by Cédric Sire
The office was at the back of the house. Fabre-Renault opened the door and asked them to have a seat.
Vauvert hesitated. He had to make sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. The wallpaper in the doctor’s office was a pink floral. The traditional psychoanalyst’s couch was there, but it also was pink. Moreover, the desk, the leather chair behind the desk, and the carpet were pink. Old sepia photographs of men and women from a bygone era—family souvenirs maybe—hung on the walls. Vauvert wondered if this was the way you would see things if you were on a mind-altering drug.
“This is where I see my patients,” the doctor said. “I’ve tried to create an atmosphere.”
“Yeah,” Vauvert responded cautiously. “It’s quite an atmosphere.”
“Make yourselves comfortable. I’ll be right back.”
Leroy did not need to be told twice and hung his long leather jacket on the coat stand. Then he lay down on the pink couch, shutting his eyes. Vauvert was so tired, he was having trouble concentrating. The fatigue would soon be a serious problem.
The doctor returned with a tray holding an old porcelain coffee pot and three large mugs. He set the tray on the desk and poured Vauvert some coffee. It appeared that Leroy had fallen asleep.
“Sugar?”
“No, thank you,” the inspector said, finally taking a seat in an armchair.
He took a sip. The coffee was strong, the way he liked it. He welcomed the warm, mellow taste in his mouth
“We really are sorry to disturb you this late at night, doctor. We are investigating a series of murders, and we think you might be able to help us shed light on certain… facts.”
“Well, I figured as much. I recognize you, you know. You’re the one who arrested the Salaville brothers last year. You were in all the papers.”
“Not just me,” Vauvert said. “A colleague of mine actually solved the case.”
“That woman with the white hair? She’s an albino, isn’t she?”
“Yes, she is,” Vauvert said, uncomfortable. “But that’s beside the point.” He glared at the doctor. “Listen, we’re running out of time. The Salavilles committed atrocities, but it’s our belief that they weren’t the only ones involved. We have reason to believe that something happened in your former hospital that started them on their murder spree. It’s absolutely essential that we understand what it was.”
Fabre-Renault nodded. He dropped four cubes of brown sugar into his coffee. He stirred with the spoon, absorbed in his thoughts.
“There’s no question that a lot of odd things did happen at Raynal.”
“The apparitions,” Vauvert said.
“The hallucinations,” the doctor corrected. “When we told the administration what was happening, everybody thought we were out of our minds. And look what they did in the end. They got rid of the hospital, simple as that. The Regional Office claimed that we were not profitable enough. What complete bullshit, if you’ll pardon my language. They’d had enough of Raynal’s reputation, that’s all. They couldn’t blame me, though. So they sent me here, as the head of the loony bin. My bosses have a mean sense of humor, to say the least. They are the craziest of all.”
He took another sip of his coffee. A film of sweat had appeared on his forehead and temples.
“Let me tell you, you see the entire spectrum of weirdness in that kind of institution. We did all we could to settle everyone down. The nurses upped the sedatives at night. Injections in the ass for the younger ones to keep them quiet. It worked, at least for a while.” He took a deep breath. “What is done is done, isn’t it? What happened in that hospital, nobody could have done a thing about it. Not I, not anyone. It just happened. Even now, I can’t explain it. No one could. And for the record, all the strangeness started well before the Salavilles were admitted.”
“We know that already,” Leroy said.
He rose from the pink couch and poured himself some coffee. Then he sat in the armchair next to Vauvert’s.
“I read the files, doctor. What we’re talking about is much more than just hallucinations or strangeness, as you call it. It is four of your patients disappearing over the course of three months. Those disappearances are similar to the abductions carried out by the Salavilles.”
Fabre-Renault winced.
“You read the files, and so what? You think you’re an expert? You weren’t there. To be blunt, gentlemen, I doubt either of you could even begin to understand what is really happening.”
