Talking to Ghosts

by Hervé Le Corre

  “Will everything be alright?” Pradeau said.

  Vilar nodded.

  “Could I have the photo please?”

  He heard the man open a drawer in the dining room and rummage around. Finally he came back and handed Vilar a photograph.

  “That one was taken three years ago.”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  Vilar walked to the front door. As he passed the living room, he glanced in at the old woman sleeping, her head resting against the back of the chair, her mouth open. He turned to the old man.

  “Don’t worry. Well, what I mean is … Just take good care of her, Monsieur Pradeau.”

  He went back to Bordeaux the way he had come, dazed by the speed, the noise and a headache. Driving through the city centre, he found it difficult to convince himself these places were familiar, that he had spent years patrolling these streets. He felt almost as if he were a stranger, a traveller who had returned after a long voyage. Out of sheer reflex, he saluted the security guard as he turned into the police station car park and, when he got out of the car, he was startled by the sound of voices, car doors slamming, tyres squealing as a squad responded to a call.

  People stared at his bloodstained shirt, his swollen face. He smiled at them to throw them off the scent, told them it was nothing. He asked after Daras and was told that she had been looking for him.

  She was in her office.

  “Close the door,” she said as soon as he appeared.

  He sat facing her and she stared at him, pretending not to notice the gashes and the lumps on his face that had now turned black or blue.

  “I’m not going to ask you what happened,” she said. “I’d rather believe you walked into a door, because you’ve been pretty distracted recently. So much so that I’ve got someone in the cells, a certain Thierry Lataste, without mentioning any names, and I have no idea what he’s doing there – is he under arrest? Is he being deported? Or is he just here to see how comfortable our cells are? And where are the notes of the interview? You go to this guy’s office, you arrest him, you drag him here single-handed, you interrogate him, you toss him in a cell, you request an arrest warrant for someone named Éric Sanz, all this without consulting with anyone? Who do you think you are? Dirty Harry? What sort of shit is this? I’ve got the juge d’instruction screaming down the phone at me because some lawyer is accusing us of arbitrary arrest and detention, I’ve got Garnaud busting my balls wanting to know where my officers are, one of whom disappeared a week ago and the other isn’t answering his phone … I mean, fucking hell! Right now, you’re going to go home and wait there until we’ve dealt with you. That’s all. You get out of here, get yourself stitched up and you don’t go around playing cops and robbers until I say you can, got it?”

  Vilar stared at her. His cheeks were flushed with anger and it gave him a healthy glow. “You want me out of here right now, or do you want to know what happened? Might help you do your job.”

  “Go on, then, spill … Jesus, you haven’t got a fag, have you?”

  He found a crumpled pack in his pocket and tossed them onto the desk.

  “You’re lucky I didn’t bleed all over them.”

  “Yeah, yeah, you’ll have me in tears in a minute … Right, so what have you got to tell me?”

  She smoked with obvious relish, inhaling deeply and blowing clouds of smoke above her head. Perhaps she was also trying to calm herself.

  Breathlessly, he told her about what had happened and what he had found out. Daras, not knowing where to stub out her cigarette, ground it under her shoe so as not to interrupt Vilar as he talked on and on, eyes fixed on her though probably without seeing her; she did not want to break the fragile silence that swooped down on every sentence as though to pin it to the ground, to stop it having its effect or even being heard. When he had finished, she said nothing, she did not move, she stared at the map of the city on the wall as though searching through that maze for some way out. After a moment, she sat back in her chair and spoke quietly.

  “What I don’t understand, what I can’t even imagine, is where Laurent is now and what the fuck he’s up to. I just hope …”

  “I’ve thought about that too. But if he has, we’ll never find the body. It would be just like him to disappear without a trace, to piss everybody off even when he’s dead.”

  “Jesus, for months he’s been keeping his brother up to date about our every move, all that so you couldn’t arrest him? There we were wondering how his aim was so bad that night he shot at the guy who attacked you in the playground. He didn’t even manage to put him out of action, remember? We were thinking of clubbing together to send him on a training course. We didn’t realise that actually, his aim had to be perfect to graze him in precisely the right place so you could testify that he’d been hit.”

