Chapter 40
Saturday morning. Nora opened her eyes after a restless night.
Her sleep had been peopled by malevolent specters.
She was in pain, emotional and physical.
Her neck hurt, her shoulders and back were stiff, the echo of a night filled with terrible dreams. She groaned, desperate to fall into the no-man’s-land of sleep, to escape the throes of fear.
She tried turning onto her side, curling up as if to protect herself from the abuses her memory was inflicting on her.
Every movement triggered a dull pain and the memory of the ghastly events of the previous night.
The worst night of a life that now lay in ruins.
It took her several long minutes to gather the strength to get out of bed. From downstairs she could hear the muffled voices of her children, who were already up. She gave a sigh that seemed to vibrate with all the world’s misery.
At last she managed to haul herself out of bed. Her arms ached; it felt as if she would dislocate her shoulders if she moved. Her muscles hurt from the effort of moving Gérard’s body. Christ! Had she really done it?
She tiptoed to the bathroom and steadied herself on the edge of the basin. She felt like throwing up. She barely recognized the face in the mirror, cruel witness to the awful hours she’d been through.
Yes, she had done it.
She had seen it through to the bitter end.
She had climbed out of Mathilde’s car like an automaton and walked back to the house without a backward glance, her expression vacant, finding from deep within her a determination she didn’t recognize.
She stopped outside the front door, perhaps giving herself one last chance to change her mind before she committed the irrevocable. Don’t do that.
Braving her revulsion, she pushed open the door and went inside.
Gérard lay at the foot of the stairs, blood pooling on the tiles around his body.
The sight of the dark, sticky substance almost broke her resolve: who would have thought he would have had so much blood in him.
She had to act quickly; cleaning up hadn’t been part of the plan.
Pulling herself together, she glanced at her watch and went down to the basement.
She lost precious seconds looking for the tarpaulin she knew was in there somewhere, that must once have belonged to Madame Coustenoble, the previous owner.
At last she found it, blue and crumpled, and dragged it up the stairs to wrap Gérard’s body in.
It wasn’t easy to lay it out; the entryway wasn’t very wide and the body was already taking up a fair amount of space.
She had to keep starting again, forcing herself to control her shaking and her clumsiness, but she managed it eventually.
Then she had to drag the corpse over to the tarp to roll it up inside.
Touching the dead body repulsed her. Summoning all her courage, she seized Gérard by his jacket lapels and bumped him over to the plastic-coated canvas.
Disgust. Don’t think about it. Don’t breathe.
Focus on what has to be done and do it. Get to the end of this nightmare.
Once she’d rolled the body up inside the tarp, she dragged it by the feet to the kitchen, then turned right into the dining room.
She hauled it out through the glass door and onto the deck, then dragged it along the back of the house to the bay that protruded at the corner, far enough from the outside light to be plunged into shadow.
It was almost nightfall. Gérard’s body wasn’t exactly hidden, but it couldn’t be seen unless someone was really looking. It would do for the time being.
Wasting no time, Nora hurried back inside and into the kitchen, where she grabbed a pair of rubber gloves, a mop, a bottle of floor cleaner, and a bucket that she filled halfway up with hot water.
She went back into the entryway. Just then her phone rang from inside her purse, which was sitting on the kitchen table.
She started at the sound, her nerves on edge, swore under her breath, put down the cleaning equipment, and went back into the kitchen to rummage in her purse for the phone.
It was Mélanie, of course. She answered, cutting short the secretary’s apologies, and promised she would be over as soon as she could.
She had never scrubbed a floor so thoroughly in her life.
Suppressing her nausea, she wiped up the blood, rubbed down the tiles and the grout, soaped, rinsed, and polished until there was not the slightest trace left of Gérard’s fall.
Then she did the same on the stairs. When she had finished, she put away all the cleaning materials, took a quick look at herself in the mirror to check she was presentable, and hurried out of the house and into the car.
