Fortnight of Fear (29 page)

“I think we'd better call the police,” said Robert, seriously.

They walked along the main street to the gendarmerie, a
large three-story building of pale orange brick, with a small walled courtyard, in which meticulously-pruned bay-trees grew. The sky had grown much darker now, and the stone steps of the gendarmerie were measled with rain. They pushed the heavy door open, and found themselves in an echoing mosaic-floored hallway, where a round-faced young man in a police uniform sat at a lonely desk, smoking and reading a newspaper.

David stood in front of him and coughed. The gendarme looked up, his head almost entirely hidden in wreaths of blue Gitanes smoke.

“
Parlez-vous anglais
?” asked David.

The gendarme nodded and shrugged. “If it is strictly necessary. That is the secret of France, of course. Almost everybody in France speaks English. It is just that they do not choose to. How do you say it? It is our ultimate deterrent against the English.”

“My wife's missing,” said David.

The gendarme blew out a last stream of smoke and crushed out his cigarette. “Your wife?”

“We're staying at La Colonne de Bronze. This morning she felt ill so she stayed in bed. I took the boys out for lunch at Les Pilotes. When we came back – well, she was missing. No sign of her. She'd taken her clothes, too. Her coat, her make-up, everything.”

The gendarme listened to this with no expression on his face. Then he consulted the calendar on his desk. “
Merde
” he said, softly.

“Is something wrong?”

“No, no,
monsieur
. Of course not. It's just that I've forgotten something.”

“The thing is,” said David, “the landlady at La Colonne de Bronze denies that she ever saw my wife. She says I checked in by myself, with nobody else except my two sons.”

The gendarme sniffed, and then wiped his nose with
the back of his hand. “Why do you think she would say something like that?”

“I don't know. I don't have the faintest idea. But we all came over on the Seacat from Dover to Boulogne on Monday … and my wife's been with us all the time. We've taken photographs, and videos.”

“Mme Courbet, at the hotel, did she take your wife's passport?”

David shook his head. “No, no. Only mine.”

“Do you have any idea what might have happened to your wife? Any clues? Any wild guesses?”

“None at all. We hadn't argued, everything was fine.”

“Have you tried to telephone your home in England, to see if perhaps she has returned there?”

“I hadn't thought of that, but I will.”

“Good. Meanwhile, stay at your hotel, and I will call some assistance. You understand that we are a very small gendarmerie here. Only two officers, as a rule, except in the summer months. Do you by any chance have a picture of your wife, to help with identification?”

David took out his wallet, and leafed through receipts and laundry tickets until he found the photograph of Carole which he always carried with him. The picture that he had taken on their fifteenth wedding anniversary, in the garden.

To his surprise, Carole's face was obscured by a dark, brownish mark, as if his wallet had got wet, and the dye had run. “I'm sorry,” he told the gendarme. “That's the only one I have … apart from the pictures that are still in the camera, and the videos.”

The gendarme took the picture and held it up to the light. Then he carefully sniffed it.

“You see … it's been scorched,” he said.

“Scorched? I don't understand. It's never been out of my wallet.”

“This has happened twice before, to my knowledge.”

“What's happened twice before?” David demanded. “What are you talking about?”

“
Monsieur
, two English women have disappeared from St Valéry-sur-Mer in the past one hundred years. One was a very famous case, Mrs Brownlow, who came here in 1915 with the Prince of Wales to visit the Western Front. At your hotel you may have seen a brass plaque beside one of the tables in the dining-room. It was at this table that the Prince of Wales dined with Mrs Brownlow the evening before she vanished.”

David was becoming increasingly exasperated. “That was nearly eighty years ago! What on earth does that have to do with my wife?”

“I don't know,
monsieur
. Perhaps nothing at all. But when the Prince of Wales returned to England, he discovered that the photograph of Mrs Brownlow which he kept in his dressing-room had been badly burned.”

David took back the photograph of Carole and raised it to his nose. The gendarme was right: it did smell scorched. “Was Mrs Brownlow ever found?” he asked.

