Talking to Ghosts (17 page)

He sat a little way off in a hammock and watched her. Rebecca was dressing the doll in some sort of evening gown, biting her lower lip and frowning. Her hair fell over her face and she constantly had to push the heavy black locks behind her ear with a hand or a thumb, a gesture the boy decided he liked. Her fingers moved quickly, her rings shining. The plastic creature was soon dressed in its sequinned gown. Victor counted seven rings. He knew what his first present to her would be. She had crossed her legs and was nervously swinging her foot, a sandal
decorated with coloured beads balanced precariously on the end of her toes. He did not dare look at her thighs, at the hem of the white cotton shorts that sometimes gaped over her brown skin.

“You want some more Coke?”

At first he did not realise she was talking to him. He emerged from a sort of daze to see that she was holding the bottle towards him.

“Here, I've hardly touched it, I wasn't really thirsty.”

He got up, took the drink, mumbled his thanks. He took long gulps. The coldness and the sugar did him good. He stood there in front of the table. The girls paid no attention to him, bent over what they were doing, concentrating like couturiers. They did not talk to each other. They handled the tiny pieces of cloth with the deftness of skilled workers. It was like a job.

He sat down again, unsure what to do. Eventually, he stretched out in the hammock, turned towards the girls. He had tried to tear his eyes from Rebecca, to stop undressing her inch by inch, almost physically able to feel the touch of her skin beneath his fingertips. He decided to make her a character in his novel about the survivor. She would appear from nowhere on a motorway, dressed in rags, and throw herself under the wheels of his 4 × 4. Naturally he would swerve just in the nick of time, then comfort her. They would be alone in the world, amid the utter chaos. He liked this idea. Rebecca and him in the first days of the end of the world.

Marilou's voice pulled him from his daydream.

“Do you want to play with us? You can dress this one,” she said with a big smile.

She waved a doll representing a man, or a boy, and Rebecca burst out laughing and hid her face in a tiny tulle dress which she balled up in her fist.

“That's Ken the gay boy,” she said in a hoarse voice.

Victor shivered. He felt ill. He stood up, about to leave, and asked where Julien was.

“I wasn't talking about you,” Rebecca said. “Shit, I was just joking. Wasn't I, Marilou?”

“Yeah, it's nothing,” Marilou said, hunched over her mobile phone, tapping out an S.M.S.

“Who're you texting?”

“Paola. She's in Portugal at her nan's house.”

“So are you happy here?” Rebecca asked Victor. “Denis and Nicole are so cool. I love them. Where did you live before?”

She didn't look at him, busy putting together some sort of pink camper van. Victor wondered whether there was any point in replying. He would have liked to see her eyes on him.

“I lived with my mother,” he said eventually.

Bent over her task, the girl said nothing. She might not even have heard.

“She's dead,” Victor whispered, feeling his lungs empty of every last atom of air, unsure whether he would ever be able to speak again.

“Oh yeah, that's right. Marilou told me.”

She turned her eyes on him. Grey, or green, they captured all the light which stole between the leaves. She blinked twice, three times. She settled back in the deckchair and looked away.

Victor felt as though he were suspended in mid-air by a steel hook buried in his chest. The girls said something he could not make out, tapping away on their phones. He managed to get a little breath back, leaning on the table because his head was spinning.

“What about you?” he said.

Marilou put down her phone and looked at Rebecca.

“Yeah, I'm cool. Next year I'm going to study at La Maison rurale in Lesparre. To learn a shitty trade, so I can earn a shitty living. And so I can get out of here.”

“Do you live with your parents?”

She shrugged and went back to listening to her voicemail. Marilou, her huge eyes wide, seemed to be trying to signal something to him.

He stared at the low neckline of Rebecca's T-shirt, at the curve of her breasts. He could not help himself. He was two metres from her, yet he thought he could feel the heat of her body, as if he was standing in front of a fire. She talked quickly, swallowing her words, her voice
hoarse, and shrill. Her gestures were often brusque and her looks callous. She frightened him. She probably got into a lot of fights.

