Irene (14 page)

One of the few paintings to which she had ever given a title.

As she set the canvas down, Irène saw that Camille was crying. She wrapped her arms around him and held him for a long time.

He had not been back to the studio since.

*

“I’ll think about it,” Camille said at last.

“Whatever you like,” his father said draining his cup. “The money will go to you in any case. For your son.”

Camille’s mobile phone chirruped – a text message from Louis:
Lambert not in his lair. Stake out? Louis
.

“I have to go,” Camille said, getting to his feet.

His father gave him the same surprised look he always did, apparently astonished that time had passed so quickly. But for Camille it was always the same: at some point a signal would go off in his head. Once it did, he found he could not sit still, he had to leave, had to get out of there.

“That thing with the reporter …” his father said, getting up.

“Don’t worry about it.”

The two men embraced and moments later, Camille was in the street. Looking up, he was not surprised to see his father leaning over the balcony and giving that little wave. Sometimes Camille reflected that one day he would see it for the last time.

Camille called Louis.

“We’ve found out a bit more about Lambert,” Louis said. “He went straight home as soon as he was released on parole. That was on the 2nd. From talking to his associates, he seemed in good spirits. One of his cronies, Mourad, a snot-nosed kid who deals drugs for him in Clichy, said that Lambert was planning a trip, he was due to leave on Tuesday. One of his henchmen, Daniel Royet, was supposed to be going with him. We haven’t been able to track him down either. Since then, there’s been no news. I’ve arranged for a 24-hour watch on Lambert’s place.”

“Gustave had better keep his head down. We’ve got two days to sort this. After that, Lambert is likely to disappear for a long time …”

They discussed the teams who would stake out places where Lambert was likely to show up. Two key locations had been identified. By some miracle – or by dint being nagged – Le Guen, who knew Camille did not have the resources to cover the operation, provisionally assigned two teams which Louis was tasked with coordinating.

He set the pile of books on his desk:
Brown’s Requiem
,
Clandestine
,
Killer on the Road
, then
Suicide Hill
,
Dick Contino’s Blues
, then the L.A. Quartet:
The Black Dahlia
,
The Big Nowhere
,
L.A. Confidential
and
White Jazz
, lastly
American Tabloid
.

He picked one up at random.
White Jazz
. It was not an entirely random choice. On the cover was the portrait of a woman resembling the one on
The Black Dahlia
. Her style and general appearance were similar, though on
White Jazz
the face was rounder, the hair fuller, the make-up heavier and the model was wearing earrings. Abandoning the more spontaneous style he had adopted on
The Black Dahlia
, the illustrator had opted for a slightly sleazy Hollywood vamp. Camille had not previously considered whether his three victims looked alike. Though it was not too hard to draw comparisons between Évelyne Rouvray and Josiane Debeuf in Courbevoie, what could they possibly have in common with little Manuela Constanza in Tremblay?

On his desk blotter he scrawled three words, added “Louis”, and underlined them twice.

“It seems rather an arduous task …”

Arduous? … Louis’ use of vocabulary was a mystery to Camille.

“That’s your pile,” he said. “This one here is mine.”

“Ah.”

“We’re looking for a scene with a large apartment, two women who have been raped and dismembered. We should be able to skim read.”

The early books had a somewhat “classic” feel. Private detectives, their desks piled high with unpaid bills, mouldered in grubby offices sipping coffee and munching doughnuts. Out of the blue, crazed killers unleashed their psychopathic tendencies. But gradually the style evolved, it became more savage, more visceral as Ellroy began to trade in inhumanity at its most elemental. The seediest districts of the city became a metaphor for a desperate, disillusioned humanity. Love took on the acrid taste of urban tragedy. Sadism, violence, cruelty, the dregs of our wildest fantasies were made flesh and with them came injustice, revenge, women battered and bloody murders.

The afternoon flew past.

As he grew tired, Camille was tempted to skim the few hundred pages remaining, hunting only for certain key words and phrases … but which words, which phrases? He quickly abandoned this idea. How many times had he seen an investigation drag on or founder because procedures had been hurried or were insufficiently systematic? How many anonymous killers owed their freedom to the carelessness of weary officers?

