From where she stood, she could see the front door opening. Gérard was about to go back into the dining room when he saw her standing there, frozen. Curious, he turned to see the door swing open and Sylvain appear in the entryway. Sylvain went straight over to the coatrack, dropping two file folders and his keys on the bench. As he began taking off his jacket he saw them both staring at him, one with a look of dismay, one of satisfaction.
The man looked vaguely familiar—something about his face triggered an alarm, which corresponded to Tiphaine’s expression. Yes, he had seen this man before. He didn’t know why, but his heart began to beat faster. He had the feeling something dreadful was happening, and he was about to find out what it was. A defense mechanism made him root around in his memory. He absolutely had to remember the circumstances in which he had last seen the man who was now standing in the doorway of his kitchen.
When he finally recognized Gérard Depardieu, the blood drained from his face, and he thought he might be about to have a heart attack. His face grew ashen, and in a fog of incomprehension he turned and looked at Tiphaine. Seeing her appalled expression, his last particle of composure melted away.
“Tiphaine!” he cried out urgently. “I can explain.” He rushed to her, and as he brushed past the attorney, he caught the man’s eye and felt a burst of fury in his chest that compressed his rib cage so hard it hurt.
“You bastard!” he muttered through clenched teeth as he grabbed Gérard by the collar and pushed him against the wall. “What have you been telling my wife?”
Surprised by this ambush, Gérard’s only thought was how to get out of Sylvain’s grasp. He didn’t understand the question. The words went around in his mind. Whathadhe told Tiphaine? Sylvain let go of him as suddenly as he had grabbed him and turned to Tiphaine.
“Tiphaine, it’s not what you think. We need to talk. It was a mistake.”
Tiphaine witnessed this strange scene with a mix of alarm and incomprehension. First there was the horror of witnessing skeletons emerging from the closet, armed with shovels and pickaxes to dig up sensitive stories about Sylvain and her. And now Sylvain was talking about a mistake that wasn’t what she thought it was. Was that what the attorney had come to tell her about? She didn’t understand what was going on.
Before she had time to ask Sylvain what he was talking about, and what on earth had made him manhandle this guy who had come to talk to them about David Brunelle, Gérard threw himself at Sylvain, grabbed him by the shirt collar, and yelled, “What should I not have told your wife? That you’ve been sleeping with mine? Is that it? Is that what you don’t want her to know?” He was behaving like a madman. Sylvain’s instinctive reaction had furnished him with the proof of what he had dearly been wishing wasn’t true. The asshole had betrayed himself all on his own. He must have realized Gérard was Nora’s husband, and when he’d come in and seen the two of them in his house, thought that Gérard had shown up as the jealous husband seeking revenge against the guilty party, who was, of course, Sylvain.
Gérard glared at Sylvain, his eyes gleaming with sadistic pleasure.
“Well, the funny thing is, I haven’t told your wife anything, you goddamn fool,” he said, his tone softened by vindictive pleasure. “You just told her yourself. All on your own. What a clever boy you are.”
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 notdesperate. 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.
