Alex (18 page)

She is outside.

Immediately, she feels the cold night air – it tastes sweet, the cool damp of evening – and smells canal water somewhere. Life returning, a faint glimmer of life. The panel was hidden in an alcove in the wall at ground level. Alex crawls out then turns back to see whether she can put it back into place, but gives up; there’s no need to take precautions now. As long as she leaves now, fast. As fast as her stiff, aching limbs will allow. She creeps out of the alcove.

Some thirty metres away is a deserted wharf. Further off, a
scattering of small houses with almost every window lit up. There are muffled sounds from the boulevard that can’t be far away.

Alex starts to walk.

She comes to the boulevard. Exhausted as she is, she won’t be able to walk very far. Suddenly she has a dizzy spell and has to cling to a streetlight to stop herself from falling.

It feels too late to be able to find any form of transport. But there, in the distance, a taxi rank. It’s deserted, the few neurons still working whisper, and besides it’s much too risky. She is bound to be noticed.

But her neurons have no better solution to offer.

When you’ve got a lot of irons in the fire, as he has this morning, and it’s difficult to prioritise, Camille claims “the most urgent thing is to do nothing”. It’s a variation on his approach to dealing with cases with as much perspective as possible. When he used to teach at the police academy, he referred to this as the “aerial technique”. From a man who is four foot eleven in his socks, it’s a term that might have raised a laugh, but no-one ever dared.

It’s six in the morning. Camille is up and showered, he’s had breakfast, his briefcase is by the door and he is standing, cradling Doudouche. He scratches the cat’s tummy; they both stare out of the window.

His gaze falls on the envelope from the auctioneers which he finally opened last night. This auction is the last act in dealing with his father’s estate. Camille had been shocked, upset, had grieved a little, but his father’s death had not been devastating. It had caused limited damage. Where his father was concerned, everything had always been predictable; his death had been no exception. If Camille has been unable to open the envelope until yesterday it is because it marks the end of a whole era in his life. He will be fifty soon. Around him, everyone is dead: first his mother, then his wife, now his father; he will never have children. He never imagined he would be the last living soul in his own life. This is what bothers him; his father’s death brings to a close a story, but the story is not yet over. Camille is still here – he may be dead beat, but he’s still standing. The problem is his life now belongs entirely to him; he is sole owner and sole beneficiary. When you become the main character in your own life, it’s no longer interesting. What troubles Camille is not simply survivor’s guilt, but that he feels overwhelmed by such a cliché.

His father’s apartment has been sold. All that remains is a dozen or so paintings by Maud Verhœven which her husband had hung on to.

Not to mention the studio. Camille can’t bring himself to set foot there – it is the meeting point of all his griefs, for his mother, for Irène … No, he simply cannot, he would not even be able to climb the four steps, push open the door and step inside … Never.

As for the paintings, he has summoned up all his strength. He contacted a friend of his mother’s – they were at the Beaux-Arts together; the man agreed to make an inventory of the works. The auction will take place on October 7; it’s all arranged. Opening the envelope, Camille sees the titles of the paintings on
offer, the date and time; the entire evening is devoted to Maud’s work with speeches and reminiscences.

At first, he made a big deal of the fact that he didn’t plan to keep any of the paintings, devised a whole string of theories. The most impressive was the theory that selling off all her works was a tribute to her. “If I wanted to see one of her paintings myself, I would have to go to a gallery,” he explained with a mixture of satisfaction and solemnity. Of course, that’s bullshit. The truth is he worshipped his mother above everything, and since he has been alone he has been shaken by the ambivalence of this love mingled with admiration, rancour, bitterness and resentment. This love tinged with anger is as old as he is, but if he is to be at peace with himself he has to cut it loose. Painting was his mother’s great cause – she sacrificed her life to it and with it Camille’s life. Not entirely, but the part she sacrificed became her son’s destiny. As though she had a child without ever imagining he would be a person. Camille will not be relieving himself of a burden, simply ridding himself of baggage.