Every hour, Camille stepped out of his office and, on the way to the coffee machine, paused in the doorway of Louis’ office and watched him poring over the books with the diligence of a theology student. Neither of them said a word, a look was enough for each to confirm that what had seemed such a promising lead was now a dead end, that what few notes they had would likely prove irrelevant when the passages were reread, that in all likelihood this would still be the case when the books and the men were exhausted.

Camille made notes on slips of blank paper. The tally was profoundly depressing. A teenage girl asphyxiated with a pair of panties soaked in acetone; a naked woman hung by her feet above her bed, another dismembered with a hacksaw after being shot through the heart; a third who was raped and then stabbed to death … A universe of carnage, peopled by impulsive psychopaths, shady deals and old scores settled in ways that seemed utterly different to the methodical work of whoever had committed the murders in Courbevoie and Tremblay. The only unsettling parallel was the one Camille had first noticed, but there was a yawning gap between the way the Tremblay murder precisely mirrored the scene in
The Black Dahlia
and the vague similarities he had found in certain passages to elements of the Courbevoie killings.

Louis had drawn up his own list. When he appeared in Camille’s office to go through them, Camille shot him a questioning look and immediately realised Louis had fared no better than he. He glanced at the notepad on which Louis, in his ornate handwriting, had jotted down his thoughts: gunshot wounds, stab wounds, knuckledusters, rapes, another hanging …

“O.K.,” Camille said, “I think we’re done here.”

At six o’clock, the team reassembled in Camille’s office for the final briefing of the day.

“Who wants to start?” Camille said.

The three men looked at each other. Camille heaved a sigh.

“Louis, you go first.”

“We’ve had a quick look through a number of other novels by James Ellroy, because the
patron
here thinks …” He bit his tongue. “Sorry.”

“Two things, Louis,” said Camille with a smile. “First, since I am your ‘
patron
’, thanks for correcting yourself – you know how I feel about that word. Second, as far as the books are concerned, try and make it sound positive.”

“Fine,” Louis said, returning the smile. “To put it simply, we’ve been through pretty much the complete works of James Ellroy and have found nothing to substantiate the theory that the murders are being copied from his books. Is that O.K.?”

“Perfect. Louis, you’re a gentleman. I would add that we both wasted half a day on that theory. And it’s bullshit. I think that covers it …”

The three men smiled.

“Come on then, Maleval, what have you got for us?”

“What have you got if you haven’t even got ‘nothing’?”

“Nothingness?” Louis said.

“Nada?” chimed in Armand.

“O.K.,” said Maleval, “in that case, I have a nothingness of nada. The faux cowhide has no label that would allow us to trace where it was bought or made. The black and white wallpaper in the bathroom did not come from a French factory. I’m expecting a list of the main foreign manufacturers tomorrow morning. There’ll be five hundred at the very least. I’ll try an international search, but I’m guessing our guy didn’t buy the wallpaper in person and hand over a copy of his I.D.”

“You’re right, it’s not very likely,” said Camille. “Next?”

“At the Mercure Hotel where Évelyne Rouvray first met her client – the man who would kill her – the room was paid for in cash. No-one remembers anything. As for forensics, the lab haven’t managed to decipher the serial numbers on the stereo, the T.V., the C.D. players, etc. The makes and models are commonplace, hundreds of thousands of these things have been sold. The trail stops there.”

“Right. Anything else?”

“One more dead end, just for a change …”

“Go on …”

“The video is a clip from an American weekly T.V. show that’s been running on U.S.-Gag for the past ten years. It’s a popular programme. The clip on the tape was broadcast four years ago.”

“How did you find out?”

“I called T.F.1, they bought French rights. The show is so shit they stopped running it, but they sometimes use the best clips to plug gaps in programming. The one of the dog peeling an orange was broadcast last on February 7. Our man might have recorded it then. As for the matchbook, it’s obviously a mock-up. The blank matchbook itself is standard issue, you can get them at any tobacconist.
Le Palio
’s logo was added using a generic colour printer, four hundred thousand of which have been sold in France. The paper used is widely available, as is the glue.”