They did not say much more for a while. Then Rebecca got up suddenly, because she had to go, she said. She kissed Marilou goodbye and walked away without so much as a glance at Victor, and the boy did not know if he was disappointed or relieved to see her go.

As he pushed open the door to his building and stepped into the lobby, Vilar saw the letter poking out of the letterbox. It was a thin brown envelope with his name and address printed on it and no stamp. His heart skipped a beat, then he remembered that this was how the president of the housing association sometimes circulated the long-winded and detailed minutes he took at meetings with the building manager. He turned over the envelope, and noticed nothing out of the ordinary, except that the flap had been reinforced with Sellotape, so that it was impossible even to slip a finger inside to open it. Without knowing why, he sniffed the envelope but could smell nothing, then he started up the stairs, using his car key to open it.

Photographs. Six sheets. Three were contact sheets with twenty or so tiny images. The other three each contained two enlarged shots.

He stopped on the half-landing. Children. Innocuous images, portraits and happy snapshots, had been mixed with others. He held one up to the yellow ceiling light. He groaned, gritting his teeth, and slid the photos back into the envelope. He climbed the stairs to his apartment in a daze, plunged into the darkness, kicked the door closed behind him and stood in the hall without turning on the light, feeling the blood pounding in his veins, sending showers of sparks into his brain like struck flint. His arm was rigid, he could feel the envelope stuck to his sweaty fingers. The whole left side of his body felt paralysed, and he realised this was what a heart attack must feel like. It occurred to him that he might die right now, and discovered that, try
as he might, he could not summon any memories of his life, not even an out-of-focus slide. The pictures he had glimpsed on the stairs made it impossible for any others to take shape.

Evil thwarting happiness.

The ringing telephone nearly made him lose his balance, and he had to support himself against the door frame before going into the living room to answer it.

“So? You see them?”

The man talked rapidly, roughly. The voice was hoarse, almost rasping.

“Who are you? What do you want?” Vilar bellowed, out of breath.

“Hey, hey, hey! Don't start kicking off, you're not down the station now, trying to intimidate some poor bastard. Shut your fat fucking mouth, or I'm hanging up, O.K.? Did you see them?”

“What is there to see?”

The voice let out a little high-pitched snigger that ended in a dry cough.

“Are you fucking dumb, or what?”

Vilar went over to the window, studying the street in the foolish hope of seeing the man he was speaking to. He took a deep breath and tried to control his voice.

“Kids. So what? I've seen thousands of pictures like this, these last few years, and that …”

Suddenly, he understood. He threw the photographs to the ground, clicked the switch of a lamp behind him and crouched down to examine them.

The voice of the man on the phone was mockingly sympathetic.

“Did you take a good look? You thought you'd never see him again, and here I am sending you a picture. What do you say?”

Vilar was trying to think what to say, how to deal with this, when his eyes fell on a photograph of a boy of about eight or nine, his face half hidden by a mask. Behind him stood a naked man, his thick hands on the boy's hips. Vilar could do nothing to stop the tears streaming down his cheeks. He set the telephone down on the floor and brought the
photograph closer, peering at the small face, the tired, vacant eyes shining behind the mask. He saw the thin arms, the narrow chest on which the camera flash cast deep shadows, the jutting chin, his neck straining as he was raped.

He heard the stranger's voice reverberate in the earpiece and picked up the telephone once more.

“See what your friend the
gendarme
was jerking off to? I found loads of this stuff at his place, a whole sack full! This is what you went over to his place to look at, isn't it? But now you've got it, you don't know what to say, am I right? Never mind, I'll leave you to your happy reunion. Don't worry, I'll be in touch.”

There was silence. Still Vilar sat on the carpet, clutching the hideous picture, not daring to look at the others, unable to take his eyes off the boy in whose face he thought he could see something of Pablo's when he was sad or sick; he thought back to the bad bout of flu Pablo had had when he was six, the chest infection that had sent his temperature soaring to 40°C while Victor and Ana sat up all night with ice packs by his bedside, terrified that he would have a convulsion, ready to dash to the hospital, dozing off whenever the fever allowed the boy to rest a little, only to jolt awake whenever they heard him whimper. By the following morning, Pablo's temperature had dropped almost two degrees, he woke up and beamed at them, dark circles around his bright eyes, which he quickly closed again, before sinking back to sleep.