  “To say nothing of making Morvan disappear. You always knew it must have taken two men to do it, and the crime scene, not a hair, not a fibre – same thing in Nadia’s studio.”

  Daras got up and leaned on the desk next to Vilar.

  “How could he? Morvan was tortured. I just can’t imagine Laurent doing something like that, it’s out of the question. And all those calls winding you up about Pablo? Shit, you guys were friends, Laurent knew the kid.”

  “I know. Maybe things got out of control.”

  “But why, for fuck’s sake? Why take all these risks, why attack you, his friend, and why bring your son into it? How can someone change so much, so quickly? There’s something between those two bastards that goes way beyond the fact they’re brothers. There’s something else. We’ll have to go through everything. Go back over their lives, now we know there’s a connection. There’s a skeleton buried somewhere.”

  “There was some officer who used hang around the high-class orgies organised by those big shots – Sandra de Melo mentioned it. I’m not sure exactly what his role in the whole thing was, it was Sanz who did the pimping. But I’m sure the officer was Pradeau.”

  “What the hell would he be doing there? Looking out for his little brother? Stopping him doing something stupid?”

  “I could imagine a little erotic game going wrong, things getting a little extreme, a girl dying.”

  “It’s pointless to speculate, that won’t get us anywhere. There’s always rumours and people shit-stirring. Besides, when did they take place, these orgies? We’d have to go back over the files of every missing girl, every unsolved murder … It would be a nightmare. And besides, there are plenty of other psychos out there – right now, we’ve got a guy running loose in the city murdering girls. He’s decapitated two, and there’s a third case we can probably pin on him … Are you really suggesting – with no proof, trusting to a hunch – that we start reopening cold cases and combing through missing persons files going back years? Besides, like I said, I can’t imagine Laurent as some psycho.”

  Vilar said nothing. He was trying to take in was she had just said, trying to gauge the scale of the investigation it would represent. He knew the past was never dead. That it dies only with memory.

  “Yes, I can see him being involved. Now I can.”

  He tried to sit up in his chair, but felt a terrible shooting pain in his side. He pulled a face, struggled to catch his breath.

  “Don’t you think you should get yourself looked at?” she said, concerned. “Do you want me to take you to Casualty? That bastard’s broken at least one of your ribs.”

  Vilar waved away the offer and got to his feet. His whole body ached and he stood motionless for a moment, waiting for the pain to subside. Daras rummaged in a desk drawer and took out a blister pack of tablets. She went to fetch a glass of water.

  “Here, take two of them. That way you’ll be able to stand up.”

  He swallowed the pills and drank some more water. He felt as though he could drink litres of the stuff.

  “Go home, get some rest, sleep if you can, I’ll call you as soon as I’ve got anything. You’re no good to anyone in that condition. You�
��ve done enough for today, don’t you think? For three months we’ve been floundering and now we know the guy’s name, we know his haunts … that’s not bad, is it? I’m going to go organise surveillance units to keep an eye on the parents’ place and the caravan, even though I don’t think either will do any good. If he takes his brother’s advice, he’s not going to fall into that sort of trap. But it may be our only hope.’

  Vilar went home, took a shower, cautiously soaping his aching body. The pills Daras had given him made it possible for him to move, to breathe without too much difficulty, but his skin burned beneath his fingers, like a touchscreen, sensitive to the slightest movement. He tried to remember where Sanz had hit him, wondering how he could have landed so many blows in such a short space of time. Or had he gone on beating him after he passed out?

  He examined the wound on his head: a two-centimetre gash which did not look particularly deep, and a large swelling. He dabbed it with Betadine, found some antiseptic powder in the bathroom cupboard and shook some over the inflamed area. Then he rubbed his bruises with an ointment that smelled of mint and camphor and remembered that Pablo, when he had to have ointment applied, loved to bring the tube to his nose, close his eyes and smell it.

  He had just managed to dress himself when the telephone rang. Of course, his heart stopped and for a moment it seemed as though it might not start up again. Of course, he made for the telephone as though nothing else existed, as though he were walking through pitch darkness along a girder suspended high in the sky.

