Apocalypse Baby (7 page)

Blah blah blah, I've already noted the fees: at three thousand five hundred euros a term, I imagine that pupils who are expelled from this school must at the very least have tried to massacre the others with a chainsaw.

The head accompanies us to the main door, repeating to the Hyena that no, the police don't seem to know at all what's happened. I wait for her to go back in.

‘Lucky we came, eh? Fantastically interesting. She told us piles of things she didn't think of telling the police, so we're way ahead of them.'

‘Do you ever get fed up of being so negative?'

‘I'm not being negative. I could have told you about her grades without us having to sit and sweat in this bell jar: if you've read the file, everything's in there. The grandmother had told me about them. And that she bunked off school, same thing, mega scoop. That's why I was hired in the first place.'

‘And it doesn't strike you as interesting that precisely for the fortnight you've been following her, she's been coming to school every day?'

‘Yes of course it has. And it pisses me off, believe me.'

I said that for no special reason, just to say something back, but you would think I'd made the gag of the year, the Hyena bursts out laughing and looks at me almost with affection. I think perhaps she's flirting with me, but at the same time what do I know?

‘Show me where the kids eat lunch.'

The school is on the banks of the Seine, in one of those districts full of office blocks and fancy apartments where it doesn't seem possible that anyone needs to go out for a loaf of bread or a litre of milk. Car sales, hi-fi equipment, computer shops. But nothing much that's convivial, bars, restaurants or little boutiques. I've never understood why there are never any practical shops or nice coffee bars in the areas where the very rich live. Is it such poor taste to eat out? So the kids have the choice between a brasserie which is very expensive and a long way off, and a tiny bar that sells little plates of sushi and three kinds of sandwich on white bread. That was a problem for me: passing unnoticed in such a small place was difficult. Luckily, the young don't usually bother looking at people my age. I point out to the Hyena a table where I recognize some pupils from Valentine's class. She's taken off her jacket now, and slung it over her shoulder, revealing the Japanese-sailor-type tattoos that crawl all over her arms. She goes up to the biggest of them, by instinct, he has the face of a mischievous child on the body of a lumberjack.

‘I work for a firm of private investigators. Valentine's parents have called us in to back up the police effort.'

A small curly-headed youth with freckled cheeks, wearing a hoodie and wide trousers, sees fit to reply. ‘Yeah,
they're right, the police do fuck all, look at the traffic chaos everywhere.'

Chorus:

‘The police didn't even come to talk to us.'

‘There wasn't anything on the TV news, was there? So what did they care?'

‘Yeah, that's right, there was this girl last summer and she'd been gone a week, and people recognized her from the photo, so how are people going to know she's missing?'

The Hyena hasn't sat down yet, she's listening to them seriously and casting an amused look over them. I'm two paces behind, and not too surprised that not one of them says, ‘Hey, you're always round here.' My talent is being invisible.

‘Did you know her well? Did she have many friends in school?'

‘No, she wasn't all that friendly with people in school.'

‘Yeah, she could be, she sometimes ate her lunch with us. But mostly she went off on her own with her iPod.'

‘Mostly she didn't come back either.'

‘She was a bit snobbish with us, if you want to know. If you said something, she'd put on this superior air and say the opposite. She was more friendly at the beginning of the year, I thought…'

‘She's not friends with any of us on Facebook, is she?'

‘We don't even know if she has a Facepuke page, actually…'

‘But did she have problems with anyone at school?'

‘Nah, not even. Perhaps she thought she shouldn't be here at all. Dunno.'

‘And none of you saw her outside school?'

‘Yeah, I did, but it was a long time ago, oh, about three months ago. But we had words.' This is a dark-haired girl with very pale skin speaking: she looks intelligent, but so languid that you feel like shaking her to see if she'll switch on.

‘What happened?'

The girl who'd said this purses her lips and looks at the ceiling, not sure how to reply. The other kids burst out laughing.