Vilar lay on his back and wept, overwhelmed by visions of his tortured son, his mind teeming with every picture of an abused child he and Morvan had seen in the past few years, it seemed to him that Pablo was the victim in every one. At some point the tears and the sobs began to choke him and he coughed and had to sit up so that he could breathe, his chest crushed by a diffuse pain, a burning sensation that spread through his muscles and bones, an acid coursing through him threatening to dissolve him from the inside. He stood up, gasping, went back to the window and opened it. A cool breeze made the curtain behind him flutter. He stepped out onto the balcony and leaned on the railing, taking slow, deep breaths to calm his heart which was still pounding
but could so easily stop, and once again he thought about the possibility that he might die right here, with no terror, no regrets about what he would be leaving behind, knowing that he had already lost everything that mattered, that his life was merely a limbo, an agonising twilight he could not escape either by plunging into darkness or returning to the light.

A car door slamming in the distance brought him back to his senses and once again he studied the street and the lines of parked cars, the curved windscreens gleaming under the lamp posts. He was convinced that the guy was out there, huddled in his car, spying on him, revelling in the grief he was causing, and Vilar weighed up his chances of catching him if he rushed outside right now, gun in hand, imagined bringing him back inside and making him talk. He thought about what he might do to him, about wounds he could inflict on this piece of garbage, he felt the sickness well up in him again, felt an icy shiver course through his whole body.

He went back inside and rolled down the blinds without really thinking, perhaps to avoid the eyes he could feel trained on him. Not daring to look at the images again, he put them back into the envelope and set it on the sideboard. He felt drained. He looked at his watch: almost 11.00 p.m. He turned on the C.D. player, intending to play whatever was in it, but the tray was empty and he did not feel up to choosing something. What could he listen to? Had music, especially when listened to on a machine, ever drowned out silence? He felt no desire to shut himself away in a bubble of sound and, not for the first time, he thought about explorers in novels trekking through the Arctic, who believed that by huddling over the flickering light of a fire, they could ward off the cold and the wolves.

He needed to hear a human voice. He would deal with the wolves later.

Pradeau answered on the second ring.

“Oh, Pierre. Hi.”

He could hear music, a deep throbbing bassline. He could even hear Pradeau smile.

“What are you listening to?”

“Stuff you wouldn't like. Hip-hop.”

“Do you like it?”

“I'm not really into rap. But I like this record. Kool Shen. Ex-member of Nique Ta Mère, every policeman's favourite group.”

“You on your own?”

Vilar heard him light a cigarette.

“Depends on what you mean by on my own. Got a pack of fags, a bottle of Glenmorangie, a packet of crackers – I couldn't fucking face making something to eat. But, honestly, ossifer, I've hardly drunk a drop.”

“You supply the company and I'll supply the food: pizza quattro stagioni, homemade liver pâté and a bottle of Graves to wash it down. But don't take too long, or I'll top myself.”

“I love your sense of humour.”

“It's not a joke.”

Vilar heard Pradeau laugh nervously at the other end of the line.

“Have you got a choc ice in the freezer?”

“I do indeed.”

“I'll be right over. We'll talk.”

Vilar hung up. “Get a move on,” he murmured. “It'll get cold.” He sat for a long while, holding the telephone, then jumped up and turned on the lights, put Patti Smith's “Easter” into the C.D. player. He played “Because the Night” first, listening to her work her magic as he hummed along.

Pradeau showed up half an hour later with a carrier bag containing all the bits and pieces that helped him fill the lonely hours. He stood in the doorway for a long minute, his large frame silhouetted against the light, staring questioningly at Victor, then came over, patted him on the shoulder and asked what was up.

“Let's eat first,” Vilar said. “Let's get a drink and I'll tell you all about it later.”

