December 2016: before dawn
The paramedics rig up a stretcher and, with assistance from two gendarmes, lift Paul out of the trench. They all seem sceptical when I tell them that I think my husband has been attacked.
“Accident?” one suggests, unable to believe a sane person would amble around an unlit building site at night.
They examine Paul’s head wound by torch light. He stirs and his eyelids flicker. One of the sapeurs tries to coax a few words from him before he lapses back into semi-consciousness. Questions hang heavy in the air.
While the paramedics work on Paul, Henri shields me from the police officers’ questioning. I’m convinced Eve was waiting for Paul but why would she attack him if she still hoped to entice him back to her? It’s too confusing.
“It is good you found him,” a paramedic tells me. “By morning, he would have had hypothermia.”
As they lift Paul into their vehicle, Henri returns to my side. We watch the tail lights of the ambulance bump along our rutted track and disappear into the damp mist and I feel empty and numb.
“Could he have hit his head in the fall, rolled onto his front and blacked out?” I ask Henri.
“I don’t think it was an accident,” he replies.
One of the officers has been photographing the septic tank pit and its surroundings, holding up a makeshift light. He’s kept us at a distance and is taking infinite care, but if there were any footprints, they would have been trampled during our efforts to revive Paul.
“The officers want a statement from you,” says Henri. “I mentioned you have an interview set up with the police in Limoges at ten but they need a brief report from everyone at the scene.”
I nod and glance to the east where the sky is lightening. I’m anxious to get to the hospital—not for Paul, for Mollie.
“I’ll speak with them. I hope it won’t take too long.”
A shout goes up from the second officer and I twist round to see he’s holding an implement in a gloved hand. Henri and I edge forward for a closer look. It’s a shovel. As the officer turns it over in his hands, even my short-sighted eyes can see those dark smears and stains aren’t mud.
*
I can’t let Mollie see me in these mud-spattered clothes and, if I turned up at the hospital looking like I’ve been sleeping rough in a field, I’d probably be permanently barred. I make a brief diversion home to shower.
Poor Milou races to the door, barking a greeting.
“Sorry, boy.” I bend to stroke him, hastily refill his food and water bowls and give him a five minute run in the courtyard.
On the drive into Limoges, I try to silence my chattering brain. I know reaction to shock follows a cycle—denial, anger, depression, acceptance, but yesterday’s rapid string of events has catapulted me forward to acceptance, tinged with anger.
The ties of love that bound me to Paul have been severed. Brutally. Despite his injury, my concern for him is for his role as Mollie’s much-loved father—or so I tell myself. In the realm of officialdom our formal connection persists, and will do for some time. I’m still his wife and next of kin.
When I reach the hospital, it’s not yet seven o’ clock so I head to the emergency department to track down Paul in the critical care unit. He’s in a single room, watched over by a male nurse. I peer through the glass door panel and see he’s wired up to a bank of machines and a drip. There’s no mask on his face so he must be breathing normally. Spotting me, the nurse strolls over to the door.
“Madame Willshire?”
“Yes. How is he?”
“Come in—see for yourself.”
Propped up against a slope of white pillows, Paul stirs. One eyelid flickers open, then closes again without focusing.
“You see,” says the nurse. “He is doing well. Just now he was talking.”
He fetches a chair and I sit at the bedside and study Paul’s face, once so familiar to me. I stroke his arm, taking care to avoid the infusion cannulas taped to his skin.
The room is a soundscape of whooshes, punctuated by an occasional high-pitched beep. Wordlessly, the nurse meanders between his patient and the machines, giving equal attention to both, checking and recording readings. Occasionally, when he completes a reading, he nods and smiles encouragement at me.
Outside the window, morning traffic builds to a crescendo and permeates the double-glazed cocoon. I glance at the wall clock and get to my feet. It’s time to go to Mollie.
My lower back aches from the strain of the night and I stop in the doorway to massage it. The nurse calls my name and, as I turn, I see that Paul is awake and lifting his arm to beckon me back.
“He is recovering, I think,” says the nurse.
I troop back to the bed. Paul smiles and moves his lips but the effort of forming words seems to defeat him.
“I’m going to Mollie,” I tell him. While he was sleeping, I was able to stroke his arm and hold his hand, but now he’s conscious, my fingers recoil. “We’ll come back later. Both of us.”
The hospital corridors bustle with the optimism of a new day. At Mollie’s ward there’s no sign of the nurse, who evicted me and Paul the night before but, when I give my name, the smile of the woman who greets me falters and I guess we featured in despatches when she was given her handover briefing.
“Mummy!” Mollie, pink-cheeked and boisterous, launches into my arms almost knocking over her cup of milk.
The nurse’s frown softens. I perch on the bed and gather her wriggling body onto my lap; her sleep-matted hair smells of ripe summer fruit and some of her vitality transmits to my heavy limbs.
“She’s fine, then?” I ask the nurse, as I stroke Mollie’s hair.
“The doctor will come soon but, I think—yes.”
I postpone telling Mollie her dad’s in the hospital. My eye falls on a box of children’s books.
“Let’s read,” I suggest, as we wait for the doctor, and she chooses one about animals and laughs at my pronunciation of the word for dog.
“No, Mummy—you said chin. It’s chien!”
I let my mind wander from the surreal situation we’re in and think of Milou, all alone in the house, waiting for us.
As the time of my police interview approaches, my throat feels dry and my reading falters. The doctor arrives, carries out a few rapid checks on Mollie and confirms she can be discharged.
“Home!” Mollie demands.
