Stone Bruises

Epilogue

A mist-like drizzle, too light to call rain, blurs the distinction between ground and low grey clouds. The trees by the roadside are displaying their skeletal nature, stark branches showing through the sparse leaves, while what were fields of wheat are now furrows of bare stubble waiting to be ploughed under.

I walk the last kilometre to the farm. After the car has pulled away it occurs to me that, by a vagary of the last few lifts, I’m following the same route as when I first arrived. I stop when I reach the barbed-wire-topped gate, looking past it at the familiar track disappearing into the trees. The mailbox stencilled with Arnaud is still nailed to the post. But the white lettering is more faded than I remember, and the rusty padlock that used to bar entry has been replaced by a severe construction of brass and steel. Pinned to the centre of the gate is a subtler form of warning: a printed notice announcing that this is now bank property.

I rub my hand along the gate’s weathered grain, but make no attempt to climb over. Now I’m here I’m reluctant to go any further. I wait for a lone car to flash past before throwing my rucksack onto the other side and clambering across the corroded wire. The once-dusty track is puddled and muddy, and without the cover of leaves I can soon make out the farmhouse through the trees. Then the track emerges in the courtyard, revealing the changes a few months have made.

The place is abandoned. No hens scurry about as I cross the cobbles, and the van and trailer have been removed. But the stable block’s dead clock still stands at twenty to nothing, and the ancient tractor remains; too broken and decrepit to move from its long-time home. The house is closed and shuttered, more dilapidated than ever under its rusting scaffold. The section of wall I repaired looks smaller than I remember, a cosmetic repair that doesn’t conceal the fundamental rot.

I’ve been apprehensive about coming back. Now I’m here, though, I don’t feel very much at all. The changed season and bleak landscape are too different from my memory, robbing the once familiar surroundings of their potency. Seeing them again feels surreal and strange, like revisiting a fever-dream.

In the days after Arnaud put a bullet into his youngest daughter’s heart, I went through my story countless times with the French police. Eventually, once they were satisfied I’d told them everything I knew, I was allowed to return to the UK. I’d given my assurance that I’d return for the trial, which was true as far as it went.

I just didn’t mention that the decision wouldn’t be mine to make.

London seemed grey and dirty after the green lushness of the farm. The world had continued to turn in my absence: the streets still seethed, the traffic still crawled, and the Thames still flowed. My return was momentous only to me. I’d expected to find myself a wanted man, that there would be a warrant out for my arrest at the very least. The reality was less dramatic.

In my guilty imaginings I’d always assumed that the police would know what had happened in Docklands; that I’d killed a man and run away. It never occurred to me that the only person who could tell them might have chosen not to. Rather than draw that sort of attention to himself, Lenny had simply left Jules’s body lying in the gutter, where it lay undiscovered until later that morning. Given the nature of his injuries, it was blamed on a hit and run, and with no evidence or witnesses his death had remained unsolved.

It might have stayed that way if I hadn’t given myself up.

Of course, I knew that wouldn’t be the end of it. There was still the threat of Lenny, and what he might do once he found out I was back. But by now Jules’s former business partner had problems of his own. I learned from a coffee-breathed CID sergeant that the big man was in custody himself after being caught in a drugs raid. Lenny was facing ten years in prison, on charges that included assaulting police officers as well as supplying and distributing class A drugs.

I kept my expression neutral when I heard that.

There was another surprise to come. I’d taken it for granted that I’d be held in custody myself, at least until it was decided what I was going to be charged with. Instead, at the end of the interview I was told I was being released on bail. ‘You came back from France to hand yourself in,’ the CID officer shrugged. ‘I don’t think you’re much of a flight risk.’

For want of anywhere else to go, I headed back to my old flat. I expected to find someone else living there, my belongings long since thrown away. But my keys still worked, and when I let myself in everything was as I’d left it. If not for the dust and accumulated post piled behind the door, I might never have been away. As indifferent to my absence as everything else, the rent had automatically continued to be taken from my bank account, eating up the money I’d been saving to go to France. The irony wasn’t lost on me. Still, it meant I had somewhere to stay until my case came to trial.

There was no point thinking further ahead than that.

And so I stepped back into the husk of my old life. I even returned to my old job at the Zed, after a contrite conversation with Sergei. I needed the money, but it was a bizarre feeling, as though the events of that summer had never happened. That was brought home to me when I bumped into Callum one day.

