Three Days and a Life

by Pierre Lemaitre, Frank Wynne

Genres: Suspense; Historical Mysteries; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

Twelve-year-old Antoine lives with his mother in Beauval, a small town where nothing much ever happens. But in the last days of 1999, a series of events unfolds, culminating in the disappearance of a child. In the years following Rémi's disappearance, Antoine wrestles with the role his actions played. As a seemingly inescapable net begins to tighten, breaking free from the suffocating environs of Beauval becomes a gnawing obsession.

Release date: July 13, 2017

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 320

Sample

In late December 1999, an alarming series of tragic events struck Beauval, the most important of which was unquestionably the disappearance of little Rémi Desmedt. In this region of lush, dense woodland which moved to its own slow, ineluctable rhythms, the sudden disappearance of the child was met by shocked disbelief and was considered by many of the residents as a harbinger of catastrophes to come.

For Antoine, who was at the centre of the tragedy, it all began with the death of the dog Ulysses. Do not trouble to ask why its owner, Monsieur Desmedt, gave this scrawny, long-legged white-and-tan mongrel the name of a Greek hero, it will be one more mystery in this story.

The Desmedts were his next-door neighbours, and Antoine, who was twelve at the time, was all the more attached to the animal since his mother had always flatly refused to allow pets into the house; no cats, no dogs, no hamsters, nothing – they just make a mess.

Ulysses would eagerly scamper up to the fence when Antoine called him, and often followed the gang of friends when they went to the pond or on their rambles through the surrounding woods. Whenever Antoine went out on his own, he always took Ulysses with him. He was surprised to find himself talking to the animal as to a friend. The dog would tilt his head to one side, solemn and focused, then suddenly take off, a sign that the time for talking was over.

Late summer had mostly been spent with his schoolmates building a fort in the forest on the hills of Saint-Eustache. It had been one of Antoine’s ideas that, as usual, Théo had presented as his own, thereby assuming command of operations. The boy held sway over the little group because he was the tallest, and was also the mayor’s son. Such things matter in a small town like Beauval (politicians who are routinely re-elected are despised, yet a mayor is treated like a king and his son like the dauphin; it is a pecking order established by traders and shopkeepers that spreads to local associations and reaches the school playgrounds by capillary action). Théo Weiser was also the dunce of his class which, in the eyes of his classmates, was proof of character. When his father gave him a hiding – as he often did – Théo would proudly flaunt his bruises, like a tribute paid by superior minds to pervasive conformism. He also turned the heads of the girls, and as a result he was feared and admired by the boys, but he was not liked. Antoine, on the other hand, asked for nothing and begrudged nothing. For him, building the fort was reward enough in itself, he did not need to be the leader.

All this changed when Kevin got a PlayStation for his birthday. The woods around Saint-Eustache were soon deserted as everyone flocked to Kevin’s house to play, something that suited Kevin’s mother who would rather her son was at home than in the woods or at the pond, places she considered dangerous. Antoine’s mother, however, disapproved of these Wednesday afternoons slumped on the sofa, these video games, they make you stupid, and eventually she forbade him from going. Antoine protested, not because he particularly enjoyed video games, but because he was being denied time spent with his friends. On Wednesdays and Saturdays he felt lonely.

He spent a lot of his time with the Mouchottes’ daughter, Émilie, twelve years old like him. She had curly hair as blonde as a baby chick and piercing eyes, a little minx, the sort of girl it was impossible to say no to, even Théo had a crush on her, but it wasn’t the same, playing with a girl.

And so Antoine went back to the words of Saint-Eustache and began to build another fort – a tree house this time – perched three metres high in among the branches of a beech tree. He kept the project a secret, already savouring the triumph he would feel when his friends, bored with the PlayStation, would come back to the woods and discover it.

Work on the tree house took a long time. From the sawmill, he filched scraps of tarpaulin to weatherproof the windows and doors, lengths of tar paper to seal the roof, fabric to brighten the place up. He made nooks and crannies to store his treasures, the work was never-ending, especially since, having failed to come up with an overall design, he was frequently forced to change his plans. For weeks the fort took up all his time and occupied all his thoughts, which made the secret even more difficult to keep. At school he made cryptic remarks about a surprise that would have his friends’ eyes popping out of their heads, but no-one took the bait. The gang was feverishly anticipating the release of the latest instalment of “Tomb Raider”, they talked about nothing else.

