The Chrysalis Read online

  THE CHRYSALIS

  CATHERINE DEVENEY

  Dedication TK

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  COPYRIGHT

  CHAPTER ONE

  Marianne

  The night Patrice Moreau died felt like the last night of summer in Saint Estelle, the first sharp hint of autumn cutting through those lazy evenings of heat we thought would never end. I remember shivering slightly, though not only with the cold, as I stood in the shadows of the alleyway that ran from the Rue de Chèvre to the cul-de-sac where Bar Patrice stood. It was a Wednesday, the night before the bins were emptied, and the air still smelled warm and rank, the metal bins so full that the rubbish dribbled lazily, half in and half out, from open lids. In the half-light, I knocked against one and grabbed out frantically for the lid to stop it falling, but it clattered noisily onto the street and I froze.

  “Merde!” I muttered. “Shit!”

  I moved back against the wall and looked up to the first floor apartment above the bar. The light were full on and I saw a figure – Patrice - move to the window and glance down briefly into the street. A woman with long blonde hair moved in behind him and he smiled as she turned him round towards her. She was facing me; I saw her face quite clearly. Patrice ran his fingers down her cheek, a gesture so sensual and tender that my heart jammed with the pain of it. Then he turned back to the window and closed the wooden shutters, and only fragments of light escaped out into the street, leaving me in the darkness.

  It was the end of more than summer.

  A cat shot past me in the lane, upon me before I heard it, and my jangled nerves made me jump at the movement. Then I crossed the road briskly to the bar. It was almost deserted in the front bar that night but I felt the eyes of the old men swivel appraisingly as I walked in. Old goats. I hated Bar Patrice with its dismal, dust-covered orange lights and worn, scuffed tables. They are not fastidious the French. And I hated Henri, who served there, with his coarse, thick lips and his eyes like dried raisins.

  “Gitânes,” I said abruptly. I had stopped saying please or thank you to Henri long ago. I slapped the money down on the counter so that he would not notice the tremble in my hand, then tore the cellophane off the packet on the spot. One of the old goats stood up to light my cigarette.

  “Merci,” I muttered, without glance or gratitude. I could hear the dull thump of music and glanced up at the doors near the back of the bar, before looking at Henri who was watching me silently.

  “Je cherche Raymond.”

  Henri said nothing but nodded briefly towards the back door. The clock on the peeling wall above the door said 11.16. I threw the cigarettes into my bag and walked up, barely hesitating as I turned the handle. A soft rumble of noise opened up with the door and I closed it behind me, seeing the old goats eyeing me curiously through the open doorway as I turned.

  The room beyond was dimly lit, with no windows and only flickering candles and votive lights, floating in bowls of water with scattered flower petals. My eyes narrowed, trying to acclimatise to the darkness, and I became increasingly aware of the shape of pillars and the silhouette of bodies looming towards me. I hoped Patrice had come downstairs but there was no sign of him. No sign of the blonde woman. No sign of Raymond either.

  “Marianne!” For a moment, above the music, I could not tell where the sound came from. “MARIANNE!”

  Then I saw that it was Jasmine who called, walking unsteadily towards me, arms outstretched.

  She was an exquisite creature, Jasmine, delicately boned with long dark hair and kohl-rimmed eyes so wide open they looked incapable of closing. She wore a black and white, Mary Quant-style, geometric shift dress that stopped mid-thigh, and her legs were slim and shapely.

  Only when you looked more keenly at Jasmine did you notice that her shoulders were broader than you might expect, her hands bigger. Her skin was not creamy but white as lilies and something about the unnatural pallor of it, the association in my mind with funeral flowers, made me a little uneasy round her. And of course there was our history.

  “Marianne,” she said softly, stroking my back much too intimately for me to be comfortable. I shifted slightly.

  “Have you seen Raymond?”

  Jasmine shrugged and waved her hand.

  “Somewhere. He disappeared.”

  I could smell the alcohol from her, see the sleepy, sexy haze it produced in her eyes.

  “Never mind him,” she said, linking her arm through mine and wrapping herself around me. “Come and have a drink.”

  I did not know why I had this effect on Jasmine. It was not something I was used to. I have never been what you would call a beautiful woman. My life has not been oiled by good looks and so I found other ways to get what I wanted. Women like me have to fight for everything. My face was always too odd, eccentric even, to be pretty; my broad, mobile gash of mouth almost too wide for my face. As for my eyes, I suppose they were nice enough in their way - dark and lively, I am told - but too small and deep set to be truly attractive.

  There was a time, a brief blossoming, when youth was on my side and lit my face kindly, gave a creamy lustre to my skin and a distinctive, quirky beauty to my lopsided looks. I grew into myself. It lasted perhaps ten years, in my late teens and twenties, the most powerful period of my life. That was when I met Raymond. But age somehow happened quickly, re-arranging my cheekbones almost overnight into a strangely angular assortment of peaks, while my cheeks collapsed into squashed hillocks. I had to become cleverer to get what I wanted. Or keep it.

