The Circle (2 page)

The storm had broken over Marsac.

That night, as on every other night, he was sitting at his desk. He was writing a poem. His study was on the first floor of the house he had bought with his wife in the southwest of France thirty years earlier; a room with panelled oak walls, almost entirely covered with books. Primarily British and American poetry from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Coleridge, Tennyson, Robert Burns, Swinburne, Dylan Thomas, Larkin, e.e. cummings, Pound …

He knew he could never hold a candle to his personal idols, but he didn't care.

He had never shown his poetry to anyone. He was approaching the winter of his life, even autumn was behind him now. Very soon he would build a big fire in the garden and into it he would throw 150 black notebooks. All in all, more than 20,
000
poems. A poem a day for fifty-seven years. Probably the best kept secret of his life. Even his second wife had not been allowed to read them.

After all these years, he still wondered where he found his inspiration. When he looked back on his life, it was nothing but a long procession of days that always ended with a poem written in the evening in the peace of his study. He never went to bed until he had finished, sometimes at one or two o'clock in the morning, even back in the days when he had been working. He had never needed a great deal of sleep and his job was not physically demanding: English professor at the University of Marsac.

Oliver Winshaw was about to turn ninety.

He was a calm and elegant old man, known by all. When he settled in this picturesque little university town, he was immediately dubbed
l'Anglais.
This was before his compatriots had swooped down like a swarm of locusts onto everything in the region that possessed old stones to be restored, and the nickname became somewhat diluted. Now he was only one among hundreds of other Englishmen in the area. But with the economic crisis the English were heading for destinations that were more financially attractive, such as Croatia or Andalusia, and Oliver wondered whether he would live long enough to find himself once again the only Englishman in Marsac.

He paused once again.

Music
… He thought he could hear music above the regular patter of rain and the endless echoing of thunder across the sky. Obviously it couldn't be Christine, she had been asleep for a long while. Yes, it was coming from outside: classical music.

Oliver grimaced in disapproval. They must have the volume on full blast for him to hear it in his study despite the storm and the closed window. He tried to concentrate on his poem, but there was nothing for it: bloody music!

Annoyed, he looked again at the window. A lightning glow came through the blinds, and he could see the rain streaming down. The storm seemed to be concentrating its fury on this small town, cutting it off from the rest of the world.

He pushed his chair back and stood up.

He went over to the window and cracked open the blinds. The central drain was spilling over onto the cobblestones. Above the rooftops, the night was streaked with thin bolts of lightning, as if inscribed with the trace of a luminescent seismograph.

In the house across the street all the lights were on. Perhaps they were having a party? The house in question, a townhouse with a garden to one side, was protected from the street and outside observers by a high wall. A single woman lived there; she was a professor at the lycée in Marsac, the most prestigious prep school in the region. A good-looking woman, with brown hair and an elegant figure, in the prime of her thirties. From time to time Oliver spied on her discreetly when she sunbathed in her deck chair, sheltered from all eyes – except his, because her garden was visible from his study window. There was something wrong. All the lights on every floor of the four-storey house were lit. And the front door was wide open, a little lantern clearly guiding the way to the threshold.

But he couldn't see anyone in the windows.

At the side of the house, the French windows were wide open, banging in the wind, and the rain was driving at such an angle that it must be flooding the floor inside. Oliver could see it splashing on the tiles on the terrace and crushing the lawn.

That was probably where the music was coming from. He felt his pulse quicken. He looked slowly over towards the swimming pool.

Thirty feet by twenty. Sand-coloured tiles all around. A diving board.

He felt a sort of dark excitement, the kind that grabs you when something unusual has just interrupted your daily routine. And at his age, routine made up his entire life. His gaze travelled all around the swimming pool. At the end of the garden the forest of Marsac began, 2,700 hectares of woods and paths. There was no barrier on that side, not even a chain-link fence, just a compact wall of vegetation.

