Chapter 4

Twenty-Six

They talked in the corridor, under the humming strip light, in low voices, like two people arguing in a hospital.

— What do you mean, “must not be found”?

— Exactly what it means.

— Thomas.

He ran his hand through his hair. He looked, all at once, much older than he had that morning.

— Six years ago, a woman came to the practice. A client. Divorce. She had a fractured wrist which she explained as a fall.

He looked at the empty corridor.

— I believed her. I helped her draft her petition, I explained the procedure, I gave her an appointment in six weeks, and I let her go home. Because that is what we do. We handle the file.

— And?

— And three weeks later she came back with the other wrist.

Clara said nothing.

— She sat in the same chair, said Thomas. She laid her arm on my desk and asked me whether that changed anything for the procedure.

He made a vague gesture.

— I told her we could file a report with the police. She told me she had done that twice already. I told her we could apply for a protection order. She said: “How long does that take?” I said six days. She said: “And where do I sleep for six days?”

He looked at Clara.

— I had no answer. I had done the job for eleven years and I had no answer to that question.

— So I did something other than handle the file. I called a friend of my mother's who had an empty studio above her garage. I told her it was for three weeks. It lasted four months.

— And then?

— And then somebody else needed a place. Then a third.

He gestured towards the door.

— That was six years ago. There are lawyers, two doctors, an accountant who puts the benefit claims together, four people who take women in, a man who repairs cars for nothing. There is a retired gendarme who wrote all our rules and who tells us off when we don't follow them.

— And there are women.

— There are women. And two men as well, which people never believe.

— And nobody knows.

— Three hundred and twelve people know, said Thomas.

Clara looked up.

— How many?

— Three hundred and twelve. That is the number of people who have come through us in six years. They all know where it is, they all know faces. That is the problem: it has grown. At the start there were four of us and we met in a kitchen.

He pointed at the wall, and behind the wall, the room.

— The day somebody talks in the wrong place, a woman gets a visit.

Clara took a long time to ask the question. When she asked it, her voice was not as usual.

— Why didn't you tell me?

And there, for the first time, he looked away.

— Because if I told you, you became somebody who knows. And people who know can be made to talk.

— Made to talk? By whom?

— By a husband looking for his wife, said Thomas. You have no idea what they are capable of. They call the schools. They call employers. They write to families. One man, two years ago, paid a private detective for eight months.

— You were protecting me.

— I was protecting them. — He raised his hands and let them fall. — And you too, yes. Both. I never managed to tell the difference and that is why I have been an idiot for six years.

Clara looked at her husband in that corridor.

She thought of six years of plates going cold and three hundred and twelve Tuesdays, and felt something open in her chest that was neither relief nor anger, and that she could not name for several weeks.

— You could have told me there was a reason.

— I did tell you. Every Tuesday. I told you I couldn't.

— That is not the same thing, Thomas.

— No, he admitted. It is not the same thing.

A door banged at the end of the corridor.

The man of about sixty appeared, the one from the first car. He had a phone in his hand and an expression Clara did not like at all.

— Thomas. We need to get everybody out.

— What?

— Loïc has just called. There's a car stopped at the entrance to the village, lights off, engine running. For the last twelve minutes.

Thomas straightened up.

— Is he sure?

— He's cycled past it twice. There's somebody inside and they're not getting out.

The man looked at Clara.

— It isn't yours, madame. Yours is along the wall, a grey Clio, I saw it as I came in.

He said it without hostility, as a fact, and that is exactly what made Clara understand where she had just set foot: a man she had never seen already knew her car, its colour and where it was parked.

— That one is at the entrance, he said. And there's somebody in it.