Eight canvases, mostly from the last decade of Maud Verhœven’s life, are to be sold. Mostly abstract works. Looking at some of them, Camille has the same impression he has looking at Rothko’s work: the colours seem to vibrate, to throb – it’s something you have to feel to know truly what it is to see living painting. Two paintings have already been pre-empted; they’ll go to museums – works from her last days, howls of agony painted in the terminal stage of Maud’s cancer and the apogee of her work. The one Camille might have kept is a self-portrait she painted when she was about thirty. It depicts a childlike face, anxious, almost solemn. The subject is looking past the viewer, there is something vacant about the expression, a sophisticated mixture of adult
femininity and childlike innocence, the sort of expression one might find in a face once young and tender and now ravaged by alcohol. Irène loved this painting. She took a photograph of it once, a six- by four-inch snapshot that still sits on his desk next to a blown glass pot for his pencils which Irène also gave him, the only truly personal item Camille keeps at work. Armand has always had a fondness for the picture; being figurative, it’s one of the few paintings by Maud Verhœven he understands. Camille always meant to give him the photograph one day, but he never has. But even this painting is included in the sale. When his mother’s works are finally scattered, perhaps he’ll have some peace, perhaps he’ll finally be able to sell the last link in the chain that will no longer connect to anything: the studio in Montfort.

*

Sleep came and with it other images, more urgent and more topical, images of the young girl who was imprisoned and managed to escape. All images of death, but these are images of future deaths. Because he doesn’t know how he knows, but from the moment he saw the disembowelled cage, the dead rats, the traces of flight, he has been convinced that all this obscures something else, that there is death still to come.

Downstairs, the street is still humming. For someone like Camille, who sleeps little, it doesn’t matter, but Irène would never have been able to live here. For Doudouche, on the other hand, it’s entertainment; she can sit staring out of the window for hours at the barges, the opening and closing of the lock. When the weather is fine, she’s even allowed to sit out on the windowsill.

Camille won’t leave until he has got things clear in his mind. And right now there are too many questions.

The warehouse in Pantin. How did Trarieux find it? Is it
important? Though derelict for years, the place has never been squatted; the homeless haven’t taken it over. The fact that it was unfit for human habitation would have put them off, but the main reason was that the only possible way in was through a long narrow tunnel just below ground level, making it nearly impossible to bring in everything you would need. Maybe this was why Trarieux built such a small cage – he was limited by the length of the planks he could bring in. And it must have been difficult to bring the girl in. He had to be pretty determined. He was prepared to leave the girl for as long as it took to get her to confess to where she had buried his son.

Nathalie Granger. They know it’s not her real name, but since they’ve got nothing better, that’s what they still call her. Camille prefers “the girl” but even he slips up from time to time. Between a false name and no name, how can you choose?

The magistrate has agreed to initiate a manhunt. Though, pending evidence to the contrary, the girl who bumped off Pascal Trarieux with a pickaxe before almost taking his head off with sulphuric acid is being sought simply as a witness. Her housemate in Champigny formally identified her from the E-FIT, but the Public Prosecutor’s Department needs hard evidence.

Samples of blood and hair together with other organic matter have been collected from the warehouse in Pantin, which will quickly confirm a match to the traces of the girl found in the back of Trarieux’s van. That, at least, will be something. But it’s not much, Camille thinks.

The only way to pursue this lead is to reopen the two recent cold cases involving sulphuric acid and see whether they are connected to the same killer. Despite the divisionnaire’s doubts, Camille is absolutely persuaded that the same person – the same
woman – is responsible for all three murders. The case files are due to arrive this morning; they should be there by the time he gets to the station.

Camille thinks for a moment about Nathalie Granger and Pascal Trarieux. A crime of passion? If it were, he would have expected things to be the other way round: Pascal Trarieux murdering Nathalie in a jealous rage, or because he could not stand the idea of being dumped, a sudden impulse, a moment of madness, but the reverse … ? An accident? Difficult to believe when you consider how it played out. Camille finds it hard to focus on these theories – another thought is running through his head while Doudouche claws at the sleeve of his jacket. It’s the way the girl managed to escape from the warehouse. How exactly did she do it?