Oliver focused his attention on the pool. The surface seemed to be dancing slightly. He narrowed his gaze. First of all, he wondered what he was seeing. Then he realised that several dolls were bobbing on the water. Yes, that's what it was … Even though he knew it was only dolls, he felt an inexplicable shiver go through him. They were floating next to each other, their pale dresses rippling on the rain-battered surface. Oliver and his wife had been invited for coffee
once by their neighbour from across the street. His wife had been a psychologist before she retired, and she had a theory about the profusion of dolls in the home of a single woman in her thirties. When they got home she explained to her husband that their neighbour was probably a ‘woman-child', and Oliver had asked her what she meant. She had gone on to use expressions such as ‘immature', ‘evading responsibility', ‘thinking only of her own pleasure', ‘undergone an emotional trauma', and Oliver had beaten a hasty retreat from the conversation: he had always preferred poets to psychologists. But he was damned if he could fathom why there were dolls in the swimming pool.

I ought to ring the gendarmes,
he thought.
And tell them what? That there are dolls floating in a swimming pool?
But it wasn't normal. The house all lit up, no one in sight, and those dolls – where was the owner?

He opened the window. A wave of humidity came into the room. The rain beat against his face, he blinked at the strange gathering of plastic faces, with their staring eyes.

He could hear the music perfectly now. It was familiar, although it wasn't Mozart, his favourite composer.

Dammit, what the hell was going on!

A bolt of lightning severed the darkness, immediately followed by a deafening clap of thunder. The noise made the windowpanes vibrate. Like a blinding light from a projector, the lightning showed that someone was there. Someone sitting at the edge of the pool, legs dangling in the water, and Oliver hadn't noticed him because he was swallowed by the shadow of the tall tree in the middle of the garden.
A young man
… Bent over the floating tide of dolls, gazing at them. Although he was nearly fifty feet away, Oliver could make out the lost, frantic expression in the young man's eyes, and his gaping mouth.

Oliver Winshaw's chest was an echo chamber, his heart pounding like a demonic percussionist. What was going on here? He rushed over to the telephone and took the receiver from its cradle.

World Cup

‘Anelka is a loser,' said Pujol.

Vincent Espérandieu looked at his colleague and wondered whether his opinion was based on the striker's poor performance, or on his origins and the fact he came from a housing estate on the outskirts of Paris. Pujol had no fondness for council estates, and even less for their inhabitants.

For once, however, Espérandieu had to admit that Pujol was right: Anelka was useless. Worthless. Hopeless. Like the rest of the team, as it happened. This first match was a heartbreaker. Only Martin seemed not to care. Espérandieu looked over at him and smiled: he was sure his boss didn't even know the name of the manager whom all of France despised and who had been called every name in the book.

‘Domenech is one fucking coward,' said Pujol, as if he had been reading Vincent's thoughts. ‘If we made it into the final in 2006, it's because Zidane and the rest of the team took over.'

No one disputed the fact, and Pujol wove his way through the crowd to fetch another beer. The bar was packed.
11
June 2010: the opening day and first matches of the World Cup in South Africa, including the match that was on the screen at that very moment, Uruguay-France, 0-0 at half time. Vincent looked again at his boss. He had his eyes glued to the screen, but his gaze was empty. Commandant Martin Servaz was just pretending to watch the match, and his assistant knew it.

Not only was Servaz not watching the match, but he wondered what on earth he was doing there.

He'd wanted to please his team by going along with them. For weeks now there'd been talk of little else but the World Cup at the regional crime squad. What sort of condition the players were in,
the catastrophic friendlies they'd played, including a humiliating defeat against China, the selector's choices, the hotel that was expensive beyond belief: Servaz was beginning to wonder if a third world war would have aroused this much attention. Probably not. He hoped that criminals were similarly engrossed and that the crime statistics would go down all on their own without anyone having to lift a finger.

