The Poisoning Angel by Jean Teulé

eye was now drawn to a dozen wreaths around a hole. ‘To our father’, ‘To my husband’. Dr Toursaint and his sister were holding up their fainting mother, who was wearing a blue widow’s cape. Some women in headdresses with fluttering or turned-up edges, and dressed in black, were there like carrion crows, watching what was happening around them. As the crowd began to disperse, Thunderflower announced, folding up her fan, ‘Ah me, that’s another one then. And to think it won’t be the last …’ The prediction resounded in the ears of the Breton women walking in the tranquil cemetery where little white crosses bloomed in the shade of the gothic church.
    Â 
    On 18 May, the sky was overcast and the ground damp. Thunderflower found the people who had come for the burial ugly. Dr Toursaint had his arms round his mother, who could no longer stand unaided: ‘My daughter as well …’ She answered her neighbours’ greetings with ‘
Trugaré
’ and the vague gesture of an old lady who is crying. As reddish light washed over the trees,anger darkened the brows of the Bretons approaching that perfect beauty, the cook. ‘How many deaths is that now since you’ve been in our village? Even just at the Toursaints’, how many?’ Hélène brushed off the question, saying, ‘Let Death count the dead!’ There was a grinding of teeth: ‘The cemetery won’t be big enough if that girl stays in Locminé.’ Among themselves they likened her to the innards of a hanged bitch. ‘Destruction is in you. You’re possessed. You bring misfortune,’ they told her.
    While the sly Morbihan women went into the hydrangeas and began removing the needles and pins from their headdresses and bodices, Thunderflower, knowing what they had in mind, prudently beat a hasty retreat from the cemetery. In silence, taking the road where grass was growing up between the stones, she returned to her masters’ house (well … just her elderly mistress’s from now on) where a wisp of smoke could be seen rising from the chimney above the kitchen. Oh, the meat that was cooking, and the cake that followed!
    Â 
    20 May. ‘It is with great sorrow that Dr Toursaint announces the death of his mother …’ Stuck to the outside wall of the town hall at Locminé, the death notice fluttered in the wind while on the façade of the Toursaint house, written in charcoal by an anonymous hand, were the words, ‘People are murdered here.’ In the drawing room of his parents’ house, the village doctor was utterly bewildered.
    â€˜I’ve lost my whole family. Their house has completely emptied in little more than a week …’
    He was lamenting to the President of the society of goodworks, who had come to offer support in his cruel trial. She said in surprise, ‘Pierre-Charles, I don’t see your cook, who was also absent from the burial, I think.’
    â€˜Yes, Hélène vanished at first light without even asking for her wages, but you can see her point of view. Given all the superstitions being heaped on her, and people’s fear of her, that beautiful woman chose to keep out of sight. If she’d come to the cemetery for this latest burial, just imagine what the villagers would have done to her. In Basse-Bretagne there’s such a strong belief that evil characters from legend really exist.’
    Â 
    Squeak … squeak …
As she walked along the road leading to Auray, with her bag over one shoulder, the road stretching ahead of her, but her thoughts elsewhere, Thunderflower suddenly heard a sound like a squeaking axle behind her.
    Squeak, squeak.
    â€˜That’s not the noise of a carriage drawing nearer and about to overtake me. I’d have heard it in the distance.’
    Squeak, squeak.
    The shrill creaking was growing ever louder, ever closer. It was deafening, echoing even close