The Cleaner of Chartres by Salley Vickers

Author:Salley Vickers
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-06-02T04:00:00+00:00

28

Chartres

When, twenty years later, Agnès looked back on this period of her life, it seemed to her that she had descended into an intractable hellish nightmare and then everything had resolved into an improbably happy dream.

She only very dimly recalled the time of the first troubles, the hours and hours during which people had questioned her about the attack and her abiding feeling that all she had to cling to was that the baby was – must be – she knew he was – her own little Gabriel. She was assured of this again from the pictures she was shown – the little curly-haired boy with the pointed features and pale brown skin. Of course he was her baby. All she had done was try to take him back.

But this later time was different. He was not her baby. She knew this now. And to find her real child she had to get away. Maddy was her friend. Maddy had told her how.

‘Stick to your guns, sweetie. Simple denial, repeated then repeated again, works wonders. My dad was accused of stealing once. He worked in a garage and some jerk was light-fingering the till. My dad said he just went on denying and denying and denying and they found who did it before he gave up. Tell them you made a mistake, you were upset, out of your mind, whatever helps. It’s true after all.’

This time there were interviews she remembered in detail. Always holding on to the idea that the one fact Maddy had taught her would get her through. ‘I know now he was not my baby. I made a mistake.’

‘But you insisted he was yours at the time.’

‘I imagined it.’

‘And you were never at this address?’

A piece of paper was held out to her. ‘I don’t recognize it.’

‘You never went there?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know where that is.’

But this was not enough to stop the questions. ‘You have no recollection, then, of going to this address and attacking Michelle Boyet with a knife?’

Be firm, Maddy had said. Don’t give up. Remember my dad. Stick to your guns.

‘No.’

‘No recollection at all?’

‘It was a mistake. I was upset. I said things. I see that now. I say things that aren’t true when I am upset.’

(‘Good girl,’ Maddy had said when they were practising that night. ‘Saying you were “upset” is just the ticket. They can’t argue with that.’)

Dr Nezat had of course become involved in the decision over the reconsideration of Agnès’ psychiatric status. She gave it, at some length, as her opinion that Agnès had been suffering a psychotic delusion as a consequence of the trauma of losing her own child. Nothing remotely aggressive had ever been observed in her behaviour at the psychiatric hospital. On the contrary, she was passive and biddable, maybe even too much so, at all times. The girl’s previous consultant, Dr Deman, had visited her, quite properly, as he was concerned that there had been a confusion in the diagnosis, and suggested they

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