A Brush with Death

Lodève, Christmas Eve.

Pascale Hervé waved her badge and the gendarme lifted the tape and allowed her past the cordon with a salute. “Lieutenant.”

The narrow street was quiet now as much of the small market town had shut down for the festivities. Evening was descending with a light drizzle swept in from the Mediterranean some fifty kilometres south. The old walls of the buildings were illuminated by the silent blue flashing lights of the emergency vehicles and the Christmas lights suspended from the streetlamps. Pascale cast experienced eyes across the scene. A suicide, she sighed. What a time to end it all. What, she wondered briefly, drove someone to such despair that they felt there was no alternative but to end it all?

Ordinarily, a suicide wouldn’t be something she would be troubled with. However, there was always the possibility that it was foul play, so she needed to rule it out before handing over to the local police. Brigadier Viala was crouching over the body.

“Daniel,” she said.

Daniel stood. “Madame,” he said, watching his superior as she surveyed the scene as they had done so many times before. Retirement loomed and she was unhappy about the prospect. He took in the slim figure dressed in leather jacket and Kevlar jeans she’d worn for riding the motorcycle from Montpellier. Despite being in her fifties now, her dark hair pulled back in a low ponytail showed few signs of grey and her olive skin was lined about her dark eyes, but was otherwise fresh and smooth. Pascale had aged well, yet in her demeanour there was an underlying unhappiness as age brought with it its own reward; the end of her career. This was her last Christmas with the department and by New Year she would be gone with nothing left to do. No purpose to her life.

“What do we have?”

Daniel looked up at the building deep in the Arab quarter of the town where the streets were narrow and dark, such that the buildings were clustered together shutting out much of the light during the day. Now in the early evening, the artificial light caught the drizzle and held it up for examination before it drifted off into the shadows. “Fell from that window,” he said, gesturing to an open window three storeys up. He looked down at the corpse, spread-eagled on the flagstones.

“Come, look.”

Pascale knelt down and looked at the crushed and broken body. Immediately she saw what was troubling Daniel. The man was alive. “Impossible,” she breathed.

“Indeed,” He said, kneeling down beside her to examine the body once more. “This is not the first one lately. The back of the skull is shattered and yet there is life in the eyes. Third one of these undead corpses in the past twenty-four hours.”

She looked in the eyes that stared back at her. There was life, yet no reaction. The pupils were dilated and they moved to look at her, drilling into her soul, and occasionally the eyelids blinked, so, yes, there was indeed life, but this shouldn’t be happening she assured herself. “This man should be dead. Have the paramedics taken a look?”

Daniel nodded. “They are as baffled as we are. Everything about the body is dead except the eyes.” He stood. “If you have seen enough, they will take him back to Montpellier.”

She nodded and stood. “And the others?”

He sighed. “Exactly the same. The body is dead to all appearances, but there is something still there. Tests show that the brain is dead, but the eyes remain alive. It makes no sense. It’s as if…” He paused, considering the absurdity of what was going through his mind.

“As if?” She prompted.

“As if… As if the soul cannot depart the body, as if there is some link keeping them there. I’m not making any sense, I think.”

“No less than what we are looking at.” She glanced at her watch. Guillaume would be wondering where she was. Again, she was out late working when they were supposed to be having a quiet night in. She should have been home an hour ago. He wanted to celebrate the coming of Christmas with her and again she was allowing dead bodies to come between them. He would understand. He always understood and sometimes that irritated her to distraction. Maybe if he got good and angry, she would feel better about letting her work absorb her life to the exclusion of everything else, including her marriage.

“Any sign of foul play?” She asked with little expectation of a positive answer.

Daniel shook his head. “He left a note. Even so, we will do a complete search of the crime scene.”

“What a time to do it, eh?”

Pascale spent a short time looking about the man’s flat and perused the suicide note held out for her by the CSI sealed in its plastic bag. The usual thing, she mused, looking at the final pathetic communication from a desolate soul. Life was just too much for some. Loneliness and despair while everyone else was celebrating togetherness and family. Christmas was, for some, a dark, lonely place full of anguish and pain. Season of good cheer indeed. Goodwill to all men, except those who lived alone; lonely, lost and without the touch of human kindness – even in the throng of the crowd.

