The Night Gate

Chapter Twenty-One

Enzo felt sick as he drove into the visitors’ car park in front of the women’s wing of the maison d’arrêt at Fleury-Mérogis. It was just under an hour’s drive from Paris, directly south of the city and close to the edge of the Forêt de Sénart.

This was the largest penitentiary in Europe, built in the 1960s in the conventional style of French prisons. Five blocks, each with three wings, radiated from a polygonal central building. The MAF, or maison d’arrêt pour femmes, hosted more than 270 female prisoners in fewer than 170 cells, which meant that many of the women were forced to share.

A time-worn French flag fluttered listlessly in the autumn sunshine of this October morning. And somehow it seemed wrong for the sun to be shining, when people were locked away in tiny cells where the light of freedom was limited by small barred windows that provided only a tantalising glimpse of the world left behind. Parking slots were arranged around a scrubby patch of lawn boasting a few stunted shrubs. Enzo switched off the engine and sat holding the steering wheel for some minutes in an attempt to stop his hands from shaking. He was aware that he was under observation from security cameras left and right and knew that he could not sit here for any length of time. He drew a deep breath and stepped out into the cold morning air.

At reception in the tour centrale, they checked his identity and authorisation, and handed him a bar-coded security badge to pin to his coat. A female prison officer escorted him up a large spiral staircase to the couloir des parloirs, a long, pale blue corridor with tall, narrow windows along one side that spilled incongruous sunlight across a polished grey floor. A row of shiny, blue-painted doors on the wall opposite opened into the parloirs themselves, the private visitors’ rooms. Narrow floor-to-ceiling windows next to each door allowed for observation by prison officers.

The officer who led Enzo along the corridor wore a dark blue skirt and open-necked pale blue blouse with dark blue epaulettes. Her hair was dyed blond and tied back in a ponytail, and her shoes slapped softly on reflecting sunlight. She stopped at a door halfway along the corridor and opened it for Enzo to step inside. This was a narrow room with an identical door and window at the far end of it leading to the cells beyond. It was divided in half by a thick wall that stood a metre high, designed to separate prisoner from visitor. It was clad in tiny flaking mosaic tiles, and Covid precautions had seen the installation of a Plexiglas screen that extended from the wall to the ceiling.

There was a solitary chair on Enzo’s side and the prisoner officer said curtly, ‘Sit one metre back from the screen.’

It wasn’t until she closed the door behind him, and the reflected sunlight vanished from the Plexiglas, that he saw Charlotte seated in a chair on the other side of it. At first he thought there had been some mistake. That they had brought him to the wrong room. Before he realised, with a shock that almost stopped his heart, that this, after all, really was Charlotte.

In his memory she had always been the woman he had fallen for all those years ago. A sardonic smile playing about full lips. Lustrous dark hair tumbling in glistening curls to her shoulders. Dark eyes which had held him in their thrall from the moment they met. He could still hear the laughter that spilled so freely from the mouth he had kissed so often, the cries of passion that accompanied their lovemaking. The vibrant young woman who had stolen his heart and his reason.

And here sat a woman he barely recognised. An old lady with grey hair cropped to an unruly shag. Dark shadows beneath dull eyes that seemed to absorb rather than reflect the light. A blue mask hid half of her ravaged face. She wore a short-sleeved smock, exposing skin stretched tightly over fleshless arms. Shrunken hands were clasped together in her lap, outsized knuckles on painfully thin fingers.

Instinctively she raised a hand to her mouth as she barked into her mask, a retching cough that left her breathless and brought tears to her eyes. The first light he had seen in them since he stepped into the room.

She blinked them away and stared up at him for several long moments. ‘For God’s sake, sit down,’ she said. ‘And don’t look at me like that. The shock on your face is like looking at a reflection of what I’ve become. One I never look at myself.’ She was breathing with difficulty, and her breath rattled in her throat.

Enzo lowered himself into his chair, face stinging as if she had slapped it repeatedly. He attempted to blink away involuntary tears and saw Charlotte flinch from his reaction. Somehow it had not occurred to him that the woman he had come to visit would not be the Charlotte he remembered. He could never have imagined that the woman he had once loved might be reduced by prison and time to the shadow that sat before him now.

She said, ‘Last year a fashion designer came to the prison to dress us up and make us walk the walk, parade her clothes down the red carpet. Sakina M’sa. I’d never heard of her. Of course, she chose all the young ones. The girls who still had their looks. I remember her looking at me, and how quickly her eyes moved on. Had she been casting a pantomime, she’d probably have given me the role of the wicked witch.’ She forced a laugh. ‘Typecasting.’ Then launched into another bout of coughing that lasted a full half minute.

Enzo could only watch from his side of the screen, shocked and unable to disguise his distress.

