Alex (12 page)

Seeing Camille open his mouth, the magistrate raises a hand, palm out, to cut him off.

“What we have is a difference of opinion, one that I propose we settle later. It seems to me that, whatever you might think, the most pressing matter now is to rapidly locate this … victim.”

He may be a bastard, but he’s undeniably a cunning bastard. Le Guen lets two or three seconds of silence pass then coughs.
But the magistrate quickly turns to the team and continues.

“If I may, divisionnaire, I’d like to congratulate your men on tracking Trarieux down so quickly with such scant evidence. Remarkable work.”

This really is too much.

“Are you running for election?” Camille says. “Or is this a particular approach you’ve patented?”

Le Guen coughs again. Another silence. Louis purses his lips delightedly. Armand smiles down at his shoes. Everyone else wonders what the hell is going on.

“Commandant,” says the magistrate, “I’m well aware of your service record. I’m also aware of those details of your personal history intimately related to your work.”

This time, the smiles of Louis and Armand freeze. Camille and Le Guen go into high alert mode. The magistrate has stepped forward, though not close enough to seem as though he is eyeing the commandant scornfully.

“If you should feel that this case … how shall I put it … might have too great an impact on your personal life, I would of course understand.”

The warning is clear, the threat only thinly disguised.

“I’m sure that Divisionnaire Le Guen could bring in someone less conflicted to run the case. But, but, but …” he spreads his hands wide now, as though holding back the clouds, “but I leave that to your commanding officer. I have every confidence.”

As far as Camille is concerned, this settles the matter: the guy is a grade-A arsehole.

Camille has long understood how those murderers feel, the ones who kill without meaning to, in a fit of blind rage; he’s arrested dozens of them. Husbands who strangled their wives, wives who
stabbed their husbands, sons who pushed their fathers out of windows, friends who shot friends, neighbours who ran over their neighbour’s son – now he racks his brains trying to remember a case where a police commandant drew his service revolver and put a bullet through the forehead of a magistrate. But Camille says nothing, merely nods. It takes every ounce of strength to say nothing in spite of the magistrate’s dismissive reference to Irène. In fact it is the reason he finds the strength to hold his tongue: because a woman has been abducted and he has sworn to himself that he will find her alive. The magistrate knows this. He understands and clearly decides to take advantage of Camille’s self-imposed silence.

“Very good,” he says with evident satisfaction. “Now that ego has deferred to the spirit of public service, I think you can all get back to work.”

Camille is going to kill him. He knows this. It will take as long as it takes, but he will kill him. With his bare hands.

“Divisionnaire.” The magistrate turns to Le Guen, and making good his exit says in measured tones, “It goes without saying I expect to be kept closely informed.”

*

“We have two key priorities,” Camille says to his team. “First, work up a profile of this Trarieux guy, get to know everything about his life. Somewhere in there we’ll find a link to our girl and maybe her identity. Because our main problem is that we still don’t know anything about her, we don’t know who she is, so obviously we don’t know why he abducted her. This leads me to the second priority: our only lead on Trarieux is the list of contacts in his mobile and the one on his son’s computer – which Trarieux obviously used. The list is not up to date, a couple of weeks old to judge from the call log, but it’s all we’ve got.”

It’s not much. The only facts they have right now are alarming. No-one can say what Trarieux intended when he locked the girl in that suspended cage, but now that he’s dead, they all know she hasn’t got long to live. None of them puts the danger into words – dehydration, starvation – they all know such a death is slow and painful. Not to mention the rats. Marsan is the first to speak. He’ll be acting as liaison between Verhœven’s squad and the forensics teams working on the case.

“Even if we do find her alive,” he says, “dehydration can have irreversible neurological consequences. By the time we get to her she might be a vegetable.”

He doesn’t pull his punches. And he’s right, Camille thinks. I don’t dare because I’m scared, but we’re not going to find this girl by being scared. He shakes himself.

“What do we have on the van?” he says.

“Forensics went over it with a fine-toothed comb last night,” Marsan says, checking his notes. “Found hair and blood, so we’ve got D.N.A. for the victim, but since she’s not on file, we still don’t know who she is.”

