Moon in a Dead Eye: Shocking, hilarious and poignant noir. Pascal Garnier

just very hot …’

      ‘Maybe I put a bit too much ginger in.’

      ‘No, it’s fine.’

      ‘What were you talking to Maxime about?’

      ‘This and that … animals.’

      ‘What about the widow?’

      ‘Come on, Odette, why are you so set on her being a widow?’

      ‘Why shouldn’t she be? Anyway, Marlène agrees with me.’

      ‘And what does that prove?’

      ‘Women can sense these things.’

      ‘Oh, right! Look, I really couldn’t care less. We’ll soon find out one way or the other.’

      ‘We will, won’t we?’

      Martial woke up with a start in the middle of the night. It was not a nightmare, more a sense of having forgotten something important, like turning off the gas or a switch … something vital … It had something to do with the dunes at Wissant … At least, he thought it did … His throat raging, he got out of bed to fetch a glass of water and was amazed, looking down, to see his erect penis straining the fabric of his pyjama bottoms. In the kitchen, he swallowed one of Odette’s pills with his water.

      Léa took one last walk around the house before turning off the lights and going into her room, where she fell back on the bed, arms outstretched.

      ‘My final resting place …’

      She had never pictured it like this. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Madeleine had always been generous towards her, but with this bizarre gift she had ensured her dreadful taste would live on after her death. That said, Léa would not have been at all surprised if this unlikely inheritance (the house and a comfortable pension) had been somewhat cynically arranged by the family of the deceased, all too happy to see the back of the very personal assistant to the owner of Lomax pharmaceuticals. Madeleine would have signed anything at the end. It was only right to provide for a faithful … employee. Perhaps if she had pressed the solicitor to look more closely at the will, Léa might have got more out of it, but what was the point? There was nothing else she needed now.

      Good old Madeleine … Perhaps she might have preferred to end her days here herself, rather than in her mansion on Paris’s Avenue de Wagram. She liked the simple things in life: going for walks, watching TV, eating stews … That was pretty much all they had done together for the last few years, yet they were both contented. Each of them had looked back at her own life and realised that past a certain age, independence begins to feel like a trap. What they had never amounted to love, but the arrangement they had come to many years before had fostered a tenderness that was something like it.

      Léa rolled onto her side. She felt acid rising in her throat. It must have been those red-hot fritter things Madame Sudre, Odette, had served.

      She had been a little taken aback to find the four of them on her doorstep. The removal men had only just left and she had barely had time to get her breath back. They stood there smiling like Jehovah’s witnesses, the tall one especially, Maxime Node. He was the one who introduced everybody, showing them off as though trying to get a good price for them. Then they had all begun talking at once, each of them impressing on her their willingness to help. They didn’t seem like bad people, but they still frightened her a bit. Too eager, too smiley, too many outstretched hands … so old and wrinkled it was hard to tell whether they were grasping or giving. She couldn’t turn down their invitation to the buffet party they had put on in her honour at the Sudres’, the house closest to hers. The four of them seemed to get on well and to be happy living there. It was strange, but Léa felt straight away as if she knew them, or rather recognised them as people she had crossed paths with long ago, colleagues or classmates … The clown, the shy one, the flirty one, the swot … It was always the same. Claiming tiredness after a long day, she managed to escape, though not without assuring Odette of her support on two apparently burning issues: opening the clubhouse and filling up the pool.