It has become customary to feature at least one Christmas short story to end the year, with its usual Crime Cymru twist. So, before we go into a two week break, settle down with a mince pie and a glass of sherry to enjoy this tale from Rachel Morris who takes us off to a cold winter in Paris

CHRISTMAS IN THE SWAMP – BY RACHEL MORRIS

The fog crept through the narrow streets of the Marais in the early hours until it filled them all, almost to the height of Amandine’s small attic apartment. Standing in the chilly air between a yellowed lace curtain and her dormer window, she could easily imagine being at the prow of a vessel at sea, or a night bird in flight above the surly winter clouds of Paris. The Marais, the Swamp, suited its name more than ever.

Amandine put her arms out to the side like wings, then behind her like a ship’s figurehead. She glanced behind her through the lace, to find her ancient tabby cat Poubelle staring at her sardonically from a tatty armchair, bringing her back to her senses.

Amandine stuck her tongue out at the cat, which looked away and started licking its flank as though she didn’t exist. Their life together was one long armistice.

There was a muffled sound from the street below, perhaps of crates bring knocked over, or a sandwich board being put out with that day’s menu chalked on it. Amandine peered down to the street again. The fog had thinned slightly, but little detail could be seen.

It was time to go up to the marché des Enfants-Rouges and fetch the day’s provisions, make the slow climb back to her eyrie, and sleep for the day. Amandine sighed and wished, not for the first time, that she hadn’t given in to her natural inclination to be nocturnal decades before. It was so noisy in the daytime that she never quite slept right.

Tendrils of fog wrapped themselves around the beshawled and behatted heads of Christmas shoppers. Shop and cafe windows glowed warmly through the murk like giant tree candles. Smells of burnt sugar and roasted chestnuts made Amandine drool a little. She wiped it surreptitiously with the end of her shawl, though everyone around her had their heads lowered and were unlikely to see.

She was very tempted to go into the patisserie for a jésuite, but was saving her small fund for sweets until the next day, Christmas Eve.

A couple passed her by, too close for her comfort. She overheard the woman say to the man, “We don’t talk about the ghosts unless we’re away from the building.”

Amandine stopped dead for a moment. She whirled around for another look at the couple, thinking perhaps to follow them and eavesdrop, but they were already lost in the fog.

As she turned back to her path home, another woman jostled her as she dashed past, deeply swathed in a thick black shawl or cloak; it was hard to tell. All wrapped in black from top to toe, a column of ebony, like Monsieur Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Future. Amandine glimpsed an unusual walking stick, and could hear it clunk clunk clunking on the pavement, gradually fading away, all the way to her front door on Rue des Blancs-Manteaux.

She recovered in the armchair for a bit after climbing all those stairs. Poubelle had been occupying it still, he considered it his throne alone. But she just heaved him off. He hissed at her, and she hissed back.

We only talk about the ghosts when we’re away from the building, is that what they’d said? Amandine didn’t believe in ghosts, yet it had been as chilling to hear as the fog was in her 60-year-old bones.

After resting a while, Amandine got up to put her paltry shopping away and make a cup of coffee. She was just unwrapping the cheap fish heads she’d bought for her soup and Poubelle’s delight when she heard a piercing scream from somewhere nearby. Perhaps from the apartment building across the street.

It all went flying, newspaper, twine, and fish alike. Amandine cursed, then crossed herself. An old habit. Her parents were long since gone to their miserly reward, and while she sensed that they still emanated disapproval, it was too far off to matter.

That scream, though. It had been the scream of a startled woman, or a petrified man, nearby. Like an arrow fired through an open window and piercing a thin path of fog. She returned to the window.

The fog had turned to clouds of cold, misty rain, and the lit windows glowed more brightly than ever, like rows of jewel boxes. Amandine noticed some wooden crates scattered untidily on the pavement opposite; that must be what she’d heard earlier. It was strange, as usually things were kept so tidy along the narrow Marais streets.

There were a number of people in the street, clearly looking for the source of the scream. Then a young woman flew out of the front door of the building opposite. She tripped on a stray crate, then the hem of her own skirt, and went flying. She smashed uncontrollably onto the cobbles of the street, and screamed. Amandine was certain it was the same scream she’d already heard.

The neighbours who’d been looking about ran to the young woman and lifted her off the pavement. She was dazed and blood was pouring down her face, but she was able to stand, and gestured wildly at the windows above her. Some of the men from the group in the street pushed through the door opposite, into that building’s courtyard. Even from her perch, Amandine could hear the pounding of their boots up the stairs across the way.

The shutters directly opposite her window but one floor lower were thrust open. One of the men put his head out and faced a growing crowd below. Amandine recognised him as a baker that worked on Rue des Minimes and always had flour caught on the rim of his hat, like a dusting of snow on a dark mountain. He seemed to be catching his breath, his face a mix of horror and excitement.

“Murder!” He bellowed, then gulped another deep breath into his balloon-like belly. “There’s been a slaughter here!”

Amandine’s first instinct was to run down to the street and get involved. Well, to hover on the edges and find things out. But she could do that perfectly well from here, without having to face all those stairs again. She just needed a better pair of eyes and ears.

