Alex (25 page)

*

“I realise you know all this already from your colleagues in Toulouse,” the magistrate says. “But that’s not the interesting part …”

Go on, Camille thinks, out with it.

“What’s interesting is that up until now, she killed only men older than her; consequently the murder of a woman over fifty rather jeopardises your hypothesis. I’m referring to Commandant Verhœven’s theory that the murders are sexual in nature.”

“It was your theory too,
monsieur le juge
.”

This from Le Guen, who is also beginning to feel a bit narked.

“I don’t dispute that,” the magistrate says. He smiles, almost contentedly. “We all made the same mistake.”

“It’s not a mistake,” Camille says.

Everyone turns to look at him.

*

“So,” says Delavigne, “they go to the dance hall. We’re up to our eyes in witness statements from friends and relatives of the victim. They describe the girl as very charming; they all recognised her from the E-FIT you sent me. Pretty, slim, green eyes, auburn hair. Though two of the women swear the hair was a wig.”

“I think they may be right.”

“So they spend the evening dancing at Le Central, then back to the hotel at about three a.m. The murder must have occurred shortly afterwards because – this is an estimate, we’ll have to wait for the post-mortem results to be sure – the coroner puts time of death at about three thirty.”

“An argument?”

“It’s possible, but it would have to be one hell of a disagreement to resort to sulphuric acid.”

“And no-one heard anything?”

“No, sorry … Then again, what do you expect? At that hour everyone was asleep. In any case, a couple of blows with a Bakelite telephone – it’s not going to make that much noise.”

“Did she live alone, this Zanetti woman?”

“From what we’ve been told, she had her moments, but recently, yeah, she was living alone.”

*

“The theory doesn’t matter, commandant. Cling to it all you want; it won’t move this investigation forward an inch and unfortunately it won’t affect the outcome. We’re dealing with a murderer who moves quickly and often, kills indiscriminately, a
murderer who is free to come and go as she pleases because she’s not in the system. So my question is simple: just how exactly are you planning to catch her, divisionnaire?”

“O.K., I’ll come back if it’s just for half an hour … but you’ll give me a lift back?”

At this moment, Félix would promise anything. It’s strange because he got the impression things hadn’t gone so well with Julia, that she hadn’t found his conversation exactly fascinating. In fact, the first time he’d met her, outside the restaurant, he’d felt she was out of his league, and on the telephone earlier this evening he didn’t exactly put in a brilliant performance. In his defence, it threw him, having her call him; he couldn’t believe it. And now tonight … The restaurant – what had he been thinking? He’d been caught off guard; he had to come up with somewhere …

At first, she took pleasure in turning him on. There was the dress she was wearing. She knows the effect it has on men. It didn’t fail – the moment he saw it she thought his jaw was about to hit the pavement. Then, Alex said, “Hi, Félix,” and laid a hand on his shoulder, brushing his cheek with her fingers, very briefly, a gesture of familiarity. Félix almost melted on the spot; it unnerved him too, because it could as easily mean “we’re
on for tonight” as “let’s just be friends”, as though they were colleagues. It’s something Alex does to perfection.

She let him talk about his work, about scanners and printers, the opportunities for promotion, the colleagues who were no match for him, the latest monthly figures; Alex even managed an approving “Oh!” Félix was pleased with himself, reckoned he was back in the game.

No, what kept Alex distracted was the man’s face, which stirred up powerful, disturbing feelings, especially seeing the ferocity of his desire. This is why she is here. He wants her in his bed; it oozes from his every pore. It would only take the slightest spark for his manhood to explode. Every time she smiles at him, he looks so horny he might lift the restaurant table into the air. He was like that the first time too. Premature ejaculator? Alex wonders.

Now, here they are in his car, Alex has hiked her skirt a little higher than she should and he can’t stand it. They’ve been driving for about ten minutes when he places a hand high up on her thigh. Alex says nothing, closes her eyes, smiling to herself. When she opens them again, she can see she’s driving him crazy; if he could, he’d fuck her right now, right here on the Périphérique. Ah, the Périphérique … they pass the Porte de la Villette – this is where Trarieux was squished by an articulated lorry. Alex is in seventh heaven. Félix slips his hand higher; she stops him. The gesture – calm, affectionate – feels more like a promise than a prohibition. The way she holds his wrist … If his dick gets any harder, he’s going to explode in mid-journey. The atmosphere in the car is warm, tangible, silence hovering over them like a flame above a detonator. Félix drives fast; Alex isn’t worried. And after the triple carriageway, a vast housing estate, a bleak, depressing tower block … He screeches into a parking space,
turns towards her, but already she is out of the car, smoothing her dress with the palm of her hand. He walks towards the building with a bulge in his trousers she pretends not to notice. She looks up; the tower block must be at least twenty storeys.

