Bea took an inventory of her injuries. Her right shoulder was hanging; she couldn’t move the arm and the three middle fingers of the hand were numb. That pain had masked the others before, but now she checked herself from feet to head. She had a twisted ankle. A lot of pain there. Blood and bruises on her legs. Her chest hurt from being crushed, but not sharp pain, she didn’t think her ribs were broken. Both her breasts hurt a lot, and she couldn’t work out why, until she realised they were bruised too. Her left arm was fine, apart from shallow holes where his fingers had dug into her and torn the skin in shreds. It hurt to swallow. Her mouth was split and swollen, and the drying blood burned, and felt like ripping when she parted her lips. Her teeth had cut into her gum inside. One tooth was broken. The roots hurt, and her jaw and face, into the deep bruising. Her cheekbone throbbed, tender, like it had no skin, and her left eye hurt to move it. It could see, but blurrily. They weren’t on the autoroute, they were on small roads. Her head ached badly, much worse on the right side, ebbing and flowing when the car bumped, and she was nauseous. Her stomach was a rising ball of acid. She was scared of vomiting, and breathed, carefully, and swallowed. Very slowly, not to get his attention, she reached up and felt the back of her head with her fingertips. No blood.
‘Do they know this car?’ said Russ. ‘Do they know it?’
She didn’t answer, she wasn’t sure she could speak.
‘I’m pretty sure it stands out,’ he said.
He turned off that road and onto another, and her shoulder seemed to scream as the car leaned. Then he turned again.
‘No problem,’ she heard him say, through waves of pain. ‘We’re good.’
She was injured enough to be protected from him. The pain was a world of its own, it gave her distance. Quietly, she went through the parts of her body that did not hurt. Her abdomen felt fine. Her right eye was clear. Her nose didn’t hurt at all, and both ears were as undetectable as they had ever been. Not quite true. One burned a little, at the top. She welcomed it, letting her know it was there, but nothing serious. Comforted, she went back through her body again, piece by careful piece. It was familiar. It was her friend.
Consciousness brought perspective. She began to watch Russ as he drove. She kept herself very, very still and tried to read his mind. She knew how she looked; not like herself, crumpled in the footwell with her clothes ripped, like an ultra-violent fantasy. But she was not that. She wasn’t his. Modesty was shame made palatable. She had a quick memory of how she’d covered her breasts when the boy spied on her at the river; she saw the sunlight on the ice-cold water and his strange eyes, and imagined instead that she had stood up and walked out, instead of hiding. She was her own. She was her secret mind that nobody saw, her work and the things she loved. She concentrated on the precious places inside herself, untouched, and only hers. She focused on her body’s future and pictured herself well and strong. She would be. She was the mother of babies yet conceived. But thinking that cut her open, not knowing where Dan was, and awful terror for him. She mustn’t cry or show what she felt. She had to keep herself secret. She concentrated on her pain, and then on forgetting the pain, and then the pain again. First things first, she thought. First things first.
She remembered seeing Russ in the hall, and being up in the roof space, but after that, her memory was faulty, like a film with pieces missing, jumping. She remembered Dufour’s voice, from behind the trees. The police had Russ’s registration. But they hadn’t seen his car. If they had, Dufour would have sounded urgent. She didn’t know how hidden the BMW had been, if the police could have just gone by it, as they turned into the hotel, and not seen it. There was a chance they were being followed. But he wasn’t driving as if they were. She didn’t know if she was clear enough in her mind to be aware of how long they had been driving. Maybe an hour. Maybe two. There was a chance nobody knew anything, and she was completely alone. First things first, she thought.
Through the tinted windows signs flashed by. She tried to read the place names but she couldn’t. They were driving south and east, the sun swung from the right of the car to behind, but never in front. The air conditioning was cool and the car was quiet, and muted, like a hospital room.
From her place on the floor, she examined him, driving fast but not recklessly. He seemed rational. He didn’t act in rage, even when he was violent. He seemed to operate within a narrow margin, from enthusiasm to irritation; the variations in his moods were small. From last night, until now, from punching her to rolling cigarettes, he seemed dissociated from the world. It was how he had seemed so harmless, he didn’t see the difference in himself, everything was normal.
‘I’m going to get onto the seat,’ she said.