When finally the coughing subsided, she said in a voice scraped thin, ‘I caught Covid in the spring. It was rampant in the prison. They say I have recovered from it, but it has left me without any sense of taste or smell. And this damned cough.’ She drew breath with difficulty. ‘Damage to the lungs. They say it’s permanent.’

‘Jesus, Charlotte,’ he said. Which seemed to amuse her.

She shook her head. ‘Not often I’ve seen you at a loss for words, Enzo.’ But the smile which briefly lit her face quickly vanished. ‘How is Laurent?’

Enzo found it hard to meet her eyes. ‘He’s doing well.’

‘Does he ever ask about me?’

‘He used to. All the time.’

‘And what did you tell him?’

‘I made excuses. You’d gone abroad. Work meant that you couldn’t come back. At least not immediately. He couldn’t understand why you never wrote or phoned, and it broke my heart to lie to him.’ He fixed his eyes on white-knuckled hands interlocked in his lap. ‘Of course, he knew I was. He’s a smart kid. In the end he decided you were dead.’ He looked up to see tears brimming on the brink of her lower lids. ‘And maybe that’s better than the truth. Though one day, I suppose, he deserves to know.’

He saw her swallowing hard to try to control her voice. ‘I don’t think I’ll live long enough to see out my sentence. So I’ll probably not see him again before I die.’ She sucked in more air. ‘Then it won’t be a lie any more.’ She looked very directly at him. ‘I didn’t believe anything could ever be worse than death, until they brought me here. I wish Sophie had killed me that day.’ And Enzo could still see the scar on her temple. ‘I wish I was dead, Enzo.’

This time Enzo couldn’t stop his tears. Hot and silent, springing from the depths of his despair and regret. He brushed them away with the backs of his hands.

‘Good to see we can still cry,’ she said, just a hint of the old Charlotte in her voice. ‘We spilled a lot of tears together in our time, you and I.’

‘We did.’

He watched her use her mask to dry hers away, and was glad he had his own mask to hide behind. She said, ‘So why are you here?’

The whole Bauer enigma seemed almost irrelevant now. And for a moment he considered not even raising it. But how else to explain his visit? ‘A case I’m working on,’ he said. ‘A murder suspect who is a complex and unusual individual. I thought your special insights might throw light into some dark places.’

An exhalation of air filled her mask. ‘I might have known. You always did have an ulterior motive, Enzo. Your own priorities. Selfish, self-obsessed, regardless of others.’

And he knew that this had been a mistake. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. And stood up. ‘Really. I thought you might have relished the challenge. A distraction from...’ He looked around and spread his hands out hopelessly to either side. ‘This.’ He sighed. ‘But I can see I was wrong. I won’t waste any more of your time.’

He turned towards the door, and her voice came to him like an arrow out of the darkness, piercing him so painfully he almost cried out.

‘Don’t leave.’

He stood for a moment, still with his back to her, before turning to see that she had risen to her feet. And he was shocked all over again at how much weight she had lost.

‘Time is all I have.’ He saw her struggling for control. ‘Please stay. We have forty-five minutes before they throw you out.’

He sat down again, and wondered if Bauer had only been a pretext, the excuse for seeing her that he had never been able to find before. He realised now it would have been better had he stayed away, held on to those memories of her as she had been. Now, forever, he would see this wasted creature behind the Plexiglas who wanted nothing more than forty-five minutes of his time. And to die.

‘Tell me.’

And so he did. Everything from the remains under the dead tree to the familial DNA tying the cadaver to Bauer. The mystery of who killed Narcisse and why. The doubt that the blood spatter had created in Enzo’s mind about Bauer’s guilt. The young German’s temper-fuelled violence, his search for the truth about the existence of an evil gene, his obsession with his dead grandfather and the possibility that he had somehow bequeathed his grandson the curse of inherited violence.

She listened in silence, interrupting him only once with a fit of coughing. When he had finished she said, ‘Quite a story.’ And he could see that in her mind at least she was no longer sitting in a visitor’s room at the woman’s prison in Fleury-Mérogis. There was light and intelligence again in her dark eyes, a brain left to atrophy in a prison cell now actively sifting through her extensive knowledge and years of experience as a forensic psychologist. ‘There is no such thing as an evil gene, Enzo. Evil itself is far too difficult a concept for a scientific enquiry. Though it hasn’t prevented people from trying. A couple of researchers in San Diego managed, after twenty-one generations, to breed a fruit fly that was intensely aggressive. In its brain they found higher levels of a particular enzyme that seemed to be the cause of the aggression. And that enzyme was produced by a single gene. But an evil gene? I don’t think so. And given that it would take twenty-one generations, it’s hardly an experiment that could be conducted with humans.’

‘What about inherited violence?’

‘Oh, there’s plenty of evidence for that. Several genes acting together, with the right environmental conditions, can drive people to pathological violence. Genes that are inherited and lead to a genetic predisposition for aggression. Plenty of evidence.’

