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.
Chapter 41
Nora splashed her face with cold water and made herself go downstairs. The children had eaten lunch, and now Nassim was settled in front of the PlayStation and Inès was in the middle of one of her seemingly endless conversations with Léa—or was it Emma?—on her BlackBerry. The indifference with which they greeted Nora was salutary: the less they demanded of her, the better her mood. She gave each child a brief hug, which they barely acknowledged, then walked over to the door that led onto the deck. She stepped outside, squinting at the back of the yard to see if she could make out any traces of the previous night’s activity. There were marks on the grass where she had dragged the body, and she knew she was going to have to spend the morning mowing. Farther back, the end of the hedge didn’t seem to have suffered too badly, but Nora didn’t dare go down there in case Tiphaine, Sylvain, or Milo spotted her from an upstairs window—she didn’t want to draw the slightest attention to that end of the yard.
She turned back and went inside to make herself coffee. Then, knowing she had no time to lose, she went upstairs to get dressed. Ten minutes later she began mowing the grass with particular care. When she reached the end she peered at the gap between the hedge and the wall through which she had managed to push Gérard’s body. There were a few broken branches on the ground, which she kicked into the pile of grass clippings.
The night before, once she had realized there was no way she was going to be able to hoist Gérard’s body over the hedge, Nora had almost given in to despair. But as she felt blindly up and down the hedge, she noticed a gap between the end of it and the boundary wall. At first glance it looked too narrow for the body to pass through, but by pushing the branches aside perhaps she could do it. Once again, adrenaline, fear, and nervous tension gave her a surge of energy: she took hold of the corpse by the armpits and pulled it with all her strength as close as she could to the spot she’d identified, where she leaned it against the wall, facing away from the hedge. Then with a massive kick she pushed it through the branches. Gérard collapsed miserably in the middle of the hedge. Nora stifled a cry of victory. All she had to do now was step over the body into the next-door yard and pull it toward her. Gathering her courage, she grabbed the end of the tarpaulin and bumped it along slowly and haphazardly, almost falling backward with each tug. Utterly exhausted, Nora had to draw on all her strength not to give up and simply kill herself. Hang herself from the top of the stairs.
For a second, the image of a hanged man appeared in her mind, and Gérard’s words came back to her: “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, he was found hanging in the stairwell.”
A man had hanged himself here, or in the house next door, because he had been accused of a crime he said he hadn’t committed. And now she, Nora, was thinking of hanging herself to atone for a crime of which she was well and truly guilty.