The gendarme nodded. “Yes,
monsieur
. She was discovered on the beach, just below the cliffs. Her body had been burned to ashes, and she was almost unrecognizable. In fact she was identified only by the diamonds which the Prince of Wales had given her as a gift, in the form of a brooch. The brooch itself had completely melted.”

“You said you knew of
two
disappearances,” said David. He didn't believe for a moment that the burned body of a woman who had been found here in 1915 could possibly have any connection with Carole's disappearance, but all the same he wanted to know what had happened.

The gendarme took out another Gitane and lit it, and breathed smoke out of his nose. “The other was in 1838 … another very famous case. An Englishwoman came here with her elderly mother on a painting holiday. One afternoon, while her mother was asleep, she went out to
paint and disappeared. There were stories of a fierce fire that rushed through the streets of St Valéry that night like a whirlwind, but this lady's body was never found. When the mother returned to Gloucestershire, however, she found that her daughter's self-portrait had been burned black.”

“Well, that's fascinating,” said David. “I don't think it's very relevant to my wife's case, though, do you?”

But Robert said, very gravely, “It's seventy-seven years from 1838 to 1915 and it's seventy-seven years from 1915 to 1992.”

“That doesn't mean anything,” Jeremy retorted. “Mummy's just lost her memory or something or got fed up and gone home by train.”

The gendarme said, “Of course, yes, you are probably right. The most mundane answer is always the most likely. I apologize,
monsieur
, I had no wish to alarm you. These are only stories … the sort of Gothic mysteries that we relish so much in France … like the murders in the Rue Morgue.”

“What are you going to do now?” asked David.

“As I say … I will call at once for reinforcements, and I will initiate a search. You would do well to try to think of anywhere your wife might have gone to … perhaps a town or tourist attraction she might have mentioned. Sometimes, when people are ill, they have a tendency to act out of character.”

David looked down at the brown-scorched photograph. He could just make out the very edge of Carole's smile. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose they do.” They spent the rest of the afternoon searching the town. Although it lay in one of the flattest parts of France, the old quarter of St Valéry-sur-Mer had been built on the side of a steep cliff, on top of which stood the ruins of its fifteenth-century castle. The streets and squares were almost deserted: a silent medieval community with cobbles and courtyards
and shuttered windows. Now and then they came across an open window in which a child might stare out at them, saying nothing; or an open door which gave them a narrow view of a kitchen or a flight of ancient stone steps. But there was no sign of Carole, and the day grew grayer, and the cold breath of the Somme estuary chilled the town like the breath of some Breugelesque pestilence.

They reached the very crest of the cliff, where the dark hunched towers of the castle's gatehouse stood, overlooking the river. Far below them, in the grayness, a bulldozer toiled, leveling the beach, and occasionally they could hear the bellowing of its engine and the clanking of its tracks.

Jeremy held his father's hand. “She hasn't gone for ever, you know.”

“I know,” said David, although he didn't. He had never felt so alone in his life. Supposing he
never
found her? Supposing she
never
came back?

Robert was reading the plaque on the ruined gatehouse. “Through this gate … in 1430 … Joan of Arc was taken on her way to Rouen to be surrendered to the English.”

They walked disconsolately back down the cobbled hill, past the castle ramparts, and down through the town. There was another broken heap of stones at the bottom of the hill, on which a plaque said, “Here, Joan of Arc was imprisoned after her capture by the Burgundians.”

“What happened to Joan of Arc?” asked Jeremy.

“They tried her as a witch and a heretic,” said Robert.

“Then what?”

“They burned her at the stake, of course. Don't you know anything?”

The three of them returned to La Colonne de Bronze. There was no sign of
madame
– the restaurant was being prepared for this evening's dinner, and already there was a strong smell of poaching cod. However, a young gendarme with a wispy mustache was waiting for
them in the bar. He stood up when they came in, and saluted.

“
Bonsoir, monsieur
.”

“Any news?” asked David, tiredly.