‘Hey, Sean,’ he said. ‘Not seen you around lately. What’ve you been doing with yourself?’

It dawned on me that he’d no idea I’d even been away. People have their own lives, and it’s vanity to think we play anything other than a bit-part in them.

‘Got your tickets yet for the New Wave season at the Barbican?’ Callum asked.

He looked surprised when I told him I hadn’t even known about it. At one time I would have rushed to book, but now the news left me unmoved. Thinking about it, I realized I’d not been to the cinema or watched a film since my return. It wasn’t even a conscious decision; I’d just had more important things to do.

Chloe would have appreciated that.

My trial was held in a busy courtroom, just one in a long line of proceedings held that day. After all my anxiety it was almost an anticlimax. For a while there was talk of charging me with involuntary manslaughter, but that had been quietly dropped. Jules’s own history of drug dealing and violence, as well as his treatment of Chloe, weighed in my favour. Even the fact that I’d technically stolen his car was considered too much of a grey area to bother with. While it counted against me that I’d fled the country, my lawyer argued that I’d been acting in self-defence and justifiably scared for my life. And if it had taken me longer than it should have to turn myself in … Well, there were extenuating circumstances.

I was found guilty of failing to report an accident and of leaving the scene. The sentence was six months in prison, suspended for two years.

I was a free man.

I stayed in London long enough to hand in my notice and say a few goodbyes, then I left. There was nothing to keep me there, and I still had unfinished business to attend to.

And now here I am.

Slipping a little on the wet cobbles, I go over to the house. The storeroom door is closed. Water drips onto me from the scaffold as I stand outside, suddenly certain that it’ll be locked. But it isn’t: there’s nothing in there anyone would want to steal. The warped door creaks open reluctantly. Inside seems darker than ever, the grey daylight from the courtyard barely illuminating the windowless room. The red overalls are missing, but everything else looks untouched since I left it. I go over to where the bags of sand are stacked. One of them is set a little apart from the others, though not so much that anyone would notice. Putting down my rucksack, I roll up my sleeve and push my hand and arm up to the elbow into the damp sand. I dig around slowly at first, then more urgently when I can’t find anything. I plunge my arm deeper, spilling sand onto the floor. Just when I’m convinced there’s nothing there my fingers encounter something hard. I pull it out.

The plastic-wrapped package looks just as it did when I hid it here, on the afternoon after the gendarmes’ visit. I’d made no mention of it when I’d recounted my story to either the French or UK police, an omission of which I’m not particularly proud. But given everything else I had to tell them it would have been an unnecessary complication. Even if they’d believed I was unaware of what was in the boot of Jules’s car, I’d be hard pressed to explain why I’d kept it.

I’m not sure I know myself.

The storeroom seemed a good hiding place at the time, but I’d not anticipated the package would be left for so long. Since then barely a day has gone by that I haven’t fretted it would be found, that the storeroom would be searched or cleared out. But I needn’t have worried.

Mathilde kept my secret, just as I kept hers.

News of Louis’s murder and Gretchen’s death was met with predictable outrage in the town. But while the facts surrounding the tragedy were soon widely known, the truth behind them was another matter. Before I left the farm to call for the police and an ambulance on the night of the shooting, Mathilde had begged me not to reveal that she was Gretchen’s mother.

‘Promise me!’ she’d insisted, her face etched with grief. ‘Promise me you won’t tell them!’

I hadn’t wanted to listen. I couldn’t see what could be gained by further silence, and the idea of protecting Arnaud was repugnant. But Mathilde clutched my arm, grey eyes burning with intensity.

‘It’s not for me, it’s for Michel. Please!’

I understood then. In everything she’d done, her first priority had always been her children. It would be hard enough for her son to grow up with his mother and grandfather branded as murderers, without having to endure an even worse stigma. I couldn’t blame her for wanting to spare him that. And I thought there might also be another reason for her reticence. If the truth about Gretchen’s parentage were to come out, it might easily raise questions about Michel’s. Mathilde had told me he was Louis’s son, but I wasn’t sure she’d want that claim put to the test.

Some stones are better left unturned.

So I kept my silence, and Mathilde’s secret. The only other person who might have thrown more light on the farm’s murky history was Georges, and for a while I wondered how much the old pig handler might really know. But not even the police could breach his indifference. He maintained that in all the years he’d worked at the farm he’d seen nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing. The only emotion he displayed came when the interview was over.

‘What about the sanglochons?’ he asked.

He’d broken down and wept when he learned they’d been destroyed.

