Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 926 & 927, November/December 2018

Take Care, Love by Jean-Claude Mourlevat

Translated from French by Samuel Ashworth

France’s Jean-Claude Mourlevat is the award-winning author of over fifteen novels for children and young adults. Silhouette, his first collection of adult short stories (including this one), was published in 2013. Translator Samuel Ashworth is an assistant fiction editor at Barrelhouse whose own fiction has been published in a number of literary magazines.

Class had ended and the lecture hall was emptying slowly. Madame Seligman, professor of American Civilization at the University of St. Etienne, gestured to the thin blond student lingering in the front row.

“Mademoiselle, if you please.”

Angelique came forward. She looked like a schoolgirl with her glasses, her coat buttoned up to her neck, and her backpack dangling from the crook of her arm.

“Yes, madame?”

“Have you ever thought of applying to be a teacher in England or the United States?”

“No,” replied Angelique, taken by surprise.

“It would do you considerable good, I think. You are a fine student, but a little too timid. You realize this.”

“Yes,” Angelique agreed. “I’m not self-confident, especially speaking.”

“Precisely. And it is to your detriment. Look at the presentation you did for your classmates on Catholic charismatic renewal in the United States. It was excellent, articulate, and the argument was remarkable, but it was as if you wanted to keep it all to yourself. We could barely hear you. Your barely lifted your nose from your notes. It’s a pity, don’t you think?”

She was speaking softly and solicitously, returning her papers to her leather briefcase.

“I know that you have had some difficulty in your life,” she went on, lowering her voice even though the lecture hall was deserted now. “I also lost my mother very early, and in a brutal way. I was fourteen, and starting that day I expected the worst at every instant, as if the worst was just... normal. It took me twenty years to understand that it wasn’t true, that life could have good surprises in it too, that the worst was not a sure thing. Twenty years, gone.”

Angelique lowered her head to hide her emotion. Mme Seligman was much more than a professor to her. This woman, who was her mother’s age, had taken her under her wing at the beginning of the year and had encouraged her fiercely. Angelique had returned her confidence by working tirelessly.

“Forgive me, I’m not a psychologist,” she pressed, “but I get the impression that you try to protect yourself from everything. Am I mistaken?”

“No,” said Angelique, reproaching herself for blushing again, “you’re right.”

“Then we agree,” concluded Mme Seligman. “I am quite convinced that a year abroad would greatly benefit you. You will gain conviction and self-assurance. Consider it.”

For Angelique a suggestion from Mme Seligman was a commandment from God. Without hesitation she took the necessary steps, and easily secured a posting as an assistant French teacher for the coming year. Her assignment was to a secondary school in Hull, in East Yorkshire, England. A glance at the map told her the port city lay three hours north of London.

As soon as she heard, she went to see Mme Seligman to tell her the news.

“Magnificent,” she said. “I am convinced that you will have a fine experience there. But above all, don’t curl up and hide. Make friends. Be active. Do not hesitate to scrape yourself against real life.”

As Angelique was leaving, she reminded her: “If you want to write me during your trip, I would be glad to know how it’s going. Here, take my home address.”

“I’ll write,” Angelique promised.

She had barely ever left her province up until that point, and so she felt a great rush of emotion when, at summer’s end, she brought herself to Lyon, dragging two bulging suitcases, to board the bus that would take her to England. They drove all night. She slept terribly because of her uncomfortable seat, and because of the fifty hundred-franc bills stuffed under the Ace bandage wrapped around her abdomen. She’d earned them in July, checking meter readings for EDF. The first salary of her life. And it was a good job. Except for whenever she went out to farms, and the dogs would keep her from getting out of her little blue Renault.

At Victoria Station, she ate what was left of the provisions she’d brought from France: a saucisson sandwich and an apple. When they were consumed entirely, she could hear it all around her: The only language anyone was speaking was English. She was far from home, she realized, and alone, and she would be for a long time.