They ate in the kitchen, sitting facing each other on rickety metal chairs at a bistro table, the rudimentary furniture he had kept when he
and Ana separated, a throwback to the kitchenette in the studio flat they had rented for three years in Paris a lifetime ago. They talked in low voices, calmly, confidingly, about trivial and serious matters, and for two hours the silence was banished by the babble stirred up by cigarettes and alcohol.

At times the air of melancholy made them sigh, robbed them of speech as they dithered over what they were trying to express, scarcely knowing whether there was anything left to say.

At other times they laughed over some shared memory, some ludicrous case they'd had to deal with at work, those situations when people are no more than jesters in the tragedy of their lives, clowns watching their own downfall.

At about 2.00 a.m., Vilar stood up, rubbing his back, and suggested they move into the living room and have one for the road. Sucking his cheeks in, Pradeau announced that this was a fine idea, because they'd suffered enough for one day. He grabbed the back of his chair and shook it, laughing.

“The fucking chairs we force hairy thugs to sit on during questioning are sheer luxury compared to these death traps. So anyway, what was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

“Morvan has disappeared. Kidnapped, it looks like. And then this,” Vilar said, cutting across Pradeau's questions and holding out the envelope. “The guy who shoved them through the letterbox called me two minutes after I got home. He couldn't have been far away. He had to be watching the building.”

Pradeau studied the photographs, his face frozen, a waxen mask in the dim light. He breathed through his nose and, in spite of himself, Vilar could hear the revulsion in every breath. He jabbed a finger at one of the images.

Vilar was sat on the other side of the chest that served as a coffee table and did not move, just studied the frozen horror on his friend's face.

“You think this is Pablo?” Pradeau said.

Vilar grimaced.

“I hope not, but I think it might be.”

“It's hard to say, you know … With the mask …”

“The guy took great pleasure in calling just after I got in. Gave me just enough time to look at them, then rang.”

“He phoned you?” Pradeau's voice choked “He phoned you … !”

He shook his head, dumbfounded. This information seemed to shock him more than the vile picture he was looking at.

“Yes, he fucking phoned me, what's wrong with you?”

Pradeau suddenly seemed to regain his composure and took a slug of whisky.

“Nothing, it's just that this guy is … I mean, for fuck's sake, why take it this far? And look, some of the faces have been deliberately blurred. He's trying to confuse you.”

He studied the photographs again as if he might discover some arcane secret.

“It's the guy who kidnapped Pablo,” Vilar said. “I'm sure it is. Remember the message on Morvan's computer: ‘I've got the boy'?”

“Give it up, Pierre. Guys like that don't do this kind of shit, you know that. But then what exactly does he have? Did he kidnap Morvan, is he holding him somewhere? What does all this mean? Besides, why the fuck would he turn up seven years later when the case is as good as dead and he's almost out of the woods? It's insane. You think maybe Morvan found a lead?”

Vilar shrugged.

“I'd be surprised. The one time he thought he'd got a lead somewhere down in Nice, he told me about it on the telephone, he didn't beat around the bush. You remember the case, four years ago? We found those twelve-year-old girls trafficked from Bulgaria. But if Morvan had any doubts about the photographs, or just wanted to tell me something, he'd get me to come over. And like I told you the other day, he sounded strange on the telephone. I had the impression he wasn't alone and he was trying to warn me.”

“Trying to tell you not to come? But why? I mean he needed help. You think this other guy laid a trap for you? Does that make sense?”

Vilar stood up, walked as far as the rolled-down blinds, then turned.

“I don't know,” he said, almost in a whisper. “All I know is that this guy knows what happened to my son and I'm going to find him and make him talk, even if I have to cut him into little pieces.”

Pradeau looked up at him and Vilar held his gaze.

“I'll be there to hand you the knife,” Pradeau said, breaking the silence. “In the meantime, we've got to tell Daras. We'll put a team on it. Don't you worry, we'll catch this fucker.”

He poured them both another shot of whisky, lit a cigarette, coughed, took a swig for medicinal purposes. Vilar came over and sniffed the contents of his glass. He screwed up his face and set the glass down again.