‘So Bauer was right to search for something in his family history that might explain his behaviour?’

‘I can see why he would want to. Lets him nicely off the hook, doesn’t it? After all, from what you tell me, there doesn’t seem to have been anything environmentally that would have led him to violence. Except of course for a domineering mother, the absence of a male role model, and probably the need to vent his frustrations. Men often feel emasculated by a dominant woman.’ She smiled, and it almost broke his heart to see how it brought a glimpse of the old Charlotte to the ruined face. ‘Never had that effect on you, though, Enzo.’

And had he been able to, he would have reached out to touch her. Brush her face with the tips of his fingers.

‘Those same researchers in San Diego studied a large number of males from birth to adulthood and found strong evidence of a genetic predisposition to violence. A couple of other studies showed a genetic variant in a particular enzyme called monoamine oxidase A, which had a significant impact on whether a man developed antisocial problems or not. A male with low levels of the enzyme was more likely to veer towards adult violence if someone had severely abused him as a child. High levels appeared to give protection against ending up in trouble, even if there had been earlier mistreatment.’ She paused. ‘It seems that only men carry this genetic variant.’

A silence fell between them, each aware of the unspoken question about what might explain Charlotte’s predilection for violence. A question that neither of them was about to address.

Enzo said, ‘There’s nothing that I know of in Bauer’s background to suggest that he had been abused as a child.’

But she just shrugged. ‘It’s not an exact science, Enzo. But it’s true that behavioural patterns, or personality traits, or talent, often skip a generation. So it’s perfectly possible that Bauer might have inherited his tendency towards violence from his grandfather, particularly if there was no history of it in the rest of his family. The fact that he is abjectly apologetic afterwards suggests that he is engaging in an internal battle where violence wins out over an otherwise empathetic personality. A combination of psychology and genetics.’

‘A pity he didn’t have you as a therapist.’ Enzo attempted a smile which froze awkwardly on his lips.

‘Maybe I could have done with a therapist myself.’ That self-mocking look in her eyes that he recognised of old.

Reluctantly he said, ‘Do you want to talk about that?’ He had no real desire to rake over the ashes of those events that had led her to this end, but thought that maybe she would. Even if just to apologise.

To his relief she said, ‘Good God, no! We’ve done well thus far in avoiding it. Let’s not spoil things now.’

And silence descended again between them. A difficult silence, reminding them both that it was using up what little time they had left. He had no idea what to say. And in the end resorted to the prosaic. ‘Do you share? A cell, I mean?’

She shook her head, resigned to the fact that the remainder of his visit would be conducted in an exchange of the banal. ‘I have a single cell. They force me to exercise every day and eat their lousy food.’ And then for just a moment she lit up. ‘A Michelin-starred chef came once to do a cookery course with us, and we got to eat the food that he’d taught us how to prepare. What a treat after the pigswill they feed us here. All that was missing was a fine wine.’ She smiled sadly. ‘No doubt you could have suggested something appropriate.’

He returned an equally sad smile.

‘Of course, that was before Covid. I can taste nothing now. Even if you took me to the best restaurant in Paris there would be no pleasure in it.’

More silence. The door behind him would open any moment, and Enzo found himself wishing that his visit would not end this way. That he would not have to go and leave her like this. Even though she had attempted to kill him twice, he felt no hatred for her in his heart. Only the pain of remorse, and a deep hollowing sadness that her life would end so unhappily in this miserable place.

And even though he was expecting it, he was still startled when the door actually opened. The officer who had shown him in stood in the doorway. ‘Time’s up,’ she said.

Charlotte remained seated as he stood. He knew that she didn’t want him to go.

‘See you,’ he said.

‘Will you?’ Her voice was tiny.

He said, ‘I’ll come again.’ Though both of them knew that he wouldn’t.

At the door he glanced back. She remained in her chair, hands clasped in her lap, tears running down her face.

Enzo was numb as he walked back out into the sunshine. If there was any warmth in the air, he could not feel it. Only the chill of the wind that stirred the faded French flag flying over the car park.

He slipped behind the wheel of his car and pulled the door shut, cocooning himself in its silence. A silence in which every movement he made seemed unnaturally loud, his whole world reduced to this tiny space where only he existed. He stared sightlessly through the windscreen at the sixties world of concrete and glass that contained and constrained the woman he had once loved. And maybe still did. In a life of many lows, this was one of his lowest.

He had left his phone in the glove compartment of the car, and an alert from within reminded him now that it was there. It startled him out of his reverie, and he opened the glove box to reclaim it. The home screen revealed several missed calls and a text from Dominique. Ironic, he thought, that it was Dominique who had interrupted his thoughts of Charlotte. He tapped the text icon to bring up the message.