For three hours she sat on a suitcase, waiting, before boarding another bus. The trip took longer than expected, so it was night when she arrived in the Hull bus station, after a voyage of twenty-seven hours and thirty minutes.

“You’re late, love.”

These were the first words addressed to her by Miss Sykes, her landlady, who was tapping her foot on the platform.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and began to explain that it wasn’t her fault, but the woman silenced her with a gesture and led her to a dusty Ford Fiesta with a dented left door.

She was a woman of some fifty years, stout, brusque, and masculine. She wore an old, weathered coat, her hair cropped and bristly, like a shoe-brush. As she drove, she sniffed noisily and multiple times she scratched her crotch, like a man. Angelique took in the stubby red hands on the wheel, the crusted blood on the back of her thumb from a recent wound, the chewed fingernails, and asked herself how she was supposed to live with this woman for a whole year.

The conversation was brief for the simple reason that Angelique could barely understand a quarter of what Miss Sykes was saying to her, to the point where she wondered momentarily what language she was speaking. But there could be no doubt: It was indeed English, the language she had been passionately studying for years. Doubt crept back into her.

The brick house stood at the end of the road, in a run-down neighborhood in the northwest of the city. Angelique found it a little sinister, though that could have been due to the darkness, and the fog that swathed everything in gray.

Miss Sykes stopped the car outside the gate, opened the trunk, and lifted out the suitcases as if they were empty. Angelique hurried after her up the driveway and front steps, then up the stairs to the second floor. As she climbed she was impressed by the enormous posterior that appeared like a concentrated mass before her, by the exaggerated back, the bulllike neck. This woman could play for the English national rugby team, she thought.

The room had seen better days, but was clean and well appointed. A twin bed, a chest of drawers, a desk with a lamp, a chair, a coal-burning stove, and a bathroom. The window looked out on a grassy garden surrounded with a brick wall. In the corner was a wooden shed.

“Would you like a bite to eat?” asked Miss Sykes, making a hand motion to go with the words to make sure she understood.

The sandwich was far away, but Angelique said she wasn’t hungry.

“Well, goodnight, love,” said the landlady, and retired to her floor of the house.

Angelique wondered if “love” translated to “ma chérie,” and why Miss Sykes would call her that, since they barely knew each other. Then she proceeded to set up the room a little, before finally allowing herself to collapse onto the bed, exhausted. She found herself weeping with rage when she discovered that her legs were so swollen she could not get herself out of her jeans. She fell asleep in them.

The next morning was a Sunday. The women ate a solid English breakfast together, which Angelique inhaled, and then Miss Sykes gave her a tour of the house. In the garden shed there was a pile of coal from which Angelique could supply her little stove. There was a metal shovel with a wooden handle sticking out of it.

“And here’s your horse!” said the landlady, indicating an old women’s bicycle leaning against the planks of the wall. “If you want to save a bit on the bus, take it.”

In the kitchen she urged her to help herself to “anything, anytime.” She told her she should likewise use the living room at her leisure, take all the baths and showers she liked, play music at full volume, and bring home whoever she wanted, whenever she wanted, for as long as she wanted. The important thing was that she felt good — “Okay, love?”

It turned out that the user’s guide to Miss Sykes only had three simple lessons: first, this woman was utterly indifferent to what anyone thought of her; second, she allowed Angelique absolute freedom; third, she was not an unpleasant person.

It did not take long for Angelique to get her bearings. Quickly, she grew used to the accent of the region. During the week, to save money, she abstained from going out; she devoted herself to her work and to studying English. On weekends, though, she went on excursions with the other French assistants in the town. Together, they explored the North Sea and Scarborough. Little by little a delicious feeling of independence and liberty began to grow within her. How well she had done to leave! she thought, and thanked Madame Seligman in her heart.

Then, in October, came the night that changed everything.

In the morning she had biked to school, like she did every day. The trip was only four kilometers, but whenever she had to fight through stinging rain and wind, it could turn into an ordeal.