Melancholy followed her as she walked back to the bike. The Harley Springer Softail loitered menacingly on its sidestand. The American beast was a brutal thing; ugly to the eye and designed for the long, straight highways of the American west. The twisting, narrow European roads were not its ideal terrain and every time she rode it, it reminded her of its heritage. Roundabouts were a particular bane as the long wheelbase and wide rake made counter steering difficult at best, so the bike had to be wrestled against its will into tight turns. Pascale, being perennially stubborn, persisted with the bike rather than buy a European or Japanese machine more suited to the roads around the Cevennes Mountains. She relished the challenge. The battle of wills betwixt rider and mount made for an interesting ride.

She pulled on her helmet, fastened it and as she straddled the machine she started the engine. Her hunter bag full of the necessities of life dangled from her shoulder. She shifted it behind, so that it nestled comfortably in the small of her back as she sat.

The rumble from the exhaust echoed down the constricted streets bringing a smile to her lips. Pulling in the clutch, she engaged first gear with a clunk and edged her way out of the winding thoroughfare past the Super U supermarket and towards the junction with the A75. She negotiated the roundabout, hauling the bike reluctantly through the necessary turns, musing on the heavy steering and low ground clearance of the machine and inwardly questioned her choice of bike. She loved it on the one hand and yet the critics who complained that these bikes really didn’t handle well at all, were correct in their assessment. Her dogged determination to tame the beast amused her, she supposed, knowing full well that she never would.

Once on the AutoRoute, the bends were less extreme, becoming more sweeping as the road descended to the plain and the shores of the Mediterranean. She accelerated through the tunnel south of the town and settled the machine at a steady 80kmh, feeling the wind pressure on her chest and enjoying the sensory feedback of the bike at this speed. Here, the lazy nature of the bike’s handling became more pleasurable as she moved into the left hand lane to overtake a gaggle of cars with a tanker truck at the head of the queue. The road started to gently climb again as she drew alongside the truck. It was at this moment, the vehicle signalled left to move out and overtake a slow moving Citroën Picasso in the right hand lane. As soon as the signal blinked on, the heavy vehicle swung out into the left lane. Pascale glanced in her mirror. The car she had just overtaken was already out in the lane behind her, planning to follow past the tanker. To her right, a silver Clio was in the process of undertaking. Inexorably, the tanker moved out and the triangle of available tarmac diminished. There was nowhere to go.

***

The house looked ancient. Centuries old. A rambling higgledy-piggeldy collection of granite and mortar that had evolved rather than been built—with each century adding its own distinct architectural flavour—sitting in the middle of a clearing. Gnarled old oak trees, bereft of leaves at this time of the year, poked their naked branches like bony fingers into the moonlit sky. Above, the occasional cloud scudded across the pale-faced moon that grinned down like a toothless old vagrant at the blue planet below. Pascale breathed out and her breath caught like a miniature cloud in the chill air. The gravelled driveway scrunched under her booted feet as she walked. The large oaken door was open and outside a red Ducati sports bike lounged with latent vitality on its sidestand. Even stationary it looked as if it was travelling at eye-watering speed. She paused briefly to look at the machine; her natural curiosity aroused as it always was when she saw a motorcycle.

“How did I get here?” She wondered. Then, almost immediately, “Where is here anyway?”

As the door was open, she walked through it into the house. Somewhere inside, she could hear music. Someone was playing that godawful Christmas album that gets dusted off and played ad nauseam every December. Although—as she reflected sourly—more like every October onwards in the shops and on the radio. It really was the most tacky, dire, drivel she thought to herself, so who on earth was so lacking in taste that they would play this dreck voluntarily?

Her curiosity aroused, she followed the sound, walking along the semi-dark corridors into the interior of the rambling house. “No,” she thought irritably, “I am not having a wonderful Christmas time, thank you very much.” The sound grew louder as she walked until she found the source. The room was warm and cosy. A fire roared in the grate and sitting in one of two expansive leather wingback armchairs puffing on a huge cigar, a shadowy figure awaited his visitor.

Pascale stared at the vision before her. The room was a mixture of the comforting and the bizarre. Around the walls mounted on boards fixed to them with upside down L-shaped wooden brackets, ran a miniature landscape, carefully constructed to scale with a train trundling along tiny tracks. It wound through the model mountains and valleys of a place far away that she had never seen.