The curly-haired one, who didn't think the police were doing their job, intervenes. ‘Valentine's a bit weird. Kind of OK, but weird. Very hot. Especially when she's had a few.'

‘She ought to be in the ads against binge drinking for teenagers. You really wouldn't want to be her when she's drunk.'

The brunette takes up her story again. She talks like a little girl, in an unpleasant whiny voice. ‘She can be funny if it's just the two of you, she's fine. She's nice. But if you go out somewhere, she can be a real drag. She binge-drinks. She knocks it back till she can't stand up straight, and if you're at a party, no prizes for guessing you'll have no fun, you'll end up carrying her out to the taxi, and then she'll be sick all over it, and then you'll have to help her get up the stairs at home. See what I mean? A drag.'

The Hyena is nodding her head all this time, looking round at them in turn, then suddenly asks, ‘And what about boys, what's she like with them?'

A tall gangling youth with a long, horsey face replies.

‘She can come on to you just like that, saying “Wanna
blowjob? If you want one, just tell me.” Well, that's what she used to do, when she first got here. Boys she liked, she'd go up to them and, pow! just like that, she'd come out with it. But she calmed down. In fact lately, she didn't seem to bother with us.'

The brunette takes up the story again. ‘Say you go out in the evening with a few guys, well honestly, you feel ashamed for her. When she drinks, she'll do anything with anyone. But I think in the school she was in before, the girls were all like that. Or so she said.'

‘So you got fed up going out with her, that it?'

‘Yeah… and she can be pretty wild too. She comes out with really mega awful stuff.'

‘Like what?'

‘Oh anything, if it can upset someone. If you're a blonde, it's something bad about dumb blondes, if you're Jewish, it's anti-Israel, if you're black, she'll talk about banana trees, if you're gay it's about AIDS, and so on. Valentine's always got an insult for everyone. And in the end you can't take it any more, you just want a quiet evening.'

There are few reactions round the table. Their apathy hasn't been disturbed. A girl who was kind of OK, not too many problems. Nothing out of the ordinary. The more I see of this generation, the more I imagine how they'll be as adults and the less I want to make old bones.

‘Still, she isn't the local clown. When she's sober, she's even rather quiet… And she's good at lessons. When she got here, we were well impressed by her level.'

‘She's good at everything, she reads books and all. But she's good at maths too. And chemistry. Yeah, everything really.'

‘The teachers like her fine. But she misses too much school. That's why she was sent here. She's been chucked out of all her other schools.'

‘She bunks off school.'

‘Valentine doesn't care about grades, her dad's this writer. When she wants to work, he'll pull strings for her, that's all, that's how it goes.'

Three of them are doing the talking, the brunette and the two boys. The two other girls are holding back, laughing at the right moments, but saying nothing for now. The Hyena asks, ‘But the boys she
was
interested in, where did they come from, then?'

‘When we were still friends, she liked heavy metal. She didn't miss any concert by PUY, she was very in with them… Well, you know what I mean… she was a groupie. I didn't want to go with her to see them, it was around the time she was giving me too much grief with all this acting like a slapper.'

‘PUY?' The Hyena gets out her notebook.

Amandine confirms: ‘Panic Up Yours, hard rock, heavy metal. I don't know, it's not my scene really.'

‘I think I'll remember the name.'

‘I don't know if she was still hanging round them, because she changed, Valentine did, over the year.'

‘Did she talk about her parents? Her home, at all?'

‘Not a lot, no.'

‘I know she adores her father.'

‘But the stepmother not so much, normal, isn't it? She doesn't have to sleep with her.'

‘What did you think, when you heard the news she'd disappeared?'

‘We flipped, we were worried for her.'

A blonde girl, with a nose so tiny that you wondered how she got enough oxygen, dressed like a Roma but every garment must have cost a fortune in the Marais, speaks up for the first time. ‘We thought something horrible had happened, of course. When a girl goes missing, you're always afraid they're going to find her dead in a ditch, beaten up.'

‘None of you thought she might have run away?'