Once more she had to dismount and walk, her fingers tight on the handlebars, frozen, eyes tearing. The water drummed on her backpack, strapped to the bike rack and wrapped in plastic. The day hadn’t gone very well either. Certain of her students had begun to take advantage of her, in particular a group of boys of fifteen or sixteen, all dumb as turf. At first they’d stayed quiet, observing her, but more and more they had become unpleasant, mocking and disrespectful. She suspected that they would make sexual jokes in English about her that the class would laugh at, and she alone couldn’t understand.

She left school at four, sad and vaguely humiliated. By luck, the weather had improved and she cycled with pleasure under a ray of sunshine that was as charming as it was unexpected. Along the way she stopped at a Barclay’s bank, where she had opened an account, just up the road from the house. She leaned the bike against the wall, looped the chain lock around it, and entered. Only two customers were ahead of her. When it was her turn at the teller, she asked for two hundred and fifty pounds sterling. She was putting the envelope into her backpack when she sensed eyes on her fingers. They were coming from the other side of the window, these eyes. From outside. She just caught sight of the man before he vanished down the sidewalk. Young. Seedy leather jacket. Hat pulled down over his ears. Skinny. And two piercing little eyes aimed straight at the money.

As she unlocked the bike, she looked for him up and down the road, but couldn’t see him. She cycled as calmly as possible the rest of the way, but couldn’t help but feel relieved when she made it home. She dismounted, turned the key in the lock, passed through the gate, closed it behind her, and walked around the right side of the house. Miss Sykes wasn’t there, as evidenced by her empty parking space in front of the house. She worked in the warehouse for a mall and rarely came home before six.

Angelique pushed her bicycle up to the shed. She entered. Placed the bike in its spot by the wall. She was releasing her backpack from the bike rack when she heard the gate creak on its hinges. I should have locked it, she thought, confused. She didn’t know she would regret the mistake for the rest of her life.

There were two of them now. The one from the bank with his hat and gaunt skeletal face, and another, fatter and older, sweating, with a knife in his right hand. She thought she would faint.

“The money. Now!” said the fat one, stalking toward her, holding the blade out in front of him.

“In the backpack,” said the other, who was keeping a lookout by the door of the shed.

With his free hand the fat one snatched the backpack, which she was still clutching to her chest, opened it, took the envelope, and tossed it to his henchman. Then, instead of leaving, he grabbed her by the neck and kissed her greedily on the mouth. He stank of sour sweat and grime. She fought back, shouting in French: “Non! Arrêtez!”

But all it did was excite him more. He pushed his knife into her ribs. He was wrapping his meaty arm around her body, pressing himself against her.

The two men exchanged words in an English she couldn’t understand, and the younger one closed the door of the shed, plunging them into darkness. Surely this hadn’t been their plan and the robbery was the only thing they’d had in mind, but how could they resist the temptation before them now, this unexpected bonus? A quiet spot, far from prying eyes, a woman at their mercy and a foreigner too, a little skinny, maybe, but pretty enough.

The fat one moved behind her, surrounded her with his arms, and let himself fall backwards, taking her with him. She screamed.

“Shut up!” he spat as he drew the blade along the side of her throat.

She shut up. They were on their backs now, him under and her on top, as if fused together. The young one in the hat lunged forward and threw himself at her, attempting to remove her jeans. She lashed out with her knees. He slapped her. The fat one pressed the knife.

“Nice and easy, yeah?”

They seemed to know what they were doing — the method was clearly tested and their individual roles set: one held, while the other... and then, surely, the reverse.

When she saw her own legs appear, naked and white, she despaired, and began to wail. Nothing and nobody could save her from the worst. Why? she asked herself. What did I do wrong?

The younger one got up to kick off his pants more easily. She shut her eyes so she wouldn’t see. She felt him kneeling between her legs, forcing her open. She screamed again and a few more millimeters of knife dug into her throat.

“Shut up, bitch!”