He reached for the cold beer that Pujol had just placed in front of him and raised it to his lips. On the screen, the match had started again. The little men in blue were running around with the same useless energy as before; they hurried from one end of the pitch to the other and Servaz could see absolutely no logic behind their moves. As for the strikers, he was no expert, but they seemed particularly clumsy. He had read somewhere that travel and accommodation for the team would cost the French Football Federation over one million euros, and he would have loved to know where they got their money from, and whether he himself would have to dig into his pocket. But although ordinarily his neighbours in the bar, as taxpayers, were easily riled, this question did not seem to trouble them as much as the ongoing absence of goals. Servaz tried all the same to get interested in what was happening, but there was a constant unpleasant buzzing from the television, as if it were a giant beehive. Someone had explained to him that it was the sound made by the thousands of trumpets the South African spectators had brought to the stadium. He wondered how they could produce and above all how they could stand such a racket: even at this distance, attenuated by microphones and technological filters, the sound was particularly enervating.

Suddenly the lights in the bar flickered and exclamations could be heard all around: the image on the screen shrank and disappeared then suddenly flashed back on. The storm was hovering over Toulouse like a flock of crows. Servaz gave a faint smile at the thought of everyone sitting in the dark, deprived of their football match.

His distracted thoughts veered into a familiar but dangerous zone.
Eighteen months gone by and still no sign of life from Julian Hirtmann.
Eighteen months, but not a day went by that Servaz didn't think about him. The Swiss convict had escaped from the Wargnier Institute during the winter of 2008, only a few days after Servaz had visited him in his cell. At their meeting, he had discovered to his amazement
that he and the former prosecutor from Geneva shared the same passion: the music of Gustav Mahler. And then there had been escape for Hirtmann, and for Servaz – the avalanche.

Eighteen months, he thought. Five hundred and forty days, which meant just as many nights having the same nightmare over and over.
The avalanche
… He was buried in a coffin of snow and ice, and he was beginning to run out of air, while the cold numbed his limbs … Then finally the drill making its way through, and someone furiously clearing the snow above him. A blinding light on his face, gulping fresh air by the lungful, his mouth gaping, until a face filled the open space. Hirtmann's face. He burst out laughing, and said, ‘Bye, Martin,' then filled up the hole again …

Give or take a few variations, the dream always ended the same way.

He had survived the avalanche. But in his nightmares, he died. And in a way, part of him had died up there that night.

What was Hirtmann doing at that very moment? Where was he? With a shiver Servaz pictured the snowy landscape, its incredible majesty … the dizzying summits protecting the lost valley … the building with its thick walls … locks clanging at the end of a deserted corridor … And then that door with the familiar music.

‘About time,' said Pujol next to him.

Servaz glanced distractedly at the screen. One player was leaving the pitch, another was replacing him. He gathered it was Anelka again. He looked at the upper left-hand corner of the screen: the seventy-first minute, and the score was still 0-0. Hence the tension that reigned in the bar. Next to him, a big man who must have weighed twenty stone and was sweating abundantly beneath his red beard, tapped him on the shoulder as if they were friends and blew in his face with his booze-heavy breath: ‘If I was the coach, I'd give ‘em a good kick up the arse to get ‘em moving, the wankers. What the fuck, they won't even budge for the World Cup.'

Servaz wondered if his neighbour was much in the habit of moving – apart from when he had to drag himself down here or go and fetch his six-packs at the corner shop.

He wondered why he didn't like watching sports on television. Was it because his ex-wife, Alexandra, unlike him, had never missed a match with her favourite team? They had been the kind of couple who, Servaz had suspected from day one, would not last long. In
spite of that, they got married and stuck it out for seven years. He still didn't know how they could have taken so long to realise what was so obvious: they were as mismatched as a member of the Taliban and a supermodel. What did they have left today, other than their eighteen-year-old daughter? But he was proud of his daughter. Oh yes, he was proud. Even if he still hadn't got used to her look, her body piercings and her hairstyle, it was in
his
footsteps Margot was following, not her mother's. Like him, she liked to read and like him, she had qualified for the most prestigious literary prep school in the region. Marsac. The best students went there from miles around, some from as far away as Montpellier or Bordeaux.