“Twelve,” he tells her.

It’s pretty decrepit; the walls are filthy and scrawled with obscenities. There are a few ripped-open mailboxes. He feels embarrassed, as though it’s only just occurred to him that the least he could have done would be to take her to a hotel. But mentioning the word “hotel” as they were coming out of the restaurant would be tantamount to saying “I want to fuck you”; he couldn’t bring himself to do it. So now he’s ashamed. She smiles at him to let him know it doesn’t matter, and it’s true, it doesn’t matter in the least to Alex. To reassure him, she lays her hand on his shoulder again and, as he fumbles for his key, she plants a quick, warm kiss right in the crook of his neck, where it will make him shudder. He stops dead, tries again, opens the door, turns on the light and says, “Go on in. I’ll be right back.”

It’s an apartment that could only belong to a single man. A divorced man. He’s dashed into the bedroom. Alex slips off her jacket, puts it on the sofa and comes back to watch. The bed isn’t made; in fact the whole place is a tip, and he’s hurriedly tidying up. When he spots her in the doorway he smiles awkwardly, apologises, tries to work faster, desperate to tidy everything away, to be finished. A room with no soul – the bedroom of a man with no woman. An old computer, clothes scattered everywhere, an antiquated briefcase, an old football trophy, a picture frame with a mass-produced reproduction of a watercolour, the kind you get in hotel rooms; the ashtrays are overflowing. Félix is on his knees next to the bed, leaning over
to straighten the sheets. Alex comes over just behind him, lifts the football cup over her head in both hands and brings it down on his skull; with the first blow the corner of the marble pedestal sinks in at least two inches. It makes a muffled sound, like a vibration in the air. The force of the blow destabilises Alex. She staggers sideways, comes back to the bed looking for a better angle, raises her arms above her head again and, aiming carefully, brings the trophy down again with all her strength. The edge of the base smashes the occipital bone; Félix is sprawled on his stomach, his body wracked by spasms … As far as she’s concerned, he’s had it. Might as well save energy.

Perhaps he’s dead, and the convulsions are simply his autonomic nervous system.

She comes closer, leans down, checking, lifts him by the shoulder: no, he looks as though he’s just unconscious. He’s moaning, but he’s breathing. His eyelids are flickering; it’s a reflex action. His skull is so staved in that clinically, he’s already half-dead. Let’s say two thirds.

So, not completely dead.

So much the better.

In any case, with all the damage to his noggin, he represents no real threat.

She turns him onto his back; he’s heavy, but he offers no resistance. There are ties and belts, everything she needs to tie his ankles and his wrists; it only takes a minute or two.

Alex goes into the kitchen, grabbing her bag on the way, then comes back into the bedroom. She takes out her little bottle, straddles his chest, breaks a couple of teeth as she forces his jaws apart with the base of a lamp, bends a plastic fork in half and sticks it into his mouth to prop it open. She steps back, forces
the neck of the bottle down his throat and calmly pours half a litre of concentrated sulphuric acid down his throat.

This, unsurprisingly, rouses Félix from his stupor.

But not for long.

*

She could have sworn buildings like this were noisy. In fact, at night, they’re very peaceful and the city spread out all around is rather beautiful seen from the twelfth floor. She looks for landmarks, but it’s difficult to find her bearings in this nocturnal landscape. She hadn’t noticed that the autoroute was so close – it must be the road they took coming here; maybe Paris is on the other side. Alex has a good sense of direction …

If the flat is a shambles and he neglected the housework, Félix clearly took good care of his laptop: it’s in a nice neat case with separate compartments for files, pens and power cables. Alex opens it up, logs in and opens a browser. She has fun looking through the browser history: porn sites, online gaming; she turns back towards the room – “Naughty, naughty, Félix …” Then she types her own name into a search engine. Nothing. The police still don’t know who she is. She smiles, about to close the laptop, then changes her mind and types:
police – wanted persons – murder
, skips down the first few results and finds what she’s looking for. A woman is being sought in connection with a number of killings; there’s been a call for witnesses. Alex is considered “dangerous”. Given the state of Félix next door, the adjective is hardly unwarranted. And the E-FIT is pretty good. They must have used the picture Trarieux took to mock it up. They clearly know what they’re doing. That vacant stare always makes the face look a little dead. Change the hair and the colour of the eyes and you’ve got someone
altogether different. Which is exactly what she is planning to do. Alex snaps the laptop shut.

