‘Of course. I’ll remove it first thing tomorrow. She won’t know it was there-unless she tries to go out, that is.’
‘Christ, you really do think like a policeman,’ said Marc. ‘And if you’d thought of that yesterday, she’d be off the suspect list. You’re a bit late in the day with your bright idea.’
‘I did think about it, actually,’ said Vandoosler. ‘But I didn’t do it.’
Marc turned round, but his godfather stopped him with a wave of his hand before he could get launched.
‘Don’t get worked up. I’ve already told you it’s a good thing sometimes to let out a bit of rope. Otherwise we might just get stuck, learn nothing at all, and the whaler will go down with all hands.’
He smiled as he pointed to the coin nailed to the beam. Preoccupied, Marc watched him go out of the room and heard him climb his four flights of stairs. He still did not understand what his godfather was up to and he was not even sure they were on the same side. He took the shovel, and collected a little pile of ash to cover the embers. However much you cover them, they still go on glowing underneath. If you put out the light, you can see that at once. That was what he did, and sat on a chair watching the glow of the red-hot cinders. He fell asleep in this position. At four in the morning, stiff-limbed and cold, he went up to his room. He did not have the willpower to get undressed. At about seven, he heard Vandoosler going downstairs. Ah yes, the clamp. Sleepily he sat up and switched on the laptop Lucien had left on his desk.
XXXI
THERE WAS NO-ONE ELSE IN THE DISGRACE WHEN MARC SWITCHED THE computer off at about eleven o’clock. Vandoosler had gone off to find out whatever he could. Mathias had disappeared and Lucien had gone in pursuit of his seven notebooks. For four hours, Marc had passed all the press cuttings across the computer screen, reading and rereading every article, memorising each detail, each turn of phrase, observing their convergences and differences.
The June sunshine was steady and, for the first time, it occurred to him to take a bowl of coffee out into the garden and sit on the grass, hoping that the morning air would get rid of his headache. Marc trod down a square metre of so of long grass, found a wooden plank and sat on it cross-legged, facing the sun. He could not see where to go next. He knew the documents by heart now. His memory was good and capacious, and it collected everything, uncritically, including odds and ends and the memory of past despairs. The trip to Dourdan had not produced very much in the end. Dompierre was dead and had taken his story with him, and it was hard to see how to go about resurrecting it. It was not even clear that it would be of any interest.
Alexandra went past in the street, carrying a shopping bag and Marc waved to her. He tried to imagine her as a murderer, but that pained him. What the hell had she been up to, driving her car around for three hours?
Marc felt useless, impotent, and sterile. He had the feeling there must be something he was not picking up. Ever since Lucien had come out with that sentence about the essential being revealed in the investigation of paroxysms, he had been ill at ease. It bothered him. Both in his research on the Middle Ages and when it came to the business in hand. Tired of having such vague and inconsequential ideas, Marc got up from his plank and observed the Western Front. It was curious how Lucien’s way of talking had got under their skin. Now they would never dream of calling that house anything except the Western Front. Relivaux was probably not back yet or the godfather would have said something. Had the police been able to account for how he spent his time in Toulon?
Marc put his bowl down on the plank and went noiselessly out of the garden. From the street, he studied the Western Front. As far as he had observed, the cleaner only came on Tuesdays and Fridays. What was it today? Thursday. The house seemed quite still. He considered the tall gate, which was well maintained and not rusty like theirs, and which had sharp and efficient-looking spikes along the top. The problem would be to climb up there without being seen by a passer-by, and then, with luck, to be agile enough not to get impaled on the way over. He looked up and down the street. He was fond of this little street. He went over to the big refuse bin, and as Lucien had the other night, he climbed on top. Holding onto the railings, he managed after a few false starts to reach the top of the gate and climb over it without getting snagged.
His agility pleased him. He dropped down on the other side, thinking that after all he might have made a good gatherer, if not a hunter, wiry and nimble. Feeling satisfied with himself, he adjusted his silver rings, which had twisted on his fingers during the climb, and walked lightly over to the beech tree. What was he hoping for? Why was he going to all this trouble to see this dumb tree? No reason, just that he had promised himself he would, and because trying to save Alexandra was becoming a more doubtful project every day. That stupid girl with her pride was doing all the wrong things.
Marc put one hand, then the other, on the tree’s cool trunk. It was still small enough for him to be able to encircle it with two handspans. He felt like strangling it, wringing its neck until it told him, between choking sounds, just what it thought it was doing in the garden. He let his arms fall, discouraged. You can’t strangle a tree. A tree just keeps quiet, it’s as silent as a fish, and doesn’t even make bubbles. All it produces are leaves, wood and roots. Yes, it makes oxygen too, that’s quite practical. Apart from that, nothing. Deaf and dumb. As silent as Mathias, who tried to make his flint fragments and bones speak to him: a silent guy conversing with silent objects. Yes, they suited each other. Mathias swore he could hear them speaking, that you just had to learn their language and listen to them. Marc, who only liked what texts had to say, his own or other people’s, couldn’t understand this silent conversation. And yet Mathias did end up finding things out, that was certain.
He sat down by the tree. The grass had not yet grown back properly around it because it had twice been dug up. There was just a little covering of new grass which he touched with the palm of his hand. Soon it would be more plentiful and there’d be nothing to see. People would forget about the tree and the earth it stood in. Angrily, Marc pulled up a few tufts. Something was odd. The soil was dark, heavy, almost black. He remembered very well the two days they had spent digging and then filling in that pointless trench. He could see Mathias standing up to his thighs in the trench, saying that that was enough, they could stop because the lower layers of earth were undisturbed. He saw once more Mathias’ feet, bare in sandals, covered with earth. But the earth had been yellowish-brown, light soil, the same as in the stem of the white clay pipe he had picked up, muttering, ‘eighteenth century’. Light-coloured crumbly soil. And when they had filled it in, they had mixed leafmould with the same light soil. Not at all like the stuff he was kneading between his fingers. Was it new leafmould already? He scratched away some more. Black earth again. He walked round the tree, examining the topsoil the whole way round. No, there was no doubt, someone had disturbed the earth beneath the surface. The layers of soil were not as they had left them. But the police had come digging after them. Perhaps they had dug deeper, reaching a layer of black earth that was lower down. That must be it. Not being archaeologists, they had not been able to distinguish the layers and had dug into the black earth and then spread it around on the surface. No other explanation. Nothing to to get excited about.
He stayed there a few moments more with his fingers furrowing the soil. He picked up a little piece of pottery that looked more sixteenth than eighteenth century to him, though he didn’t really know much about it, and put it in his pocket. He got up, patted the tree trunk to tell it he was leaving and went back to climb over the gate. He had just touched down on the dustbin when he saw his godfather arriving.