Alex (5 page)

“Strip,” the man says.

His voice is deep, calm. The order is deep, calm. Alex opens her mouth, but she does not have time to utter a word before he
slaps her so hard she spins around, losing her balance. Another slap and she crumples on the floor, her head smashing into the ground. The man comes towards her slowly, grabs her by the hair. The pain is vicious. He pulls her up. Alex feels as though her hair is going to be ripped out of her scalp; she grips his fist in both hands, tries to hang on, in spite of herself she feels strength returning to her legs and she stands up again. When he slaps her a third time, he’s still gripping her by her hair so her body just gives a jolt, her head whips round a quarter turn. The sound is so loud. She is in so much pain she can barely feel anything.

“I said strip,” the man says again. “Everything.”

And he lets her go. Alex takes a step, dazed. She tries to stay standing, collapses onto her knees, stifles a whimper of pain. The man comes over, bends down. Lowering over her, his fat face, his large head with its oversized skull, his grey eyes …

“Do you understand?”

As he waits for an answer, he raises his hand, the fingers splayed. Alex panics. “Yes,” she says over and over, “yes, yes, yes.” She immediately gets to her feet, prepared to do whatever he wants so he doesn’t hit her again. Quickly, so he will realise that she is prepared to do whatever he says, she peels off her T-shirt, rips off her bra, fumbles hurriedly with the buttons of her jeans as though her clothes had suddenly caught fire – she wants to be naked as quickly as possible so he won’t hit her again. Alex wriggles and squirms, takes off everything she’s wearing, every last stitch, quickly, then stands up, arms against her body, and it’s only then that she realises what she has lost and can never get back. Her defeat is absolute – by undressing so quickly she has accepted everything, said yes to everything. In a sense, Alex has just died. She dimly feels something, though it is very far away.
As though she is outside her own body. Perhaps this is how she finds the courage to ask:

“Wh— what do you want?”

His lips are so thin they’re almost invisible. Even when he smiles, you can tell it’s anything but a smile. Right now, it’s a question.

“What have you got to offer, you filthy whore?”

He tries to make it sound lascivious, as though actually attempting to seduce her. To Alex, the words make sense. They would make sense to any woman. She swallows hard. She thinks: he’s not going to kill me. Her mind coils around this thought, knotting itself tightly against all contradiction. Something inside tells her he’ll kill her anyway, later … but the knot in her mind is tight, tight, tight.

“You can f— f— fuck me,” she says.

No, that’s not right, she can tell, that’s not the right way …

“You can r— rape me,” she says, “You can do wh— whatever you want.”

The man’s smile freezes. He takes a step back so he can look at her. From head to foot. Alex spreads her arms wide; she wants him to know she is offering herself, surrendering herself – she wants to show him she has relinquished her free will, that she is putting herself in his hands, that she is his, so she can buy some time, just a little time. In these circumstances, time means life.

The man studies her steadily; his eyes move slowly down her body, finally coming to rest over her genitals. She doesn’t move. He leans towards her slightly, questioningly. Alex feels ashamed of what she is, exposing herself like this. What if he’s not attracted to her? If what little she has to offer is not enough, what will he do then? He shakes his head as though disappointed, no, not
good enough. And to make her understand he reaches out, grips Alex’s right nipple between thumb and forefinger and twists it so hard, so fast, that the young woman immediately doubles up and screams.

He lets go, and Alex holds her breast, eyes bulging, gasping for breath, hopping from one foot to the other, blind with pain. The tears come in spite of herself as she says:

“Wh— wh— what are you going to do?”

The man smiles as though simply stating an obvious fact.

“Me? I’m going to watch you die, you filthy whore.”

Then he steps to one side, like an actor.

And she sees. Behind him. On the floor, an electric drill lying next to a small wooden crate. About the size of a human body.