  At this time, when Jasmine accosted me on the dance floor, I was perhaps in my thirties. I was already past the winter of my blossoming, yet she was still drawn to me for reasons I could not fathom. For some reason, I intrigued her. Anyway, this night she swayed slightly against me, murmuring close to my ear, and trying to encourage me to dance with her. I felt the old claustrophobic fear of the place settle round me and my eyes darted round, still hoping to see Raymond emerge from a dark corner… yet somehow knowing I would not.

  The seductive wail of a saxophone had drawn several bizarre couples onto the tiny dance floor. Right in the middle was Mel and his partner. Mel was a raging queen from Essex, usually referred to as Melanie, who had a purple feather boa wrapped around his scrawny neck and clung with what was, quite honestly, distasteful fervour to a butch Frenchman with Popeye biceps.

  Then, on the left corner by the pillar, was the Parisian manager of a bank in town, a fat, slug-like creature who dressed in stockings, suspenders and the kind of short skirt that the sixties had tried to make acceptable but never could. Or perhaps I simply disapproved of miniskirts because I was jealous that my legs were not like Jasmine’s. Nor were the bank manager’s, come to that. I was relieved now that midi and maxi lengths had become fa
shionable, choosing to hide myself beneath their flowing lines. In any case, the bank manager I speak of was middle-class trash, a man who perspired a lot and left his trail of slime over a bored looking youth with a special overdraft arrangement. How I hated Bar Patrice and its sordid little secrets.

  In my anger, I shrugged Jasmine off when she tried coaxing me forward and she stumbled in surprise. Jasmine looked at me reproachfully. We had history together, though not as much as she would have liked. For a while, Raymond had tried to assuage his own guilt by pushing me towards her. In a desperate search for liberation from my feelings for him, I kissed her once. She was James then, not Jasmine, and the rough stubble of unshaven cheek had irritated my skin. James was a good-looking man, but Jasmine was an even more beautiful woman. Her average height as a man became strikingly tall and willowy when she switched gender, and she developed a presence that her masculinity had simply swallowed up. But I was not interested in James and was even less so in Jasmine. I was heterosexual but that was not the reason; the reason was that I was never interested in anyone but Raymond. Never could be.

  “I am still the same person,” Jasmine said bitterly, as I walked away. “The same person,” she yelled suddenly at my back, and her voice held deep pain and a hint of despair. She thought I hated her. She did not understand how much I feared her.

  Bar Patrice, as I saw it, was a refuge for misfits and deviants. (You should not, by the way, assume ‘deviant’ to be a term of disapproval. These people did, literally, deviate from the norm and as a lawyer, I am comfortable using analytical terminology. It is true I did not like most of them, but I like to use language correctly.) They were not all beautiful as Raymond was. Men dressed – badly on the whole – as women; women dressed as men; transvestites, transsexuals, gays, lesbians, bisexuals… Their proclivities were different but they herded together in their sense of otherness. It was a place of safety for lonely and confused people who were liable to come out of an ordinary bar with a glass embedded in their skull. To Raymond, visiting Bar Patrice felt safe and secure. For him, it was like coming home.

  The front bar was ordinary enough. Entrance to the back room, to the secret heart of Patrice’s underworld, was carefully selected. Raymond and I had been popping into the front bar for some time before Patrice spoke to him. I had gone to the farmer’s market to buy some bread and cheeses for a light lunch and arranged with Raymond to meet him at Patrice’s for an espresso. When I came in, I noticed immediately that there was something very intimate about the way he and Patrice were sitting, their heads almost touching. Patrice was murmuring something in a low voice and smiling at Raymond like he was the only person in the world. Such a thing was never going to escape my attention.

  Patrice had fewer boundaries than any other person I have ever met. There was an amoral quality to him. He was certainly very handsome - in that French kind of way. A soupçon too much oil, if you ask me. His smile had something of the hungry crocodile about it, but I could see that Raymond was very taken with him. Raymond tended to like masculine men. Men with broad shoulders and some metaphorical dirt in their fingernails. Patrice, on the other hand, liked butch men and queens, straight women and dykes. Anyone, in other words. But he did not like me. The feeling was mutual.

  As I approached the table, Patrice stood up immediately and took his farewells.

  “Madame,” he said politely, inclining his head towards me before disappearing through the back.

  Hard to believe but it grew - all of it - from there.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Patrice Moreau died like a pig with its throat slit. His blood seeped from him, dripping through the floor of his apartment onto the ceiling of Bar Patrice, forming a mysterious dark, damp circle. Forensic evidence suggested he died sometime between midnight and 2am. His door had been left wide open with no sign of forced entry. It was mid-morning the next day before Henri noticed and went to investigate the damp patch. According to what I heard, moments after he disappeared there was the loud thump of a door slamming on the floor above, the sound of Henri’s heavy footsteps running on the stairs, and then he burst back into the bar, white-faced and shaking. I almost wish I’d been there to see the implacable Henri shaken from the certainties of his narrow little existence.