‘What did you say?’
Her voice was scratchy and unclear. ‘I’m going to get onto the seat.’
‘Go ahead.’
Inch by inch, testing him and herself, she moved, forcing herself not to make any noise when her right arm shifted. She tried to hold it still with her other hand. He put the radio on as she eased herself upright. She shifted her position, and he changed stations, jumping through disjointed songs.
‘I haven’t set the system up yet,’ he said. ‘New car.’
She was sitting now, facing front. It felt better to be sitting. She wasn’t sure how much fear she felt. Her mind was taking care of her. First things first, she thought again, repeating it. First things first.
‘All good?’ he said.
‘Thirsty.’
He handed her a small bottle of Vittel, swimming-pool blue. The red top was still sealed, so he couldn’t have drugged it. Like he must have drugged Alex. She blocked out the thought. She took the bottle. Her lips hurt against the plastic rim. She drank it all.
‘Just throw it in the back when you’re done,’ he said. ‘I’m not one of those assholes obsessed with keeping a clean car. I mean, whatever, right? I won’t smoke in the car, though. I’d smoke in my old car, but not in this car.’
She wondered if it was more dangerous to talk to him or not to talk to him, whether forming a relationship was good or bad. Her instinct said it made no difference. He was impervious. But maybe she should keep him comfortable in his version of things.
‘What was your old car?’ she asked.
‘Peugeot.’
‘We had a Peugeot.’
‘Oh yeah?’ he said. ‘Mine was shit.’
‘So was ours.’
As clearly as the day they’d bought it she remembered standing on the pavement, in Tottenham, with Dan, as the guy fetched the keys from his flat, and how Dan had been so stubborn. She’d given in to him as if he knew something about cars. It’s kind of cool, he’d said. I like it.
‘Where’s Dan?’ she said. ‘Tell me.’
There was no answer. She realised her eyes were closed. She made herself open them. Russ was smiling, but not at her. She wasn’t sure now if she’d asked out loud, or how long ago. She shut her eyes again to keep from crying. The one he’d punched felt like a fist grinding into the socket. He was talking again. His voice came in and out like a broken signal.
‘You like this car?’ he was saying. ‘This is the shit. Got it a couple of weeks ago. In Switzerland.’
He looked across and smiled, knowingly.
‘I paid cash,’ he said. ‘In Switzerland?’
He wanted her to be curious and ask him about Alex. She wouldn’t. She didn’t need to know. She didn’t want to be the one to invite him to relive it. She wouldn’t give him that. She looked out of the window.
‘So guess how much I paid,’ he said. ‘Guess.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Bea.
‘C’mon, guess.’
That’s got to be sixty grand’s worth of car, Dan had said, looking out at the BMW from the window of the hall. She shifted to make her collarbone grate, so the stabbing pain would take her feelings.
‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘Ballpark.’
‘About sixty?’ she answered from her pain, anaesthetised.
‘Nice guess,’ said his distant voice. ‘I’m impressed.’
‘Was I right?’
‘Almost! It was sixty-four three-fifty. It’s a very high-spec vehicle. Alex had a hundred with him.’
She imagined Alex, freed up by alcohol, telling Russ all about his hotel in the bar – she couldn’t remember the name of the bar. She couldn’t remember where the police had said it was. Oyonnax. The Bar Jeanne. In Oyonnax. Or Justine. Alex would talk, trying to impress Russ with his hotel, and how Griff had sent him on a secret mission. She shifted her feet on the carpet. She felt the lightness of the empty plastic bottle in her hand. She went back to her pain.
Cars passed with faces in the windows. They could not see her behind the tinted glass.
‘You know we can’t relax yet, right?’ he said.
‘What?’
‘We’ve got to get clear first.’
He examined the satnav on his phone, held down beside the seat, so she couldn’t see. It seemed pathetic to her, as if she had any way to stop him. He must feel very weak.
‘Almost there,’ he said.
She drifted. She saw the BMW on the road from high above, one car, zigzagging on the network of roads, and then all the other thousands and millions of cars, ants in a maze, blind and intent. She saw Alex, driving back from Switzerland. She saw herself and Dan, waiting to meet the police outside the Hotel Paligny. Sitting on the steps.
