The Honest Folk of Guadeloupe Read Online Free PDF Page A

toward Sainte-Anne.
    The dogs were still barking, call and answer.
    “I thought it’d be a good idea if we could talk, Anne Marie.”
    “Eric, I have a job to do.”
    “So do I, Anne Marie.”
    “I’ll let you get on with yours.”
    “Half past twelve at the Tribun. I’ve booked a table.”
    “You’re very sure of yourself.”
    “Very sure of my sister-in-law.”
    “The ex-sister-in-law of your wife.”
    A brief laugh. “Half past twelve at the Tribun. I’m counting on you.” Eric André hung up.
    The receiver still in her hand, Anne Marie closed her eyes.
    For a few minutes, unaware of the noise and flickering image of the television, she thought about Eric André.
    She went to bed without touching the
rhum vieux
.

10
Palais de Justice
    Thursday May 17, 1990
    “So much for discretion.”
    Trousseau was smiling and he ran a finger along the line of his moustache. With the other hand, he handed Anne Marie the newspaper.
    She sat down at her desk, and yawned. “Another day.”
    “I like the red shoes. As always you’re looking marvelous,
madame le juge
.”
    “I bought them in Caracas.” She placed her bag in the drawer and glanced at the headlines: YOUNG TOURIST RAPED AND MURDERED . Beneath, in smaller print, WOMAN ’ S MUTILATED CORPSE DISCOVERED NEAR THE POINTE DES CHÂTEAUX .
    A passport photograph, badly reproduced and badly printed.
    “Not very good for the tourist trade,” Trousseau said.
    “Not very good for anybody.”
    Anne Marie liked her office—the same place she had been given when she had first arrived in 1979. It was little more than a cupboard, just big enough for her desk and the
greffier
’s, a couple of filing cabinets, a floor of polished mahogany and a small sink. It was at the top of the
palais de justice
and the gentle winds came through the open shutters and pushed against the lace curtains. The same Chantilly lace that she had bought in Paris before sailing out to the Caribbean with her husband and son.
    Anne Marie leaned her elbows against the desk and glanced outover the vivid red of the corrugated roofs of the nearby bank and the old Chamber of Commerce that had been converted into the Tourist Office. Ship masts, bare without their sails, rocked to the movement of the green sea within the small port.
    Pointe-à-Pitre.
    In the distance, standing out in clear relief against the sky, La Soufrière. The mountain range filled the horizon and the volcano, with all the intricate detail of its eroded flanks, its gullies and its tropical vegetation, rose up above everything else until its summit was lost in a dark crown of clouds.
    After all these years, the view still managed to impress her. “Those curtains are dirty. They need changing.” She turned to look at her
greffier
sitting behind the Japy typewriter. “Well, Monsieur Trousseau? Apart from the newspaper?”
    “Two faxes,
madame le juge
. Not sure they’re any use.” He paused, nodded toward to the
France Antilles
. “Our local paper seems to have more information than Paris.” He stood up and moved round the desk. Taking the paper and holding it at arm’s length—his long-sightedness had notably worsened over the last two years—Trousseau read aloud, his voice nasal:
    “The young woman, Evelyne Vaton, had been in our
département
for less than ten days. She was staying with the family of a doctor friend from a hospital in Villejuif, outside Paris. Monsieur and Madame Lecurieux of rue de la Manufacture in Basse-Terre, both retired schoolteachers, whose daughter is a doctor in the hematology department at Villejuif, said the young woman was charming and very friendly. Evelyne Vaton arrived on Saturday, May fifth, and spent her first week in Guadeloupe visiting the Basse-Terre region. Last Saturday morning she shopped in the town of Basse-Terre and went to mass in the evening. After an early breakfast on Sunday morning she had taken the hired car, announcing her intention to visit the Pointe des Châteaux. She