Ten minutes later she drew up outside her former home.
She turned off the engine and took a few moments to compose herself.
The hardest part was still to come. First, she was going to have to face her children without letting them see that anything was amiss, which, given her state, was going to be tricky.
Then, after they went to bed, she was going to have to carry out the second part of her plan.
She felt a wave of overwhelming weariness and had to force herself to control her despair. Now was not the moment to waver.
Mélanie greeted her with relief. It was already almost nine, and this unfortunate hiccup had made her late for dinner with some friends who had been expecting her an hour ago.
The children were thrilled to see Nora, too.
They bombarded her with questions about their father, asking her if she knew where he was or had heard from him.
Nora hugged them tight, feigning complete ignorance about everything, before shooing them off to pack their bags.
“We’re going back to your house?” Nassim asked, surprised. “How will we know when Papa gets back?”
“We’ll call him,” said Nora.
As she spoke she felt a cold sweat running down her entire body.
Gérard’s phone! She’d left it in his jacket pocket.
If it rang, it would draw attention to where his body lay like nothing else.
How could she have forgotten about it? She tried to calm her rising panic, forced herself to think logically.
If anyone called him before she got back, what was the risk if a neighbor heard it?
Wasn’t the sound of a cell phone ringing so utterly banal today that it would arouse zero curiosity?
She had to hurry home to sort out this bothersome detail.
“Get a move on, you two,” she said, sounding flustered. “It’s late.”
“So?” said Inès with an insouciant shrug. “We don’t have school tomorrow, it’s Saturday.”
Nora eyed her daughter with a mixture of consternation and sadness. “Maybe so, but if you don’t mind, I’d like to get home,” she said testily. “I haven’t eaten yet, for one thing.”
“Fine, no need to get mad about it.”
Inès went up to her room to pack her stuff.
Nora began pacing up and down, unable to stop thinking about the signal she’d left in Gérard’s pocket.
If she’d wanted to tell the whole world she had hidden a body in the garden she couldn’t have done it better.
She knew her husband: he was always getting calls, even in the evening, and if someone was trying to get ahold of him .
. . her head began to fill with the most terrible scenarios: she imagined arriving back at her house and finding the street filled with police cars, blue lights flashing, a body being brought out on a stretcher, all the neighbors standing at their front doors observing the scene in horror.
And her driving up, the kids in the back seat with a barrage of questions, why are there cops outside our house, what are they doing, who’s that on the stretcher?
“Are you ready?” she called up to hurry things along.
“Are we coming back here to spend the weekend with Papa?” asked Inès from the top of the stairs.
Nora was about to say no, but she caught herself in time.
“I think so, yes. I’ll bring you back once he gets home. But it’s late now, so tonight you’ll stay with me.”
“Should we bring our backpacks?” asked Nassim.
“You might as well, you never know,” Nora replied, trying—not very well—to conceal her impatience.
At last they were ready to go.
“How will Papa know where we are?” Nassim asked as she opened the front door.
“Good point!” said Inès. “We should leave him a note so he doesn’t worry.”
“That’s enough!” said Nora, losing her temper and at the same time wondering how she could be so cynical. “He’s the one who’s let you down, and now you’re worrying about him?”
“Maman!” said Inès reproachfully. “He might have a very good excuse.”
“Your father always has a good excuse,” said Nora under her breath, thinking to herself that this time he’d surpassed himself.
She found a scrap of paper in her purse and scribbled a brief note telling Gérard where the children were. She put it on the table in the entryway.
Inès read the note. “That’s not a very nice message,” she said.
“Well, that’s how it is,” snapped Nora. “Let’s go. I’d like to get home.” Inès cast a dubious look at her mother and followed her out of the house, her purse dangling from her shoulder. She was tapping at her phone’s screen.
“What are you doing?” asked Nora.
“I’m calling Papa, just in case.”
“Stop that right now,” her mother said curtly.