She knocked on the paint-peeling door across the hallway, clutching the saucisson sec she’d fetched at Enfants-Rouges for Monsieur Gratter. He was even less inclined to go out than she was, even though he lived his life during the day. She was ready for bed herself, yawning and feeling the astonishing weight of her eyelids, but local excitement took precedence.

Gratter slowly opened up. He was well-dressed but his clothes hung from a frame almost as narrow as that of his door. He took the sausage from her with a nod, and headed back into his apartment without closing its door. That was as close as Amandine was going to get to an invitation.

Gratter put the tube of salted pork on a small table next to his reading chair, and walked straight to a window. It was identical to hers and facing the same way, but without a curtain. Amandine rarely opened either of her windows, to keep heat in and damp out, but Gratter’s were open at all times. She often felt a draught when she passed his apartment, and heard a low moan of wind.

Without a word between them, Amandine went to stand next to Gratter at his window. He passed her a small brass spyglass, and gestured at the fourth-floor window opposite. There was no need to focus the object, the sight through it was of perfect clarity: an arm in once-white linen hanging limply over the edge of a stained mattress, blood dripping from grey fingertips at the speed of a long-faulty faucet.

“I take it you were awake and working all night?” Gratter’s voice was as dry as his saucisson and as precise as a metronome.

“Naturally. I finished a penny romance for one publisher and started on a vampire story for another.”

Gratter didn’t bother to hide his disdain. They shared a taste for earnest literature, often exchanging books. and he considered her work beneath them both. “Tell me everything you saw and heard up until the scream.”

The first thing that came to Amandine’s mind was the remark about the ghosts. But Gratter might never speak to her again if she brought that up. He had to accept her need to make a living to supplement too small a pension, but seemed to want to consider her a serious person.

Amandine took her time. The more detail she could provide, the fewer questions he’d ask and the less she’d feel like one of his pre-retirement suspects. She closed her eyes and ran through her night and early morning in her mind.

The night had been entirely uneventful, of that she was sure. The sound of her pen nib scratching. A brief detente with Poubelle, who had wished to be scratched. She had got up periodically, to make a coffee, fetch a new bottle of Herbin ink – she used rose-scented red for the romance, orange-scented amber for horror, as it helped with the mood – and to use the toilet. She’d not looked out of the window as no moon would have been visible, and there’d been no notable noises. A walking stick perhaps? A clunk clunk clunk.

Ah, yes. Amandine told Gratter of the woman, if a woman it was, who she’d brushed against in the street. A column swathed in ink-black fabrics, an unusual stick.

“Unusual in what way?”

Amandine had learned to be as precise in her words with Gratter as she was in her work. “In two ways. First, its shape. It seemed short for a walking stick, whereas the person was of average height. And thick. It had a sort of crossbar across the top, which served as a handle, but it was longer in one direction than the other. I’ve never seen one like that before. And it was also strange because …”

What was it that had bothered her? She hadn’t given it much thought at the time so it kept slipping away from her maddeningly, like tendrils of fog. Gratter waited patiently, having long since learned when to shut up and listen. “Ah! She didn’t need it. She used it like a walking stick but she didn’t seem to have any problems walking. Or with balance and so on.”

Gratter nodded. “You’re very observant, Mademoiselle.”

Amandine shrugged. “I’m a writer.”

She went to bed after all, unable to keep her eyes open and knowing that Monsieur Gratter would gather any information she might wish to know. His curiosity, and longing for his former profession, had outweighed his love of solitude.

Although Amandine could look down into the murder apartment, and had when she could, it usually had its shutters closed. She had the impression that a spinster like herself lived there, or maybe a widow, also in her 60s. There’d been an aura of sickliness, perhaps.

Sometimes it was hard to distinguish between reality and the compulsions of her imagination. It was simply more interesting to have someone fading away over there from the pain of lost love, descending into madness, a Mademoiselle Havisham.

As she drifted off to sleep, she heard Poubelle chewing a bone under the armchair in the other room, and saw again in her mind the slow drip, drip, drip of blood from a fingertip. But it sounded like clunk, clunk, clunk as it hit the floorboards of her imagination. 

Amandine had only slept for a few hours when there were three firm knocks at her door. She threw her dress back on, draped a shawl around herself, and went to open it, expecting to see Monsieur Gratter. He was there, a plank of wood in a worsted suit, hat in hand, but accompanied by a ruddy-faced man in a police uniform, and a nervous-looking young fellow in an artist’s smock. She wondered whether she was still sleeping.

“Might you be so kind as to step into my apartment, Mademoiselle?” asked Gratter. He considered it an impropriety to enter hers and had only done so once in ten years, to help her rescue Poubelle from the roof, where he had gone to punish her for leaving a window open. It was the only time she had ever seen Monsieur Gratter nervous.

She nodded and closed the door, then dressed again, less haphazardly. The shawl she kept on, against the draughts in the other apartment. Poubelle was back in the chair, looking extremely self-satisfied, even for him.