The door of the shed opened and Miss Sykes entered. She froze for an instant, unable to believe the sight that greeted her. Once she understood that it was real, she went into action, and she was unstoppable. She seized the coal shovel, drew up behind the rapist, raised high the metal tool and smashed it down on his head. There was a sickening noise of splintered bone. The man, who had half stood up, fell to all fours under the impact. She kicked him in his bony and preposterous bare buttocks and hit him a second time, then a third, then again and again, always on the head, hurling curses at him, of which the gentlest was “you son of a bitch.”

The fat one had let go of Angelique, and was cowering in the corner of the shed, pointing his pathetic knife at the avenging fury that used to be Miss Sykes.

“Stop!” he cried. “Christ, you’re killing ’im!”

But he was too much of a coward to rescue his friend and when she turned her wrath on him he charged for the door. She caught him in flight and stove in his hand with a swing of her shovel. The knife went flying. Despite the pain, the man took the time to pick it up with his other hand, swore, and fled, clutching his wrist. Miss Sykes chased him as far as the yard, hurling the shovel into his back. Then she came back into the shed.

Angelique had stood up and pulled her jeans back on, but her legs were shaking so violently she could hardly stand.

“ ’Twas a close shave, love!” said Miss Sykes, gathering her into her arms.

In all her years of study, Angelique had been taught that the best way to memorize an idiom in a foreign language was to hear it used in a real-life context. And the more emotional charge this situation carried, the more solidly the idiom would stick. “Ф’Twas a close shave, love!” C’est passé près, ma chérie! She would remember it all her life.

For a long time she sobbed into the muscular chest of her landlady, who all the while whispered, “It’s all right... it’s all over... you’re safe, dear.”

Then they had to consider the man at their feet.

He was lying on his side, his pants around his thighs, grotesque. Even under his hat his skull looked dented and the black hair that stuck out was viscous with blood. The open eyes expressed a kind of astonishment, but mainly their message was: “I am dead.” Miss Sykes knelt and passed her hand over the eyes to close them.

“He has my money,” Angelique remembered, and collected her envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket, trying not to look at his face.

Miss Sykes took a tarp off the shelf and threw it over the body, then shepherded Angelique out of the shed.

The two women would spend the rest of the afternoon in the kitchen. Angelique, in shock, thought they should call the police. Miss Sykes could only see the dangers.

“I killed him, do you see?”

“Yes, but you were defending me.”

“To defend yourself you hit once or twice. I bashed this lad’s brains out. How’m I to explain that in front of a judge?”

She wasn’t wrong. But then what should they do?

“And there is the other,” Angelique argued. “He saw everything.”

“That one knew what they were about to do. He won’t talk.”

So be it, then.

“At that,” Miss Sykes asked, “he didn’t have the chance to...”

“No, he did not do anything to me. You were in time. Thank you. Thank you.”

As she was repeating “thank you” the tears began again.

“Go take a bath. Put on your favorite music, nice and loud, and we’ll deal with the rest tonight.”

Much later that night, Miss Sykes knocked on Angelique’s door.

“I figured you weren’t sleeping. D’you want to help? Not saying you have to.”

“I’m coming.”

“As you like.”

Miss Sykes called it her garden, but it would be more accurate to describe it as a grassy rectangle, stuck between the back of her house and her neighbors’ property. A waning moon washed it all with a pallid light.

It was there that the two women undertook to bury the man in the shed. Miss Sykes had measured him and traced with the tip of her spade the dimensions of the hole they had to dig: the very size and shape of a coffin. They set to work, one at each end. Angelique, who was more accustomed to manipulating the present perfect than the handle of a shovel, soon found her hands mushrooming with blisters.

“Leave it,” Miss Sykes told her, already shining with sweat, “and go get me some beers.”

They spoke in whispers, out of prudence, and the sound of the shovel sinking into the loamy soil — this was England, after all — wasn’t likely to wake anyone. Angelique came back with three cold beers and a bottle opener.

