I flinch away as the rifle fires. The report is followed by a shriek from the boar. When I look back Arnaud is still weeping beside his daughter. Mathilde fires again. This time I hear the bullet slap into the boar’s flesh. It roars and spins around, then charges the fence once more. Mathilde calmly works the rifle bolt to reload. She walks closer until she’s firing right down onto the animal’s back. Each shot is accompanied by a frenzied squeal as the boar continues to attack the planking. Its dark-grey hide is black with blood as it shrieks its pain and rage.
Then Mathilde puts the barrel to its ear and pulls the trigger, and the screams are abruptly cut off.
Silence settles, shroud-like, around the pens. Only the soft weeping from Arnaud disturbs it, but gradually other sounds begin to filter in. The pigs’ frightened squeals, Michel’s cries, the rustle of the trees. As the land comes back to life around us, Mathilde lets the rifle drop from her hands. She stares off at nothing while her father kneels over Gretchen’s body, and I stand apart from them both, convinced that this moment will go on for ever.
A MIST-LIKE DRIZZLE, too light to call rain, blurs the distinction between ground and low grey clouds. The trees by the roadside are displaying their skeletal nature, stark branches showing through the sparse leaves, while what were fields of wheat are now furrows of bare stubble waiting to be ploughed under.
I walk the last kilometre to the farm. After the car has pulled away it occurs to me that, by a vagary of the last few lifts, I’m following the same route as when I first arrived. I stop when I reach the barbed-wire-topped gate, looking past it at the familiar track disappearing into the trees. The mailbox stencilled with
I rub my hand along the gate’s weathered grain, but make no attempt to climb over. Now I’m here I’m reluctant to go any further. I wait for a lone car to flash past before throwing my rucksack onto the other side and clambering across the corroded wire. The once-dusty track is puddled and muddy, and without the cover of leaves I can soon make out the farmhouse through the trees. Then the track emerges in the courtyard, revealing the changes a few months have made.
The place is abandoned. No hens scurry about as I cross the cobbles, and the van and trailer have been removed. But the stable block’s dead clock still stands at twenty to nothing, and the ancient tractor remains; too broken and decrepit to move from its long-time home. The house is closed and shuttered, more dilapidated than ever under its rusting scaffold. The section of wall I repaired looks smaller than I remember, a cosmetic repair that doesn’t conceal the fundamental rot.
I’ve been apprehensive about coming back. Now I’m here, though, I don’t feel very much at all. The changed season and bleak landscape are too different from my memory, robbing the once familiar surroundings of their potency. Seeing them again feels surreal and strange, like revisiting a fever-dream.
In the days after Arnaud put a bullet into his youngest daughter’s heart, I went through my story countless times with the French police. Eventually, once they were satisfied I’d told them everything I knew, I was allowed to return to the UK. I’d given my assurance that I’d return for the trial, which was true as far as it went.
I just didn’t mention that the decision wouldn’t be mine to make.
London seemed grey and dirty after the green lushness of the farm. The world had continued to turn in my absence: the streets still seethed, the traffic still crawled, and the Thames still flowed. My return was momentous only to me. I’d expected to find myself a wanted man, that there would be a warrant out for my arrest at the very least. The reality was less dramatic.
In my guilty imaginings I’d always assumed that the police would know what had happened in Docklands; that I’d killed a man and run away. It never occurred to me that the only person who could tell them might have chosen not to. Rather than draw that sort of attention to himself, Lenny had simply left Jules’s body lying in the gutter, where it lay undiscovered until later that morning. Given the nature of his injuries, it was blamed on a hit and run, and with no evidence or witnesses his death had remained unsolved.
It might have stayed that way if I hadn’t given myself up.
