Talking to Ghosts (4 page)

So the policeman reeled off the questions once more, in a low voice rephrasing them, leaning over the boy like a priest taking confession.

A quarter of an hour later the doctor came back, still smiling, and found herself mired in this oppressive rhythm of murmured questions that went unanswered, and that was more uncomfortable than if noone had spoken at all. After a short while, in the same low voice, she suggested to the policeman that he stop the questioning now because the boy was tired. Reluctantly, Vilar got to his feet and said goodbye. He held out his hand to Victor and, lifting a skinny arm, the boy shook it, his hand as limp as a spray of withered flowers.

The body lay huddled at the foot of a wall, the head resting on an arm, as though asleep. It had fallen in front of a sex shop whose brash neon colours turned the faces all around into shifting, sickly masks. The dead man had his back to the police, to the onlookers, to the cars that passed, slowing in the glare of the strobing blue lights, to the pool of blood trickling across the sloping pavement into the gutter which reflected the seedy, squalid lighting. The body had not yet been covered and, under the jacket and the rucked up T-shirt, the pale skin of the man's lower back was visible. On the far side of the street passers-by hurrying towards the nearby train station lugging heavy bags and suitcases craned their heads, hoping for a glimpse of something in the scrum of police cars and the uniformed officers patrolling the crime scene.

Vilar pulled on a pair of latex gloves and crouched down in order to make out the man's features, examine the wounds and determine cause of death. He noted a shallow gash below the right ear a few millimetres wide, which had not bled significantly. Lifting away the front of the stained denim jacket, he could see only a black Johnny Hallyday T-shirt, slashed in three places across the chest and soaked in blood that had already begun to clot. There was a stab wound to the left of the sternum. Vilar moved a latex-gloved finger tentatively over the gash, then withdrew it with a sigh.

The face was that of a man of maybe twenty-five. Short dark brown hair. Three days' stubble. Delicate features. As he always did when
he examined a body, Vilar watched intently for several seconds – motionless, holding his breath – for some shudder that might indicate that the victim was not quite dead, that there was yet something to be done, but of course nothing happened. Once again he cursed the illogical stubbornness that made him
EJECT
the evidence of his own eyes, the refusal to accept the inevitable that, some years earlier in a morgue, had made him scream at the pathologist to stop just as he was about to make an incision because he thought he noticed the pale fingers trembling on the stainless steel table. The pathologist had not seemed surprised and – out of kindness or pity – had smiled and explained that it sometimes happened to him too.

Vilar was the sort of man who did not resign himself to death, who felt that it could be conquered, could be eliminated. By force of will, through memory, or by summoning ghosts.

“Kevin Labrousse, born 8 July, 1979 in Villeneuve-sur-Lot,” a voice above his head said.

An officer from the
brigade anti-criminalité
who had been first on the scene was waving a wallet and a plastic I.D. card.

“Someone found it on the street, not far away. There's some cash, forty euros, and a couple of photos, social security card, bank card, that kind of thing. We had a scout about for the knife, but we didn't find anything.”

Vilar stared at the photograph the
brigadier
was holding, but the face smiling defiantly into the camera, chin slightly raised, no longer resembled the dead man. He gently pushed the hand away, got to his feet and took a small plastic bag from his pocket, into which the officer dropped the victim's effects.

“There was someone with him, wasn't there?”

“Some friend from work. He's in shock. Over there in the ambulance.”

