Graeme Burnet - The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau

At half past six he went home, resisting the temptation to stop off in a bar on the way. At seven o’clock Gorski’s wife, Céline, placed a dish of baked fish and potatoes on the table. Gorski uncorked the bottle of wine they had opened the previous evening and poured each of them a glass. His daughter, Clémence, was seated at the table, a paperback flattened on her dinner plate. She was sixteen and had inherited her mother’s fine features and chestnut hair. She had retained a boyish figure, something Gorski found unaccountably reassuring. Clémence closed her book and pushed her glass forward. Gorski poured the remains of the wine into it.

Céline dished out the food. There was barely enough to go around. She was not much of a cook. Gorski sometimes wondered if her frugal helpings accounted for Clémence’s lack of physical development. Céline herself was half a head taller than Gorski, willowy, with small breasts and slim hips. It was a miracle she had ever borne a child and, after Clémence, she had sworn it was not an experience she intended to repeat.

Gorski rarely spoke about his work with Céline, and especially not over the dinner table, but the disappearance of Adèle Bedeau was big news. Clémence was fascinated, but Gorski had nothing new to tell her. ‘Without a body, it’s all in limbo,’ he said.

He took a mouthful of fish. It was tasteless. Céline refused to have salt in the kitchen, maintaining that it was nothing more than a road to high blood pressure.

Clémence looked disappointed. ‘But you still think she was murdered?’

Gorski shrugged. ‘People disappear all the time.’

He picked a fishbone from between his teeth and placed it on the edge of his plate.

‘ I think she was murdered,’ said Clémence. She ignored a look from her mother.

‘What about the motive?’ he asked.

‘A crime of passion, of course. Most murders are committed by a person known to the victim.’

‘That’s true,’ said Gorski. He enjoyed playing along with Clémence’s theories. ‘But if that were the case, where’s the body? It’s unlikely that a murder committed in the heat of the moment could be covered up.’

‘I think it was the fat butcher on Avenue de Bâle. He killed her, chopped her up and put her in his sausages.’

Céline finally intervened. ‘Can’t we discuss something more suitable for the dinner table?’

Gorski and Clémence exchanged a conspiratorial look. The rest of the meal was passed in silence.

Céline ran a fashion boutique in town. The shop had never done better than break even. The stock was too upmarket for Saint-Louis, but Céline insisted that the women of the town needed to be educated. In spring and autumn she held a reception to present her latest collection, as she liked to call it. She hired models, served champagne and canapés and invited what great-and-good Saint-Louis had to offer. Céline insisted that Gorski attend these gatherings. She encouraged the ladies to bring their husbands, since, she maintained, it would be they who would be opening their chequebooks at the end of the evening. Gorski spent these evenings with the other reluctant husbands loitering close to the table where the drinks were served. These occasions were less about the success of Céline’s business, than establishing ‘the Gorskis’ as part of the Good Society of the town. Céline made no attempt to conceal her belief that her husband’s job was an impediment to such status. When they were first married, she had encouraged him to give up the police to study law. After his promotion to inspector her aspiration switched to moving to a proper town, perhaps even Paris — somewhere her business could thrive and where she could mix in what she called ‘sympathetic society’. But, Gorski explained, it wasn’t easy for a provincial cop to get a move to a big city. Once, he had put in for a transfer to Strasbourg, but when it was turned down he did not pursue it. Gorski sympathised with his wife’s desire to move to somewhere less dreary than Saint-Louis, but over the years he had convinced himself that it was not viable. It was not that he had grown fonder of Saint-Louis. The truth was that he was privately convinced that he had found his level.

DURING THE SUMMER AFTER the death of his mother, Manfred’s principle activity was to walk in the woods behind the Paliard house. He had never enjoyed hot weather and even on the warmest days it remained tolerably cool on the forest floor.

One day Manfred was lying on his back in a small clearing, his head resting on a soft mound of moss at the base of a tree. His shirt lay in a crumpled heap by his side. His eyes were closed but he was not asleep. He was listening to the papery rustle of the leaves in the breeze. It sounded like a distant stream. He breathed evenly and deliberately. The ground was bone dry and scattered with twigs that smelled like kindling. Manfred imagined a fire raging across the forest floor like a tidal wave. He pictured his body engulfed by flames and turned to blackened cinders which would float high on currents of air above the tree-tops.

Manfred opened his eyes suddenly. A girl was standing a few feet from where he lay. He had not heard her approach.

‘How long have you been there?’ he said.

‘A while,’ said the girl.

She was wearing a yellow cotton dress printed with orange flowers. She had leather sandals on her feet. Her hair was blonde and secured with a yellow bandana. She had large blue eyes, which she kept fixed on Manfred. She did not appear in the least embarrassed. She had a boyish figure and stick-thin arms. She was perhaps fifteen years old, although her childish outfit suggested she might be younger.

‘Who are you?’ Manfred asked as if he was a landowner discovering a trespasser.

The girl shrugged and smiled a little. ‘No one,’ she said. ‘Just a girl. Who are you?’

Manfred was impressed by the girl’s reply. He could think of no better response.

‘Just a boy,’ he said. But he had a sudden urge to tell her everything about himself, how his father had run the Restaurant de la Cloche, how his mother had died, how he now lived with his grandparents, how he sometimes stared at his bedroom ceiling for a whole day without noticing the time pass.

The girl sat down next to Manfred, smoothing her dress underneath her as she did so. She sat with her arms around her knees, not saying anything. She was the most beautiful girl Manfred had ever seen. Right there and then he wanted to marry her and be with her every moment of his life until he died. He was suddenly embarrassed by his skinny, naked torso. He untangled his shirt and put it on.

The girl just sat there. Manfred couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound stilted or phoney. The hem of the girl’s dress fluttered slightly in the breeze. Downy blonde hair grew down the nape of her neck. Eventually she turned her head and looked at him.

‘Not much of a talker, are you?’

Manfred felt himself blushing. If he didn’t say something now, she would get up and leave and he would never see her again.

‘I…’ He hoped that if he started a sentence, something would tumble out, the way that when he recited a poem under his breath, the words just came. But nothing followed. He started again.

‘Do you live near here?’ It was so banal he wished he’d kept quiet. ‘I’ve never seen you before,’ he added by way of explanation.

‘My parents have rented a house on the other side of the woods,’ she said.

‘You’re on holiday?’

‘I suppose,’ said the girl.

Manfred knew that he should now ask where she was from. But he didn’t want to know. All that mattered was that they were both here at this place at this moment. He didn’t want to think of her in some far-off town or city where he didn’t live, going to a school he didn’t attend, talking to boys that weren’t him.