Ignoring her mother’s command, Inès brought the phone to her ear. Nora snatched it out of her hands.
“Hey,” her daughter blurted out. “How dare you do that? What’s up with you?”
“Don’t speak to me like that, Inès.”
“Give me back my phone!”
“Learn to obey when someone tells you to.”
“I’m allowed to call my father.”
“I just told you, he won’t answer.”
“You could say it a little more pleasantly. What’s up with you?”
At the end of her rope and not wanting the situation to deteriorate any further, Nora didn’t reply. Inès glared at her and mumbled something, no doubt unpleasant, then the three of them got in the car and Nora sped off.
There was a gloomy atmosphere in the car the whole way back to the house.
Nora drove fast, staring straight ahead.
Inès glowered in the passenger seat beside her, while Nassim sat in the back and stared out the window.
As she turned down rue Edmond-Petit, Nora let out a sigh of relief: everything was quiet, as usual.
Once inside, against all her basic principles, she gave the children permission to kill their brain cells in front of the screen of their choice.
Surprised, Inès rewarded her mother with a triumphant smile, convinced that this magnanimous gesture resulted from her embarrassment at having been so unfair earlier.
Nassim, who couldn’t care less what the reason was, simply leaped on his PlayStation.
Nora went out onto the deck to the body she’d hidden in the shadowy nook.
Recovering the phone from Gérard’s jacket required her to be patient and rational: the body, rolled up in the tarpaulin, was bent double.
She had to get it almost upright and then, using her shoulders and hips to keep it more or less straight, slip her arm beneath the tarpaulin.
She couldn’t bear having to touch the body.
Turning her head away from Gérard, repulsed and appalled, she patted her ex-husband’s torso.
It gave out a waft of pungent air, adding to her revulsion.
She groaned as she realized the phone wasn’t in his breast pocket and she was going to have to explore lower down, obliging her to get even closer to the body.
This time she almost touched his cheek. Her hand continued its blind exploration and eventually reached the left-hand pocket.
Empty. If it wasn’t in the one on the right, it was a catastrophe.
Nauseated by this final proximity to Gérard, Nora could barely control her disgust. She stretched her arm as far as she could to reach the third pocket and felt, at last, the shape of the phone.
She grabbed it and immediately pulled away from the corpse.
Gérard collapsed in a heap. A dead weight.
Nora immediately switched off the phone.
She didn’t know what to do next. Taking it into the house seemed too big a risk; the children might find it and wonder what their father’s phone was doing at her house.
On the verge of a nervous breakdown, she shoved the object inside the tarpaulin alongside Gérard’s head, and went back inside.
The evening seemed to go on forever. For the first time in a long while she couldn’t wait for the children to go up to bed, but as Inès had already pointed out, given that it was Saturday the next day, there was no reason for them to go to bed early.
Midnight. At last, everyone was asleep. Nora was a nervous wreck.
She went back outside to the corpse. She took the phone and slipped it into her pocket, then swiveled the body around so she could grab it by the feet, and began to pull it along the hedge that separated their property from the Geniots’.
The dead weight of the corpse made progress difficult, but adrenaline gave her strength.
Fear did too. Fear of losing everything.
A survival instinct kicked in that was stronger than anything else—principles, morals, conscience.
She would have killed to save what could still be saved. Actual murder.
When she reached the farthest end of the hedge, she let go of Gérard’s legs, then gave herself a few seconds’ rest to catch her breath. She was drenched in sweat, out of breath, terrified. She felt so tyrannized by this feeling of suffocation that she wished she could detach herself from her body.
In front of her rose the wall that marked the boundary of her property. On her right, the hedge that separated her from the neighboring yard. Tiphaine and Sylvain’s yard.
This was where the operation grew complicated. Unfortunately for Nora, the final part of her plan was the riskiest: the hedge was almost as tall as she was, and hauling the body up in order to tip it over to the other side required more strength than she possessed.