Vilar peeled off his gloves and walked over to the ambulance. He looked around for his partner, Laurent Pradeau, and saw him questioning a weeping girl. Two forensics officers from
l'Identité judiciaire
appeared, weighed down by their cases. As they shook hands, Vilar
racked his brain to remember their names. He had worked with them before, particularly on the Dejean case in which a girl had been doused in petrol and burned alive right outside her house, by an ex-boyfriend who couldn't bear the fact he had been dumped. Vilar could still picture the girl's body slumped against a metal door, half her face bloated and contorted, the other half charred to the bone. He felt a chill run down his spine. He remembered the arrest, too, remembered hurtling down the stairs, gun in hand, chasing a lunatic with a sword. In the lobby of the building, the ex-boyfriend tripped over a pushchair and lay, still struggling, arms flailing, spewing obscenities about the dead girl; it had taken two or three well-placed kicks to persuade him to shut up and be still. Vilar had pistol-whipped him, breaking his nose, and would have pounded his skull against the floor if the other officers had not pulled him off. Vilar could still picture the suspect sprawled on the ground, his face covered in blood, sobbing convulsively like a small child. Even now he could felt a twinge of anger, felt his heart beat a little faster at the memory of that arsehole wallowing in self pity while a team of firemen gritted their teeth as they carried away the charred body of his girlfriend. He remembered the details so clearly, it was almost physically painful: the sweltering heat of that early June morning, the exact address where it had happened and yet the names of the two forensics officers at the scene were buried in some remote corner of his brain. It didn't matter. Vilar handed the evidence bag to the younger of the two officers, who slipped the dead man's possessions into his case and asked what the story was.

Vilar sighed.

“Knife attack. Multiple stab wounds. The guy probably died instantly, or pretty much. Heart or artery. I'm going to question the victim's friend. The scene is contaminated, there's been people trampling all over it; the only thing I can say for definite is that the body hasn't been moved.”

“Right, no surprise there. Assaults on a public roads are always shit. It's not like we're going to take samples of tarmac.”

Vilar left them to deal with the body, climbed into the ambulance
and asked the paramedic comforting the witness to leave them. The man climbed down without a word and lit a cigarette. The dead man's friend, who was still shivering spasmodically, had been wrapped in one of those foil survival blankets that shimmer in the midst of a catastrophe like a silver gown at a society ball. The man was about fifty with grey, receding hair cropped close. His shirt and trousers were smeared with blood. The man's broad shoulders, stocky build and thick neck reminded Vilar of a rugby forward. He wondered just how tall the man was.

“Commandant Vilar. I just have a few questions. Would that be O.K.?”

The man nodded. He still had not looked up. Pradeau, who had followed Vilar into the ambulance, produced a wallet with a sigh. His face was drawn, his eyelids heavy. Vilar tried to meet his gaze, to see how he was holding up, but Pradeau managed to avoid him.

“His papers,” Pradeau said, nodding towards the man. “There were two guys and a girl. We've got their descriptions. The guy with the knife was tall, skinhead, earring, wearing combat trousers. The other guy …”

“What did the girl look like?” Vilar said, turning towards the witness who was shivering where he sat.

“Short, skinny, dyed red hair, wearing a black leather miniskirt and a chunky pair of Nikes.”

“Are you sure of the brand?”

The man shook his head, screwed up his face.

“Um … no, what I meant was big trainers, you know? With those thick soles.”

“What did she do?”

“She tried to intervene, tried to calm them down, told her mates to quit it, said they were off their faces. She ran off when things got out of hand. She was long gone by the time they left, just after …” He fell silent and bit his lower lip. His eyes filled with tears, which he wiped away with the back of his hand.

Pradeau patted the man on the shoulder, shooting Vilar a look that
might have been exhaustion or impatience, then quickly looked down at his pad, several pages of which were covered with scribbled notes.

“That confirms the witness statement I've got here: a girl coming out of the station heading to school, she saw the whole thing, though at first she didn't realise what was happening. The other witnesses showed up a few minutes later when the victim was on the ground, all they saw was the two guys running away. We've got cars patrolling between here, Les Capucins and La Victoire, I radioed in a rough description.”

Vilar nodded. Pradeau added that Darien, the deputy
procureur
, had just shown up and was dealing with the girl. Vilar scarcely heard, focused as he was on the man huddled beneath his foil blanket, slowly rolling between his hands the tissue he had used to wipe his eyes. He let it fall at his feet, then touched his neck gingerly with his fingertips as though afraid he had broken or dislocated something. Vilar leaned towards him.

According to his papers his name was Michel Vanini, born 1961 in Sainte-Livrade. Married with two daughters aged twenty-four and seventeen.

