Free The Lying Down Room (Serge Morel 1) by Anna Jaquiery Page B

on and worries that otherwise she’ll miss the boat.’
    ‘What boat?’
    ‘The baby boat.’
    Morel sighed and looked at his watch. ‘I really can’t discuss this now. I have to get back to work,’ he said.
    ‘Will you talk to her?’
    ‘What do you want me to say?’
    ‘Nothing! Just see how she is.’
    ‘Sure, I’ll give her a ring,’ Morel said. He didn’t tell Adèle that he’d already tried several times and left messages. Maly wasn’t returning his
calls.
    ‘Thank you.’ She seemed to relax, and she looked at him now, while he fished in his pocket for change to pay for their drinks. ‘What about you? How’s life at home with
Dad?’
    Morel counted out the coins and left them on the table. ‘It’s fine. He’s a bit difficult at times.’
    Adèle snorted. ‘A bit! I don’t know how you can stand it.’
    Morel leaned over and kissed her cheek. ‘I have to go.’
    ‘Promise you’ll call Maly?’ Adèle said.
    ‘I’ll do it,’ he said.
    ‘When are you going to move out?’ she called out as he started to cross the road.
    ‘Soon.’ He raised his hand.
    Walking back to the office, he thought about Maly. He liked Karl. Maly had always had a weakness for academics. Karl was one of the more presentable ones she’d latched on
to. In her younger days Morel had watched them come and go, a few of them insufferable, more interested in posing as writers and thinkers than in actually producing anything. They let their hair
grow long and wore scarves all year round, regardless of the weather. In their back pockets they carried poetry paperbacks, making sure the title was clearly visible. On more than one occasion, as
a younger man, Morel had sat and argued with Maly’s boyfriends over a cheap bottle of wine at her flat. Animated discussions where some pseudo-intellectual with Trotsky-like hair and glasses
would try to tell him that art without suffering was meaningless. That communism was the future, even when it became apparent that the communists themselves had stopped believing it.
    Pompous narcissists, many of them. Entertaining, though. Morel had enjoyed riling them.
    How long had it been since he’d last seen Maly? Six, seven weeks? It niggled at him, the fact that he’d let so much time go by. The two of them had been close since their
mother’s death. Over the past year they had grown apart. He wasn’t sure why.
    He thought about Adèle’s question. When was he going to move out and get his own place?
    It was more than twenty years now since his mother’s death. Morel had made the decision then to move back in with his father.
    It hadn’t been an entirely selfless decision. Walking back across the Pont-Neuf, Morel thought of Mathilde, his first love, whose memory he couldn’t seem to shake, even now.
He’d lived with her for two years, the happiest time of his life, before throwing it all away. Then he’d lost his mother. Frightened at the extent of his despair, he’d retreated
to his childhood home.
    He had grown used to his mother’s absence, but he still mourned Mathilde, who was living her life without him.
    The truth was that, since moving back in with his father he had never seriously contemplated a change. He’d never hankered for his own place.
    It struck him as strange now.
    As he neared the police headquarters on Quai des Orfèvres, he started to feel anxious. Would he always live with his father? Would he wake up one day and find that they had become two
grumpy old men living together, bickering over who had forgotten to turn the lights off before going to bed? His father lost in his books, and Morel seeking some form of resolution to the violence
he dealt with each day. It was a bleak prospect, but for now he couldn’t see his way out of it.
    Back at his desk, Morel went over his interview with Chesnay and studied the pamphlet. He scanned Lila’s list of religious organizations again and added a couple of names
to it, based on Paul’s suggestions. Lila and