Alex (6 page)

Alex makes it through the gap in the wall and slows just long enough to notice, on her left, that at the far end of this room is another opening like the one she has just come through. All the rooms are the same. Which way is out? The thought that she will be running out of the building stark naked, bursting out
into the street like this, has not even registered. Her heart is hammering fit to explode. Alex is desperate to look round, to see how far ahead of him she is, but even more desperate to get out of here. A third room. This time Alex stops, gasping for breath, and almost collapses. She can’t believe it. She starts running again, but already she can feel tears welling – she’s reached the other end of the building, come to the door that must surely lead to the outside world.

It is bricked up.

From between the large red bricks oozes still-wet mortar that has not been smoothed, simply thrown on in slapdash fashion to seal the doorway. Alex feels the bricks, which are also damp. Trapped. The cold suddenly hits her again. She pounds on the bricks with her fists, she screams – maybe someone on the other side will hear her. She screams; she can’t find words.
Let me out of here. Please.
Alex pounds harder, but already she’s tiring; she presses herself against the wall as she might a tree, as though trying to become one with it. She stops screaming, has no voice left, only a plea that is lodged in her throat. Sobbing quietly she stands, plastered against the wall like a billboard poster. Then suddenly she falls silent because she senses the man behind her. He did not chase her; he simply walked to where she is standing. She listens to the approaching footsteps. She doesn’t move; the footsteps stop. She thinks she hears him breathing, but what she hears is her own fear.

The man does not say a word, he simply seizes her by the hair – this is how he does things – grabs a fistful of hair and tugs violently, jerking Alex towards him so that she falls heavily onto her back, stifling a scream. For a moment she is convinced she is paralysed, she whimpers, but the man is not prepared to leave
it at that. He gives her a vicious kick in the ribs and, when she fails to move quickly enough, gives a second, even more brutal kick. “Slut!”

Alex howls – she knows this is not going to stop so, mustering all her strength, she curls into a ball. Bad move. As long as she refuses to obey him, he will keep beating her. He lashes out again, this time driving the toe of his boot into her kidneys. Alex howls in pain, struggles up onto one elbow, raises a hand in surrender, a gesture that clearly says:
Stop, I’ll do whatever you want
. The man doesn’t move; he is waiting. Alex is on her feet now – she staggers, tries to get her bearings, sways, almost falls, moves in zigzag fashion. She is not moving quickly enough so he kicks her from behind, sending her sprawling, but she gets to her feet again, knees streaming blood, and keeps moving, more quickly now. It’s over; he has no other demands of her. Alex surrenders. She walks back towards the first room, goes through the gap; she is ready now. Utterly exhausted. When she comes to the huge crate she glances at him. Her arms dangling, she has given up every last shred of modesty. He does not move either. What was it he said? What were his last words? “I’m going to watch you die, you filthy whore.”

He looks at the crate. Alex looks at it too. This is the point of no return. What she is about to do, what she is about to accept, is irreversible. Irrevocable. She can never go back. Will he rape her? Kill her? Kill her before, after? Will he make her suffer endlessly? What does he want, this mute executioner? In a few minutes she will have the answers to these questions. Only one mystery remains.

“P— please …” Alex begs. She is whispering, as though asking him to confess a secret. “Why? Why me?”

The man frowns like someone who does not speak her language trying to guess what her question might mean. Reflexively, Alex reaches behind her, her fingertips brushing against the rough wood of the crate.

“Why me?”

The man smiles slowly. Those invisible lips …

“Because you’re the one I want to watch die, you filthy whore.”

He says it as though stating the obvious. He seems satisfied he has answered her question.

Alex squeezes her eyes shut. Tears trickle down. She wants her life to flash before her, but nothing comes. It is no longer simply her fingertips touching the wooden crate; her whole hand grips it to stop herself collapsing.

“Go on …” he says, exasperated, and nods towards the crate.

When she turns back, Alex is no longer herself; it is not she who steps into the box – there is not a shred of her in this body that curls up inside it. She squats, feet apart to balance on the slats, arms wrapped around her knees as though this crate is her sanctuary and not her coffin.

The man approaches, gazes at the image of the naked girl huddled at the bottom of this crate. Eyes wide with delight, like an entomologist studying some rare species. He looks jubilant.

The concierge left them to it and went to bed. She snored like a pile-driver all night. They left her some money for the coffee and Louis left a note to say thank you.

It is 3.00 a.m. The various teams have all left now. It has been six hours since the abduction and the evidence they have collected so far would fit in a matchbox.

Camille and Louis are out on the street, each heading home to take a quick shower before meeting up again.

“You go ahead,” Camille says.

They’ve arrived at the taxi rank. Camille isn’t taking a cab.

“Don’t mind me, I’ll walk part of the way.”

They go their separate ways.

Camille has sketched her over and over, this girl, as he pictures her, walking down the street, waving to the bus driver; constantly starting again because there was always some trace of Irène about her. Even the thought makes Camille feel sick. He walks faster. This girl is a different person. This is what he needs to remember.

Especially the one terrible difference: this girl is alive.

The street is deserted; cars go by every now and then.

He tries to think logically. Logic is what has been worrying him from the start. People don’t kidnap at random; more often than not they abduct someone they know. Maybe not very well,
but well enough to have a motive. So the kidnapper must know where she lives. This thought has been running through Camille’s mind for the past hour. He quickens his pace. And if he didn’t snatch her from home or from outside her house, it has to be because it was impossible. He can’t think why, but it must have been impossible, otherwise he wouldn’t have snatched her here in the street, with all the risks that that entails. Yet that’s precisely what he did.