Fabre-Renault’s eyes looked weary behind his enormous yellow glasses, and a vein pulsed in his forehead.
“You can tell me now,” he whispered in a voice that made his exhaustion clear. “It has started again, right? The Salavilles are dead, and yet there have been more disappearances? Is that it?”
“Yes,” Vauvert said. “That’s it, exactly. Except we’re not just talking about disappearances. Two women are already dead, and a third one has been abducted. Her time is running out. Please understand that anything you can offer us will be extremely helpful. We know there’s a connection between the Salavilles’ stay at your hospital and what they did afterward. We need to understand what that connection is. It’s extremely important. We need to find out who we are dealing with, doctor.”
“I see. And yet, I want you to know that I personally alerted the police after every one of those disappearances. I sent very specific reports to them, stressing just how serious the matter was. But—and I do hope you’ll pardon any disrespect for your fellow officers—I had to deal with a bunch of idiots. For them, it was a case of runaways. The missing girls were all nearing the end of their treatment. At that stage, patients were allowed to go home for the weekend. Usually it wasn’t a problem, except in the case of those girls. Monday morning came, and they never showed up. We tried to contact them immediately, as you can imagine, but their telephones were turned off. Their families were out of their minds with worry. They, too, filed police reports. And still, the police did nothing to investigate, do you hear me? The idiots claimed that since there were no signs of break-ins at the girls’ houses, there was no reason to worry. But do you want to know what the real reason was? It was simply that these girls were addicts, social outcasts, and the cops couldn’t have cared less. That’s why they did nothing. Not a damn thing…”
He drank more coffee. His hands were trembling.
“They were kids. They had their entire lives ahead of them. As much as I try to forget, their faces haunt me. I can remember their names as if they were still my patients. Not one of them was over twenty, can you imagine? First, there was Anne Rouquier. It happened in December, and nobody was really alarmed, because she’d already run away a few times. Then, in January, Marine Lafont and Sophie Lieber went missing, and neither of them had ever given us any trouble. The last one was in March. Her name was Christine Garnier. We did find her, as you know. She was murdered. An extraordinarily violent slaying. We had never seen anything like it.”
“Her boyfriend was accused of the murder,” Leroy said. “Mario Dupuy.”
“That poor boy had a serious drug problem. His treatment was an abysmal failure. But if you want my professional opinion, he had nothing to do with it.”
“How can you be so sure?” Vauvert asked.
“I can’t be. But that boy, he was convinced that Christine was in danger, that someone was going to hurt her. He told me so.”
“He talked to you about it? Before it happened?”
Fabre-Renault sighed and then began to explain, slowly. “I was his doctor. Our last appointment was the day before his girlfriend’s murder. Until then, Mario had always been an extremely withdrawn young man with paranoid tendencies. That’s the reason I didn’t believe a word of his story.” The old man kept folding and unfolding his hands, obviously ill at ease. “Until then, I’d never been able to get ten words out of him, which is quite understandable. It’s not easy opening up to a shrink, and this kid’s life, let me tell you, had been no picnic. His parents kicked him out of
the house when he was fifteen, and he had to fend for himself. And yet, during that one session, he talked. He poured his heart out. He admitted that he’d never abided by the rules of his treatment and that he’d continued dealing dope. He admitted all of this, as if he’d been desperate to confess. That boy was absolutely terrified. He said that the devil lived at Raynal and that Christine had been chosen as a sacrifice.”
There were a few moments of uneasy silence.
“A sacrifice?” Vauvert repeated.
“Those were his words precisely,” Fabre-Renault said. “To some sort of god that demanded a bloody meal. No, scarlet. A scarlet feast. That’s all I really understood from his story. But it makes no sense, does it?”
Vauvert exchanged a quick glance with Leroy. Then he turned to Fabre-Renault again.
“On the contrary, it makes a lot of sense. Believe me, doctor, all this is extremely important. What else did Mario Dupuy tell you?”