She shifted her gaze to the fire and the armchairs separated by a low coffee table. Against the fireplace rested a scythe. In one of the chairs sat Death. He was leaning back with his hood slung over his shoulders, revealing the bony skull with the luminous eye sockets that watched her every move. On his bony dome, he wore a red and white Santa hat. As the train ran past his seat, he reached out and plucked a glass of single malt from one of the wagons and lifted it towards her. “Salut.”

Pascale stood, transfixed. She couldn’t make up her mind whether she should be looking at the incongruous sight of the Grim Reaper with a Santa hat on his head, sipping whisky and smoking a cigar, or at the method of the drink’s delivery.

“A toy train…” She said eventually, struggling for something coherent to say. It was the best she could manage.

“A model railway!” He retorted haughtily. “That is a scale model, I’ll have you know. It’s OO9.”

Pascale raised an eyebrow that said something like “I have no idea what you are talking about and really couldn’t care less anyway.” Rapidly followed by “You’ve got to be kidding me, right?” It’s amazing what a raised eyebrow can say when you put your mind to it and Pascale Hervé had perfected the art. Everyone in the department had become used to translating it as most of them had at one point or another, been on the receiving end. Today it was Death’s turn.

Death continued, blithely ignoring the visual cues she was giving out like a full sized steam locomotive travelling at line speed directly towards him that said “who gives a fuck anyway?”

“It’s OO scale,” he said. “4 millimetres to the foot, but narrow gauge. I’ve modelled it on the railway at Ffestiniog. That’s in Wales,” he explained. “They used the railway to move the slate after it was quarried. These days, it’s used by tourists. A beautiful spot and certainly worth a visit. I can recommend it.”

“I don’t care what it is.” She replied with the realisation dawning on her that what she had been recently witnessing was connected to the sight before her. “You’ve been lounging about here drinking and smoking when you should have been collecting souls, haven’t you? That’s why I’ve been investigating undead bodies.”

Death had the grace to look mildly guilty, which is quite an achievement when all you have is a fleshless skull for a face.

“I felt like a break. Everyone else does at this time of the year.”

“I don’t. People don’t stop dying just because it’s Christmas. Someone still has to clear up the mess and that someone is me. I have to work, so why shouldn’t you?” She scolded.

“Not for much longer,” Death pointed out, ignoring the rebuke. “As I understand it, you are supposed to be retiring on New Year’s Eve.”

She said nothing. Tears fought to well up at the corners of her eyes and she blinked them back, angry with herself for the emotion. Death gestured to the empty armchair. Compliantly, she sat and as she did so, the floor moved much like the deck of a ship at sea. She looked about with mild alarm.

Death waved a bony hand dismissively. “Oh, that’s nothing. It’s just time getting impatient.”

Again, the raised eyebrow.

“I can do pretty much what I like with time. How else do you imagine I manage to collect all those dead souls? Every so often, the continuum ripples in response. It’s just showing off because I’m overdue. As you noticed,” he added. “That’s the thing with time. There’s plenty of it, so we can enjoy a drink and a chat.”

He reached down and lifted a bottle of dark red wine that had been sitting by his feet. “Pegiorolles,” he said. “I believe you are partial?” He poured a glass and proffered it. Pascale took it and sipped at the fruity, aromatic liquid, tasting the warmth of the summer sun trickling across her taste buds and the gentle glow as it slid effortlessly down her throat. The flavour of the south of France; the foothills of the Cevennes where the grapes had ripened and been pressed before fermenting. The foothills with their micro climate of long, warm summers and harsh, cold winters and the gentle slopes that led down to the mild Mediterranean. The Languedoc Roussillon; her home; the land she loved with a passion and this red encapsulated it all in one fruity flavour. She smiled as the liquid warmed her throat and oesophagus as it went down. All the time, Death watched his guest as she drank. This self-assured woman at the peak of her abilities was now facing change and she didn’t like it one little bit.

“What will you do?” He asked.

Pascale blinked. “Do?”

“When you retire?”

Puzzled she put the glass onto the low table that sat between them. “Do? What do you mean, do? I’m dead. I won’t do anything.”

“Humour me.”

Puzzled by this line of questioning, she thought for a moment. “I really don’t know. I’ve spent my adult life in the police. It’s all my life and now it will be gone. I am redundant, useless, cast out to pasture as it were. I have no meaning to my life anymore.”

“Really? That’s it? You are your work? Nothing else?”