“What about the E-FIT?”

Trarieux was carrying a picture of his son in his inside pocket. It was taken at a funfair and showed the son with a girl whose arm was draped round his neck, but the photograph was soaked in blood and, besides, it was taken from some distance away. The girl looks quite fat, and there’s no guarantee it’s the same person. The photographs on the mobile are more promising.

“We should end up with something good,” Marsan says. “It’s a cheap mobile, but we’ve got several shots of the face from different angles, pretty much everything we need. You’ll have it this afternoon.”

Analysing the location will be crucial. The problem is that all the shots were taken in close-up or tight close-up; there’s very little of the location where the girl is being held. Digital forensics have been over them, making measurements, analyses, projections …

“We still don’t know what kind of building it is. Given the date on the photographs and the available light in the pictures we know the room faces north-east. That’s pretty common. There’s no perspective in the pictures, no depth of field, so it’s impossible to calculate the dimensions of the room. The light is coming from above, so we estimate the ceilings are at least fourteen feet high. Maybe more, we can’t be sure. The floor is concrete and there seems to be a leak from somewhere. All the photographs were taken in natural light so there might not be any electricity supply. As for the materials used by the kidnapper, from what little we can tell there’s nothing out of the ordinary. The crate is made of lengths of untreated timber you can get anywhere, it’s screwed together, the steel ring it’s suspended from is standard issue and there’s nothing on the rope either – it’s standard hemp rope. From what we can tell, the rats aren’t specially bred. So we’re probably looking at an abandoned, disused building.”

“The dates on the photographs prove Trarieux visited at least twice a day,” Camille says. “So it has to be somewhere in the Paris suburbs.”

Everyone around him nods in agreement. Camille can tell they knew this already. Fleetingly he imagines himself at home with Doudouche. He doesn’t want to be here anymore; he should have handed the case over when Morel got back. He closes his eyes. Pulls himself together.

Louis suggests Armand take charge of making a short description of the place based on the limited information they have and urgently circulate it to stations all over the Île-de-France. “Yeah, of course,” Camille agrees. They’re under no illusions. Their information is so generic it applies to three out of five buildings and, according to the figures Armand has collated from other police stations, there are sixty-four sites in the Paris area classified as “industrial wasteland”, not to mention hundreds of buildings and warehouses standing empty.

“Anything in the media?” Camille asks Le Guen.

“You kidding?”

*

Louis heads down the corridor towards the exit, then turns and hurries back.

“I was thinking …” he says to Camille. “It’s all a bit sophisticated, don’t you think? Building a
fillette
? Maybe a bit too clever for someone like Trarieux?”

“No, Louis, I don’t. I think
you’re
too clever for Trarieux. He didn’t build a ‘
fillette
’; that’s
your
word, a nice obscure word that shows everyone how cultivated you are. But he didn’t build a
fillette
: he built a cage. And it’s too small.”

*

Slumped in his chair, Le Guen listens to Camille. His eyes are closed; he looks as if he’s asleep. This is how he concentrates.

“Jean-Pierre Trarieux,” Camille begins. “Fifty-three years old, born 11 October, 1953. A qualified metalworker with twenty-seven years’ experience in aeronautical workshops – starting out at Sud Aviation in 1970. Laid off in 1997, two years on the dole, he ends up getting a maintenance job at René-Pontibiau Hospital, laid off again two years later, unemployed again, in 2002 he gets a job
working security on the building site. He gives up his apartment and goes to live on site.”

“Violent?”

“Brutal. His personnel record is full of scraps and fights; the guy’s got a hair-trigger temper. At least that’s what his wife thinks. Roseline. Married her in 1970. One son, Pascal, born the same year. Now that’s where things get interesting, but I’ll get back to the son.”

“No,” Le Guen interrupts him. “Tell me now.”

“He was reported missing. July last year.”

“Go on.”