“Well, just that. He thought that his girlfriend was in danger and… You do know that normally I’m bound by professional confidentiality, don’t you?”
“The two people we’re talking about died three years ago,” Leroy said sharply. “This is a homicide investigation.”
“Yes, I know.”
Fabre-Renault took off his glasses and started cleaning them clumsily. He seemed to want to say certain things but hesitated. Raising his eyes to the police officers, he whispered, “You know, I’ve made my share of mistakes over the course of my career. Wrong diagnoses, poor judgment. Patients I couldn’t help who wound up swallowing a handful of sleeping pills with a fifth of whisky. It’s horrible to say, but we all make mistakes because we’re human, and we all forgive ourselves eventually, right? But what happened at Raynal, the death of that poor girl, I just can’t come up with any excuses. Mario Dupuy told me all about his fears. He cried out for help, and I didn’t believe what he was telling me. None of it made sense. I concealed my shortcomings behind that fucking professional confidentiality excuse. I told no one. The very next day, Christine Garnier died in a dreadful way, exactly the way Mario had told me it would happen. And that very night, it was his turn to end his life. He hanged himself in his holding cell. It would have been easy to believe that he was the guilty one”
“But?”
“I knew better.”
“Doctor, we’re running out of time,” Vauvert said. “Did Mario Dupuy tell you who was planning to sacrifice his girlfriend?”
“Of course he did. He was obsessed with one of my female patients. A very odd case. Mario was convinced that the woman was some sort of witch, that she had pledged Christine’s soul to the infernal forces.”
“What’s her name?” Leroy demanded. “No more beating around the bush. We need to know who that woman is!”
“Unfortunately, knowing her name won’t help you much.”
“And why’s that?” Vauvert mumbled.
“Because that person is dead. She had a fatal disease, and she was terminal during her time at Raynal.” Fabre-Renault shut his eyes and uttered her name. “Judith Saint-Clair.”
55
“Doctor, you have to explain what happened,” Vauvert insisted. We’re running out of time. Someone’s life is at stake.”
“I know, detective. You don’t understand. This whole story makes no sense. Judith Saint-Clair could never have harmed Christine Garnier or anybody else. She was so weak, she couldn’t even get out of bed.”
“And so she’s dead now?”
“She has to be.”
“You mean she didn’t die at Raynal?” Leroy said, becoming increasingly upset.
Fabre-Renault absently arranged the mugs on his desk as he framed the response in his head.
“No, she didn’t die at the hospital. She left us just before she died. As I told you, she was terminal. Her family hired an ambulance to take her home so that she could spend her last days there.”
“So, you’re not certain that she died?”
Fabre-Renault made a weary gesture.
“That was three years ago, detective. She was on her deathbed. I examined her myself.”
“That illness you’re talking about, what was it? Cancer?”
“No. She had progeria. To be precise, Judith Saint-Clair suffered from what is called Methuselah Syndrome.”
“What’s that?” Vauvert asked.
“I’m sure you’d recognize it,” the doctor responded. “Haven’t you ever seen those photos of children with old people’s faces?”
Vauvert and Leroy nodded.
“That’s it. That’s the illness. It can manifest itself in many ways, and appear at different stages of life, but everyone suffering from it has the same problem of cell and protein regeneration. Methuselah Syndrome is the most terrible form, because it is practically undetectable before the onset of symptoms, and then it is devastating once the illness has set in.”
“Judith Saint-Clair was aging in fast forward? Is that it?” Vauvert asked.
“That’s it. Although, technically, it is not actually aging, but rather cells being unable to divide normally. Yes, the result is quite the same: the patient appears to age ten times more quickly than a healthy person. In Saint-Clair’s case, the first signs of the illness appeared when she was twenty-five.”
“Is there a treatment?”