She reached for the wine and took another sip, savouring the flavour. “It seems that way. I’ve spent so many years doing it, I cannot imagine doing anything else and…and I really hate the idea of handing over to others.”

Death smiled. She thought it odd how he could do that, but nonetheless, he was definitely smiling. He took a puff at the cigar and blew out a plume of smoke that drifted up to the ceiling. “You are more than your work, you know. Guillaume has told you that often enough, but you don’t listen to him.”

Pascale was startled. “You know an awful lot…”

“I know everything. About everything and everyone. It’s my job, you know. I like my job.”

“So I see,” she said drily. “Yes, Guillaume nags me. He sees retirement as an opportunity not an end. Yet my career was so important. I am a police officer. I will always be a police officer. It seems but a moment ago, I was a twenty-year-old recruit with my life and career ahead of me and now… Well, now here I am at the end with no future and nothing to show for it but the past and no one will remember.”

“Everyone you have touched will remember. Every life saved…”

“Saved?”

“When you solved crimes and put murderers behind bars, did you not save innocent lives? What you did touched many, many lives. Take my word for it. You leave behind a legacy that cannot be measured. But it is the past now and you must look to what lies ahead.”

“But I am dead. There is nothing ahead.”

“Indulge me.” He paused for a moment and watched the miniature train as it traversed the tiny mountains of North Wales, wending around the equally tiny slate tips and through miniscule tunnels. He reached across to the mantelpiece and turned a switch on the controller, bringing the train to a gentle stop in the station. “Need to pick up the passengers,” he explained. “What about that thought you once had?”

“Thought? What thought?”

“About teaching people to ride bikes?”

“Good God! That was decades ago! I was in my twenties or early thirties I think. It was a passing fancy, nothing more.”

“But you did teach, though. At the academy.”

“Yes. I spent a few years there, after Geneviève died.” Ah, Geneviève Duval. Her partner. Her partner who ignored protocol and paid the ultimate price. She missed her friend of so many years. Long gone now.

“And you liked it, didn’t you?” Death’s questioning brought her sharply back to the present.

“I suppose so.” She reflected for a moment. “Yes, I think I did.”

“More than that, I believe. You discovered that you are naturally didactic and you were in your element. That would be closer to the truth now, wouldn’t it?”

He was right and she knew it. Guillaume had been happier then, too, as her hours were more regular and his finely cooked meals tended to be eaten rather than thrown away. But the lure of promotion and crime detection had been too great a draw and she returned to front line policing.

“I couldn’t do it on the Harley,” she remarked, returning to the subject of motorcycle training.

“No, I suppose not.”

“The handling would make it hard work.”

“Tell me about it.”

Pascale raised an inquisitive eyebrow again and Death noted how attractive she looked when she did that. She should smile more, too, he observed.

“I had a Harley once. I thought I ought to look like something from a Meatloaf album cover. Well, you get these fancies, don’t you? The image, you know. Well, I do have to say it looked the part. Unfortunately, they don’t respond well to counter steering. As I discovered when I came to my first roundabout. Harleys aren’t designed for roundabouts.”

“What happened?” She asked, knowing full well what happened.

“Nothing. I leaned on the handlebars and the bloody thing kept going. I went straight across the roundabout for some impromptu off-roading. Just as well it was an empty road. Piss-poor ground clearance, too. Not to mention off-roading on road tyres. Undignified doesn’t start to cover it. Meatloaf wouldn’t have wanted that on the front of his albums.”

She laughed then. Genuine laughter that engulfed her and lit up her face. He looked at her and thought that this was the first time in a long time that she expressed mirth. Happiness had eluded her for so long yet now, in this room, at the end of time, she was relaxed and happy, such that she could laugh at a humorous anecdote.

She stopped then, gasping for breath. “That’s why I like them,” she explained. “They are cussed brutes.”

“I got the Ducati after that. It goes round corners.”

“I noticed.”

“So?”

“Maybe. I would have to get another bike though.”

“Use your pension pot. A decent European or Japanese middleweight would do the job nicely. Think about it. All day out on the bike getting paid for it. And home in time for one of Guillaume’s delicious dinners.”

She nodded. “Nice idea, but it’s all moot. I’m dead, remember?”

“Ah…”

“Ah? What’s that supposed to mean?”

He furrowed his non-existent brow and scratched his head. “Well, things aren’t quite what they seem. You see, normally I go to my clients. Yet you are visiting me at home. Don’t you think that a little odd?”

