The Circle (47 page)

Other photos of people Servaz didn't know. He closed the box. Looked around. Followed the trail of rat turds distractedly.

The team of investigators had already searched the attic; he had read their report. They had looked for clues, any traces of the men who had attacked Elvis and fed him to the dogs. And what was he looking for? It wasn't Elvis's attackers who interested him for the moment, it was Elvis himself.

Dig in past
, the Albanian had written.

He couldn't see anything here. Just an ordinary attic. He carried on, leaving no stone unturned, for a good hour, even opening the boxes of video games and porn cassettes, wondering whether he would have to look at them …

He felt like a rat.

Like the rats that had left that trail on the floor.

The trail
…

There was one spot where it broke off, then continued a bit further along. As he stared at it, an alarm bell went off in his brain. He went over and knelt down. Peered closer. At this particular spot the floorboards were not as evenly joined as elsewhere, and the layer of dust was thinner. Servaz put his hands on the two uneven floorboards and wobbled them with his fingers. He looked for a way to get a grip on them … and found it. He pulled. The two floorboards came up. There was a hole underneath, a niche, and there was something in it. Servaz grabbed what was at the bottom of the hole and pulled it out of its hiding place.

A binder.

He opened the rigid cover and began turning the pages.
He was on to something.
He seated himself more comfortably on the dusty floor and looked at the photographs, one by one.

Diversion

You're being watched. We have to find a way to get you out without them seeing.

Margot reread the text and typed:

What for?

The answer came straight away.

Have you forgotten? It's tonight.

Tonight what? she wondered. Then she remembered.
The Circle
… The other night, in the clearing, they had talked about a meeting on the seventeenth. Elias was right: it was 17 June. Shit! She gave up texting and dialled his number directly.

‘Hey,' he said, totally relaxed.

‘Okay, then, I'm listening: have you got an idea?'

‘Yes, I have.' He explained. Margot wasn't exactly enthusiastic. Particularly when she thought about that lunatic who might be wandering about out there. But Elias was right: something was going to happen that evening. It was tonight or never.

‘Okay,' she said. ‘I'll get ready.'

She ended the call and went to get the darkest hoodie she had as well as a pair of black trousers. She looked at herself in the mirror, took a deep breath and left the room. The corridor was so silent and dark that for a moment she was tempted to go back and tell him to forget it.

In these situations, there's only one solution, babe: don't think. No ‘What if?'s, no ‘Do I want to do it?' Just go.

She hurried to the stairway and went down the wide steps, her hand running along the stone banister. Beyond the big stained-glass window the day was leaden. She heard the distant rumbling of thunder. When she was downstairs, she called him.

‘Okay, I'm ready.'

‘Don't move. Wait for my signal. Not before …'

Hiding in the woods opposite Margot, Elias had Samira Cheung in his binoculars. The cop had her eye on the lycée, but most of the time she was looking directly at Margot's window. Margot had left the window open and the bedside lamp was on. The front door she normally used was just two floors down and Samira could not miss her.

Elias put two fingers in his mouth and let out a long, strident whistle. He saw Samira turn at once in his direction.

‘Now!' he said. ‘Hurry!'

Margot rushed through the door. She immediately felt the electricity in the air, like a presentiment. The leaves were rustling, the swifts were flying and circling in every direction, agitated by the approaching storm. She bent over the way Elias had told her to, and hugged the wall as she ran to the corner of the west wing. Then she dashed to the entrance to the maze.

‘Good,' said Elias over the phone. ‘She didn't see you.'

Margot wondered if that was really reassuring. Now she was out of doors, in the open – when Vincent and Samira thought she was safe inside.

A minute later, while she was making her way through the winding paths, Elias appeared before her like a mischievous ghost, and her heart leapt.

‘Bloody fucking hell, Elias! Couldn't you say you were here?'

‘Oh, yeah? And have your bodyguard jump on top of me? I don't feel like getting attacked by some girl who looks like a member of the Addams Family. You're not watching the football?'

‘Fuck off.'

He paused for a moment. ‘Maybe their famous meeting is just about the match, after all.'

‘I'd be surprised,' she said, pushing him. ‘Move!'

A Crack of Thunder

The roof beams shuddered with a crack of thunder. Still no rain. Servaz would have heard it splashing on the tiles. He looked up. The day was drawing to a close; it was getting darker and darker in the attic. But it was only six o'clock on a June evening.

He turned his attention back to the binder.

Prints. Taken with a good-quality digital camera. Carefully classified and protected with transparent sleeves. No names, just places, dates and times. The photographer did not have a great deal of imagination. Almost all the photographs had been taken in the woods, from the same angle, and represented the same scene each time, more or less: a mature man, trousers down, copulating in the grass in the middle of the thickets. Invariably, the prints that followed showed the man getting back to his feet. Invariably, the series ended with several close-ups of the individual's face.

He went on turning the pages. The monotony of the exercise almost made him smile. The positions did not betray an overabundant imagination, either. Urgency, if anything. A quickie in the woods. Click-click. Smile, you're on camera. Servaz concentrated on the partner, the bait. On most of the prints he could see only her legs, arms and a patch of hair. He thought there were freckles on her pale skin, but it was hard to say. He was willing to bet it was the same girl every time. She seemed very young, but that too was difficult to tell because of the angle of the shot. A minor?

Servaz was already halfway through the album and he had counted a dozen different individuals, a heap of possible suspects and motives, and a pile of alibis to check. But what was the connection to Claire Diemar? One thing was for sure: it wasn't enough that Elvis was a dealer, a rapist and a bastard who sent his dogs to kill or be killed
in sordid combats, he was also a blackmailer. When all was said and done, Elvis Konstandin Elmaz was a king-size scumbag.

