As I was leaving, I came across Sue sitting at a table with a group of friends on the terrace of a café nearby, opposite the abbey. They had had quite a lot to drink, and they invited me to join them. It could have been a pleasant evening, if they hadn’t told me that John and Mary’s belongings had been auctioned in their absence, that they’d been seized by the bailiffs. Apparently they owed large sums of money to quite a lot of people. Nobody knew where they’d gone. Everybody had tried to find them, in vain. Eventually, even the house had been sold. The man who’d bought it, at auction, was the estate agent who’d showed it to me.
I couldn’t bring myself to go inside the house and fall asleep in one of those empty rooms, on the floor, as I’d planned. I was feeling more and more uneasy about that past friendship, which was turning into an obsession. There was I in the garden with the key in my hand, about to put it in the lock, when I stopped. It was late, but I decided to go and see Collins all the same; I knew he would still be up and grateful for any company. Tonight, his friends had told me something I’d already suspected: He didn’t have any set routine. He would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and go back to bed at three in the afternoon. Sometimes, he would decide to drive back to England on a whim, and stay there without getting in touch with anybody for three or four weeks. But there was nothing very surprising about that for anyone who knew the Dordogne and its exiles.
I could see him through his window in the blue glow of a television screen. He must be watching a news bulletin or the weather forecast on the BBC, thanks to satellite television.
He opened the door. He was obviously delighted to see me, but I must say that my heart sank when he declared that he’d received another video from his family, and that he had just started watching it. To get through the ordeal, I accepted the whisky he offered and didn’t even say “just a little” or “a drop.”
It was deadly dull, of course, and I watched without much attention, except when suddenly it struck me that the relatives on the screen were not the same as last time.
“Is this still your sister?” I asked.
“Yes, and my brother-in-law,” he said, turning towards me with a beaming smile. He was obviously delighted to see that I was touched by the film.
“How many sisters have you got?”
“Just the one. Listen, listen to what the little one is about to say... he’s so funny.”
And sure enough, the kid on the screen made an inept joke. The only funny thing about him was that he didn’t look at all as he’d looked in the other video. But I didn’t ask questions; I wasn’t interested in Collins’s nephews and I didn’t want to have the whole family tree explained to me.
Eventually, as I was falling asleep on the sofa, Collins told me that I could spend the night in his guest room. And I accepted gladly.
The following day, he drove me to Brantôme. I’d decided to go and drink a strong cup of coffee on the terrace, as it was Monday, and to buy the English Sunday papers which arrived a day late in the shops. I hoped that within half an hour I would find the energy to go and confront the estate agent.
That’s when I saw the photo. Collins’s family. They were all there, sitting in a row on a sofa. It reminded me of the video I’d seen the night before. But the article’s headline told me they were all dead, that they’d been dead for months.
Suddenly I understood why he behaved in such an eccentric manner. Even by Dordogne standards. Wasn’t he doing with these films what I’d been doing trying to buy back my friends’ house? He watched those films over and over again to give himself the illusion that all the dead people were still alive, even showing them to his guests and friends. The article explained that the family had all been murdered, at home, one night, by one or several men, the inquest hadn’t been able to establish which. The parents had been killed first, then the murderers had stepped into the children’s bedrooms.
I thought about poor Collins and the images that must haunt his worried mind. I wanted to go back and see him, ask him all sorts of questions about the people he had lost, and listen while he talked about them as if they weren’t dead.
But I had something to do first. It was half-past eleven. I’d decided to go and see the estate agent to ask him why he’d lied to me, to tell him that John and Mary had been very close friends, and that I’d spent many a day in that house that I now wanted to buy. I intended to tell him that he’d been accused of having an affair with Mary, thus being partly responsible for their leaving. And what did he have to say for himself?
But I did nothing of the sort. I ordered another coffee and looked through the paper until I found the article again; I looked at Collins’s family — all those people who’d been murdered in Batley. Then I folded up the paper and threw it in the first bin I found.
I took a taxi to Collins’s place. I passed the château again that would send Mary dreaming of aristocratic grandeur, stone floors and cold corridors; I thought back about Collins asking me if I would use my dead friends’ bedroom and his little nod towards the window.
He was both friendly and worried when he saw me. I asked him if I could come in. I put my hand on his arm, and tried to look as sympathetic as I could as I said: “I heard the terrible news.”
“What? What news?”
“Your family... they’re dead, aren’t they?”
He looked me straight in the eye for a few seconds, motionless, and then he began to sob madly. He wiped his eyes, he was snivelling like a child, and he nodded frantically, repeating: “Yes, yes, they’re all dead.”
“I came to tell you that... I understand; I’m sorry. I know what it’s like, and I was worried about you when I heard the news.”
“How did you learn?” he asked, still sobbing away.
“In the papers. They even printed their picture.”
He was now crying on my shoulder, full of sorrow and gratitude.
I asked if he sometimes took tranquilizers. He said yes, that there was a box in his medicine cabinet. He was crushed; it was as if he didn’t have the strength to be suspicious anymore. I offered to bring him a glass of water with a pill; he accepted immediately.
I went to the bathroom cabinet and found more than one box of tranquilizers; it was full of drugs of all sorts, including an impressive collection of sleeping pills. I gave him a generous whisky and a very efficient dose of sleeping pills mixed with the drink.
He calmed down almost instantly, and started to talk, telling me how much he loved his family, and how hard it is to see everything you hold dear disappear around you.
When he’d fallen asleep, his mouth gaping, I began to go through his things. I went to the cassettes and DVDs next to the television set and read their labels. Names, dates, and places. And suddenly I knew what was in all of those films: images of people who didn’t exist anymore. People who’d been massacred by Collins, and whom he watched regularly while imagining that he felt love and affection for them. The two families I’d seen on the home videos were not the same. He had killed them and come back from England with their souvenirs to watch on his television screen in the Dordogne.
In the cupboard next to the television, in the middle of neat rows, I found what I was really looking for: a VHS tape bearing the title “John and Mary.” I didn’t have the courage to watch. They were probably there, waving to the camera at Collins’s request, before he butchered them with a knife, an axe, a sledgehammer, who knows? Maybe Collins, like me, had said childishly, “They’re my best friends” when he’d shown this video to some stranger or other. It wasn’t by chance that he’d pointed out the right window when he was talking about John and Mary’s bedroom.