“None. The cells can’t code the proteins correctly, there’s no hope at all. The patients develop cardiovascular complications. They rarely survive more than a few years. Judith Saint-Clair was exactly thirty-one years old when she arrived at Raynal. The illness was already at an advanced stage. Her face…” He tried to come up with the right words, but obviously couldn’t find any. “She had the face of a very old woman. Old, and in very poor health. She had lost all of her hair. Watching herself die that way drove her mad with rage. She had been a beautiful young women. She had won a number of beauty pageants. She had dreams of becoming an actress.”
“So, when she started losing her looks, she couldn’t cope with it?”
“Precisely. She couldn’t stand watching her body fall apart while her brain remained perfectly lucid. She raged against the nurses and kept the blinds in her room drawn day and night.”
“It’s her,” Leroy said. “This has to be the woman we’re looking for.”
“Sounds like it to me, too,” Vauvert replied.
“You don’t understand,” the doctor said. “She can’t still be alive.”
“What if she found a cure or at least a way to slow the illness?”
“As I said, there’s no cure,” the doctor insisted.
“And yet, you admit that mysterious events took place at Raynal.”
Fabre-Renault did not know what to say. He twisted his fingers on the desk.
“Do you have this woman’s address?” Leroy asked.
“I’ve kept some of the Raynal documents on my computer. I can give you the address I have.” Fabre-Renault turned on the laptop on his desk. The screen lit up. He tapped on the keyboard, then wrote the address on a piece of paper. Leroy took it from him and got up.
“If you’ll excuse me, I have to make a few phone calls to check out some things.”
He went into the hallway to be alone, and Vauvert knew that the detective would have to tell his colleagues some very big lies in order to get information on Judith Saint-Clair.
But he had to do what he had to do.
They needed the information, as fast as they could get it.
Vauvert let out a long sigh.
“Thank you for your cooperation, doctor.”
“You’re welcome,” Fabre-Renault answered. “You really believe that she could be involved in what’s happening now?”
“Someone is reenacting a very old ritual. We’re talking about human sacrifice. It’s possible that Judith Saint-Clair is dead, as you believe. But it’s also possible, even though it seems crazy, that she’s still alive and that she has convinced herself that this ritual could save her life.”
&nbs
p; Fabre-Renault seemed lost in his own thoughts.
“Who wouldn’t dream of being healed, even by means of a pact with forces from beyond?” he said. “Saint-Clair was certainly desperate enough to believe in such things, I admit.”
“And to make other people believe it, too.”
“People like the Salavilles?”
“Exactly. If she was bedridden, as you say, she had to find disciples to carry out the crimes.”
“I follow your train of thought, detective. But all this just seems insane.”
“And yet it’s the only explanation. You never noticed some sort of special relationship between the Salaville brothers and Judith Saint-Clair?”
“I wouldn’t have noticed anything like that, I…” Fabre-Renault hesitated. Beads of sweat were forming on his forehead again. He wiped them off with a napkin he had brought in with the coffee. “I’m not sure how to say this. I avoided those two patients. I was afraid of them. That’s the truth. I did all I could to not get involved in their treatment.”
“They weren’t sedated?”
“Of course they were. Their first week, they broke a nurse’s nose because she wouldn’t bring them cigarettes. I can assure you that we had them pumped full of drugs. But the drugs were never enough. They managed to terrorize the entire staff. Animals, that’s what the Salavilles were. I know someone in my field should never say something like that, but it’s the hard truth. Claude and Roman were wild animals, impossible to control. If you think that a dying woman managed to tame them, well,” The doctor paused. “I’m not saying it’s impossible. But if it is the case, then you’re dealing with a woman in possession of an extraordinary gift.”
Vauvert tried to imagine the scene: a gravely ill woman in a secluded hospital room converting two feeble-minded beasts to her own barbaric religion.
Maybe this woman did have a gift. An extraordinary gift. Irrational, maybe, but a gift that enabled her to…
Manipulate people’s minds?
Show things that weren’t real?