Camille pores over a map of Paris. Outside the concierge’s lodge, a uniformed officer seconded by the local station spends his time telling the rubberneckers and the neighbours that they’ve no business being there unless they have vital information about the kidnapping. A kidnapping! It’s entertainment; almost like being in a movie. Granted the star is missing, but that doesn’t matter – just being on the set is magical. As the night wears on, the news spreads like wildfire, like village gossip. People can’t believe it,
who is it, who is it, who is it, I told you I don’t know,
some woman is what I heard, but do we know her, tell me do we know her?
News travels fast, even kids who should be in bed by now are coming down to check out what’s going on; the whole neighbourhood is thrilled by this unexpected situation. Somebody asks whether they’re going to be on T.V. Over and over people ask the duty officer the same questions. They hang around waiting for no-one knows what, just so they can be there in case something finally happens, but nothing happens and gradually the whispering dies away, interest fades, it’s getting late, a few hours later and as the night draws on, excitement becomes irritation, the first shouts of protest come from the windows,
Can you keep it down? There are people here trying to sleep
.

“Maybe they should call the police,” Camille says.

Louis, as always, is more stoical.

On his map, he has marked out the main roads leading away from the scene of the abduction. There are four possible routes the woman could have taken before being kidnapped. Place Falguière, boulevard Pasteur or rue Vigée-Lebrun or, from the other direction, rue du Cotentin. She might haven taken a bus – either the 88 or the 95. The nearest
métro
stations are quite some distance from the scene, but can’t be discounted: Pernety, Plaisance, Volontaires, Vaugirard …

If they don’t find anything, tomorrow they’ll have to widen the search area, comb further afield in search of some scrap of information and for that, they’ll have to wait for people to get up, to wait for tomorrow, as if they’ve got time.

Kidnapping is a singular crime: unlike murder, the victim is not present; you have to imagine them. This is what Camille is trying to do. With a pencil he sketches the figure of a woman walking down the street. He looks at it critically: too elegant, a
society woman. Maybe Camille is getting too old to draw women like that. He puts a line through it and starts again, making telephone calls as he sketches. Why does he imagine she is young? Do people kidnap old women? For the first time he thinks of her not as a woman but as a girl. “A girl” has been kidnapped on rue Falguière. He goes back to the drawing. Jeans, short hair, handbag slung over her shoulder. No. Another sketch: in this one she has a pencil skirt, a big bust. Exasperated, he crosses it out. He pictures her young, but actually he can’t picture her at all. When he pictures her, he sees Irène.

There was never any other woman in his life. On the rare occasion the opportunity has presented itself to a man of his height, his sex drive has been complicated by too many factors – a feeling of guilt, a touch of self-loathing and the fear of resuming normal relations with women – so things never worked out. That’s not quite true: there was one exception. A colleague who’d got herself into a jam, a girl he’d helped out of a tight spot. Turned a blind eye. What he saw on her face at the time was relief, nothing more. Later he had run into her by chance near his apartment. They went for a drink on the terrace at La Marine, then on to dinner and – one thing leads to another – you go upstairs for a nightcap and then … In normal circumstances, it’s not the sort of behaviour a decent, upstanding officer should allow. But she was sweet, a free spirit, and seemed genuinely eager to show her gratitude. Or at least this is what Camille told himself later to allay his guilt. It had been more than two years since he’d touched a woman, that was one reason – but it wasn’t reason enough. What he had done had been unethical. That casual, tender evening, they hadn’t felt it necessary to think about feelings. She knew his
story – it’s one everyone in the
brigade criminelle
knows: Verhœven’s wife was murdered. She had said things, simple everyday things, she had undressed in the next room and immediately climbed on top of him, with no foreplay, they looked into each other’s eyes, Camille had closed his at the end – he couldn’t help himself. They run into each other from time to time; she lives close by. Forty-something, maybe. And six inches taller than him. Anne. Tactful, too: she hadn’t spent the night, had told him she had to get home. It was the right thing to do; it spared Camille pain. When they run into each other, she acts as if nothing happened. The last time, there was a crowd of people and she even shook hands with him. Why is he thinking about her now? Is she the kind of woman a man might want to abduct?