“I’m waiting on further information but, roughly speaking, Pascal fucked up pretty much everything: school, vocational college, apprenticeship, job. As failures go, he’s got the full set. He does unskilled labour – removal man, that kind of thing. Emotionally unstable. The father manages to get him a job in the hospital where he works – this is in 2000. They’re co-workers. The following year they’re both made redundant – that’s working-class solidarity – and they’re mates on the dole. When the father gets the security job in 2002, the son comes to live with him. Let me remind you, Pascal is thirty-six! We’ve been through his room in his father’s apartment. Games console, football posters and a broadband connection for looking at porn sites. If it weren’t for the six packs of beer under the bed, you’d think he was a teenager. In books, when they’re afraid it might not be clear, people say an ‘overgrown teenager’. Then – bang – July 2006 the father reports the son missing.”

“Any investigation?”

“Of sorts. The father’s worried, but given the circumstances, the police kicked it into touch. The son ran off with some girl,
took his clothes, his personal effects and the contents of his father’s bank account – €623 – you get the picture. Anyway, the father is sent off to the
préfecture
, Missing Persons Unit. They put the word out locally: nothing. In March, the search was widened to include the whole country. Still nothing. Trarieux’s screaming blue murder, he wants this thing sorted, so early August, a year after the son disappeared, he gets the standard form letter – ‘all attempts to locate the person have been unsuccessful’. According to the latest information, the son is still missing. I’m guessing that when he gets wind of his father’s death, he’ll show up.”

“What about the mother?”

“Trarieux divorced in 1984. Well, actually, his wife divorced him: spousal abuse, brutality, alcoholism. The son stayed with the father. Peas in a pod, those two. At least until Pascal decided to fuck off. The mother remarried, lives in Orléans. Madame …” Camille checks his notes, can’t find the name. “Doesn’t matter, I’ve sent someone to pick her up and bring her back here.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah, Trarieux’s mobile was a company phone; his employer wanted to be able to get in touch with him wherever he was on the site. The call log shows he barely used it; most of the calls are to his boss or fall under the category ‘work-related’, as they say. Then, suddenly, he starts using it. Not much, but it’s something he hasn’t done before. A dozen different numbers suddenly show up in the logs, people he calls one, twice, three times …”

“So?”

“So, this sudden urge to get chatty starts two weeks after he receives the letter saying the search for his son has been ‘unsuccessful’, and they stop three weeks before the girl’s abduction.”

Le Guen frowns. Camille offers his conclusions:

“Trarieux thinks the police are doing fuck all so he starts up his own little investigation.”

“You think the girl in the cage is the one the son ran off with?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“I thought you said the girl in the photograph was fat? The one in the cage isn’t fat.”

“Depends what you mean by fat … maybe she lost weight; how do I know? All I’m saying is I think it’s the same girl. But as for where this Pascal guy is, search me …”

Since the beginning Alex has been suffering from the cold, despite the fact that it’s been particularly mild for September. She can’t move and she’s malnourished. Now things have deteriorated, because suddenly, in a few short hours, the weather has taken a turn for the worse. Previously the cold she felt was a symptom of her exhaustion, but now the temperature has actually dropped several degrees. The weather is overcast, so the level of light from the skylights has also gone down. Then Alex hears the first gusts of wind whipping through the warehouse; it whistles and howls painfully, sounding like the moans of someone in despair.

The rats, too, have pricked up their ears, whiskers quivering. A sudden downpour lashes the building, which rumbles and
creaks like a ship about to founder. Before Alex has realised what is going on, all the rats are scurrying along the walls in search of the rainwater now streaming across the floor. She counts nine of them this time. She can’t be sure that they’re the same rats. The large piebald rat that arrived recently, which the other rats are afraid of – she watched it wallowing in a puddle, it had a puddle to itself – this rat is the first to come back. The first to scramble up the rope. It is a single-minded creature.

A wet rat is even more terrifying than a dry one: the fur looks dirtier, the eyes beadier, seemingly more vicious. When wet, the long tail looks slimy, as though it is a different animal, a snake.

After the rain comes the storm, after the humidity the cold. Alex is scared stiff – she can’t move, she can feel herself shiver all over; but these are not shivers, they are convulsions. Her teeth start to chatter. The wind blasts through the rooms so fiercely that the cage begins to spin.