“I regret no,
monsieur
. But we have fifty men searching this district, and also we have sent messages to all of the ports and airports. If you can be so good as to remain here, we will contact you immediately if we have anything to report.”

“Thank you,” said David. Then, “What about a drink, boys?”

He tried to eat that evening, for the sake of reassuring Robert and Jeremy, but he was barely able to touch his sole in lemon sauce, and he felt sick at heart. He kept glancing across the restaurant at the brass plaque commemorating the visit of the Prince of Wales in 1915. He finished off a whole bottle of Sancerre on his own, and then he went upstairs to bed.

The room was just the same. Dark, empty, smelling of foreign hotels. Upstairs, somebody was creaking the floorboards as they undressed for bed. David didn't bother to undress. He simply prized off his shoes and lay back exhausted and drunk on the orange bedcover.

He slept heavily for a while, and he was sure that he could hear somebody snoring. He woke up to discover that it was him. He climbed unsteadily out of bed, went to the bathroom, and drank three glasses of water, one after the other. He stared at himself in the bathroom mirror.
She's gone, whether she's disappeared or dead. She's gone, and now you're all alone
.

He tipped himself back into bed, and slept for another hour. This time, however, his mind was crowded with dreams and voices and inexplicable noises. He dreamed that he was running through the streets of St Valéry, forcing his way through medieval alleyways that were so
narrow and twisting that his shoulders scraped against the walls on either side. He dreamed he saw a young man in a brown tunic disappearing round a corner, just in front of him. He ran to the corner, but the young man had already started to scale the hill, up toward the ruined gatehouse. He tried to shout out, but he couldn't make his larynx work.

He heard people laughing and muttering, and somebody singing a garbled hymn. He heard odd, plangent music, drums and flutes and sackbuts. He heard a woman screaming and screaming as if she could never stop.

He opened his eyes. He was shaking, and drenched in sweat. He propped himself up on his elbow, and listened, but all he could hear was the fluffing of the wind against the window and the sharp ticking of his watch. He checked the time: three o'clock in the morning. He felt terrible. His breath stank of wine and the inside of his head felt like a coalhole.

He eased himself out of bed, and went to the window. The hairpin corner of the main road was silent. Lights twinkled somewhere in the far distance, out across the marshes. He pressed his forehead against the cold glass and said, “Carole,” and her name formed an evanescent oval of breath.

“Carole, where the hell are you?” God – she could be anywhere, dead, raped, tied up, imprisoned in some maniac's garage. He swallowed and it hurt to swallow but he couldn't bring himself to cry.

He was just about to go to the bathroom again when he glimpsed something in the shadows across the road. The window was misted, so he couldn't be sure. But it looked like somebody dressed in white, hurrying up the narrow alleyway that led toward the ramparts, and the castle.

“
Carole
?” he breathed, in disbelief.

With a surge of panic and excitement, he found his shoes, yanked the laces wide apart, and shoved them on.
He ran down the hotel stairs, colliding with the wall at the bottom, and then he wrenched at the front door. Shit! It was locked. He turned around, and hurried through to the back of the hotel, where the toilettes trickled drearily throughout the night. He found the back door, turned the key, and unbolted it. Then he ran out through the car park and into the street.

There was no sign of the hurrying white figure, but all the same he crossed the road and ran up the steep cobbled gradient. The path zig-zagged to the left, and then to the right, and then David was panting through a shadowy, echoing archway, and up past a small boulangerie, with its gray-painted shutters tightly closed.

He emerged on to the ramparts, where the wind blew steady and damp and very cold. He was gasping, and his lungs hurt. But off to his right, a curving pathway wound uptoward the ruined gatehouse, and he thought he saw the faintest flicker of white.

“Carole!” he called, his voice hoarse. “Carole!”

He struggled up the pathway, until he reached the black medieval bulk of the gatehouse. He circled the gatehouse twice, but there didn't appear to be anybody here.

“Carole!” he called again. It might be futile, it might be stupid, but so what? There was nobody to hear him.