Read Online The Lying Down Room (Serge Morel 1) by Anna Jaquiery - Free Book Online

Lila said. ‘All of us are much too dependent on our phones and gadgets these days, don’t you think?’ She smiled sweetly.
    ‘I can’t afford not to answer my phone,’ Jacques Dufour said. ‘People depend on me.’
    ‘That must be hard. That burden of responsibility,’ Lila said.
    ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters, Monsieur Dufour?’ Morel asked. He gave Lila a look. She’d seen it before. It meant shut up and behave.
    ‘Two sisters and a brother.’
    ‘And did they spend much time with your mother?’
    Jacques Dufour shrugged his shoulders. ‘My sisters both live in America. They couldn’t wait to get out of here. They know as well as I do that France is still caught up in the Middle
Ages. While the world turns, we’re being left behind with our antiquated socialist ideals. We’re so caught up in the past, so busy venerating our ancestors that we’re completely
unprepared for what lies ahead. The future is elsewhere. I should have followed my sisters but things turned out otherwise.’
    He gave Morel a bitter look.
    A well-rehearsed little speech, Morel thought. He imagined it had been delivered many times and was well received among the Dufours’ wealthy friends.
    ‘And your brother? Does he live overseas too?’
    ‘He lives in Marseille. He owns a fishing business. Takes people out on fishing expeditions, that sort of thing. He rarely comes up to Paris.’
    ‘I see.’ Morel pretended to write something in his notebook but he was thinking about Isabelle Dufour. A woman with four children, who had lived and loved and raised a family, yet
ended up dying on her own, surrounded by indifference.
    ‘I’ve contacted my siblings,’ Dufour said. ‘To tell them about our mother. They’ll fly back for the funeral, of course.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Was
there anything else?’
    ‘At this point, probably not,’ Morel said. He stood up. ‘We’ll be in touch once we know more.’
    Anne Dufour had remained on the edge of the sofa, quiet, smiling vacantly, but now she suddenly spoke up.
    ‘Jacques wasn’t always here when his mother came for dinner. But she came regardless of that. And I visited her with the children. Our youngest loved his grandmother.’
    ‘I understand you have two children?’
    ‘That’s right.’
    ‘Look,’ Jacques Dufour said, standing up. ‘I need to leave now if I’m going to catch my flight.’
    ‘How long are you away for, Monsieur Dufour?’ Morel asked.
    ‘Two nights.’
    ‘I see.’
    ‘Talk to my wife, she has all the time in the world to answer your questions. The most she’s got on is a manicure or a date with her personal trainer, isn’t that right,
dear?’
    His words hung in the air while Morel and Lila glanced at each other and at Anne Dufour, whose face looked like it might crack from the tightness of her smile. Jacques Dufour gave his wife a
perfunctory kiss and strode out the door with a wave. They heard the sound of the car engine and tyres on gravel as he pulled out of the driveway.
    Upstairs, the sound of the crying child had stopped. There was instead the sound of a vacuum-cleaner being moved across the floor. Anne Dufour looked at her hands.
    ‘How old are the children?’ Morel asked.
    She looked up and her eyes flitted over his face, as though struggling to remember what he was doing here.
    ‘The youngest is five. The older boy is fourteen. He’s at boarding school.’ She shrugged her shoulders and smiled. ‘Jacques isn’t his father.’
    ‘Madame Dufour,’ Morel said. ‘Would you sit down and tell us about your mother-in-law. The sort of woman she was. Whether she had many friends, whether she went out much,
whether she was religious at all.’
    Anne Dufour continued to smile. Morel realized he was smiling too, the same insincere widening of the lips. He stopped.
    ‘I don’t know if she had any friends,’ she said finally. ‘I only know she got very little from her family.’
    ‘Were there any problems?’ Morel