“Sounds like the name of a club …”

“Probably, or a bar. Anyway, it’s irrelevant.”

“You’re right. It’ll get us nowhere.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“That’s not quite true,” Louis said without looking up from his notepad.

Maleval and Armand turned to look at him. Camille stared at his feet and said:

“Louis is right. It is relevant. In the staging of the crime scene, it falls into a different category. There are two types of clue: those commercially produced objects whose source we are unable to trace, and those that were carefully and deliberately created as set dressing. It’s a bit like your Japanese sofa,” he said, glancing at Armand.

Caught unawares, Armand fumbled for his notepad.

“Yes, I suppose, except that we haven’t managed to identify this Dunford guy. Bogus name, payment by money order, delivery to a self-storage warehouse in Gennevilliers in the name of …” He flicked through the pages. “Peace. And then the trail goes cold.”

“Peace?” Maleval muttered. “As in ‘world peace’? Our guy must think he’s a comedian.”

“Hilarious,” Camille said.

“But why does our man use foreign names?” Louis said. “It is a little strange …”

“My guess is that our man’s a snob,” Maleval said. “So, what else?” Camille said. “What we found out about the magazine is a little more interesting. Though only a little … It’s the March issue of
GQ
, a British men’s magazine …”

“American,” Louis corrected.

Armand checked his pad.

“You’re right, it is American.”

“And in what sense is that interesting?” Camille said irritably.

“The American edition is sold by a very few English bookshops in Paris. I phoned three of them and got lucky. About three weeks ago a man ordered a back issue from Brentano’s on the avenue de l’Opéra, specifically the March issue.”

Armand went back over his notes, clearly determined to give a blow-by-blow account of his investigation.

“Keep it short, Armand,” Camille said, “keep it short.”

“Hang on. Right, the woman at the bookshop is certain that it was ordered by a man. He came in on a Saturday afternoon, their busiest time. He ordered the magazine and paid cash in advance. The girl doesn’t remember any identifying features, ‘a man’ is all she would say. A week later – same day, same time – he came back to pick it up. The girl working that weekend doesn’t remember him at all.”

“Well, that’s handy,” Maleval said.

“The contents of the suitcase haven’t turned up much either,” Armand said, “though we’re still making inquiries. Although it’s all designer brands, and expensive, they’re pretty common, so unless we have a stroke of luck …”

Camille suddenly remembered something.

“Louis … what’s his name, you know, the guy …?”

Louis, who seemed to be able to follow Camille’s line of thought the way a hound follows a scent, said, “Haynal, Jean Haynal. There’s no record of him in our files. I did a search, but I’ll spare you the details. All the Jean Haynals we’d been able to trace are either the wrong age, or they’re dead, or they left Paris a long time ago. We’re still working on it, but I don’t hold out much hope.”

“O.K.,” Camille said.

The results of their inquiries were pretty threadbare, but they had one lead: the absence of clues and the meticulousness with which the scene had been staged were themselves clues. Camille was persuaded that sooner or later, these various leads would converge and that unlike in most cases where the picture becomes clearer, like a photograph in a developing bath, this one would be
different. Everything would suddenly fall into place. It was simply a matter of perseverance.

“Louis,” he said, “I want you to try and find a connection between the two women in Courbevoie and the girl in Tremblay, places where they might have hung out perhaps without actually having met, any relationships they had in case they had a mutual acquaintance, you know the kind of thing …”

“O.K.,” Louis jotted it down.

All three notepads were snapped shut simultaneously.

“See you all tomorrow,” Camille said.

The three men filed out of the office.

Louis reappeared a few moments later. He carried in the pile of books he had been working on and set them on his boss’ desk.

“Pity, isn’t it?” Camille said, grinning.

“Yes, a real shame. It was such an elegant theory …”

Then, just as he was leaving again, he turned back to Camille.