The sun was low in the sky behind the car. It cast golden light onto the rising slopes. The road climbed and curved ahead into the Jura.
‘I’d like to see more of the Alps,’ Russ said.
On either side of the road, tidy houses like children’s models were dotted over the foothills of the mountains, and thick pine forests crowded the ridges, and poured in swathes down the empty slopes. The grass was very short, everywhere, like AstroTurf. The land grew wider and bigger. Mist gathered on the high ground to their left and the narrow roads wound on and climbed up into the mountains. Bea had begun to shiver, her joints stiffened around their damage. She felt sleepy.
‘Your brother told me about you,’ he said. ‘He said his sister was amazing. And a shrink. I said, that’s hard to believe, a good shrink.’
‘I’m not one,’ she said with her eyes closed.
‘Good to know. Shrinks are assholes.’
That’s true, Bea thought, she’d never met a psychiatrist she liked.
‘Be cool to be one, though, right?’ he said. ‘Right? Sticking those labels on you. Schizophrenia. Psycho-affective disorder. Psychosis. Dissociative disorder. Narcissistic personality disorder. Borderline personality disorder.’
She opened her eyes and tested the nerveless fingers of her right hand,
‘– on the border,’ he was saying. ‘You’ve got one foot in Mexico. You could still make it home. Want to know my personal favourite?’
He waited.
‘Want to know?’ he asked again, taking his eyes from the road. ‘Dysfunctional. This is a dysfunctional relationship. You have a dysfunctional family.’ He looked at her.
‘So?’ she said.
‘So? Functioning is a basic, Beatrice. Functioning is the bottom fucking line. Even the toilet at your brother’s fake hotel over there functions –’
He laughed. He was on a roll. He was free-falling, loving the sound of himself. She didn’t listen. She let her head fall against the door frame. She watched the reflections on the glass. She pictured Dan, lying beaten on the grass, by the hotel. She imagined the police finding him. The car swerved and lurched, in a rhythm.
‘It borderline functions, anyhow. Assholes –’
He stopped talking. Or else she couldn’t hear him. Her swelling eye was closing. She heard a rattle. It was a familiar sound, but she couldn’t place it. She opened her eyes and saw his hand in front of her, holding a plastic pill bottle.
‘You want something?’ He rattled it again. ‘I said, you want something?’
‘No.’
‘Make it easier on you.’
‘No.’
‘It’s your call. Your brother loved his pills, didn’t he?’ He whistled. ‘Said he wasn’t drinking then he drank. Said he wasn’t taking pills then he took them. You know I didn’t meet him in Paris, right? I lied, I’m sorry. I’ve never been to Paris. I met him in a bar. Not far from here, in fact –’
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked, to stop him talking about that. She didn’t want to know.
‘After this? Move on. New car. I’ll be sorry to lose this one,’ he said. ‘But hey, get another, right?’
He laughed out loud with the sudden realisation of his good fortune.
‘My God,’ he said, ‘I don’t even want to look. How much is in there? It’s like a fucking dream. A dream! It’s like it was meant, running into Alex. Real out-of-the-way place, too. It was just totally random.’
The pieces she had seen were fragments. She saw them now. The components of the instrument of her brother’s destruction, the guilty acts and sins that had brought Alex to that place, on that night, she saw them. Her mother’s years and years of sin, her weak hands holding onto him. The way her father risked and denigrated him. Drugs. His own helpless, guileless faith. And that he had no space to live beyond survival. None of these had been the thing to kill him, but they played their part. She saw her own cowardice, her awkward, respectful efforts. The picture shifted and dissolved. Pieces revealed themselves and receded, and then came back to nothing. London. France. Her father’s lies and bank accounts, the names in the notebooks and provincial policemen, sifting through logical truths and family quarrels; bureaucracy, rules, established procedure, evaporated, at the whim of one man’s anarchy. Roaming, mindless, seeking power, he’d seen his little chance and taken it, and all established evil, all efforts at good, were nothing. She saw the pieces. Each one had its share of blame. The whole had been unknowable.
‘I’m blessed,’ he was saying. ‘Blessed. I mean, I didn’t even know the guy. What are the chances?’
She couldn’t answer, or try to please him. She refused to try. He sighed. He tapped the steering wheel. Then without warning, he pulled the car over, and stopped, abruptly, in a lay-by.