After all that had happened I thought the farm could hold no more revelations, that it had exhausted its capacity to surprise. It hadn’t. Arnaud made no attempt to deny any of the charges levelled against him, and his account matched Mathilde’s in every detail. Except one.

He claimed he’d killed Louis himself.

According to Arnaud, the younger man had only been stunned by Mathilde’s blow. Once in the cinderblock hut he’d started to revive, so her father had finished the job himself before dismembering Louis’s body and feeding it to the sanglochons. When the police asked why he hadn’t tried to save him, the reply was typically blunt:

‘One pig’s throat is the same as another.’

It’s possible he was lying, trying to take the blame to protect Mathilde. But I find that hard to believe. Given the sort of man he was, it’s more likely that he was simply content to let his eldest daughter believe she’d killed her own lover. It would tie her to him even more, and that sort of casual cruelty is more in keeping with the Arnaud I knew. As for why he should confess now, I think there was no longer any reason not to. He’d already lost everything.

Mathilde saw to that when she asked Jean-Claude and his wife to adopt Michel.

I was shocked when I first heard, but then it made a certain kind of sense. Although I can’t imagine what it must have cost her to give up her son, even if the court was lenient she knew Michel would barely know her by the time she was released. So, as ever, she put his interests before her own. Jean-Claude will give Michel a good home, and just as important a fresh start. And for Arnaud, having his beloved grandson brought up by Louis’s brother will hurt far more than any prison sentence.

Like everything else about her, Mathilde’s revenge was subtle.

I barely recognized the old and broken man who was led into court. The flesh hung from his bones like an ill-fitting suit, a wattle of loose skin sagging between chin and throat. But it was the eyes where the depth of the change was most evident. The steely gaze was gone, dulled by doubt and loss.

Only once was there a flash of the Arnaud I remembered. When the verdict was announced, his head came up to glare around the courtroom with something like his old contempt. Then his eyes met his daughter’s. She stared back at him, implacable and calm, until he lowered his head.

If the condemnation heaped on Arnaud was inevitable, what I’d not anticipated was that Mathilde would be vilified almost as much. Even if she didn’t deliver the fatal blow herself, she’d still helped conceal a murder. And without the background of a lifetime’s abuse to provide a context, her role in Louis’s death emerged in a cruelly harsh light. When her own verdict was announced she remained as outwardly controlled as ever, though I could see her hand trembling as it tucked her hair behind her ear. I watched, feeling helpless, as she was led out. As she reached the door, for a brief moment she looked directly at me.

Then the door closed and shut her from sight.

Brushing the sand off the package, I go back out of the storeroom. The drizzle has turned to rain as I head across the courtyard towards the barn. Water drips from its entrance as I prop my rucksack against the wall inside. The dark interior is as cold and damp as if it’s never known a summer. I can make out the dull glint of wine bottles in the wooden rack on the back wall, too sour for anyone to want. The patch of concrete on the floor looks smaller than I recall, the crack in it still unrepaired. I’d intended to go up to the loft one last time, but there doesn’t seem any point. Instead, leaving my rucksack in the dry of the barn, I follow the track down to the lake.

The ground is muddy and churned, the leafless grapevines resembling rows of tangled wire. Even the wood is hardly recognizable as the green-canopied place I remember. The chestnut trees are bare, and underneath their dripping branches is a mat of dead leaves and bristling shells.

There’ll be no harvest this year.

I walk straight past the fork leading to the sanglochon pens without slowing. I’ve no desire or reason to go there again. It’s only when I come to the statues that I stop. I thought they might have been taken away, but they’re still here. Unchanged and apparently unmissed. I try to recall how I felt hiding from Arnaud that night, to summon up something of the uncertainty and fear. I can’t. In the grey daylight the statues are just mundane stone carvings. Turning away, I continue down to the lake.

The water is wind-shivered and grey. At the top of the bluff the ground is scarred and gouged with heavy tyre tracks. I stand under the empty branches of the old chestnut tree, staring down at the rain-pocked lake. I can’t see below its surface, but there’s nothing there any more. Louis’s truck has long since been winched out and taken away.

The polythene package in my hand feels solid and heavy. My feelings towards it remain as ambiguous as when I first saw it hidden in the car boot. I had ample opportunities to dispose of it during the summer, yet I didn’t. I could tell myself it was simple cowardice, insurance in case Lenny or any other of Jules’s associates wanted it back, but that isn’t entirely true. Like turning over a rock to see what lies underneath, now I’m here I finally acknowledge the real reason why I’ve kept it all this time.

