Chain of Vengeance: Chapter Nine - Part Two

THE ALPS – FRANCE

 

 

“My brother was murdered when I was twenty three,” said Gaston. “They never caught the killer.”

The truck swept into a tunnel just wide enough for it, the red stone walls close and natural, illuminated suddenly in the glare of the headlights. The light reflected off the stone and back into the cab and Jack saw Gaston’s face in the darkness. He wasn’t smiling anymore; he was staring straight ahead at the road. The truck shot out of the tunnel and Gaston’s face vanished again in the black.

“It affected me profoundly,” said Gaston. “Not my brother’s death; he deserved it; but the act itself. I was fascinated by the fact that the man who had done it was still free; still living his life somewhere. I decided to find out for myself who he was.”

“And did you ever?” asked Jack.

“Molly didn’t let you read my book?”

“I wasn’t there for very long.”

“And it would have been mostly in French still anyway. No. I found something else even more interesting.”

“What?”

“I found a series of unsolved murders in various parts of Europe that showed definite similarities with my brother’s killer.”

“Did you go to the police?”

“Why would I do that?” Gaston grinned. It was a shocking thing to say but it came out with such humour and charm it was difficult not to just accept it somehow. “No. I decided to follow where the clues led myself.”

“To bring him to justice?”

Gaston chuckled. “A lot of my book was conjecture; some of it plain fiction. I hoped to catch the nasty fellow as I wrote the final chapter.”

“Why did you… find this killer so fascinating?” asked Jack.

“Just think about it,” replied Gaston. “Imagine taking away the gift of life, breathing and love from a human being; looking into the eyes of a man or a woman and knowing that you were about to make their life stop.”

Jack saw Lucy’s face again. He saw the two muggers.

“You could walk away from your victim and they would live on and do many things; or you could snuff them out just to satisfy your own desire or anger. That power… Yes. It is a compelling idea. Don’t you think?”

“You sound like you admired him?”

“I think I did,” said Gaston. “That isn’t a crime, is it?”

“I guess not,” replied Jack.

It was quiet for a while in the truck. They just drove.

This was the French Alps now all around them. The roads were narrow; cut into the mountainsides half way up cliff faces. They turned back and back on themselves, following every turn of the mountain. There weren’t always railings to stop cars going over the edge. Death was only a slight relaxation of concentration away. The air pressure was different; noticeably; lighter than in England, lighter than in Nice. It was making Jack more susceptible to travel sickness than he would normally have been, and more tired as well. Gaston’s truck was white, a cab at the front, a flat bed at the back. It wasn’t a lot bigger than a car but it felt it. It felt hard and rugged. Jack loved the ugly cough of the diesel engine.

“Why do you think whoever it was killed your brother?” asked Jack.

His companion said nothing.

“Gaston?”

“Mmmm?”

“Why did he do it?”

“Perhaps he was abused. Or beaten and bullied. Maybe my brother brutally raped his wife.” Gaston raised his eyebrows. His tone was light and playful but there seemed to be malice at some level. “Being frank, I couldn’t say. I can’t know what goes on in another man’s mind, especially not someone like that, but I do believe that the background is irrelevant. Rational motivation doesn’t really exist. There is no eternal truth. There is no proof that any God exists. The moral laws we care to come up with are fabrications with no more validity than we choose to give them. Ultimately, the only truth is what we feel like doing. That has always been my truth and I think it must be the philosophy that the subject of my study followed too, in a different way. He killed because he chose to do so; because he liked it.”

Outside, the headlights caught and picked out the branches of leafless trees and rocks on the left hand side of the road, but it did nothing to illuminate the ravine to the right. It was like a bottomless space: complete formless blackness, the very edge of existence. It was like the abyss.

Jack thought about his own past. He tried to search his memory for events that might have twisted his psyche; might have made him this thing that shambled through the night of the world; capable of the degree of rage that would destroy a life... but there wasn’t anything. There wasn’t any abuse or beating from his parents.

He had killed because he wanted to. In the moment when his hand had struck Lucy’s cheek, he had been filled with rage and his desire to do it had simply been greater than his desire not to. And now she was dead and he was damned. And her brother was out there somewhere in the darkness, trying to find him.

And when he did then Jack would be killed or else he would have to kill again himself.