Fontanel had gone for a pee, whistling “Vie de merde.” When he was back in the dining room, he had sat on the other side of the table, in a different seat. As if his had been taken by someone in his absence.
“Geneviève must have been gone for an hour, tops. When she got back, and opened the door of Room 1, she came over dizzy, crashed to the floor . . . Already, that afternoon, she’d almost passed out. She thought she must be sick . . . That she’d picked up our kid’s virus. She struggled to get up . . . She opened the window to gulp some fresh air . . . That’s what saved her. It was five minutes later that she said to herself something wasn’t right . . . That the girls were sleeping too soundly. Geneviève didn’t get it straight away . . . Carbon monoxide, it’s a gas you can’t smell . . . In each room, there was an individual water heater, old as time . . . Ancient things that didn’t work at all anymore, but that weren’t allowed to be touched . . . And yet someone had. Geneviève clocked it straight away because those bloody things were stuck behind a false cupboard, and that one had been opened . . . The door was just hanging open.”
Alain Fontanel opened another bottle, using a lighter lying on the table, while still talking.
“We all knew the fixtures in the château were rotten . . . A ticking time bomb. There was nothing I could do. It was too late. Asphyxiated . . . Poisoned by carbon monoxide. The four of them.”
Fontanel went silent. His voice had betrayed emotion for the first time. He lit a cigarette, closing his eyes.
“I immediately switched off the water heater. I even found the match used to get it going. Geneviève, she’s never been able to lie . . . When you were having it off with her, I knew it. She went all gooey-eyed. Totally daft. Stank like a perfume factory, wore stuff on her face, shoes that crippled her . . . That evening, I saw in her eyes she hadn’t done it, she wasn’t to blame. I saw her terror. She stank of death . . . And anyway, you have to know what you’re doing to start an old thing like that. She wouldn’t have been up to it . . . It was strictly forbidden to touch the château’s old water heaters. And the staff all knew that. It was drummed into us often enough. It wasn’t written in the rules, or the boss would’ve gone straight to jail, but us, we knew . . . She should’ve had them removed . . . Croquevieille, when it came time to get parents to cough up, she was right there, but when it came to paying for new gear, she was gone. The only new hot water tanks were the ones in the communal showers.”
Someone knocked on the door. Fontanel didn’t open. He just grumbled, “Bloody neighbors,” and refilled his glass. While Fontanel was telling the story, Philippe didn’t move. He drank long glasses of vodka, at regular intervals, to burn away the pain, drown the sorrow.
“Geneviève panicked. Said she didn’t want to go to prison. That if anyone knew she’d gone off to see her kids, she’d get the blame for everyone. Begged me to help her. At first, I said no. ‘And how d’you think I can help you?’ I said. ‘We’ll tell the truth, that it was an accident . . . We’ll find the idiot who did that.’ She went berserk, face all twisted . . . She swore at me, threatened me. Said she’d tell the whole band of cops that I spied on the supervisors . . . that she’d seen me stealing their panties from the dirty laundry . . . that she had proof. I gave her a big slap to shut her up . . . And then I remembered that, when I was in the army, one night a squaddie had burnt down part of the barracks by forgetting a saucepan of food on a badly switched off gas cooker . . . That’s how I had the idea . . . With fire, everything disappears. When everything burns, no one goes to jail . . . Especially if it’s little kids making the mistake of forgetting a pan of milk on the stove.”
Right then, Philippe would have liked to ask Fontanel to shut up. But he was incapable of opening his mouth, of uttering a single word. He would have liked to get up, leave quickly, run away, cover his ears. But he remained frozen to the spot, paralyzed, powerless. As if two icy hands were pinning him to his chair.
“It’s me who set fire to the kitchen . . . Geneviève who put the mugs in the girls’ room . . . I waited at the end of the corridor, left their door ajar. Geneviève went up to our room . . . Since that night, she’d never stopped blubbing . . . She was scared, too . . . Said you or your wife, you’d end up coming to skin her alive . . . ”
Shudders coursed through Philippe. Like shocks from invisible electrodes.
“When the flames reached the room, I ran upstairs to give a good kicking to Letellier’s door . . . I hid away with Geneviève in our room. Lindon woke up, went down to the ground floor, screamed when she saw the fire, I acted like I’d just got out of bed, didn’t understand what was going on . . . Letellier wanted to go into the room, but it was too late . . . Flames too high. We got everyone evacuated . . . By the time the fire brigade arrived, there were nothing left . . . Looked like Hell, but much worse . . . Lindon never dared ask Geneviève where she was