“Maybe the hole is deep enough now?” she suggested, as her landlady cracked open her second lager.

“I don’t fancy finding this bloke’s big toe in the basket of my lawn-mower next spring,” she replied, and redoubled her efforts.

She dug so well that soon they were ready to get to the business that Angelique had been dreading. Yet she could not abandon Miss Sykes.

“Come on, then,” she said, putting down her shovel.

There was no light in the shed. They groped around in the dark to find the body, and then gripped him by the arms and hauled him outside. Even as she was dragging him thus to his final resting place, Angelique had the sudden thought that what she was doing didn’t feel all that extraordinary. Since being attacked in the shed, she felt as if she had tumbled into a different world, with its own internal logic. More than that, she realized, she felt happy to be doing something.

They laid the man in his plot of earth. Miss Sykes covered his face with a hand towel.

“What was his name?” she asked, taking up her shovel once more.

“I don’t know. How could I know?”

“Maybe you heard the other one call him by his name?”

“No, I can’t remember.”

“Right then. We’ll call him Bob. Work for you?”

“Yes.”

She gathered herself for a few seconds over the remains, then said, “Sorry, Bob. Rest in peace.”

She started shoveling dirt back into the hole. Angelique armed herself with the second spade and joined in. When it was finished, they stamped the earth as flat as they could, and scattered any residual dirt all around the rest of the garden.

“Let’s go home,” said Miss Sykes. “It’s done.”

In the kitchen both drank two brandies, standing, without speaking to one another. Finally Angelique wanted to go upstairs and try to get some sleep.

“Goodnight, Miss Sykes,” she said.

“I really think we can drop the ‘Miss Sykes,’Ф” said the landlady. “It doesn’t suit. Call me Pam.”

“Good night, Pam,” Angelique corrected herself.

“Good night, love.”

The next morning at eight-thirty, Angelique stood before her first class of the day, looking gently crumpled. One of the boys who exasperated her snarked that she have must been up all night partying to look like that. She ignored him, but a little later, since he was slouching in his chair, she snapped at him: “Sit up straight, please.”

He didn’t move and muttered under his breath a lurid joke about how she was making something “sit up straight.” The others guffawed. So she looked him right in the eyes and said in English, “Listen to me, boy. I understood that sad little joke. Because it turns out I have learned your language — believe it. Even though it seems you are incapable of learning mine. I understood what you said today and also what you said on all the other days. So you are going to take your things and go sit in the back of the classroom. And I do not wish to hear your voice anymore. It irritates my ears. Otherwise I will notify the principal at once and demand your permanent expulsion for making obscene comments to a teacher. Do you understand me? I want to hear your response.”

She had spoken in a precise, taut voice, without making a single mistake in either grammar or vocabulary. Until this moment she had never spoken more than four words of English in front of her pupils, out of respect for the directives she had been given: In a French class, you speak French. So well had she done so that these young people had come to believe their teacher hardly spoke their language, and were astonished to hear her express herself so well.

The accused gargled out an inaudible response.

“What was that?” she came back at him. “Are you choking on your own language?” She repeated her question: “Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” said the boy. Then he collected his things and retreated to an empty chair at the back.

“This goes, of course, for everyone, yes?” she concluded, before switching back to French with a smile: “Bien, où en étions-nous restés?”

That very evening it dawned on her that after over a month in England she still had not written to Mme Seligman. For a long time, she stood at her bedroom window, looking down at the narrow rectangle of turned-up earth which Miss Sykes had covered in autumn leaves. Then she sat down at her desk.

After that followed a long exposition about her day-to-day life, at home and outside, with her teacher friends. She described their weekly outings. She talked of school, of her difficulties at the outset, and of the confidence that was coming to her little by little. And she concluded thus:

She spent the Christmas holiday in France, and many people remarked to her that she seemed more assured. Her uncle declared that Angelique had become someone who “took the bull by the horns.”

