The Circle (28 page)

He saw her eyes, how they were shining.

He knew this was not the right time, that it was the last thing he should do. The past was the past. It would not return. Not like before. Not a past like theirs. All they would accomplish would be to lay waste to their most beautiful memories, and destroy a large part of the magic they had preserved up to this day. There was still time to press ‘pause': there were a million good reasons why he should.

But it was a wave he could not stop. Marianne's fingers seemed to flow through his hair like water and for a few seconds all he saw was her face and her wide-open eyes, shining like a lake in moonlight. She kissed him on the corner of his mouth and he felt her arms slipping around him. Suddenly the silence seemed to grow denser. They kissed, looked at each other, kissed again. As if they needed reassurance that it was all real, and that it was truly what they wanted. They found the familiar gestures again, instinctively, their own particular way of offering themselves to each other: deep kisses, complete abandonment as they let themselves go, totally – whereas Alexandra had always remained on the threshold, with a reserve that betrayed her need to control, even during lovemaking. If he had been blind Servaz would have recognised Marianne's tongue, her mouth, her kisses. It was true what they had said:
their mouths had found each other.
He had known other women – after Marianne and even after Alexandra – but never again had he found such complicity, such a complementary nature. Only she could kiss him that way.

He undressed her quickly. How familiar, too, her long neck, broad shoulders, her birthmark, the tips of her breasts, the hair between
her thighs. Her narrow waist and thin arms, and her hips, fuller: their ample curve, spreading wider, and her legs as solid as an athlete's, with the same astonishingly muscular belly. He knew, too, the movement of her hips as they arched and came to meet him, the abundant wetness beneath his fingers. It was all so familiar that he realised that the memory of these sensations had been embedded, inscribed somewhere in the convolutions of his reptilian brain, simply waiting to be reborn. And he felt as if he were home at last.

Ziegler wasn't sleepy. She had gone back to her regular routine, which kept her awake every night. Her passion, her manhunt. Revising her notes on her MacBook Air after one month's holiday, during which Zuzka had obliged her to disconnect.

The photographs and press cuttings pinned to the walls of her study testified to her obsession. If the members of the unit in Paris that Servaz had contacted had been able to get into Irène Ziegler's computer, they would have been astonished by the quantity of information she had managed to amass in just a few months regarding Julian Alois Hirtmann. And maybe they would have thought she'd make an excellent colleague. Clearly Ziegler had read a great deal on the topic. In fact, she had read everything.

In the archives of the Swiss press the gendarme had found an almost inexhaustible mine of information about Hirtmann's childhood, his law studies at the University of Geneva, his career as a prosecutor, and his three-year stint at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. A Swiss reporter had questioned both close and distant relatives at length, as well as the neighbours and inhabitants of Hermance, the little town on Lake Geneva where Hirtmann had grown up. The childhood of a serial killer always contains warning signs, all the experts know this: shyness, solitude, a liking for morbid things, animals disappearing in the neighbourhood, all of it fairly typical … The journalist had discovered one element of particular interest to the investigators. When he was ten years old, Hirtmann had lost his younger brother Abel, who was eight, in circumstances that had never been clear. It happened in the middle of the summer, when he and his little brother were on holiday with their grandparents; their parents had just divorced. The grandparents had a farm, a large, typical Swiss building with a vast panorama, blue above and below, overlooking the lake of Thun in the Bernese
Oberland: behind the house was an entire alignment of glaciers, ‘like plates on a rack', in the words of Charles Ferdinand Ramuz. A veritable postcard. According to the journalist, various witnesses referred to a solitary child, who avoided others and played only with his little brother. At their grandparents', Julian and Abel were in the habit of going on long bike rides around the lake, which could last all afternoon. They would sit in the tall grass and from the top of the gentle, graceful slope of the hill, they would look at the boats criss-crossing the lake, and listen to the bells in the valley slowly chiming the hours, their joyful sound rising like kites on atmospheric currents.

One evening, however, Julian came home alone. He declared, in tears, that he and his brother had made the acquaintance of a stranger named Sebald. They had met him at the beginning of the holidays and went every day to meet him in secret. This Sebald – an adult in his forties – taught them ‘lots of stuff'. That day he had been acting strangely and irritably. When Julian told him that Abel was hiding two Basler Läckerlis in his pocket, Sebald wanted to try one. But the little brother had obstinately refused to share his biscuits. ‘What shall we do?' asked Sebald in a syrupy voice, and this had caused both of them to tremble. And when Abel, who was beginning to be afraid, had expressed his desire to go home, Sebald had ordered Julian to tie him to a tree. The young boy wanted to please the grown-up, even though he was afraid of him, so he had obeyed, in spite of his little brother's pleading. Then the man had told him to put some earth and leaves in Abel's mouth to punish him while they ate the biscuits in front of him. That was when Julian ran away, abandoning his little brother.

Immediately after they heard the story, the grandparents and their neighbours rushed to the place, but there was no trace of Abel or Sebald anywhere. In the end, Abel's body had washed up by the lake one week later. The autopsy revealed that his head had been held under water. As for the mysterious Sebald, despite an exhaustive search by the Swiss police, no trace of the man was ever found, or even any proof of his existence.

Another journalist had matched his various trips to countries bordering Switzerland with the disappearance of a certain number of young women. Several articles mentioned the three years Hirtmann had spent at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where he had had to rule, among other crimes, on cases of rape, torture
and murder committed by the armed forces – including the UN peacekeeping force.

