“Depends.” Georges pulled out a flashlight and leaned over the water. “Could be minutes, could be hours — whoa! Look! It’s—”
“Give me that.” Jean-Paul’s unease vanished as he grabbed the torch from George’s hand. “Where? I can’t see any—”
The rest was drowned by the splash of two giant hands tipping him over the side.
“Hey! Hey, I can’t swim!”
“I know,” Georges said, rowing out of range with a speed that would have surprised Madame Morreau’s nephew, had he not been gulping so much water. “You told me.”
“All right, all right, you’ve had your fun. You’ve humiliated me, shown me who’s boss, and fair dos. I called you names, bullied you a bit, and now you’ve got your revenge — but for Chrissakes, man, I’m drowning.”
“No, you’re not. Not if you kick your feet about a bit.”
Jean-Paul had nothing to lose. He kicked his feet about a bit, but the fear of being sucked in wouldn’t leave. “Enough’s enough, you stupid bloody halfwit.”
“You killed her,” Georges said, pulling out a piece of paper and reading it by flashlight.
“What?” Jean-Paul’s arms flailed and flapped in the water. “Is that what this is about? My stupid bloody aunt, you stupid moron?”
“My mother thinks she had a long and happy life, but Mother’s wrong.”
For one thing, Madame Morreau was only sixty-eight. Georges saw her identity papers lying on the table once, and sixty-eight was no age at all these days. Also, reading her diary, he saw that she’d never got over the devastation of not having children, sinking all her love in her husband instead.
“When he fell ill with cancer, she had no qualms about spending every last centime on finding him a cure.” He didn’t know what a qualm was, but it sounded so good that he’d quoted it anyway. “She even mortgaged her house.”
“I know that, you stupid idiot.”
“Not when you killed her, you didn’t.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Now listen to me, Georges. You’ve had your laugh, you’ve made a fool of me, so come back and pull me out before I drown, you bloody retard.”
“She was too proud to let people know she hadn’t got two francs to rub together—” Or, more accurately, too ashamed to admit she’d blown their entire fortune on charlatans and quack cures. “—and like everybody else, you assumed she was well off. You were her only heir, and so you killed her. For her money.”
“Yeah, well, prove it, dumb-ass.” But the fight had gone out of Jean-Paul as the struggle of trying to keep afloat began to tell.
“You smothered her with her own pillows, then tried to make it look like natural causes, and because she was old and because you convinced the doctor that she had a bad heart, you thought you’d got away with it.”
“All right, all right, I killed the old bitch, so what? She was like a bloody succubus, Can you fetch this, I forgot that, Would you mind giving me a hand to the table. I lost my temper that night and rammed the pillow over her face, all right? She was sick and old. I was doing her a favour — oh God, help—”
The water glugged and gurgled as it covered his head. Georges felt his stomach turning somersaults.
“Please,” Jean-Paul said, bobbing up at last, and Georges could tell that he was crying. “Help me—”
“You didn’t lose your temper. You planned to kill her long before you left Paris.”
“I swear to God, it was the heat of the moment. For God’s sake, don’t let me die! I’ll give you anything. The car. Take the car...”
“You brought the medication with you. That’s premeditated murder.”
“Whatever you want, name it, it’s yours.”
“A confession,” Georges said. “I just want to hear you admit it.”
“All right, all right.” Jean-Paul was spluttering words and water in equal amounts now. “I thought she was rolling, I bought heart pills from a chemist’s in Paris, I held the pillow over her face and—”
“Did she struggle?”
“Yes, of course she bloody struggled! I had to wake her up to get her to unlock the door, spinning some cock-and-bull story about needing to talk, put her back to bed, and guess what? No pillows.”
“She used to pile them on the floor.”
“I know that now, but at the time I had to search for them, so yes, the old bitch put up a fight — oh, Christ.”
His head went underwater, and once more, it took forever before it surfaced. Even Jean-Paul, who couldn’t swim, knew the third time was his last.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” he screamed. “Do this, do that—”
“You wanted her money, you just didn’t want to earn it.”
“I’m young! I’m not cut out for fishing false teeth out of glasses, just because the stupid bitch forgot to put them in before going down to dinner! I killed her, and the only thing I’m sorry about is that she didn’t have the money. Satisfied?”
“We certainly are,” boomed a voice from nowhere, and suddenly the night was filled with blinding sunshine. It took Jean-Paul a few seconds to realize they were searchlights from other boats.
“Help,” he spluttered, and it didn’t matter the water was swarming with police uniforms. He was saved. “Help me, I’m drowning!”
“No, you’re not,” Georges said. “If you put your feet down, you could walk to the island.”
Autumn came, and the leaves on the trees turned the colour of her hair, fluttering across the ground like the freckles on her skin. Out on the lake, grebes dived, the last of the swallows fattened up on flies, and in a rowboat a young couple talked of wedding rings and babies.
Irène was already converting the old barn into a cottage.
“I’m so proud of you,” Sandrine said, dabbling her fingers in the water. “The way you went to the police, told them the only way to prove Madame Morreau had been murdered was by a confession by her killer, and then offering them a way they could get it.”
She hadn’t cut her hair like Farrah Fawcett, why would she? Not when a big man with a broad smile loved to run his fingers through it, telling her it shone like fire and smelled of lollipops and roses.
“I may have thought up the competition, but you gave it substance by saying your father was sponsoring it.” He’d had to lie, telling Sandrine that Madame Morreau confided in him on their walks. But this would be the last lie he ever told, he promised himself. “Without you to hold my hand, I’d never have plucked up the courage to walk into the commissariat.”
“In that case, come over here and show your appreciation properly,” she giggled.
“I’d rather do it improperly,” he grinned back, “but first.”
He prised the master key from his ring and, with great solemnity, consigned it to the lake. As it sank, a breeze sprang up, rippling across the open water and ruffling his hair. Georges swore it smelled of aniseed.
Affairs of the Heart
Kate Atkinson
Franklin met Connie one evening outside the Queen’s Hall. It was raining and when Connie slipped on the wet pavement Franklin helped her up and offered the shelter of his umbrella. “It was incredibly romantic,” she said afterwards. “Like something out of Forster.” Franklin happened to have been walking past when Connie was coming out of the Beethoven recital, but in her uncharacteristically flustered state she received the impression that he had also been at the concert.
“It was wonderful, wasn’t it?” she said to him fifteen minutes later in the Café Royal. “How challenging Beethoven’s late string quartets are,” she added, decorously sipping a glass of Merlot.