anyone as happy as my little Alice.’