This option shocks them more than the dead-in-a-ditch version. ‘Run away?' Leaving behind the PlayStation3, the fridge full of food, the domestic help, Daddy's credit card…

‘Yeah. Could be, of course. She'd changed a lot lately. She changed the way she looked, she wasn't so much fun, more distant… She could have been planning something. You could tell, couldn't you?'

The girl who said this was drop-dead gorgeous: all the time we've been sitting in the bar her face has been so radiant that it's as if the sunlight was falling only on her. She has the look we used to call BCBG when I was a kid, bon chic bon genre, rich girl, good home, blue, white and beige, which she wears just the kind of casual way that makes her look fantastic. She's tall and slender, elegant figure, the perfect image of the kind of bitch the aristocracy turns out best. This femme fatale speaks incredibly slowly, she must have been smoking joints all day. The Hyena gives her an odd look.

‘And you talked about it with her, when you thought she'd changed?'

‘No. We weren't friends, actually. But I could tell by
looking at her. She looked different.'

‘Yeah, it was obvious that she'd let her appearance go, these last months.'

‘Perhaps she was depressed, heading for a breakdown? She wore a lot of black, but like Noir Kennedy, vintage gear, sort of I'm-giving-up-on-life black.'

‘Yeah, that's right, she stopped wearing designer stuff. But before, she used to like it fine.'

‘Yeah, before, she liked to dress cool.'

‘Then after a bit, not to be bitchy, but she had a bit of a punky look, like when you listen to Manu Chao?'

The drop-dead beauty shrugs. ‘Yeah, I think she wanted to be distinctive.'

These kids round the table, are actually pretty easy-going, compared to the ones I usually meet. They tease each other, they josh each other, but they're not aggressive. There's no obvious tyrant among them, and they haven't got that arrogant manner you generally find in rich little Parisians. When they talk about Valentine, I find they sound quite calm. Still, that kind of sex-mad girl isn't usually so popular nowadays. These kids are resigned to never really being part of the elite. They've all dropped out. They don't have that juvenile effervescence that their equivalents in a swanky suburb like Neuilly would have. They've already tasted failure. They have all seen in their parents' eyes the disappointment at having to enrol them in a private school for children who are not making the grade.

We go back to the car. The Hyena is concentrating on one precise point. ‘The pretty girl, back there, I couldn't work
out if she was a baby dyke, or whether I just found her so stunning I mistook my desires for realities.'

‘Is that all you really care about? Come back to earth, she's way too pretty to be a dyke.'

I regret saying this the minute it's out of my mouth, because it seems particularly insulting, but she just stares at me for a couple of moments, then bursts out laughing.

‘You know, your mind is like Jurassic Park live.'

‘Well anyway, she's sixteen at the outside. You're interested in her?'

‘I'm interested in
all
girls. That's simple, easy to remember, even you can do that. Right, now I'm off to see Antonella, the woman I sent to see the father. Are you coming, or do you want me to drop you off?'

‘Whatever you like. Perhaps you want to keep your contact confidential.'

‘Keep my what what? You really are weird. Lucky for you you met me, because on your own, where would you be?'

The Hyena slows down at a pedestrian crossing and with a nod of her head lets a pregnant woman go by.

‘See that one's face? Don't tell me she couldn't have given it a bit of thought before reproducing… some people, nothing stops them.'

‘Do you ever, when you're on a case like this, do you ever feel frightened, I mean of what you're going to find?'

‘Yes. It's happened to me before.'

‘And that doesn't upset you? You don't imagine that Valentine could be in the grip of some sadist who's torturing her? Or who's even killed her. And yet here we are, taking our time.'

‘No, frankly, I think she's gone to see her mother. I think we're going to spend a few days messing about in Paris so we can say we did, then we go straight for the mother. Don't you think? If your mother had abandoned you, you'd want to go and see her, wouldn't you, see what she's like?'

‘I don't know, mine didn't abandon me, on the contrary she calls me up all the time.'