Forensic tests will confirm how she managed to snap the rope holding up the cage, but once she was outside, what then?

Camille tries to picture the scene. And in his movie version, there’s a sequence missing.

They know the girl retrieved her clothes and they have her shoeprints leading to the shaft. These must be the shoes she was wearing when Trarieux abducted her – it’s hardly likely her kidnapper would have brought her a new pair. The thing is he beat this girl, she struggled, he tossed her into the back of his van, tied her up. What sort of state would her clothes be in? Rumpled, dirty, torn? They certainly wouldn’t be clean, of that Camille is sure. Once outside, a girl like that would be conspicuous, wouldn’t she?

Camille finds it hard to imagine Trarieux being particularly careful with the girl’s things, but leave that to one side. Forget the clothes and focus on the girl.

We know she was filthy. She’d spent a whole week, stark naked, locked up in a crate two metres off the ground. In the pictures she looks half dead. They found dry pet food, kibble for pet mice and rats – this is clearly what Trarieux fed her. For the whole week, she’s been forced to relieve herself while huddled in the cage.

“She’s shattered,” Camille says aloud, “and absolutely filthy.”

Doudouche looks up as though she realises better than her master that he has started talking to himself again.

There were puddles of water on the floor, damp rags, and her prints were found on several water bottles, so before she left she obviously had a perfunctory wash.

“Even so … when you’ve been shitting yourself for a week, what kind of a wash can you do with three litres of cold water and a couple of grubby rags?”

This brings him back to the crucial question – how did she get home without being noticed?

*

“Who’s to say no-one noticed her?” Armand says.

7.45 a.m. The offices of the
brigade criminelle
. Even when you’re not altogether with it, seeing Louis and Armand standing next to each other is a trip. Louis in his grey Kiton suit, Stefano Ricci tie, Weston brogues; Armand dressed from a clearance sale at a charity shop. Good grief, Camille thinks, staring at him: he looks as though he buys his clothes a size too small to save that much more.

He takes another sip of coffee. Armand’s right: who’s to say she wasn’t noticed?

“Let’s look into it,” Camille says.

The girl attracted no attention to herself; she got out of the warehouse and disappeared into thin air. It’s hard to credit.

“Maybe she got a lift?” Louis suggests, though even he does not believe this. A girl of twenty-five or thirty hitchhiking at two o’clock in the morning? Unless a car pulls up straight away, she’s hardly going to stand there with her thumb out. And she can’t exactly stand on the kerb flagging down cars like a hooker.

“The bus …”

Possible. Though at night they don’t run very often on that route; she would have had to be lucky. Otherwise she’d find herself standing at a bus stop for half an hour or forty-five minutes, shattered, dressed in rags. Not very likely. Could she even stand up?

Louis makes a note to check the bus timetables, question the drivers.

“A taxi … ?”

Louis adds this to his list of things to check, but there again … Did she have money for the fare? And was she presentable enough for a taxi driver to take her? Maybe someone spotted her walking along the street?

The only thing they know for sure is that she would have been heading back into Paris. Whether she caught a bus or a taxi, they should know within a few hours.

At midday, Louis and Armand set out. Camille watches them go: what a pair. He steps behind his desk and flicks through the two files waiting for him: Bernard Gattegno, Stefan Maciak.

Alex steps into her apartment building slowly, nervously, suspiciously. Will Trarieux be waiting for her? Does he know she has escaped? No, there’s no-one in the lobby. Her mailbox isn’t overflowing. There’s no-one in the stairwell, no-one on the landing; it’s like a dream.

She opens the door to her apartment and closes it behind her.

Exactly like a dream.

Home. Safe. Only two hours ago she was terrified she might be devoured by rats. She falters, almost falls, and has to cling to the walls for support.

She needs to eat something, now.

But first, she needs to look at herself.

My God, she looks at least fifteen years older. Ugly, filthy. Ancient. Bags under her eyes, wrinkles, yellow blotches on her skin, her eyes wild.