It was more frightening, now the car had stopped. She tried not to flinch from him, but he seemed to have forgotten her. He sat with the engine idling, ignoring her. She rested her head on the window as he, totally concentrated, set up the sound system, and scrolled through music. He found some country rock, a thin voice singing something about the flag and coming home.
‘Yeah, it’s cheesy, but it’s good to drive to. Maybe I do miss the States, you know? Greatest country in the world. The greatest. Can’t go back now. Nope. Maybe never. I could tell you about that.’
He pulled out and started off again, onto the narrow ribbon of a road.
She couldn’t see any other cars now. Her mind dipped in and out, like lying down in snow. The pulse throbbed in her bruises. She imagined her blood crowding in, her cells, rallying to heal. She closed her eyes.
She opened them. And then it was twilight, and the pine forests were closer to the car. She licked her lips and dislodged a scab. She could see a gorge to one side, and ribbed, streaky rock dropping away to invisible ravines.
‘Almost there,’ he said. ‘Almost. Jesus. Another campsite. Every place in the whole of this goddamn country. OK, this is good, this is good, right here.’
They turned. The car bumped, slowly, up a hill. She pictured the metal tyre iron, lying on the back seat. She imagined herself reaching into the back, and the feel of holding it in her hand. She couldn’t reach it with her broken arm. She couldn’t turn to look. And she had no rage. She didn’t think she’d do it even if she could. She was wounded enough for both of them.
‘Into the wilderness,’ he said.
The pine trees thinned, and she could see long slopes going downwards, and no houses, not one, and no lights. She was far from help. She couldn’t fight. She had to not think about it, that he was taking her somewhere nobody would see him. All she could do was not give way. All she had was that. She needed to be able to think. But she couldn’t think, her mind kept failing her, and knowing that it was failing was desperate, and made her want to cry.
‘Just up here?’ he said, like looking for a picnic spot.
The car crawled then surged and crawled again, on rocks and into potholes. Nausea hit her like a punch, and waves of pain, and sudden sweat. She closed her eyes and dreamed of seabirds, soaring and white above a choppy sea. She heard kindly voices, talking, in another room. Up here, they said, just look, it’s beautiful. She heard him whoop. A crass sound. A cowboy sound. She opened her eyes.
‘Fuckin’ yeah,’ he said. ‘This. Is. Perfect.’
The car stopped. He turned the music off. In the sudden quiet her blood rushed, and she felt terror, and a sad longing to be safe.
‘Where’s Dan?’ she asked. She whispered it.
He turned the engine off.
‘Let me help you.’
He got out of the car. The fresh chill of altitude blew over her, and the smell of the pine trees. He opened her door.
‘Careful,’ he said, standing above her. ‘You look like shit. No offence.’
He watched her haul herself up, holding on to the door. Her head fell forward.
‘Over here,’ he said, snapping his fingers at her.
She leaned on the car. She looked around. It was almost night. There was nothing, just the line of pines across the short grass, which was almost invisible now, and rocks, and the smell of the mountains. Below them, she could just see the track they had driven up, curving out of sight. On the other side of the track was big, dark forest.
‘Look at that,’ he said, surprised. ‘Your shoulder. Your bone. Shit. When did you do that?’
‘When I fell.’
‘Huh. OK. It’s good you’re here.’ He went to the back of the car and opened the boot. ‘Must’ve dropped it. Damn.’
She didn’t know what he meant. His words fell out, incontinent, his only company. He shut the boot and rubbed his hands back and forth over his skull, and laughed ruefully.
‘Rookie move.’
Bea rested, taking in the space around it, and how far it was to the trees. The pain in the right side of her head was louder. It was cacophonous, and hard to connect to anything beyond it. Russ leaned into the car, and pulled the snake trap from the back seat. He tested the weight of it, pleased.
‘Hell yeah,’ he said, then took it to the back of the car and tried to cram it into the boot, but it wouldn’t fit.
Seeming to remember something, he put the trap onto the ground, carefully, and rested his foot on it, as if it would run away. He reached into the boot, groping.
‘Got it.’ His hand emerged with a black spotlight torch.
He switched it on and put it down next to the trap. The beam shone haphazardly onto the car wheel. In the almost-dark, he leaned into the shadow of the boot, and began to haul and pull at something.
