“Nice. I don’t really know. Discreet, which is all I care about. You still take two sugars?”
“Yes. Some things never change.”
Nora flinched imperceptibly. She knew by heart all Gérard’s acerbic little comments and equivocal asides. This one wasn’t malicious, but it betrayed a state of mind that was not hostile exactly, but undeniably bitter. Gérard was resentful by nature; he found it hard to forgive anyone who hurt him, and rarely failed, when the opportunity arose, to hold a grudge.
Nora didn’t rise to the bait. She poured out two cups of coffee, handed one to Gérard, and sat down opposite him.
“I know this house,” he declared, as if he had been waiting for her to sit down before making this revelation.
“You do?”
“Yes. This one or the one next door, I’m not sure. They all look the same.”
“What are you talking about?”
“A couple of days before Nassim was born, I was summoned to the police station to represent a suspect. A murder disguised as a heart attack. Don’t you remember?”
“Vaguely.”
“Yes, you do! You were literally about to give birth, Nassim could have arrived at any moment, and you didn’t like being home alone in the evening with Inès.”
“It’s coming back to me now. And?”
“The cops didn’t really have any evidence against the guy, and he was released that evening. I drove him home. And it was here. The next day, they found him hanging in the stairwell.”
Nora shuddered. “Thanks for the information,” she said sarcastically, making no attempt to hide her displeasure.
“The dumbest thing,” continued Gérard, as if he hadn’t heard her, “was that the cops had nothing on him. He’d have been fine.”
“Do you think he was guilty?”
“Honestly, I have no idea. The guy hanged himself, which everyone took as an admission of guilt, and the case was closed, bang. I must admit I didn’t delve into it any further. To be honest, what with Nassim’s birth, I had other things on my mind.”
Though eight years had gone by, Gérard remembered the case pretty well. David Brunelle had a teenage history of petty crime, and a criminal record for drug possession, home invasion, and armed robbery. He’d spent four years in jail, but then seemed to have cleaned up his act and become a loving husband and exemplary father with a well-ordered life.
Until that Saturday afternoon when Ernest Wilmot, his sixty-five-year-old former probation officer and Milo’s godfather, suffered a fatal cardiac arrest at the Brunelles’ house. At the autopsy, the medical examiner detected in the man’s body unusual quantities of digitoxin, a powerful cardiotonic extracted from the foxglove, whose diuretic action can seriously damage kidney function. The form of digitoxin found in Wilmot’s urine after his death was so pure that the coroner was able to conclude that the plant itself had been ingested. When they searched the Brunelles’ house, the police found a pot of beautiful purple foxgloves on the deck. That was all it took for him to be arrested. Of course, having flowers on one’s deck is not in itself a crime, and Gérard Depardieu, his court-appointed attorney, took less than two hours to get his client released.
There was one thing that still played on the attorney’s mind: he remembered the way Brunelle never stopped protesting his innocence. He was rambling a lot, and not always very coherent, but Gérard recognized the sincerity in his client’s voice. The news of Brunelle’s suicide two days later had unsettled Gérard, challenging his faith in his own instincts, but he had never quite managed to rally behind the police detectives’ insistence that this desperate act amounted to an admission of guilt.
“What are you trying to tell me?” said Nora, losing her temper. “That I’m living in a murderer’s house?”
Taken aback by Nora’s anger, Gérard glanced at her with a look of surprise.
“Maybe not a murderer,” he said with a nonchalant shrug. “But there’s a fifty percent chance a man hanged himself here.”
With that, he lifted the cup to his lips and emptied it in a single swallow. He stood up.
“Thanks for the coffee.”
Nora glared at him.
“Seriously? You came in just to tell me that?”
“You’re the one who invited me in.”
“Next time you can stay in the car!” she retorted angrily.
She went into the entryway and opened the front door. Gérard, following behind her, seemed to regret the turn their meeting had taken.
