Chapter 32
Tiphaine stood there rooted to the spot in the middle of the kitchen, ramrod straight, eyes bulging, staring at Sylvain with a mixture of disgust and disbelief, as her shattered heart, already wrecked by everything she had already been through, began weeping blood again.
She turned to the attorney and, her voice cracking, asked, “Who . . . who is your wife?”
Gérard let Sylvain go. He looked him up and down with disdain, a cruel smile on his face. “Your neighbor, Nora Amrani,” he said.
That was the final blow. Tiphaine looked at her husband, and the attorney thought for a moment she was going to throw herself at him and tear out his eyes.
Sylvain was only now gauging the extent of his mistake.
He looked from his wife to the attorney, confounded, his throat blocked by an excess of words, none of which could get past the obstacle of his distress.
Excuses, justifications, explanations, anything to try to salvage what he had just destroyed.
Nora, who had until then embodied the fantasy of unattainable bliss, appeared to him suddenly as the emblem of misfortune.
The weight of the consequences of his misdemeanor tipped the balance in terms of everything he stood to lose, wiping out forever the brief moments of pleasure he had enjoyed with his lovely neighbor.
Time froze. They stood there in deafening silence. Open wounds and scabbed-over scars split open. All three threw wounded looks at one another like squirts of acid; they watched one another, savage, hurt, and angry, waiting to see who would be the first to resume hostilities.
It was Gérard who, in his fury, drew on his venomous need to destroy, exterminate, reduce to ashes.
“Okay! Enough with the good manners. On to the serious stuff. I’m afraid you’re about to find out your dumbass love affair is the least of your worries.”
Still talking, he went into the dining room to fetch the apple-green file folder containing his documents. He came back brandishing it like a battle flag.
“David Brunelle was my client. Not for very long, though, it was while he was in police custody, which barely lasted two hours. Frankly, just between us, the cops had nothing on him. Do you know why?”
Tiphaine and Sylvain, frozen in horror, had eyes only for him, waiting for the words they knew must be coming.
“They had nothing against him because the guy was innocent. I can always spot an innocent man. And a guilty one as well.”
He turned to Tiphaine and fixed her with a cold stare.
“One thing I remember very clearly is the purple foxglove. The deadly weapon was a flower! Which suggests the murderer was something of a botanical expert. I don’t know why, but I can’t quite see David Brunelle being an avid gardener.
On the other hand, unless I’m mistaken, I believe you have a job at the local plant nursery? ”
He paused, keeping his gaze focused intently on Tiphaine. She didn’t reply.
“And then another thing struck me,” he went on without relinquishing his prey. “It was a couple of days later when I heard he’d hung himself in the stairwell.”
Gérard was using his oratorical gifts and years of experience in court to weave assumptions into certainties.
Things had not gone quite as he’d thought they would, and he’d had to change his strategy.
His original plan had been to put pressure on Sylvain by threatening to reveal to Tiphaine her husband’s affair with Nora.
Now that Tiphaine knew about it, any thought of blackmailing Sylvain had bit the dust. He was going to have to transform the gaps in what he knew into assets to maintain his advantage: he’d choose words whose ambiguity would conceal what he didn’t know, hoping they would push Tiphaine and Sylvain to interpret his meaning.
Insinuations are like laser beams, able to locate a guilty conscience and flush it out more surely than waving a carrot outside a rabbit hole.
“The entire time he was in custody, and the whole time I was driving him home, the poor guy seemed anxious, nervous, panicky even. But not desperate. What I’m trying to say is, at no point did he come across as someone who was contemplating doing himself in.”
Tiphaine and Sylvain were hanging on Gérard’s every word, jaws clenched, expressions inscrutable.
Both looked like they could see what was coming, and already knew there was no point trying to avoid it.
Still, Tiphaine drew on all her resources to come out with a final spurt of venom.
The desire to finish Sylvain off probably wasn’t altogether foreign to her.
“When he got home, David found his wife lying on the sofa. Dead,” she said in a quiet voice. “They’d been fighting. And she killed herself.”
“Do you know what, I don’t believe that for a second.
Since when has anyone taken an overdose because of a domestic spat?
Funny how my client was so much more concerned about his son than his wife when I was driving him home.
The son you were babysitting, if I recall correctly.
He didn’t think his son was safe with you.
Have you come across a lot of fathers who’d hang themselves, yet are concerned for their children’s safety in the house next door? ”
“Then why did he ask me to babysit?” Tiphaine said with a mocking little laugh.
“He didn’t know. It was only after he found out he’d been taken into custody for being in possession of a pot of foxgloves that he lost his temper and implicated you.”
“You have no proof of anything.”
That is always the clincher: when the accused doesn’t bother to even try to prove their innocence but proceeds directly to the next level of defense: you have no proof—four words that sweep away any lingering doubts about their guilt.
Gérard clicked his tongue, as though weighing up whether or not he did have any proof. He waved the file folder at them as if it were bait.
“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t!” he said, not even trying to hide his pleasure at seeing Tiphaine dig herself in deeper.
“How would you know?” He smiled teasingly, then went on, “So, this is the way I see it: whatever the evidence, there are enough elements here to reopen the case, and I promise that I will not let you out of my sight. But understand this: getting you put behind bars is not the aim of the game, even though I can’t deny it would give me immense pleasure. ”
“What is it you want?” asked Tiphaine, looking at him with undisguised hatred.
So there it was! A tacit acknowledgment. Better than a confession. Gérard didn’t know if Tiphaine was conceding Ernest Wilmot’s murder or the Brunelles’ double suicide. He turned to Sylvain, who stood there, pale as a ghost.
“First off, I’d like Don Juan here to stop dunking his cookie in my wife’s coffee. Got that, asshole? Forget she ever existed. You don’t even look at her anymore. Her or my kids. Hands off. Got that?”
“You really think the police are going to reopen a case on the basis of a few conjectures?” said Tiphaine, desperate to get the upper hand. “If you have no proof, you have nothing.”
“What’s gotten into you?” Gérard gave her an ironic half smile. “Does it make you hot to think of your husband getting it on with another woman on the other side of that wall?”
“You have no evidence against us,” said Tiphaine, ignoring the attorney’s sarcasm. “The police will laugh in your face with your pathetic, empty file.” Gérard gave her a dark look. The woman was unstoppable—further evidence that she was capable of just about anything.
“The police, maybe,” he conceded with a wolfish grin. “But I don’t think any of this will amuse Milo one bit.”