She knew what he was doing. She couldn’t see, but she knew – from the way his arms moved, and the way he was bending to see inside. It was intimate.
The ground was cloudlike as she began to walk, and there was a noise like water rushing. He leaned into the boot of the car, straining and tugging. She saw Dan’s hand, loosely hanging, then his arm, over the rim of the boot. Russ bent his knees, out of sight for a second, then straightened, with an effort. He had his arms around Dan’s torso, and Dan’s arm hung near the parking light, his hand illuminated by the red glow.
‘Dan?’ she said.
Russ strained, and took a half-step back. He dragged Dan out, clumsily, over the sill, and dumped him on the ground, heavy, curled up, like an embryo, facing away from her. His T-shirt had ridden up to show the skin at the small of his back. Russ stepped away.
Dan didn’t move. His knees were bent. His feet, in their trainers, lay one on top of the other, quite neatly.
‘Dan?’
It was three steps to reach him, then she knelt. His hand lay palm upwards, the arm bent back awkwardly. His head was in darkness, facing away. She couldn’t see his face. She touched the crease of his palm with the tip of her finger. His fingers didn’t move.
‘Dan?’ she whispered.
She heard Russ start talking, somewhere. She touched Dan’s shoulder. He didn’t respond. She tugged, one-handed, and his upper body rolled. His head fell towards her, and his cheek hit the ground. His eyes were open but not looking. She touched his cheek. It was warm. She touched his mouth. Her fingers rested on his lips but she felt no breath, and his eyes stayed open, shining. She touched his neck, no rise or fall, no pulse, no flicker on the skin. His fixed eyes didn’t blink.
‘Dan?’
She couldn’t look at his eyes. Slowly, she moved her hand, along his cheek, under his ear, to the back of his neck. Her hand knew the feeling of his dense, soft skin, and the shaved-close touch of his hair, and how the gradual fade went softer over the base of his skull, and the roundness of his head. Her fingers felt their way, but there was no smooth dome. She felt the bone give way to breakage, pulp, then nothing, touching the ground where the ground shouldn’t be, and wetness. She felt the jagged splinter of his skull and pulled her hand away. Her breath was quick, then panting, her body jerking at each breath, and she couldn’t stop. Without wanting it, she looked back to Dan’s blind eyes. Then there was no sound, not even pain, just silence.
Slowly, she straightened up. Unaware of herself, she travelled him. The dip above his collarbones, the ribbed neck of his T-shirt, the rest of it, hoisted up, his bare stomach, his belt buckle, the denim of his jeans, and a big, blackish stain, which must be blood. His legs looked uncomfortable, knees bent and feet side by side, neat. She could see the soles of his trainers, the rubber treads on them, impossibly exposed. She looked down, at his hand again, and how still it was. She wiped her fingers on the grass and pulled his T-shirt down over his stomach as well as she could. She put her hand over his eyes. She had the idea she could hide the horror from him. He didn’t seem to have left his body, but his body was dead. It was him and not him. Terrible. Horror. She could not take her eyes off him. His corpse. She could not take her eyes off his corpse. She smelled cigarette smoke, drifting.
‘OK, now,’ said Russ. ‘Get over.’
He pushed her and she fell onto her side. From the ground, her eyes stared at Dan’s dead eyes, a foot away. Then his head jerked. She watched it slide, in increments, away, out of her eyeline, as Russ dragged his body. She stayed staring at the empty place. This was their end. Like a marriage, like a birth, this was their end. This. There wasn’t more. Russ was pulling him away from her, into the dark. She lay and stared at the ground where his body had lain.
The greys and browns of the earth and trees were vague and fuzzy in the night. She heard the rustling cracking sound of twigs and Russ’s steps and the corpse, dragged up the hill towards the treeline. The sound grew quieter. She tried to get up to crawl, but she couldn’t use her broken arm to take her weight. Slowly, she got to her feet, and stumbling, walked to the car.
The doors were closed. The car looked dark and uninhabited. Her body began shaking, uncontrollably. She was freezing cold, juddering. She stood trying to control her shaking body, knowing Russ was coming back. It was as if he were still next to her, talking. But he wasn’t. She was alone. She tried the car door but it was locked. Her body stopped shaking and she turned her head. Her interrupted vision drifted slowly, adjusting to the distance, towards the place that he had gone. Night had almost fallen, and it was dark towards the trees. She could see the beam of his torch, uneven, and his silhouette.