Before leaving, she glances into the bedroom. The football trophy is lying on the bed. The corner of the plinth is matted with blood and hair. The statuette is of a striker scoring what’s obviously a winning goal. Lying on the bed, the winner looks rather less triumphant. The acid has dissolved away his whole throat, which is nothing but a liquefied pulp of pink and white flesh. It looks as though if you jerked hard, you could pull the head right off. His eyes are still wide open, but a shadow has passed over them, a veil has snuffed them out: they look like the glass eyes of a teddy bear. Alex used to have one.

Without turning away, Alex rummages in his jacket pocket for his keys. Suddenly she’s out in the hallway, then down in the car park. She triggers the central locking at the last moment, just as she’s ready to get into the car. Five seconds later, she pulls away. She winds the window down – the smell of stale cigarette smoke is disgusting. It occurs to Alex that Félix has just given up smoking: good news for him.

Just before she gets back to Paris, she takes a little detour and stops the car by the canal opposite the
Fonderies Générales
warehouse. Swathed in darkness, the huge building looks like a prehistoric animal. Alex feels a shiver down her back simply at the thought of what she went through in there. She opens the car door, takes a few steps, tosses Félix’s laptop into the canal and gets back into the car.

At this time of night, it takes less than twenty minutes to get to the Cité de la Musique. She parks on Level 2 of the underground car park, throws the keys down a drain and heads for the
métro
.

Thirty-six hours to track down the gypsy cab that picked up the girl in Pantin. It’s twelve hours more than they planned, but at least they got a result.

Three unmarked cars are following behind, and they’re making for the rue Falguière. Not far from where she was kidnapped. This worries Camille. The night of the abduction, they spent hours questioning neighbours without coming up with anything.

“Did we miss something that night?”

“Not necessarily.”

But still …

*

This time the taxi driver is Slovakian. A tall guy with a face like a knife blade and feverish eyes. He’s about thirty, prematurely balding, mostly on top, like a monk. He recognised the girl from the E-FIT. Except the eyes, he said. Hardly surprising – here her eyes are given as green, elsewhere they’ve been described as blue – she obviously uses coloured contact lenses. But it’s definitely her.

The taxi driver is driving ridiculously carefully. Louis thinks about saying something, but Camille gets in ahead of him. He lurches forward towards the front seat, his feet finally touching the floor – in this car, some sort of four-by-four, he can almost
stand up, which simply irritates him more. He lays a hand on the driver’s shoulder.

“Go for it, my friend – no-one’s going to clock you for speeding.”

The Slovak doesn’t need to be told twice. He brutally floors the accelerator and Camille finds himself sprawled on the back seat with his legs in the air: not really a good idea, the driver realises immediately. He slows down, mumbling apologies – he would give a month’s salary, give his car and his wife for the commandant to forget this incident. Camille sees red; Louis turns to him, puts a steadying hand on his arm.
Do we really have time for this shit?
Not that his look says this, it says something more like
We’re a little strapped for time to be indulging in tantrums, however transitory, don’t you think?

Rue Falguière, rue Labrouste.

En route, the driver gives them his account. The fare agreed was twenty-five euros. When he approached her at the deserted taxi rank near Pantin and suggested it, the girl hadn’t quibbled, simply opened the car door and slumped onto the back seat. She was exhausted and she smelled: sweat, dirt, who knows. She said nothing during the journey, her head bobbing as though she was trying to ward off sleep; it had all seemed suspicious to the Slovak. Was she on drugs? When they got to her neighbourhood, he turned to her, but she didn’t look at him, just stared out of the window. When he turned towards her she turned away as though she was looking for something or had lost her bearings, and she pointed to a space on the right and said: