Talking to Ghosts (5 page)

“We've pretty much tracked them down,” he said. “All three are regulars in the local bars. They're always hanging around the area. Tonight they were out playing the slots and getting hammered. The two guys are Jonathan and Cédric, the girl's name is Coralie. They've got a place somewhere between Les Capucins and Saint-Michel. They were spotted coming out of a bar just behind the station. They're not criminal masterminds, just three drunken arseholes who butcher some guy who happens to be walking on the wrong side of the street… ‘on the wild side', like the man says.”

Vilar looked at him blankly.

“For fuck's sake, you've heard of Lou Reed haven't you? ‘Walk on the Wild Side'? It's a song. It's on ‘Transformer'. ”

Since he knew Pradeau was quite capable of reeling off the name of the bassist and the sound engineer, and possibly even reciting the “special thanks” in the sleeve notes, Vilar raised a hand to interrupt him.

“O.K., fine. So what about you? How are you holding up? You don't look too hot.”

“You and me both, if it comes to that. I haven't been getting much sleep lately.”

“You need to get laid once in a while.”

“I try my best, but it's not much fun out on your own, you know?”

“I know. Anyway, while we're waiting for Blue Velvet to re-form, why don't you get on with taking statements from the man and the girl. Where is she, anyway?”

Pradeau jerked his chin in her general direction.

“Over by the fire engine. She's a minor, we're looking for her parents. I didn't know you knew the classics.”

“If it's trickled down to you …”

Vilar trailed off and looked at his watch. Not far from them, an ambulance started up and pulled away. The two technicians from
l'Identité judiciaire
were stowing their gear into a van.

“I'll leave the rest to you. I need to get back to the murder over in
Bacalan. I suspect it's going to be a lot more complicated than these three cowardly fuckwits who we'll probably have tracked down by tomorrow. Give it a couple of days, and we'll have them banged up. We've got all the information we need, it should be pretty straightforward.”

“How's the boy?” Pradeau said.

Vilar shrugged.

“O.K., I think. Physically, at least …”

“Shit, a kid lying in a coma next to the rotting corpse of his mother … I can't get it out of my head. It's not as if we're not used to wading through sordid, pathetic shit, but a case like that, it's sad. It's really scraping the bottom of the cesspit.”

Vilar shrugged again. He stared at the Saint-Jean station buildings in the distance and mused about all the people waiting for a train or for someone to arrive. That simple world of reunions and clear-cut destinations. Those quiet, joyful moments.

“What does it matter what we think? Like you said, we're just here to bail out the shit. So I try not to think about whether or not a case is sad. But you're wrong, there's no bottom to this cesspit. You can always dig deeper.”

He gave Pradeau's arm a friendly thump and forced himself to smile, then walked back to his car. He noticed that they were taking away the body, now hardly more than a shapeless mound in the regulation body bag, and he looked away, fumbling in his pockets for his keys.

Before driving off, he sat for a moment, hands on the steering wheel amid the muffled clamour from outside. In the rear-view mirror he watched the procession of police officers and emergency vehicles moving off. Car doors slamming, men shaking hands or giving curt salutes. He had a metallic taste in his mouth – iron, maybe, or copper – and under his tongue he produced a little saliva which he swallowed with difficulty. Just as he pulled away the sun appeared above a rooftop, dazzling him, and he blindly groped for his sunglasses, then remembered he had left them back at the station with his cigarettes.

He turned onto the cours de la Marne, his eyes smarting, squinting
against the white light that flooded the city. He thought again about the boy, Victor, lying mute in that hospital ward, about the viscous silence that oozed from him, that invisible tar in which, in spite of his best efforts, he had become bogged down. And immediately an image of Pablo came to him and Vilar glanced in the rear-view mirror, hoping to catch a glimpse of his son's face. It was something he used to do, and he would feel stupidly happy seeing his son's little face, grave or curious, intent on his Game Boy or staring at the passers-by and the scenery, and Vilar closed his eyes and felt a painful shudder around his heart because there was no-one in the mirror, nothing but the blinding rays of the sun on the stream of cars.

“Pablo.” He spoke the name aloud as though it were a fact, or a report. Or some magical incantation. And though nothing appeared still he savoured the sound in his mouth like cool water, even if, as he drove on, it could do nothing to quench the acrid burning lump in his throat, the dull pain that crept into his jaw.

When he climbed out of the car, his back and neck stiff, he could still feel the weight of his son on his back and he reached behind him to touch his neck, slippery with sweat, hoping to brush the boy's fingers clinging there. In the lift he ran into one of the drug squad officers, Bachir, a tall thin guy with stooped shoulders, who leaned heavily against the side of the lift, rubbing his eyes with the back of a hand in the manner of a sleepy child. In a weary voice he asked how Vilar was, but he did not listen for the reply. Eyes half closed, dead on his feet, he was already standing in front of the doors, ready to step out as soon as the lift stopped.

Vilar knew by the smell of perfume in his office that Capitaine Marianne Daras, his team leader, had been looking for him, leaving this faint scent in the air and, on his desk, a fluorescent green Post-it note on a blue file, asking him to call her.
I got the autopsy report for you. Nothing new. You'll see. We've got some information on the victim too that I think warrants further investigation. We need to focus on the neighbours
.

Vilar sat down heavily and opened the file, rummaged in the drawer
for a pack of cigarettes, lit one, then stood up to open the window overlooking La Chartreuse cemetery. For a few moments he watched a dark-haired woman moving along the paths carrying a plant pot, saw her stop at a grave, her head bowed, her hair streaming in the breeze, then she stooped to clean the edge of the headstone and set the flowers down, watering them with a small bottle she took from her handbag.

Vilar felt suddenly angry with himself for spying on this unknown woman. But he was a detective, it was a reflex. He often found himself watching people in the cemetery since the move to the new police station. Back in their old building, he had watched pigeons cooing on rooftops and the windowsills, leaving their droppings everywhere on the ancient, blackened stone.

Some visitors to the cemetery walked purposefully, never hesitating over which way to go; others meandered, stopping at graves, peering at the inscriptions and then wandered off again, making several such stops before they reached their destination. Watching as they knelt or sat by the grave, ran a hand over the marble headstone, or stood for long minutes, Vilar could not help but wonder who they were visiting, whether they prayed or talked to the dead. And whether, as they left the cemetery, they promised, as he did himself, to come back soon to rest in peace forever.

Pablo was not buried in a cemetery. There was nowhere he could go to talk to his son, to bring him flowers, to kneel and weep.

Vilar went back to his desk and opened the file. The dead woman was Nadia Fournier, born 4 August, 1972 in Gardanne in the Bouchesdu-Rhône. Her father was Michel Fournier, born 3 February, 1947, in Martigues, a professor of mathematics at the University of Aix-en-Provence. In an undated photograph possibly taken during a lecture, he was dark, lean and rather forbidding. He was about forty in the picture and seemed to be staring at someone or something, or perhaps he was lost in his thoughts. Vilar studied the photograph, trying to solve the riddle posed by this inscrutable face. He shrugged and turned the page.

Nadia's mother was Souad Kaci, born 15 November, 1951 in Oran,
died 20 September, 1987 in Gardanne. Suicide, barbiturate overdose. She had been a teacher. There was nothing more about her. There was no photograph. Only a brief index card. She no longer existed. She was an abstraction. Like her daughter, she had died tragically young. And from the scant evidence available she had died alone. Though Vilar did not quite know why, he would have liked to see her face. To stare into her eyes, looking for a particular glint, a premonition? The reflection of some terrible sadness, some fatal shadow of doubt?

Stapled to the next page was a photograph of Nadia, presumably taken from a photo album or a picture frame. Seeing it, Vilar shuddered: for a moment he could not tell which dead woman he was looking at. He thought back to the swollen face of a corpse he could scarcely bring himself to look at, a face that spoke only of death, a mask so grotesque that watching the funereal zip of the regulation body bag slide home had been a relief. But he felt, although he had never known her, as though he were looking at Souad, the teacher who committed suicide.

Souad or Nadia? Her eyes spoke to him, spoke of terrible things barely relieved by a half-smile that seemed impatient or melancholy.

Nadia, Souad. Regardless of the photographs, he knew that these two women were alike. Mother, daughter. Daughter, mother. From a distance their fates seemed to merge. The father would have to talk.

Her name was Nadia Fournier. As far as her neighbours knew, she had no job apart from part-time work as a cleaner for a company called
Société Aquitaine de nettoyage industrielle
, known as S.A.N.I., based in the Bruges industrial estate near the Quartier du Lac. The rent on her house on the rue Arago was €600 a month out of a total monthly income of €800 including benefits. They would have to go through her bank statements to work out how she managed to make ends meet. Now that was what you call making a living, thought Vilar. They didn't have much to go on, and this would have to open up some leads. Probably as many paths as a jungle.

He looked back at the picture. There was something bitter about Nadia's smile, and Vilar wondered whether she had been involved in drugs or prostitution.

The autopsy report confirmed the cause of death as strangulation. None of the blows to the head or face had been fatal, though they had been brutal and had caused multiple fractures. She had been punched and kicked: there were bruises to the stomach and legs. The body had been moved
post mortem
. Toxicology came back negative for drugs. No sign of recent sexual activity. There were other tests still to come back.

Canvassing the neighbours had turned up no boyfriend and no regular visitors. Nadia lived as a recluse. She was kind and polite, she could be helpful, but she was a loner. She didn't really have a routine, but that was because she worked evening shifts, leaving when her son got home from school and coming back around 11.00 p.m. They questioned almost everyone in the street, but only five or six of her close neighbours even knew the woman they were being asked about, and none of them had much to say. A Madame Huvenne, Nadia's next-door neighbour at number 36, kept an eye on Victor when he was left home alone at night. When he was younger, she used to have him over to her house for dinner, it relieved her loneliness, she being a widow whose own children had moved away and did not seem to care. She had nothing else to add. When his mother was at work, Victor never went out to hang around with friends. She knew this for a fact. She would telephone sometimes just to make sure, something Nadia had asked her to do. The boy always answered. Said he was doing his homework, watching television, playing video games.

Victor worked hard at school, was rarely absent, and seemed to have no particular problems at what was considered a problem school. He had friends, they came to his house, he went to theirs. They even checked out a few boys with whom he had had run-ins, but it proved to be nothing more than pushing in the playground or when school was letting out. Though he was not much of a talker, Victor clearly knew how to win respect. No-one gave him any grief. His mother attended parents' evenings, she was quiet and soft-spoken, attentive and undemonstrative.

Vilar leaned back in his chair and reflexively lit another cigarette
only to stub it out as soon as he felt the sickening smoke catch in his throat. Mentally, he recapped: the crime scene showed signs of a struggle, yet there were no fingerprints. Nadia had been beaten before being strangled. One thing seemed obvious: she knew her killer. It was unlikely an intruder had crept through the garden in broad daylight, stolen fifty euros and murdered the occupant. Besides, there was no sign of forced entry.

It was possible to imagine a scenario where a neighbour came around, made a pass at this pretty dark-haired woman and refused to take no for an answer. Nadia opens the door, surprised to see him there at that hour, the man insists, forces himself on her, she screams, he lashes out then strangles her to shut her up. They would have to investigate. Every hypothesis would have to be investigated. Even the possibility that it might be a serial killer. The case would have to be cross-referenced against any open homicide cases.

Vilar found himself juggling theories that seemed to multiply like coloured balls, to slip through his fingers, rolling across the floor and disappearing under the furniture. He had no talent for juggling and he felt ridiculous here, alone in the middle of this empty circus ring.

Then there was Victor to account for. This model schoolboy did not fit any of Vilar's scenarios: by rights the kid should have been a delinquent, having been left to his own devices night after night and probably suspecting what it was his mother was really up to – she was hardly a devoted parent and had probably been on the game: O.K., that was just one more speculation, but speculation was all they had to go on right now. Victor's family life was the sort of thing that could screw up even the calmest, most well balanced child. Vilar had seen level-headed kids warped by less terrible childhoods who grew up to be vicious as pit bulls, kids who had never had to deal with murder. But not Victor. This kid did his homework. Teachers praised him at parents' evenings. He was a real role model. Did he watch wildlife documentaries at night, all alone, while his mother was out working? The boy was too good to be true. It didn't fit, it made no sense.