She was alone and free. Her pain had gone. Quickly, she looked around. The cold air moved across her face, her body faded into insignificance in the open night. Without hesitating, she turned down the hill, and started towards the track she knew was just ahead. Beyond it was the forest. She began to run, feeling nothing. She focused on staying upright, holding her right arm across her body, to keep it as still as she could.
She was running. She thought she was. Quickly. Across the grass, the track, the dried earth. Her foot hit a rock and she stumbled badly. Halted, she listened for him behind her, but could only hear her breath. She ran on, painless, disconnected, all she knew was running. The trees were very black in the spaces in between. They looked like refuge. She fixed her eyes on the black spaces, imagining hiding in them, hearing her feet patter on the ground. She ran on, warm and weightless. She would hide. He would not find her in the dark. Her mouth was open, dripping blood or saliva. She observed it from far away, going on, running, thinking she was running. It occurred to her she might be dreaming because she had no pain. She might still be in the car or kneeling on the ground. She heard nothing. She felt nothing, just the air on her face.
And then she reached the trees. She stopped, because she was too out of breath to go any further. Her vision blackened, opening and closing like shutters banging in her head. The woods and the horizon and the sky tipped and tilted and spun. She put her hand out to break her fall, but it wasn’t the ground under her hand, it was the trunk of a tree. She held onto it. Getting her balance, she walked into the woods.
She walked through the trees, and their presence was like company. She was among them, like stepping into a crowded cave; no, higher than that, a huge hall, filled with silent guardians, waiting for her. She heard a wind, like whispering voices, far above her, and slippery pine needles beneath her feet. She couldn’t see. She held her arms out, to feel her way, groping, blind. Her breath rattled and the pain came back, and awful terror. She summoned all her courage, and held it tight, imagining the thousands and thousands of trees around her, solemn in the dark. She felt bark under her hands. She felt her way along, and around a massive trunk, and then there was a space, just nothing, and then another tree, under her fingers, and she put the flat of her hand on it, and went to it. The branches creaked. She took a step, and then one more, sensing them allowing her through, still and watching. After each step she asked her body to take one more, but the steps got smaller and her mind failed. She tried to fall slowly but it was a long way.
Her face rested on the ground. She thought it was the ground. She felt the resin-smelling pine needles and the sandy earth. She heard an owl, and for a moment remembered the bedroom at Paligny, and listening to the owls outside in the night, hunting for mice. It seemed so long ago. She would try to crawl. She stretched her hand out into the darkness and felt roots going into the ground. Her fingers moved over them, like raised letters she couldn’t decipher, but it was only her hand that moved, her body was still. Her hair lay on the pine needles. She knew that there were snakes nearby. She could sense them in the dark. The owls were high above her in the sky, gliding as they hunted. They were hanging in the air, and looking down on the sandy ground and the hard roots, on the pine needles, and the snakes in curls, and small flowers studding the dark earth. They saw the gentle mice and the blameless snakes, and they saw her.
She thought of the white folded paper, left on the ground, unread, and all her rage, forgotten. She thought that when she saw Dan again and they were travelling together she’d tell him that she didn’t need to be worth more than gold. She would tell him all her truths and trust him to hear her. Then she remembered she would not see Dan again, and that he’d gone. And there would be no baby. It was not for her.
She couldn’t feel anything under her fingers now. Her hand slipped and rested. She turned her head, weightlessly, and looked up to the invisible sky. She was smaller and smaller, she was diminished, dissolving, quiet. She was only her eyes, and her eyes saw moonlight, shining high above her, the furthest, smallest gleam of it, touching the tallest of the trees. Acutely, cleanly, perfectly, she felt the kindness of the night surround her. She had nothing. She was nothing and content to be.
She didn’t hear Russ coming for her, so she wasn’t frightened. And she didn’t know how easily he found her, across the track, on the empty ground before the edge of the forest, just a short walk from the car. But she saw the sweeping torchlight, silvery and bright. Inside her head were worlds as big as oceans. She gave herself up to them, and her death was nothing to her, because she was not there.