In a weary voice, hoarse from tiredness and probably too much drinking and smoking, Vanini explained that four of them had gone out on the town to celebrate the end of a job laying cables in the Quartier du Lac. He was the foreman. They had been supposed to head back to Agen that day, but had ended up partying at a club called the Black Jack until getting on for 3 a.m. After they left the club, the two others had gone home to bed but he and the dead man, Kevin, had decided party a little longer since this was Kevin's stag night, he was supposed to be marrying a girl called Vanessa; Vanini was distraught at the thought of how she would react. Vilar tried to distract him, asking where they had gone after the club. Vanini said they had been to a peepshow – not the one the victim had been killed outside, but one a bit further down the street on the corner of the cours de la Marne, they had only gone in for a laugh, you know, nothing sleazy, they had been working their arses off for two weeks straight, with no time off to go
home to kiss the wife and kids, nothing but a breather on Sundays, but it had meant a lot of overtime and besides it was not as though they had a choice – their boss had been clear that they either took the job or they found work elsewhere, so yeah, they'd gone to chill out, there was no harm in that.

The guy seemed to regain his confidence as he confided this, he looked up now, giving Vilar a defiant look that said hard-working labourers had a right to some downtime and searching the policeman's vague, distant expression for that shrug of approval and support that men reserve for that kind of boys' night out, probably thinking,
Hey, you know what it's like, it's O.K. to look as long as you don't touch
, and the man, who a moment earlier had been devastated by his friend's death, ventured a smile, and his heavyset rugby player's frame relaxed.

Vilar was tempted to ask whether the girl was pretty, what she had looked like, what she had done, whether Vanini thought she was younger or older than his own daughter and – while they were on the subject – whether he was planning to visit the peepshow next time he was in Bordeaux. He pictured the woman behind a pane of glass on that cramped, grubby podium and wondered whether she was Romanian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, whether by now she was sleeping, exhausted, on some filthy mattress while her pimp and the peepshow owner divvied up the cash, or whether she was already round at her dealer's, offering her services to save on the price of a fix.

This ordinary, decent labourer and his friend considered the city at night to be one big playground, they probably knew nothing – or chose to know nothing – about the sufferings of the woman they were leering at, just as, in their exhausted state, they did not expect to run into some idiot off his face on drink or drugs, ready to plunge a knife into the heart of the first passing stranger who refused to give him what he wanted because, in that moment, he could not defer gratification even by a second and, in a fit of blind rage, would stab this stranger he suddenly thought of as his enemy. To Vanini, their night on the town was like a visit to the zoo, but the cages were open, and having been
terrified that he might not make it out alive, he was now convinced the worst was over.

Vilar wanted to take him down a peg or two. The man squirmed in his seat, perhaps eager to have done with all these pointless questions.

“Tell me exactly how it happened.”

“How what happened?”

“What do you think? You think I'm looking for a detailed description of the arse of some girl at a peepshow? You don't think there's something more significant that's happened since?”

Vilar had raised his voice. Vanini took the words like a slap in the face, slumping back against the seat, his shoulders hunched.

They had been coming out of a bar, having had one for the road before going home to hit the sack. They heard a voice behind them asking for a cigarette, and, turning around, they found themselves face to face with two young guys and a girl who was totally off her face, hardly able to stand on her skinny legs in her huge trainers. After that everything was a blur. Kevin rummages through his pockets for a pack of cigarettes, the little wiry guy snatches the pack and helps himself, Kevin gets angry and tries to grab the cigarettes back, then the guy headbutts Kevin and that's when it all kicks off.

There's a fight, the girl screams, then suddenly a knife appears. The little guy lunges like it's a sword, then waves the knife around as Kevin stumbles back against the sex-shop window, clutching his chest, blood seeping between his fingers, and then he slumps slowly to the ground and the wiry little guy is still calling him a bastard and a fucker, still waving the knife, while the tall guy tries to drag him off, saying they can't hang around, that he's killed him.

Then his best friend is whimpering in his arms, the blood keeps pumping, he cannot staunch the flow, then suddenly the body feels so heavy he has to lay him down, let him go.

Vanini quietly began to cry, his face distorted by grief, he gave a sharp, muted wail and his broad shoulders shook with sobs.

Pradeau leaned towards Vilar, waiting until the man calmed down so that he could say something. With a nod, he confirmed that the
story tallied with the other witness statements, then asked Vilar to come with him.