Then Servaz got to the last photograph but one, and his head began to spin. This time he had it, the link he was looking for. This time too, he could see the face of the accomplice.
A kid
… Not a day over seventeen. He was willing to bet she was a pupil in Marsac.

When he got to the series' penultimate victim, he contemplated the close-up of the face. He felt as if someone were tapping him on the shoulder, saying, ‘This time, we've got it.' But of course there was no one in the attic. Only him and the truth.

Ziegler tossed the cigarette butt onto the ground and was crushing it with the heel of her boot when the man came out of the building on the other side of the boulevard. She put on her helmet and straddled her Suzuki. Drissa Kanté began walking along the pavement and she waited for him to get ahead of her before easing her bike into the city traffic. He didn't go far. On boulevard Lascrosses, he turned off for the place Arnaud-Bernard. Ziegler drove slowly across the square, towards the entrance to the car park, while keeping an eye on her target, and she saw him sit down outside a bar known as l'Escale. She went down the ramp to the underground car park. She had no intention of leaving her motorcycle unattended around here. Three minutes later she was back out in the open air.

Drissa Kanté was chatting with another customer. Ziegler checked her watch, then headed for a café that was sufficiently far away from the first one.

‘Look!'

Margot raised her head. An old Ford Fiesta had just come out of the lane from the lycée and onto the road, heading towards the town.
David's car.
It went right past them and they saw Sarah next to David at the wheel, Virginie in the back. Elias turned the ignition and pulled slowly out of the drive, the bonnet pushing aside the branches that had hidden them to some degree.

‘Aren't you afraid they'll see us?'

He gave her an amused look.

‘Well, that's the risk we take. I've never done this before. But I've seen Clint Eastwood do it plenty of times; that ought to help, no?'

She gave a smile and shrugged, but deep down she felt extremely nervous.

‘I don't think they expect to be followed,' he continued reassuringly, as if he could sense it. ‘And I'm sure they're too busy discussing their famous meeting.'

‘The Circle,' she mused.

‘The Circle,' he confirmed. ‘For Christ's sake, it's like the name of one of those secret associations, like Freemasons or Rosicrucians or Skull and Bones! Do you have any idea what it might be?'

‘In the note you left me you said you knew what it was.'

‘I never said that; I wrote “I found it”.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I'll explain.' He ignored her furious glance. ‘It's a good job I'm fed up with football,' he said before concentrating on his driving. ‘Do you know the ball game the Romans played that was called
sphaeromachia
? Seneca talks about it in his letters to Lucilius.'

‘It's a butterfly,' she said.

‘What is?'

‘
Sphaeromachia gaumeri.
Are you sure they're not on their guard? The other night in the maze they almost caught us – and they know they're being spied on.'

The look he gave her was half amused, then he shrugged and turned back to the road.

Servaz went down the steps of the veranda; the air was sultrier than ever. He walked across the clearing. The Cherokee was parked a bit further along. He was nearly there when something caught his eye: a white spot, in the vegetation to his left.

He walked over and held back the branches of the bushes. It was a pale piece of cardboard on the end of a plastic stick planted in the ground. Someone – one of the crime scene technicians – had written on it: ‘
Cigarette butts
'. Servaz frowned. The butts must have gone to the lab, like the ones he had found at Claire Diemar's place, at the entrance to the woods. The same person? Someone had been spying on Claire not long before her death. Had that person done the same thing here?
A witness? Or the murderer? Who was he? What was he doing here?
The number of butts found at Claire's place were proof of the time that person had spent there. They would have his DNA soon. But Servaz doubted that it was on file.

He went slowly back to the Jeep. In the distance thunder was still rumbling, but it seemed reluctant to come any nearer. Servaz thought of a wild animal, a tiger lurking on the outskirts of the village, or one that you hear deep in the jungle, at night – waiting for the moment to attack. He drove slowly to the end of the drive, turned left in the middle of the forest draped in shadow, and headed down the long straight stretch back to Marsac.

Ziegler recalled with apprehension that there was a match on that night. She wondered whether Drissa Kanté was going to spend his evening at l'Escale watching football, like, in all probability, eighty per cent of the inhabitants of Toulouse that night – or worse still, whether he might invite a few friends home to watch the match – but then she saw him stand up, shake hands, and leave on his own.

She had already paid for her drink. She waited one minute before getting up in turn to cross the square and collect her motorcycle from the car park, beneath the appreciative gazes of the consumers and dealers.

They had driven through Marsac and now they were heading south. The Pyrenees. The wall of mountains stretched into the distance, along the entire width of the horizon and beyond the hills – like a European Himalayas. They were driving along little regional roads, going through villages, bend after bend, and Elias tried to leave some distance between them without ever completely losing sight of his quarry. He had switched on the GPS in order to have an overview of the roads and junctions ahead of time, keying in an arbitrary destination that took into account, more or less, the direction in which they were heading. When it turned out that they were actually taking more of a southwesterly direction than a southern one, he reconfigured the GPS and keyed in ‘Tarbes' as a temporary destination. He let them get further ahead when the device indicated there were no junctions for several kilometres, then accelerated to get sight of them again the moment they approached a turnoff.

Margot admired the dexterity he displayed both in driving and in his knowledge of how to tail someone. At the beginning of the year, with his hair hiding half his face and his air of always being elsewhere, she had taken him for a gentle dreamer. But Elias was full of surprises. He had never been very forthcoming about his
family, about his brothers and sisters, but she was beginning to wonder what it was that had made him so resourceful.

Resourceful … Like the time he had taken a key out of his pocket and opened the door he was not supposed to open. Or the time he had left the note inside her locker.

‘I don't know how you got my locker open, but don't ever do it again,' she said firmly.

‘Roger that.'

But his purely diplomatic tone implied that he would try again at the first opportunity.