“This is Monsieur Demurtas,” said Gratter, gesturing at the artist. “He resides in Paris but originates from the isle of Sardinia. Mademoiselle, could you describe to him the figure that you told me of, with the walking stick?”

Amandine did so, this time adding the bit about the ghosts as she thought an artist might enjoy that. Indeed, Monsieur Demurtas shivered most gratifyingly. The two police detectives, one retired and one active, rather spoiled the pleasure by looking at each other with raised eyebrows.

“I’m not suggesting that the walking stick person was a ghost,” said Amandine. “Just being precise in my recollections.”

“As you are wearing a black shawl,” said Gratter, “could I possibly ask you to impersonate the figure, to wrap it as she did?” Cold rain blew in through the open window, and it gave Amandine goosebumps to remove the shawl, but she arranged it as best she could. This was the most interesting day she’d had in a very long time.

“And the walking stick, was it somewhat like this?” asked Gratter, presenting her with a heavy piece of aged-looking wood, shaped just as she’d described.

“Yes! That’s it,” cried Amandine. “Well, not perhaps the exact same, of course, I wouldn’t know. But it seems the right shape and size.” She clunked it on the floor a few times, then moved about, trying to inhabit the mood of the figure she’d seen. She had been speaking to Gratter and the silent policeman, but then her attention was distracted by the artist, Demurtas. He was wringing the bottom of his paint-stained smock most violently, and his already rather wild, curly, unkempt and uncombed dark hair appeared to be standing even more on end.

“Accabadora! Accabadora!” he shouted. Then fled.

Monsieur Gratter teased Amandine by sending her home with no explanations. She couldn’t possibly return to sleep, so worked on her vampire story, read a little of Colette’s new La Vagabonde, and dozed.

Now and then she watched from her window as shutters across the way were opened and closed and opened again, police and medical people came and went on foot and, in late afternoon, a body in a coffin of rough planks was carried through the courtyard and placed on a cart. There was a bloodstain in one corner.

Gratter returned in the evening, after the lamps had been lit, and invited her across the hall for a brandy. She stood her ground on the matter of windows being closed, the rain being even colder and heavier and the wind wilder than before. Gratter acquiesced.

An accabadora, Gratter explained, was a figure of Sardinian legend, or perhaps reality, it was rather unclear which. She was an older, unmarried woman nominated by a community to be a deliverer of death. Not with the intention of murder, but to relieve people of pain and suffering in the same way as might be done as a kindness to an injured horse or a cart-smashed dog.

By tradition, the accabadora was said to swathed in black, just as Amandine had described. While she might smother an ill person, or sit on them and use her knees to strangle them, her most common instrument of death was a wooden cudgel.

Amandine gasped. “A cudgel! Not a walking stick!”

“That’s correct, Mademoiselle, or so we believe. The artist Demurtas and other Sardinians we have spoken to confirmed that. The dead woman, Madame Manca, was also of Sardinian origin, and had been ill with a wasting disease for some time. It is possible that the services of an accabadora were arranged for her relief. She left a note saying, ‘I was not murdered’. Her sole heir, a nephew, has been interviewed, and denies all knowledge of the matter. It was a cleaning girl who found her.”

“Was there any theft from the apartment?” asked Amandine.

“A most perceptive question, Mademoiselle,” said Gratter, raising his brandy glass to her. “It would appear not. There is no obvious motive for anyone to murder Madame Manca, she was at death’s door anyway. No one in the Sardinian community who knew her is in any doubt that an accabadora was employed, and was an angel of mercy. The police will continue to make enquiries to save face, but I do not believe this will go any further.”

Amandine finished her brandy, and pondered the matter. Why should people not be put out of their misery as animals can be, when death is certain in any event?

She herself could abide a great deal of pain without complaint, but was peculiarly tormented by one thing in particular: having things stuck beneath her. If a cushion was stuck at the bottom of her back, or her nightgown or bedclothes were trapped under her and resisted release, she found it the most exquisite torture. She dreaded being old, weak, and dependent enough to be in such a situation, unable to release herself without help for which she might have to wait. She had often thought she might take her own life if it ever came to that.

But then again: who policed such things? Who could say whether, when, and how people might lose their lives? And by a figure from an Italian folktale, at that.

She raised her eyes, to find Monsieur Gratter looking at her, directly and steadily. “Mademoiselle, are you quite certain that it was a woman who brushed against you this morning, under all of those dark garments?”

end/

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Dr Rachel Morris is a writer, editor, proofreader, and digital collage artist. She was formerly an international project manager and educator, and before that ran a Human Rights Award-nominated research unit at Cardiff Law School offering activist expertise on law and policy affecting the GRT communities.

Her writing appears in Byline Times, Red, Womankind, and the Honno anthology of Welsh women writing crime, Cast a Long Shadow, among others. She is currently seeking a lovely home for her North Wales-set debut crime novel Back in 5, the first in a series featuring DS Seren Parry and focused on missing persons cases.

Rachel is editor-in-chief of the citizen journalism platform Bylines Cymru, and welcomes pitches on any subject from anyone in, of, or in love with Wales within the bounds of civil discourse to editor@bylines.cymru, whether experienced writers or not.