Past Imperfect

corridor and room 4A at its end. Perhaps he could wait it out. She was already fifteen minutes late, how much longer could she stay?

He fought to relax again, breathing deeply and steadily. But with each passing minute he became increasingly agitated. Two fresh sets of heels he'd heard, only to lean over and see people coming out of other rooms. False alarms. Only a few minutes had passed, but it seemed like a lifetime.

Another set of heels, faint at first, started their echoing clipping. He leant across half expecting another false alarm — then pulled back quickly, catching his breath. At last! His pulse raced, counting each beat of the slowly receding footsteps.

He waited a full twenty seconds after they had faded down the stairway, then concentrated on the sounds around for a moment. No fresh footsteps on the stairway or the corridor.

He got up and made his way along, covering the distance steadily, half of his senses attuned to the sounds around, the rest focused on what lay ahead: the door… approaching closer the last few footsteps, reaching out for the handle, listening for a brief second for any sounds beyond. Nothing. The corridor was empty, no fresh footsteps approaching. Slowly he turned the handle, the door opened, the view steadily expanding… nobodyinside! A quick release of breath. Then he looked through the glass screen to the larger room beyond, stepping fully into the small ante-room, closing the door quickly behind him.

The boy lay beyond the glass partition, his skin pallid like yellow porcelain, wires and tubes connected and monitoring. It was certainly the boy from the day before, and there was nobody else in the room. Duclos' mouth was dry with anticipation. The boy's breathing was probably so shallow that all he would have to do was reach out and cover his nose and mouth for a minute to finish him. But he would have to be quick — at any moment somebody could come back in the room.

His nerves were racing, his palm suddenly clammy on the handle of the door to the main room. His whole body trembled and he felt cold, even though the night air was close to 80?F. With a final deep breath, he opened the door and stepped inside.

'When this old world starts getting me down, and people are just too much for me to face… I climb right up to the top of the stairs and all my cares just drift right into space. On the roof, the only place I know… where you just have to wish to make it so…'

Dominic lay on his back on his bedroom terrace, staring up at the star lit sky above Bauriac, the Drifters on his record player, soothing his thoughts. It was one of the best songs of the year, his favourite. The record had been in his collection and on Louis' juke box since early January, just as it was climbing up the American billboard charts. Files and notes lay scattered over his bedroom floor. He'd finished his summary report for Poullain — all but the last paragraph. He'd searched for the right tone, that key phrase which neatly encapsulated everything, before finally giving up after half an hour and deciding on a break to clear his thoughts.

His mother had gone to bed over an hour before with some hot chocolate and biscuits, just after ten. The day's basic household activities seemed to tire her earlier by the day. He'd positioned his record player close to the double terrace doors so that it didn't disturb her asleep downstairs.

His mind drifted back to Algeria. The Foreign Legion. Where he'd first found the habit of laying on his back staring up at the stars. The desert sky had been even more spectacular, crystal clear skies of deep blue velvet sprinkled with a snowstorm of stars. After a few months, the idea had caught on with half the platoon. Somebody would light a camp fire, he'd spend a while rigging up his record player to a car battery and would put on some Ray Charles or Sam Cooke, and on occasions some hashish would appear that somebody had picked up at a souq. It was easier to get hashish in Algeria than alcohol. The sessions made him popular with comrades. The thought that they were laying in the middle of the desert, cut off from civilization and all they knew, yet listening to the very latest sounds courtesy of Dominic's uncle almost two months before the rest of France had the privilege. It somehow made them feel in touch, in tune. Compensated for the isolation.

The legion had left its scars. Not so much on him personally — he'd been a back room radio and communications sergeant and had hardly seen any fighting — but with his present career. The gendarmerie treated ex-Foreign Legion recruits with an air of suspicion, as if they were all unarmed combat experts or reformed cut-throat murderers. At the end of the last century with uprisings in Morocco and Algeria, many recruits had come from the French prison system, an alternative to the Bastille or Devil's Island — but not in the last few decades.

Dominic didn't trouble to put them right, tell them he'd hardly seen any action during the Algerian war. Sometimes the tough guy image had its advantages; colleagues were careful not to tread on his toes. Local prejudices could be used to advantage — but he feared that they might work against Machanaud if the interview didn't go well tomorrow.

The forensics report revealed little. The blood tested was the boy's group, no semen deposits were found, and there were no startling fibre discoveries. Rock particles found in the blood confirmed the medical examiner's suspicion about murder weapon. Though no blood stained rock had been found by the search team, nor the boy's shirt, and the few items of paper from the field and a man's torn jacket and shoe by the river bank looked too weathered to be connected. Still they'd been passed to forensics for checking.

With little or no forensics findings, they became more reliant on the timing of the attack and eye witnesses — which pointed back to Machanaud. But with his protest to Poullain the day before that it was ridiculous to suspect Machanaud, he was just a troublesome drunkard and poacher — if Poullain's look of thunderous reproach was any gauge of local opinion — Dominic feared it could rise swiftly against Machanaud. Like himself and Louis, Machanaud was from outside, originally from the foothills of the Pyrannees, and had been in Bauriac less than three years. More than a few times, Dominic or others from the gendarmerie had been called to a local bar because of Machanaud's drunken antics. Machanaud would usually either want to sing or fight, or both. Having warmed up for the evening's renditions with stories of his wartime exploits, how as a young lad of eighteen in the resistance he tried to blow up a Nazi truck with vital supplies; but the truck spun off the road and hit him and he'd ended up with a metal plate in his head. Most villagers thought he was half mad and treated him with a mixture of suspicion and contempt.

Perhaps the other leads would prove fruitful and divert attention away from Machanaud. When he'd phoned the gendarmerie earlier, Servan brought him up to date on progress: a green Alpha Romeo had been seen in Pourrieres, the number taken, and they were now putting through a trace request with vehicle registration in Paris. The Lyon van was seen sixty kilometeres away about the time of the attack, and no news yet on the passing traveller.

Dominic sat up. Filtering down through his thoughts, his summary notes finally gelled. He went back to the folder before the thought flow went, and wrote: Distinct lack of forensic evidence. No other blood groups other than the boy’s, no semen, no fibres. The weapon cannot be found, nor the boy's shirt. Whoever committed this crime was extremely careful. If we are to suspect Machanaud, then we also have to ask ourselves — is he really the type to be this careful and meticulous?

Dominic scanned quickly back over the report. The time gap between the two attacks had introduced a new, puzzling perspective, but with no specific relevance to suspicion of Machanaud. Whoever had made the attack, the question was the same: Where had they been in that time? No other area of flattened wheat had been discovered, and from the strength of body imprints where the attack was finally made, the Marseille teams' view was that it had been occupied for no more than ten minutes. The supposition was therefore that beforehand the boy and his assailant had been by the riverbank, mostly obscured by trees and bushes from the bordering farm lane, or somewhere else?

The record had finished without Dominic noticing, the needle clicking repeatedly on the inner circle. Dominic took it off and put on Sam Cooke's 'Another Saturday Night', then came back onto the terrace. He closed his eyes for a moment as he laid back, then opened them again, letting the broad blanket of the sky and the mass of stars sink slowly through his consciousness, suffuse through his body until it touched every nerve end. Touched his soul. Solitude.

A single candle flickered at the back of his mind. Monique Rosselot's profile, partly in shadow against the dancing light, a raw essence of beauty and motherhood hoping and praying that her only son lived. He remembered in Algeria a woman at the souq in El Asnam. He never normally paid much attention to the local women, generally a non-descript rabble covered from nose to toe in black sheets. This woman had been dressed