Winter in Hull could have felt dismal, with night falling at four o’clock and the omnipresent dampness, but she soldiered on. She never fell ill; she made some friends among her English colleagues; she built up her vocabulary, her accent, her fluency; her friendship with Miss Sykes deepened.

After the burial of Bob, Angelique had stayed on alert, persuaded that the other one, the accomplice, would return. She got into the habit of looking around her at all times, on the street, in stores, playing sports. She’d even given up the bicycle for a while out of fear that he’d attack her on her route. But as time went by, the fat one never reappeared, and she finally began to feel like she was out of danger.

Yet as springtime came this irrational uncertainty returned, this malaise... she felt watched, followed. This lasted for weeks, right up until that afternoon in April when she saw him again. Doubtlessly he had watched to make sure Miss Sykes was not home that day.

Angelique was in the kitchen, making a cup of tea. When she turned around to carry it up to her room he was at the door. Her nose filled with his stink, the exact same as it was six months ago: a stink of grime, sour and strong. A stink of death. She had had plenty of time to memorize it as he had clutched her to him, to his obscene and reeking body.

He advanced on her, knife drawn before him.

“All alone?” he asked, his tone mocking, already undressing her with his eyes.

She saw his lust and his determination. It’s him or me, she thought.

“Where is he?” he demanded.

“Who?” she said.

“You know who I mean, bitch. Where is he?”

Before his vicious scowl she chose to buy time.

“He’s in the garden. Do you want me to show him to you?”

He looked perplexed.

“I’ll show you,” she went on, moving between him and the sideboard.

Miss Sykes’s large wooden rolling pin should have been stored inside its usual drawer, but for once it wasn’t. It was sitting there, awaiting its destiny, with its two fixed handles and revolving cylindrical mass. It settled naturally into Angelique’s right hand, and the movement she made to slam it into the fat man’s temple was just a natural extension of that settling. He did not even have time to flinch. He dropped his knife and stared at her, stupefied. So she hit him again, in the same spot. He convulsed, then sank to the tiled floor. She picked up her tea again and went up to her room. Miss Sykes would be home in less than an hour.

They buried the fat man the following night, right next to his accomplice. Given his corpulence, they had to make the hole much larger and deeper than the first one. Miss Sykes drank three beers as they dug, and Angelique, who took up the shovel as well, drank two. On the neighboring plot, the grass had grown flourishingly. It would grow over this one before summer. That was England for you.

Back in France, Angelique pursued her studies brilliantly, and she earned her degree in English with excellent grades, both in written and in oral. So she continued on to get her master’s degree, where writing her thesis led her to spend long hours in the university library. She worked more assiduously there than she did at home, and she had all the documents she needed at her disposal.

At the end of one autumn afternoon, she allowed herself to take a break and began leafing through an English magazine. Her eyes fell upon an article entitled “The Gardener of Hull.” The photo showed Miss Sykes walking toward a car, handcuffed and flanked by two police officers. It was taken from the back, but she was casting a furtive glance over her shoulder to the camera. Angelique recognized the brick house, the road, and the indestructible old coat of her landlady.

According to the article, an investigation had been launched following a series of unexplained disappearances in the area, and it led to a macabre discovery: Miss Pamela Sykes, 57, spinster, warehouse employee at a mall, had buried no less than seven bodies in her little garden. According to her confession, her first victim was thirty years ago. The rest followed at sporadic intervals. She had suffered sexual violence when she was a teenager, and she had a “score to settle” with rapists and abusers of any kind. Yes, it was a kind of mission she’d given herself. Yes, she’d acted alone in every case. No, she did not feel any particular remorse.

The librarian announced that it was time to clear out of the reading room. Before closing the magazine, Angelique met the eyes of Miss Sykes staring out of the photo. As she rose from her chair she heard the deep, reassuring voice of her landlady:

“Take care, love.”

© Gallimard Jeunesse, Paris, 2013; translation

© 2018 by Samuel Ashworth