Camille speeds up and his thoughts keep time.

Two possibilities: either the guy is following her or he’s waiting for her. Could he have followed her in the van? No. She didn’t take the bus, and the idea of her walking down the street with him driving behind in slow motion waiting for the right moment to pounce is completely preposterous.

So he must have been waiting.

He knows her, knows the route she takes; he needs a place where he can wait, somewhere he’ll be able to see her coming … and be able to rush out and snatch her. And that somewhere has to be before the spot where he actually abducted her, since this is a one-way street. He sees her, she walks past, he catches up, snatches her.

“That’s the way I see it.”

It’s not unusual for Camille to talk to himself out loud. He hasn’t been widowed long, but it doesn’t take long for the habits of the single man to set in again. This is why he didn’t ask Louis to walk with him. He’s no longer used to being part of a team – he’s spent too much time alone, too much time brooding and hence thinking only of himself. They would only have ended up arguing. Camille doesn’t much like the man he has become.

He walks for a few minutes mulling over these thoughts. He’s looking for something. Camille is one of those people who seem stubbornly wrong-headed until the evidence proves they were right all along. It’s an irritating weakness in a friend but an important strength in a policeman. He walks past one street, and then another, but it triggers nothing. Then, suddenly, a lightbulb flickers on in his head.

Rue Legrandin.

A cul-de-sac that can’t be more than thirty metres long but is wide enough for cars to park on both sides. If he were the kidnapper, this is where he would have parked. Camille walks on a little then turns to look at the street.

At the junction there’s a building with a pharmacy on the ground floor.

He looks up.

Two C.C.T.V. cameras are trained on the shop front.

*

It doesn’t take long for them to find the footage of the white van on the tape. M. Bertignac is deferential to the point of sycophancy, the sort of man who revels in the thought of “helping the police with their inquiries”. The sort of person Camille finds vaguely irritating. They are in the dispensary at the back of the shop. M. Bertignac is sitting in front of a huge computer monitor. He doesn’t look much like a chemist, but he certainly has the character traits. Camille is quick to spot this since his father was a chemist. Even after he retired, he behaved like a retired chemist. He died just over a year ago. Camille can’t help but think that, even in death, there’s something of the chemist about his father.

M. Bertignac is eager to help the police and so was more than
happy to get out of bed at 3.30 a.m. and open the door to Commandant Verhœven.

Nor is Bertignac a man who bears grudges, even though the Pharmacie Bertignac has been robbed five times. With the rise in drug dealers targeting pharmacies, he turned to technology. After every break-in, he bought a new camera. There are five now: two outside covering the pavement, the other three inside. The tapes are kept for twenty-four hours; after that they’re automatically erased. And M. Bertignac loves his gadgets. He didn’t need them to get a warrant before showing off his equipment; he was only too happy to oblige. It took only a few minutes to bring up the section of the tape covering the cul-de-sac. There’s not much to see: just the wheels and the lower part of the vehicles parked against the footpath. The white van arrives and parks at 21.04, inching forward so the driver has a sidelong view of the rue Falguière. For Camille, it is not enough to have his theory confirmed (though he is happy about that, he loves to be proved right), he would have liked a better view of the vehicle, because in M. Bertignac’s freeze-frame all that is visible are the front wheels and the lower section of the bodywork. He knows more about the M.O. and about the timing of the abduction, but not about the kidnapper. Nothing happens on the tape. Absolutely nothing. They rewind.

Camille can’t quite bring himself to leave. Because it’s infuriating to have the kidnapper right there while the camera is focused on some trivial unimportant detail. At 21.27, the van pulls out of the cul-de-sac. And it’s at that moment it happens.

“There!”

M. Bertignac bravely plays the studio engineer. Spools back the tape. There. They peer at the screen; Camille asks if it’s possible to enlarge. M. Bertignac twiddles various knobs. Just as
the van pulls out of the parking spot, it’s obvious from the lower part of the bodywork that it has been repainted by hand, leaving part of the lettering still visible. It’s impossible to read what it says. The characters are barely legible and besides, they’re cut off along the top edge of the screen, out of shot of the C.C.T.V. camera. Camille asks for a printout and the chemist obligingly gives him a U.S.B. key onto which he’s copied the whole sequence. At maximum contrast, the pattern looks something like:

It is like Morse code.

The van has clearly scraped against something and there are small traces of green paint.

More work for forensics.

*

Camille finally makes for home.

The evening has shaken him somewhat. He takes the stairs. He lives on the fourth floor and on principle never takes the lift.

They’ve done what they can. What comes next is the worst part. The waiting. Waiting for someone to report a woman missing. It could take a day, two days, maybe more. In the meantime … When Irène was kidnapped, she had been found dead within ten hours. Half that time has already elapsed. If forensics had found anything useful, he would know by now. Camille is all too familiar with the sad, slow melody of cross-checking evidence, this war of attrition that takes ages and leaves your nerves shot.

He broods over this endless night. He’s exhausted. He barely has time to take a shower and knock back a couple of coffees.

Camille sold the apartment he once shared with Irène; he couldn’t bear to live there – it was too difficult seeing her everywhere he looked. To stay on would have required a strength of will better expended elsewhere. He wondered whether to go on living after Irène’s death was a matter of courage, a matter of will. How was it possible to carry on alone when everything around you had dissolved? He needed to check his own fall. He knew that this apartment was dragging him down, but he couldn’t bear to give it up. He asked his father (who could always be relied on to give a straight answer) and then Louis who had said: “To hold on, you have to let go.” It’s from the Tao, apparently. Camille wasn’t sure he understood what it meant.