I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it.

I’ve no idea how much it’s worth, but it’s more money than I’ve ever had. Enough to start a new life. And with Jules dead and Lenny in prison, there’s no one else to claim it. I was in London long enough for them to have found me if there were. I weigh the package in my palm, feeling the possibilities beneath the crinkle of plastic. Then, drawing back my arm, I throw it out over the lake as far as I can.

It arcs against the grey sky before landing in the water with a small, unemphatic splash.

I jam my hands in my pockets and watch the ripples flatten out until there’s nothing left. Chloe didn’t get a second chance, and neither did Gretchen. I’m not going to waste mine. Turning away, I retrace my steps through the woods. After stopping off at the barn for my rucksack, I head back to the house. I’ve done what I came here for, but there’s one more thing I want to do before I go.

The kitchen garden is unrecognizable. The goats and chickens have gone, and the ordered rows of vegetables have either died or run amok. The tiny flowerbed has grown wild and straggled, but even this late in the year there are still a few splashes of colour. I stand looking down at it, thinking about the sadness I saw on Mathilde’s face when she was tending this small patch of earth. As if she were tending a shrine.

Or a grave.

Mathilde never said what her father had done with the remains of her stillborn daughter, but I can guess what she chose to believe. The police were unaware of any transgression except Gretchen’s death and Louis’s murder, so the small bed of flowers remains undisturbed. Yet try as I might, I can’t see Arnaud burying evidence of his other crime where it could so easily be found. Not when he had a much more permanent means of disposal, as he showed with Louis. I doubt he’d feel differently just because it was his own flesh and blood.

Especially not another daughter.

That’s only speculation, but there are other unanswered questions. I still can’t decide if what I heard in those last moments in the hut was really the sound of Mathilde lifting the knife from the stone slab. I don’t want to believe it, but then I think about everything else she did to protect her family. Once I’d found Louis’s truck in the lake, she’d nothing to lose by telling me the rest, hoping even then to persuade me to take Gretchen away. But after I’d refused would she really have allowed me to leave, knowing what I did?

In my more optimistic moods I tell myself she would. She’d saved my life once before, when I’d stepped in the trap. Except then I’d represented an opportunity rather than a threat. In my darker moments I wonder what would have happened if I’d got worse instead of better. Would she have seen I received proper medical attention as she’d said, with all the risk that implied? Or would I have ended up like Louis, another offering for her father’s sanglochons?

I don’t know. Maybe I’ve been so tainted by the farm’s secrets that I’m seeing them where they don’t exist. And my own actions don’t give me the moral right to judge. That night in the hut when I thought Mathilde had taken the knife from the slab, my first thought was of the hammer that Georges had used to stun the sow. If Michel hadn’t announced Gretchen’s presence just then, would I have actually picked it up?

Used it?

Not so long ago I would have said no, but that was before Jules. Even though I didn’t mean to kill him, I keep asking myself if that made any difference. If I’d known what would happen when I drove away, if it came down to a simple question of him or me, would I have acted any differently? There’s no easy answer. Under the skin we’re all still animals. That’s what the society Arnaud so despised is meant to disguise, but the reality is that none of us know what we’re truly capable of.

If we’re lucky we never find out.

On impulse I crouch down and begin plucking weeds from the flowerbed. I’m not sure why, but it feels right. When a semblance of the former neatness has been restored, I stand up and take a last look around. Then, wiping the muddy soil from my hands, I go back to the courtyard and give a sharp whistle.

‘Lulu! Here, girl!’

The spaniel lopes out from behind the stables where she’s been sniffing. She’s barely slowed by the single hind leg, and her enthusiasm makes me smile. I hadn’t planned on claiming her, but no one else wanted to and the vet couldn’t keep her indefinitely. It was either that or let her be destroyed, and I couldn’t do that. Besides, it’s surprising how much easier it is to hitch a lift when you’ve a three-legged dog as a travelling companion.

As we pass the house Lulu stops by the kitchen door and whines. But she doesn’t stay long, and soon follows me out of the courtyard and back up the track. She slips under the gate while I climb over. Once we’re on the other side I look up and down the road. There are no cars in sight. The spaniel watches me with her ears cocked, wobbling slightly as she waits for me to decide which way to go. It’s only when she’s standing still that balance becomes a problem.

So long as we keep moving she’s fine.