  Raymond and I stayed away from Bar Patrice for the next few days, an uneasy silence growing between us that never completely disappeared in the years that followed. We had our own flat in town, a light, airy, first floor apartment above a boulangerie and pâtisserie that scented our apartment with heady wafts of warm dough and caramelised sugar, baked apple and cinnamon, and rich, dark Belgian chocolate. I bought our bread there, and cakes, and sometimes for a treat, little cellophane twists of dark chocolate truffles tied with pink or lilac ribbon. I like things to be nice.

  The apartment was beautiful. It was so warm in the south that our windows were always open during the day, the light voile curtains fluttering over polished golden floorboards, patterned by shadows and shafts of wavering sunlight. If it had been anywhere else, I would have loved it unconditionally. But part of me hated that place to which Raymond gravitated like a homing pigeon. One week in spring, two in late summer, and a week in autumn, without fail - and whatever other impromptu trips we could manage. This place was the price I paid for keeping Raymond. It was a high price.

  Everyone in town was shocked at Patrice’s death. Things went quiet, though there was plenty of hushed whispering. No comings and goings from the bar. At first, locals had drifted in ghoulishly, on the pretext of offering sympathy to Patrice’s wife and family, and also to Henri, but really straining to see the mark on the ceiling. The entrance to Patrice’s flat was quite separate from the bar, so the gendarmes had no objection to the bar staying open – frankly they were a little slack in a small town like ours – but after two days, Henri simply closed up and the shutters remained firmly locked.

  Raymond and I did not address the issues much. The atmosphere was strained.

  “Where were you that night?” I said eventually, after a full day of near silence.

  Raymond looked at me incredulously.

  “Where?”

  “Yes, where?”

  He turned from me.

  “You know where I was.”

  Yes but earlier. I was looking for you.”

  “Looking?”

  “I am always looking for you.”

  He crossed to the window and I watched him from behind as he leaned against the frame and watched the movement in the street below.

  “You never said you were going but I knew,” I persisted.

  “If you know where I was, why did you ask?”

  “I wanted to know if you would lie.”

  Raymond did not reply.

  “Why didn’t you say where you were going? You know I can’t stand it when you sneak around.”

  There was an almost imperceptible movement of Raymond’s shoulders, a tiny slump. I could tell he was upset. I can always tell.

  “I know it makes you unhappy,” he said. “I make you unhappy.”

  “You are all I’ve got.”

  A horn blared through the open window from the street, then a torrent of angry French drifted upwards. I crossed the room to stand beside Raymond and look down on the scene below: some altercation over a parked car that was blocking the street. They are so dramatic, the French, with their huffing and puffing and grand gestures. I turned, impatiently. I prefer things on a smaller, more British scale.

  “The gendarmes are making inquiries, door to door,” Raymond said. He glanced round at me. “They will come here.”

  “I saw Patrice.”

  Raymond blinked.

  “The night he died. I saw him at the window. I was outside the bar.”

  I held Raymond’s eyes as he watched me silently.

  “He was with a woman. A woman with long blonde hair. Perhaps I should say…”

  I could hear the ticking of the kitchen clock through the open door.

  “A
woman,” he said.

  “Yes, a woman.”

  “You should tell the police,” he said finally. “Tell them what you saw.”

  He walked to the kitchen and I heard the rush of water in the kettle.

  “Yes,” I said, though he was no longer in the room. “I will tell them.”

  Raymond and I sat a little stiffly, side by side, when the Gendarmes arrived. We were not familiar with their ways because they were not like our police. Not thorough, not painstaking. Without our eagle eye for detail. One of them actually smoked in our house, in uniform. Even as a smoker myself, I found that unprofessional. I would not blow smoke over any of my clients. But I simply smiled and ingratiatingly offered them coffee and a Gitâne - which of course, they accepted.

  To them, we were simply foreigners and therefore of little use. What could we know about local goings-on? The French are so intolerant of anyone who does not speak their language. Non, they shrugged when I asked if they spoke English. They did not. In fact I understood more of what they asked than I let on; my French is not that bad. “Pardon,” I said politely, over and over, when I did not want to answer, “Je ne comprends pas.” It was too difficult for them to communicate, so they drank their espresso and smoked their cigarettes and were content to take a little rest from the grind in the pleasant apartment of the English holidaymakers.

  One thing, I said, eventually, in halting French. I saw Patrice Moreau very briefly the night he died. I had gone to the bar to buy cigarettes – obviously, I said nothing about looking for Raymond – and I had seen Patrice at the window. They listened with casual interest as I stumbled through the faltering explanation.

  “A blonde woman,” I said, looking at Raymond as if searching for his help with the French words. “How do they say?” I looked questioningly at the gendarme who seemed to be in charge, a long-faced man with an unhealthy grey pallor to his complexion. “Une femme blonde?” I said questioningly.