Читать книгу This Little Family - Inès Bayard - Страница 7

Little Thomas didn’t have time to finish his stewed apple. His mother hadn’t given him the slightest chance. The speed with which the poison circulated through his blood simply meant he didn’t suffer when he died. Only Marie’s body was still upright, securely wedged against the back of her chair, her head tipped back. She must have struggled to ensure this was noticed. Laurent had been served first. Few people stumbling across these three ashen bodies could have imagined the warm laughter filling the room just moments before the tragedy occurred.

Marie felt absolutely no remorse and, apart from her final gesture, there was no sign of a struggle. Every object was in its usual place, the strong flavorsome smell of the meal still hung in the air in the kitchen, paper napkins hardly marked, a water jug placed squarely in the middle of the table. The child was still in his booster seat, his face pitched forward onto his plate and the last morsels he hadn’t wanted to eat. His dimpled little fingers hung limply. Marie’s fists, meanwhile, rested squarely on the table. There had been only one tragic event in her life, but one powerful enough to goad her to action. Her face looked peaceful, at last. Her features relaxed, her body utterly freed of all pointless suffering. She had finally become the woman in the picture, the sort of woman who succeeds in controlling her own destiny.

Her husband had suffered terribly. He’d felt his lungs fill with blood, his breathing slow, and his throat constrict as his moist flesh convulsed. He had fallen from his chair and crawled for many a long minute, spitting liters of blood and vomit over the kitchen’s white-tiled floor. But he wasn’t dead. He was the only survivor, and was hastily evacuated a few hours later, still hovering between life and death. In the first seconds of this hellish chaos, his wife, who hadn’t yet touched her own food, had watched him slump to the floor before giving the first poisoned mouthfuls to her son. She hadn’t wanted gushing blood. There’d been enough blood already. Poisoning had struck her as the most judicious option. Laurent’s phone had kept vibrating on the console table in the hall. Perhaps he might have found out the truth before taking his first taste.

The Charonne district was cordoned off by the police. Just a precaution. The investigators soon grasped what she’d done. The two corpses were extricated from their chairs. The stiffness in their limbs meant the medical examiner had to relax them by injection before sealing them in body bags under the stunned gaze of their neighbors across the landing.

Marie had contemplated killing her son before, several times and in different ways. She was very determined. Day after day, the false innocence in the child’s eyes had driven her to murder. But until now, circumstances had stopped her seeing it through, mostly for practical reasons. She had killed her little boy and it was simply justice being done.

Before any revelations that might invite the first verdicts, let’s take a moment to appreciate the figure of this dead woman surrounded by her loved ones, the only one of the three to have remained upright.