All the time he was working on the new fort, Ulysses was Antoine’s faithful canine companion. Not that he was useful, but he was there. It was his presence that gave Antoine the idea for a dog-lift that would allow Ulysses to keep him company when he was up in the tree house. He went back to the sawmills and pinched a couple of pulleys, a few metres of rope and enough timber to build a cage. The “service elevator”, which was to put the finishing touch to his creation and highlight its artistry, required countless hours to complete, many of which were spent chasing Ulysses since the dog had been fearful of the prospect of being winched up ever since the first attempt. The only way to keep the lift cage horizontal was by using a fallen branch to weigh down the left-hand side. It was not an ideal solution, but eventually he managed to hoist up Ulysses. The dog whimpered pathetically as he ascended, and when Antoine clambered up to join him, he huddled against him and trembled. Antoine would close his eyes and breathe in the smell, petting the dog contentedly. The descent was much easier, since Ulysses never waited for the lift cage to reach the ground, but leaped out as soon as he felt safe to do so.

Antoine brought various tools he had found in the attic: a pocket torch, a blanket, paper and pens for writing, everything he needed to be self-sufficient – or almost.

It should not be assumed that Antoine was by nature a loner. It was a situation temporarily forced upon him by dint of circumstance, since his mother disapproved of video games. His life was defined by the various rules and regulations issued by Madame Courtin, which were as regular as they were imaginative. A strong-willed woman, Madame Courtin had become a woman of principle since her divorce, as so many single mothers did.

Six years earlier, Antoine’s father had taken advantage of a change of career to implement a change of wife. To his request for a transfer to Germany, he had appended a petition for divorce, something Blanche Courtin took as a catastrophe, which was all the more surprising as the marriage had always been a rocky one and conjugal relations had been few and far between since the birth of Antoine. From the day of his departure, Monsieur Courtin had never returned to Beauval. On birthdays and at Christmas, he would send gifts that were always at odds with his son’s desires, presents for sixteen-year-olds when his son was eight, for six-year-olds when Antoine was eleven. Antoine had once visited him in Stuttgart and they had spent three long days staring stonily at each other and agreed never to repeat the experiment. Monsieur Courtin was as ill-equipped to have a son as his wife was to have a husband.

This upsetting episode brought Antoine closer to his mother. On his return from Germany, he began to interpret the slow, tedious routine of her life as evidence of her loneliness, her grief, and came to view her in a new, vaguely tragic, light. And of course, like any boy his age would have done, he came to feel responsible for his mother. Though she could be irritating (and even maddening at times), he thought he could see something in her that absolved everything, the failure and the faults, the character, the circumstances . . . The idea of making his mother even more unhappy than he imagined her to be was unthinkable to Antoine. But it was a thought he would never shake.

All these things, together with the fact he was not particularly outgoing by nature, made Antoine rather a depressive child, something the sudden appearance of Kevin’s PlayStation served only to reinforce. In this emotional triangle of absent father, domineering mother and distant friends, Ulysses occupied a central role.

The dog’s death, and the manner in which it happened, came as a brutal shock to Antoine.

Ulysses’ master, Monsieur Desmedt, was a quiet, quick-tempered man; he was solid as an oak tree, with bushy eyebrows and the face of a furious samurai, always convinced he was in the right, the type of man who does not easily change his mind. And a brawler. The only job he had ever had was as a labourer at “Weiser: Wooden Toys since 1921”, the principal employer in Beauval, where his career had been punctuated by quarrels and fights. In fact he had been suspended two years earlier for having punched his foreman, Monsieur Mouchotte, in front of the staff.

He had a fifteen-year-old daughter, Valentine, who worked as a trainee hairdresser in Saint-Hilaire, and a six-year-old son, Rémi, who worshipped Antoine and trailed around after him whenever he was allowed.

Little Rémi, it must be said, was not a burden. A chip off the old block, he already had the body of a future lumberjack and could effortlessly make the climb up to Saint-Eustache with Antoine, even going as far as the pond. Madame Desmedt considered Antoine a sensible boy – quite rightly – and one she could trust to look after Rémi when necessary. Besides, the little boy was given considerable freedom of movement. Beauval was a small town where everyone in the neighbourhood knew everyone else. Whether children were playing near the sawmills, tramping through the forest or horsing around up by Marmont or Fuzelières, there would always be an adult working nearby to keep an eye on them.

Antoine, who was finding it difficult to keep his secret, took Rémi one day to see his aerial fort. The child had been awed by Antoine’s technical ability, and with great excitement had made several trips in the rudimentary lift. After which the solemn conversation: Listen to me, Rémi, this is a secret, no-one can know about the fort until it’s completely finished, get it? I can trust you, can’t I? Rémi promised, he swore, cross my heart and hope to die, and as far as Antoine knew he kept his promise. To Rémi, sharing a secret with Antoine meant playing with the big boys, it meant being a big boy. He proved himself worthy of Antoine’s trust.

December 22 was mild, with temperatures several degrees warmer than the seasonal average. Though Antoine was excited by the prospect of Christmas (he hoped that his father might actually read his letter for once and send him a PlayStation), he had felt a little lonelier than usual.