Camille turns his thoughts to the kidnapper. It’s possible to kill in many ways, for many reasons, but all abductions are alike. And one thing is certain: kidnapping someone requires planning. Obviously it’s possible to do it on impulse, in a sudden fit of anger, but it’s pretty rare and doomed to failure. In most cases, the perpetrator organises, plans, meticulously prepares. The stats are not good: the first few hours are critical; the chances of the victim being found alive soon plummet. A hostage is a liability – you want to get rid of them quickly.

Louis is the first to get a lead. He’s been telephoning round every bus driver who worked the route between 19.00 and 21.30. Dragging them out of bed one by one.

“The driver of the last 88 tonight,” he says, cupping his hand over the receiver, “about nine o’clock. Remembers a girl who ran to catch the bus then changed her mind.”

Camille puts down his pencil, looks up.

“Which stop?”

“Institut Pasteur.”

A shiver runs down his back.

“Why does he remember her?”

Louis repeats the question into the phone.

“Pretty,” says Louis, putting his hand over the receiver again. “Very pretty.”

“Oh …”

“And he’s sure about the time. He waved to her, she gave him a little smile, he told her his was the last bus that night but she headed off on foot down rue Falguière.”

“Which side?”

“Right hand as you go down.”

The right direction.

“Description?”

Louis asks the caller for details, but doesn’t get very far.

“Vague. Very vague.”

This is the problem with very pretty girls: they take your breath away; you don’t think to notice the details. You remember her eyes, her lips, her arse, maybe even all three, but you have no idea what she was wearing … This is the problem with male witnesses; women are more precise.

Camille spends much of the night brooding about such things.

*

By 2.30 a.m., everything that can be done has been done. Now, all they can do is wait and hope something happens in a hurry, something that gives them a solid lead. Receiving a ransom demand that opens up a new line of investigation. Discovering a corpse that shuts down all other lines. Some clue, anything to work on.

The most urgent task is to identify the victim if possible. For the moment, police headquarters has said there have been no reports of a missing woman that might correspond to the victim.

Nothing in the area where the abduction took place.

It has been six hours.

It’s a simple wooden crate. The slats are spaced about ten centimetres apart, making it easy to see what’s inside. For the moment, there’s nothing; the crate is empty.

Grabbing Alex viciously by the shoulder he drags her as far as the crate, then turns away as though she is not there anymore. The drill turns out to be an electric screwdriver. He unscrews a plank from the top of the crate, and then another. He has his back to her, bent over. His thick neck is flushed red and beaded with sweat … Neanderthal: this is the word that Alex thinks.

She is standing directly behind him, a little to one side, naked, an arm covering her breasts, a hand cupped over her genitals because she feels ashamed – even in these circumstances, which is madness when you think about it. Shivering from head to foot from the cold, she waits, utterly passive. She could try something. Hurl herself at him, hit him, run. The warehouse is vast and empty. About fifteen metres in front of them is an opening, a large breach in the wall; the big sliding doors that
once sealed the warehouse are missing. While the man unscrews the slats, Alex tries to get her brain back into gear again. Run? Lash out? Try to grab the drill? What is he planning to do after he’s unscrewed the crate? Watch her die, he said, but what does he mean? How is he planning to kill her? She realises that in a few short hours she has moved all the way from “I don’t want to die” to “Please make it quick”. As she is thinking this, two things happen. First, a simple, dogged, stubborn thought occurs to her: don’t let yourself be pushed around; resist, fight back. Second: the man turns, sets the screwdriver down next to her and reaches out to grab her shoulder. In that moment a decision mysteriously pops in her brain, like a bubble, and she starts running for the gap in the wall at the far end of the storeroom. In a matter of nanoseconds, she has vaulted the crate and is running, barefoot, as fast as she can. Surprised by this burst of speed, the man has no time to react. There is no cold, no fear now; every fibre of her being urges her to run, to get out of here. The floor is cold, hard, slippery from the damp; the concrete is rough and uneven, but she feels nothing – she is swept along in a wild dash. The ground is wet where rain has come through the roof, and Alex’s feet splash through puddles of stagnant water. She doesn’t turn back, urging herself on:
run
,
run
,
run
, she doesn’t know whether the man is chasing her. You’re faster than he is. You know you are. He’s old and overweight, you’re young and slim. You’re alive.