Ziegler had compiled a list, by no means exhaustive, of the former prosecutor's ‘possible' victims in Switzerland, but also in the Dolomites, the French Alps, Bavaria and Austria, and she had noted a number of suspicious disappearances in Holland during the period Hirtmann had been living there – including that of a man in his thirties, a ferreting little journalist who, it would seem, had been onto him before anyone else had. He was undoubtedly Hirtmann's only male victim, apart from his wife's lover. The disappearance of an American tourist in the Bermudas when he was on holiday a few miles from there was also taken into account, even though the authorities had put her death down to a shark attack. At the time of his arrest, the press and the police had attributed to him forty or more cases spread over twenty-five years. Ziegler's calculations brought the figure closer to
100.
Not a single one of the victims had ever been found … If there was one domain where Hirtmann was a master, it was in knowing how to make bodies disappear.

Ziegler leaned back in her chair. For a moment she listened to the silence of the sleeping building. Eighteen months had gone by since the Swiss criminal had escaped from the Wargnier Institute. Had he killed anyone in all that time? She was willing to bet he had. How many victims should she add to the list? Would they ever know?

The dark side of Julian Alois Hirtmann had been revealed after the double murder of his wife and her lover, the judge Adalbert Berger, a colleague from the Geneva public prosecutor's office, in his house on Lake Geneva on the night of 21 June 2004. The investigation that followed led to the discovery of several binders filled with press cuttings regarding the disappearance of dozens of young women in five neighbouring countries. Hirtmann declared that he was interested in these cases for professional reasons. When this line of defence proved to be untenable, he began to manipulate the psychiatrists. Like most individuals of his ilk, he knew exactly the type of response the psychiatrists and psychologists expected from someone like him; a good number of hardened criminals are experts in the art of turning the system to their advantage. Hirtmann confessed to his jealousy on discovering that his parents loved his little brother more than they loved him, to his mother's scorn, and his father's violence and alcoholism, and even to sexually inappropriate gestures on the part of his mother.

Julian Hirtmann had stayed in several different psychiatric hospitals in Switzerland before ending up at the Wargnier Institute. That was where Servaz and Irène had met him. That was where he had escaped from, two winters earlier.

Ziegler went back to the two recent articles in the press, the one entitled ‘HIRTMANN WRITES TO POLICE' and the one that mentioned Martin's investigation in Marsac. Who was behind the leak? She thought about Martin, the state of mind he must be in. She was worried about him. They had spoken at length after the investigation in the winter of 20
0
8, and he had eventually told her about the trauma that had been haunting him since childhood. She had seen it as a great sign of trust, because she was sure he hadn't spoken to anyone about it in years. That day she had decided she would watch over him, in any way she could, even behind his back – like a sister, like a friend.

She sighed. Over these past months she had refused to allow herself to go digging into Martin's computer. The last time she had hacked into it was when the Council of Inquiry – the disciplinary board of the gendarmerie – had been handed her case by head office. In those days, she had shown an aptitude for computer hacking, which the Ministry of Defence would no doubt have found
interesting
, if they had known about it. So she had read the report Martin sent to the disciplinary board about her. It was very favourable, and emphasised her contribution to the investigation and the risks she had taken. The report recommended that the council act with clemency. As she was not meant to have read it, she had not been able to thank him.

On more than one occasion she had been tempted to obtain news of Martin this way – she knew how to hack into both his computers, the one at the Criminal Division and the one he had at home – but every time, she had decided not to. Not only out of loyalty, but also because she didn't want to stumble upon things that she might regret knowing later on.

Everyone has their secrets, everyone has something to hide, and no one is exactly what they seem.

Which held true for her as well. She wanted to preserve the image she had of Martin, the one that he had left her with: that of a man she might have found attractive if she'd been into men, a man who was caught up in his contradictions, haunted by his past, full of
anger and tenderness at the same time, whose slightest gesture or word suggested that he knew that the weight of humanity is made up of all the combined acts of every man and woman on the planet. She had never known a more melancholy man. Or a fairer one. Sometimes Ziegler found herself hoping that Martin would find someone to bring peace and a little lightness to his life. But somehow, too, she knew this would never happen.

Haunted
– that was the word that sprang to mind whenever she thought about him.

She typed something quickly on the keyboard, and this time she did not back out.
It's in your interest that I'm doing this.
Once she was in, she found her way with the dexterity of a burglar in a dark flat. She scrolled through his inbox and there it was: the e-mail that the newspaper was referring to, the e-mail he had received recently. He had transferred it to Paris, to the unit in charge of the manhunt for the Swiss killer:

She read it, and then read it again. Until she had absorbed the words. She closed her eyes, squeezed her eyelids, concentrated. Opened them
again. Then she went through the e-mails Martin had exchanged with the unit in Paris, and she gave a start: Hirtmann may have been seen on the motorway between Paris and Toulouse, on a motorbike. There was an attachment, and she hurried to open it. The picture was slightly blurred, filmed by a surveillance camera at a tollbooth: a tall man with a helmet on a Suzuki motorbike. He was leaning over to pay, his gloved hand reaching out, his face invisible beneath the helmet. Another picture followed. A tall, blond man with a little beard and sunglasses at a supermarket till. The jacket was identical; there was an eagle on the back and a little American flag on the right sleeve. Ziegler felt goosebumps rising all along her skin. Was that Hirtmann or not? There was something familiar about the way he was walking, the shape of the face … But she was wary of her eagerness to identify him; she didn't want to jump to any conclusions.