Unable to bear it any longer, he had confided in Émilie.

Antoine had discovered masturbation a year earlier and now practised several times a day. Often, when out in the woods, he would lean against a tree, his jeans pooled around his ankles, and play with himself while thinking about Émilie. He had come to the realisation that it was for her that he done all this work; he had built a nest he wanted to share with her.

Some days before the death of Ulysses, she had gone into the woods with him and studied the construction incredulously. He expected her to climb all the way up there? Being little interested in feats of civil engineering, Émilie had come intending to flirt with Antoine, but this was something she could not imagine doing three metres off the ground. She had simpered for a while, twisting a lock of blonde hair around her finger, but when Antoine became irritated by her reaction and refused to play along, she stalked off.

Émilie’s visit had left Antoine with a bad taste in his mouth; she would tell the others, he felt faintly ridiculous.

Coming home from Saint-Eustache, even the holiday atmosphere and the prospect of his present could not make him forget his fiasco with Émilie which, the more he thought about it, began to feel like a humiliation.

It is true that the festivities in Beauval were tinged with a nagging uneasiness. Christmas lights, a tree in the town square, the choral society concert – as it did every year, the town had thrown itself into the holiday season, but with a certain reluctance since the threat to close the Weiser factory cast a shadow over everyone in the town. It had long been clear that the public had lost interest in traditional wooden toys. Workers were slaving to make puppets, spinning tops and little trains carved from ash wood, but they gave their own children video-game consoles – it was obvious that something was not right, that their future was in jeopardy. Rumours of a fall-off in production at Weiser circulated regularly. Already, the staff had been cut from seventy to sixty-five, then to sixty, then fifty-two. Monsieur Mouchotte, the foreman, had been laid off two years earlier and still had not found work. Even Monsieur Desmedt, among the longest-serving members of staff, was worried. He was terrified of finding his name on the next list of redundancies which some people claimed would come just after the holidays . . .

That day, shortly before 6.00 p.m., Ulysses was crossing the main road by the Beauval pharmacy when he was hit by a car. The driver did not stop.

The dog was carried to the Desmedts’ house. The news spread. Antoine raced over. Lying in the garden, Ulysses was struggling to breathe. He turned his muzzle towards Antoine who stood pressed against the garden fence, petrified. One paw was clearly broken and perhaps a few ribs, someone needed to call the vet. Hands in his pockets, Monsieur Desmedt stared at his dog for a long time, then disappeared into his house, emerged with a shotgun and shot the dog at point-blank range. He then bundled the body of the dog into a grey plastic rubble sack. All sorted.

It had all happened so quickly that Antoine just stood there, mouth gaping, unable to utter a word. It hardly mattered since there was no-one to hear him. Monsieur Desmedt had already gone back into his house and closed the door. The grey sack containing Ulysses’ remains had been stacked at the end of the garden with the sacks full of plaster and bricks from the shed Monsieur Desmedt had demolished a week earlier in order to build a new one.

Antoine stumbled home, devastated.

His grief was so terrible that he could not even summon the strength to tell his mother, who had heard nothing about the accident. His throat tight, a terribly heaviness weighing on his heart, he could not stop replaying the scene, the shotgun, Ulysses’ head, his plaintive eyes, the hulking figure of Monsieur Desmedt . . . Unable to speak, unable to eat, he pretended he felt ill and went up to his room where he sobbed for hours. From downstairs his mother called, “Are you O.K., Antoine?” He was surprised that he managed to pronounce the words, “I’m O.K., I’m fine,” convincingly enough to reassure Madame Courtin. He did not fall asleep until the small hours, and his fitful sleep was troubled by dead dogs and shotguns. He woke shattered and exhausted.

On Thursdays, Madame Courtin always left early to work at the market. Of all the odd jobs she managed to pick up throughout the year, this was the only one she truly despised. Because of Monsieur Kowalski. A tight-arse, she called him, who paid his employees the minimum wage, always late, and gave them a 50 per cent discount on food that was fit only to be thrown out. Getting up at the crack of dawn to be paid peanuts! All the same, she had been doing the job for almost fifteen years. A sense of duty. She would complain about it the night before, it made her ill. Tall and lean, angular of face, hollow-cheeked, thin-lipped, wild-eyed and skittish as a cat, Monsieur Kowalski did not conform to the stereotypical image of a butcher. Antoine, who often bumped into him, thought he was ugly as sin. Monsieur Kowalski had bought a little charcuterie in Marmont which he now ran with the help of two assistants, his wife having died two years after he moved to the area. “Never wants to hire anyone,” Madame Courtin would complain, “Thinks we’re overstaffed as it is.” He had a. . .