I explain she’ll have to wait a while longer in the ward with the lovely nurses while I go to a meeting. The words ‘with the police’ are on the tip of my tongue but I hold back. So far, Mollie’s come through this ordeal unaware of any threat to her safety—or mine. In her eyes the trip out of school with Eve was a prank—some kind of special treat. What would be the point of infecting her with my own fear?
“You’re mean. I hate you. I want Daddy.”
When I bend to kiss her, she places her palms against my stomach to push me away.
The hospital’s network of corridors no longer mimics a maze; signs direct me to the meeting room and I knock on the door. Two police officers—one male, one female—are sitting at a grand polished table, on incongruous plastic chairs. As I enter, they get to their feet and shake my hand.
“Madame Willshire, please sit.”
The younger, female officer pours water into a plastic cup and slides it across the table to me. She tells me their names and I immediately forget them.
“This morning we have had a report of another incident,” she begins. “From the gendarmerie near to Sainte Violette.”
She refers to some handwritten notes so I guess the details have been phoned through.
“That’s right,” I squirm on the red plastic chair, the seat is too low for the table and my back aches from a night without sleep. “The officers at the scene took a report from me.”
It seems the officers weren’t told I was British and it takes a while to convince them I don’t need an interpreter.
“I studied French at university and I’ve been living and working in Sainte Violette for a year,” I tell them.
They confer in low voices. Once they’re satisfied, we begin at the beginning—perhaps before the beginning—because who knows when this nightmare began. The female officer explains the process. First, they will deal with my report of the taking of Mollie without consent. As a minimum they will need a report from me and from her father and a medical report from the hospital. They double-check my personal details and run through the initial report I gave to the call handler. Then they ask me to tell them about Genevieve Laurenson.
“I knew her as Eve,” I say. “I think she arrived in Limoges in early September. She said she was house hunting. Henri Wilson, a friend, who sometimes works for me in my bar—Les 4 Vents in Sainte Violette—was showing her properties for sale. She began visiting the bar.”
“She was your friend?”
“I thought so but it turned out she wasn’t who she said she was. She was a former work colleague of my husband’s and she’d been having an affair with him. When he broke it off, she traced him to France and followed him.”
The female officer tops up my water glass and I realise her male colleague hasn’t addressed a single word to me. Under the unblinking overhead light, his bald head gleams, as if smeared with a thin layer of grease. He concentrates on note-taking but when he glances at me, his lips curl into a smirk.
I explain about Eve offering to help me look after Mollie.
“But she was your husband’s lover, no? What did he say about this?”
“He didn’t know. He was in England at that time, working,” I stutter. “But then he came back and their affair continued.”
I stumble over my account of discovering Mollie missing from school. When I get to the part about what awaited me in Eve’s apartment, my brain fogs.
“She attacked me,” I tell them, rolling up my sleeve to reveal my wound.
I’ve covered it with a gauze dressing from our first aid kit; I peel away the tape and the dressing flaps open. It’s no longer weeping and is beginning to scab over.
They both bend forward to examine it.
“Do you have the medical report?”
“No. I didn’t get it looked at. I’ll ask the doctor.”
“What happened next?”
I tell them about picking up the perfume atomiser, finding Mollie, barely conscious, in the sitting room with the murmuring television and those pills. What were they called? I should have made notes.
“I’m sorry. I need a break.”
Acid pools in my stomach. I could be sick at any moment—like last night.
I hurry to the women’s toilets, but I’ve not eaten for twenty-four hours so I dry-retch into the toilet bowl. I dawdle back to the meeting room and open the door quietly. The officers are standing close together and some kind of argument seems to be going on between them. Seeing me, they fall silent and step apart.
The female officer has fetched coffee from the machine.
I nod, grateful for this small kindness, and gulp it down. The bitter liquid scalds my raw throat and burns my stomach.
A hospital official knocks on the door and comes in to say the room will be needed again in thirty minutes.
When she’s gone, my interview restarts and the pace of questioning speeds up, from crawl to canter, forcing me to focus. My head clears and I answer their questions with a new fluency. The male police officer leans back in his chair and observes me from beneath hooded eyelids, as I tell them about bringing Mollie to Les Urgences. I miss out the part about Paul creating a scene and getting us evicted from the hospital.
“My husband has confessed to his affair with Eve—I mean, Genevieve Laurenson. He confirmed everything she’d told me.”
“And what did you say to him?”
“That I couldn’t forgive. I mean, he’d put our daughter in danger. I told him our marriage was over.”
The female officer pauses, she glances at her colleague, who shrugs off his act of distracted boredom and leans forward in his seat. His eyes, no longer cloaked, drill into me. I lower my gaze.
“Please continue, Madame. What happened next?”
I mumble an explanation about Paul racing off into the night to meet Eve at Les Quatre Vents and how, when I couldn’t contact him, I went there myself. “With our friend, Henri Wilson.”
“Could you repeat, please?”
“I don’t know what happened last night.” How could they expect me to know? “Only that she—Eve—had demanded my husband meet her at the property we’ve been renovating. I can’t tell you if she was there when he arrived or not.”
How can I explain? My skin feels hot and itchy. With effort, I suppress the urge to scratch and grip the edge of the table.
“I was afraid he’d do something rash and make things worse than they already were, because of what she’d done to our daughter. He was so angry—he seemed to be out of control.” I shake my head. “It’s too hard to explain.”
“Madame Willshire,” the male police officer takes over the interview and there’s an edge to his voice. “Your husband was unfaithful. You found out. I wonder—why did you go to his mistress’s home?”
My jaw drops and I gape at him.
“Have you ever given your daughter sleeping tablets?”
I shake my head. “No. Never!”
“You knew he was going to meet Madame Laurenson at Les Quatre Vents late at night. Why did you follow him?”