She looked about her at the room. The armchair with a skeletal mythical entity wearing an absurd Christmas hat, surrounded by a model railway that ran around the room delivering tumblers of whisky and the fact that she was here was the odd thing?

“You are at a crisis point. A moment in time when two possible outcomes can arise. You have to make a choice. I can take you of course, if that is what you want. Or you can choose life. It is entirely up to you.”

She looked at him—eyeball to luminous eye-socket—for what seemed an eternity.

A choice.

It really was as simple as that.

***

She squeezed hard on the front brake and the long fork springs dived. She kept squeezing harder, harder, harder as the momentum of the bike shifted its weight over the front wheel pressing the tortured tyre onto the tarmac as the rubber compressed in protest. Yet the rubber gripped and slowly, inexorably, almost imperceptibly at first, the triangle of road between her front wheel and the truck opened up. She released the brakes and pressed firmly on the right handlebar. A combination of adrenaline and sheer bloody-mindedness forced the recalcitrant bike to change its line. The sliver Clio was braking hard, giving her just enough room to swerve into the hard shoulder where she brought the brutal beast to a shuddering halt. Shaking, she put her feet to the ground and placed the machine on its sidestand before her knees gave out. Gasping for breath she waited for her heart rate to return to normal.

“Life,” she said to herself. “I choose life.” At no one in particular. “I fucking choose life! Do you hear me?”

The office was illuminated as it usually was by the flickering green-blue of fluorescent tubes. Desultory bunting spelling out “Joyeux Noel” and “Bon Fêtes” were the department’s limpid attempt to give an air of festivity to the austere room. It seemed to Pascale that rather than an air of festivity it gave it a tired, slightly pathetic aura. She placed her hunter bag on the desk and looked across at Daniel who had arrived before her. She made no mention of the near miss. “How is our attempted suicide?”

“Attempted?”

“Is he still alive?”

“What are you talking about Pascale? He was stone dead as you saw.”

“But, there was evidence of life?”

Viala shook his head. “I think you need a break. You have been working too hard.”

“What about the others?”

“What others?”

I can do pretty much what I like with time. How else do you imagine I manage to collect all those dead souls?  Of course, she thought. It made sense.

“D’accord. If there’s nothing else, then,” she said. “I’ll get off home.”

“You do that and have a good Christmas.” Daniel winked at her. “And I reckon that retirement next week can’t come a day too soon.”

He lifted a hand and waved as she walked out of the office. Maybe he was right, she thought to herself.

As she turned the key in the lock, pushing open the door to the apartment, the smell of cooking swept across her senses. Guillaume turned to greet her. “Boeuf bourguignon,” he announced. “Would you like rice or buttered potatoes?”

“Rice,” she said.

“Rice it is. Good day?” He asked, glancing at his watch, unsurprised by the lateness of the hour.

“As good as they usually are.”

“Which is why I wonder about you, my darling. You claim to love the job, yet come in here depressed and tired. That retirement…”

“Couldn’t come a day too soon. I know, I know.”

He turned back to the cooking and fussed about for a moment. “Can you lay the table, Cherie?”

She set about preparing the table and opened a bottle of Pegiorolles, placing it in the centre. “I’ve been thinking.”

“Go on.”

“When I retire, I plan to retrain to teach people to ride motos.”

Guillaume stopped for a moment and looked at her. Surprise blended with relief crossed his face. “Really? Seriously?”

“You don’t think it’s a good idea?”

“I think it’s an excellent idea. At last! You are naturally didactic after all.”

“That’s the second time someone had said that in the past twenty-four hours.”

“Anyone I know?”

She shook her head. “No. No one you have met.”

“Well, you do it. You’d be good at it, I know. Spending all day on the bike and getting paid for it. What could be better? Retirement isn’t about stopping everything. It’s about changing direction and a slower pace. You aren’t just waiting for God, you know.”

“I know. You’ve said.” She poured two glasses of the red and handed him one. Taking a sip and savouring the dark liquid she said, “I think we should take a road trip on the bikes in the spring.”

“Anywhere in particular?”

“Royaume Uni.”

Guillaume stirred the beef. “Any particular reason?”

“I would like to go to Wales. There is a place there called Ffestiniog. They have a railway, I believe.”

***

This story and others are available in the Underdog Christmas Anthology.