Past Imperfect

The light of a single candle reflected against the glass. Monique Rosselot's concerned profile was caught in its glow, looking through the large glass partition towards her son in intensive care. The partition separated the small preparation and observation room, no more than eight foot square, from the main intensive care room. Monique Rosselot sat in one of three chairs close to the glass. She'd been allowed to bring in a candle, only one, and light it as part of her daily bedside vigil, two to three hours each visit.

The attending nurse had been gone for a full minute. Monique decided to go inside the intensive care room. There was no chair, so she knelt at Christian's side.

After a second of studying his features thoughtfully, she reached out and started tracing one finger gently down his face. Memories flooded back of the many times she had stroked his face, of him smiling back at her at bedtime, asking her to read him a story.

His skin had been warmer then, and it felt strange and somehow remote stroking his skin with no response. No smile. No bright eyes turning towards her. She had to be careful as she ran her finger down not to disturb any of the tubes feeding and monitoring. The story read, she would reach out and ruffle his hair. Only now, his head had been shaved clean, his skull marked out for the tests they'd made. Stitches marked a grotesque gash to one side.

Monique closed her eyes and gripped Christian's hand. But it felt even cooler than his face, and suddenly a pang of fear gripped her inside. Oh God, please… please don't let him die! Her eyes scrunched tight at the unthinkable, Christian's prone figure blurred through tears as they slowly opened again.

She tried to push from her mind what had been done to him, the cold hard details from the two visting gendarmes: the sexual assault… the repeated blows which had left him for dead. Her tears had mostly been in private — but then that had reflected how she'd felt almost throughout her vigil. Alone. Jean-Luc had merely absorbed himself more in his farmwork to cope. He'd only visited the hospital once with her.

Now, gripping Christian's small hand in hers, she wouldn't have wanted it any other way. She probably wouldn't have grabbed this moment of intimacy if Jean-Luc had been with her. She'd only done this once before — and then too had felt like a thief sneaking in and stealing something she shouldn't. Stealing a few minutes of intimacy with her son. Perhaps their last…

She shook her head. No! That wasn't going to happen! She would see Christian smile again… feel the warmth of his embrace. She gripped the small hand tighter, willing the message home. Willing Christian to awake.

The candle burning reminded her of birthdays, and she remembered then that it would be Christian's birthday soon — her mind flashing back to past birthdays with him smiling in the glow of the candles. Unwrapping presents expectantly. The Topo Gigio doll. A model car racetrack. His bicycle only last birthday. The house filled with joy and laughter. And suddenly she felt more assured: his coming birthday! Something close and real on which she could focus, could actually picture Christian's presence. 'It's your birthday soon, Christian,' she muttered. 'There'll be some great presents for you. I'll bake a cake. Bigger and better than you've ever seen before.' In her mind's eye, she could imagine Christian looking on with wide eyes and smiling at the oversized cake. And in that brief moment, she felt sure that Christian would awaken, was able to ignore the coldness of the small hand in her grasp. 'We'll all be there…'

'Now let us see what we have here.' Dr Besnard, the Chief Medical Examiner, had a manila folder already opened in front of him, as if he'd been studying it before they entered. A duty nurse ushered Dominic and Poullain to upright seats opposite his large mahogany desk. Poullain knew Besnard from four previous cases, mostly car accidents.

'…Young boy, Christian Yves Rosselot. Ten years old. Eleven on the 4^th September — just over two weeks from now. Admitted on 18^th August at 4.38 pm.' Besnard flicked forward a page and then back again. In his early fifties, he was bald except for some long wisps of greying brown hair. He cradled his head for a moment, smoothing the wisps across as he looked up again. 'So. The medics recorded arriving on the scene at 4.03 pm. The boy was wearing shorts but no shirt, and he was laying face down, his back exposed. There was blood visible on his head and shoulder, quite thick, obviously from a wound to the head. Some smaller blood spots were noted on the boy's back — from the same wound — and also a blood trail, mostly coagulated, on the boy's inside thigh. This was obviously from a separate wound. The shorts were therefore cut with surgical scissors, and the blood flow was discovered to have come from the rectal passage. The wound was not active, there was no fresh blood, so their efforts were concentrated on the head wound.' Besnard looked up at Poullain periodically, marking off his position in the file with one finger as he glanced at Dominic, as if waiting for his notes to keep pace.

X-rays, complex fractures, haemotomas, somatosensory cortex. The pages of Dominic's notepad were already filled with notes from the surgeon who'd operated on Christian the night before. Medical notes in shorthand were a nightmare. Effectively only the conjoining words could be shortened. Poullain had arranged that Dominic take the notes, then wait on Poullain for the meeting with Besnard. But there had been a spare thirty minutes for Dominic in between.

Pale green tiling and cream emulsion walls. The clatter of heels and voices along bare and stark corridors. Dominic found the atmosphere unsettling. He'd spent far too much of the past year in hospitals. Images of the doctor approaching, footsteps echoing ominously, telling him the results of his mother's biopsy. A year, two years if she was lucky. No, unfortunately there wasn't much they could do except administer morphine in the closing stages to ease the pain. Check ups every three months, but let us know if the pain becomes too much in between…

'…Clearing the airway of any residual blood was a priority, so a tracheal tube was inserted.' Besnard's finger ran quickly down the page. 'Fortunately, the boy was face down, otherwise he would have probably choked on his own blood before they arrived. The wound was cleaned and the source of the blood flow as a ruptured blood vessel was discovered, as was a likely skull fracture — though not immediately the extent of the fracture. That showed up later on X-ray. Badly bruised and broken skin also on the right cheekbone, blood by then coagulated, possible fracture beneath. The patient was therefore bandaged both to stem the blood flow and support the skull, oxygen was administered once the airway was cleared, then he was transported here to the hospital — from which point on Verthuy in emergency attended. Conclusions from the medics report and Dr Verthuy? First of all, time of the attack.' Besnard looked up pointedly. 'From the extent of blood coagulation around the main wound and rate of new blood seepage, their estimate was that the attack took place any time between an hour and an hour and a half before they arrived. As for the other injury — to the boy's rectal passage — this was more or less the same time, possibly only minutes beforehand. But probably the most interesting factor was from Verthuy's note on the boy's sexual assault. He discovered varying degrees of rectal inflammation and damage — suggesting that in fact two attacks had taken place at entirely separate intervals.'

Besnard's pause for emphasis had the desired effect on Poullain. Poullain sat forward keenly. 'Two attacks? How far apart?'

'Thirty minutes, forty minutes — one hour at most. But definitely two separate assaults. One area at the neck of the rectal canal which had been bleeding had almost completely coagulated by the time the second attack was made.'

Dominic could sense that Poullain was still grappling with the timing of the attack when he was hit with this new information. Dominic had already written on his pad: Attack, 1–1? hours before medics arrive: 2.33 — 3.03 pm. Anything from 12–42 minutes before discovery. Sexual assault minutes beforehand. Now Dominic wrote: Separate sexual attack, 30–60 minutes prior to final assault. That meant that at the outside estimate the attacker had stayed close to the path up to an hour and half, resting a full hour in between; and at the least, he had stayed there almost forty-five minutes, resting for half an hour. Surely someone else would have come along the path in the time. Where had he hidden?

'Any semen detected on either attack?' asked Poullain.

'No, none. Verthuy found nothing in the rectal passage apart from blood and inflamed tissue. All the blood is also of one type, B positive, the boy's blood group. Our attacker obviously was careful and pulled out to ejaculate. Did forensics find anything?'

Poullain pictured the succession of polythene bagged samples taken from the wheat field by the Marseille