  It was Daras.

  “The hospital just called. Sandra de Melo died an hour ago.”

  The girder swayed on its cable. Vilar had to dig deep into his chest to find the breath he lacked.

  “And the kid?”

  His voice was hoarse. He cleared his throat.

  “What?”

  “Her son, José. The little autistic boy. He was admitted to a psychiatric unit the night it happened and now … Well, it’s no place for a kid.”

  He hung up without another word. He took the photograph of Éric Sanz from his pocket and studied it, hoping for some magic revelation, some vision of the man at the wheel of a car and of where he might be right now, but all he saw was the thin face, the grey eyes smiling into the lens, looking gentle and shy, standing in front of Arcachon Bay at low tide, and here and there on the sand, glistening in the sunshine, boats large and small lying on their sides.

  23

  The barking had stopped and this only worried him more, because the dog might appear at any moment, jump at him, tug at his shirt, knock him to the ground and keep him pinned there until the police arrived. He ran straight ahead, dazzled by the sun, his weary legs straining at every little hill, his ankles twisting on the rough terrain. He stopped so he could get his bearings and work out the way to the grave. He got his breath back. He could hear nothing now, not even the roar of the tractors, or the cars passing on the road, and for a second he imagined the whole village had downed tools in order to look for him. He found the silence ominous and set off again towards the meeting point, hoping Marilou would not keep him waiting long.

  He hid in a copse of trees from which he would be able to see her arrive. Sitting on the ground, his knees drawn up to his chin, arms clasping his legs, he realised his body was beginning to give off a smell of sweat, of muck. In two or three days, he thought, he would stink, like a tramp he and his mother had passed one night outside the sports stadium; he remembered that the stench – like ripe cheese and stagnant water – had stayed with him for days. He remembered the dark figure lying motionless, remembered turning away, terrified and disgusted while his mother tried to tug him away. When he had said something to her about how the man smelled, she did not look at her son, she simply said: “That’s the smell of someone who doesn’t know if he’s dead or alive.”

  Now Victor knew what death smelled like. It smelled like his mother’s mangled body.

  He closed his eyes and began to count in his head, setting targets such that if Marilou arrived before he reached them it was a good sign, and if she arrived later it was a bad omen. He whiled away the time, frequently having to start over because Marilou had still not turned up and he could not quite bring himself to believe that such a childish ruse could influence fate.

  In the meantime, he cleaned the black crud of dust and dirt that had collected between his toes, then he wandered away from his observation post and began to collect twigs which he made into a neat pile. He cleared the whole area of brushwood and marked it out with stones he found in a hole from which an acacia tree grew. As he busied himself, he began to daydream about strange adventures. He imagined becoming a living legend, the wild boy of the forest, the boy no-one had ever found, and he thought perhaps he should head north towards the Médoc to lose himself in the forests and the swampland where noone would ever see him again.

  He was sitting in the middle of his makeshift campsite when, through the leaves, he saw Marilou’s red dress appear at the top of the hill. She stopped, picked a few grapes and set her backpack down in front of her. She shielded her eyes with her hand so that she could scan the area around the grave and as soon as she spotted Victor, she ran to him and hugged him then, taking the boy’s face in her hands, breathlessly she kissed his forehead, his cheeks, his mouth. Surprised at first, he let her, not knowing what to do with his hands, not daring to touch her, then he put his arms around her and they stood for a moment, huddled together without saying a word next to the patch of ground where Rebecca’s secret was buried.

  They went into the copse. Marilou opened the backpack and stepped away in fright as the crimson urn cast an eerie, gentle glow in the shadows where they stood, something they took to be a miracle. Then Victor crouched down, took the urn out of the bag and examined it before setting it on the ground and stroking the curved sides. A few feet away, the girl watched in frozen silence. Victor rummaged in the bag and took out two tins of pâté and some sliced bread and two big bottles of water. He opened one, clicked his tongue and took a long swig.

  At the bottom of the bag he found his knife and two packets of paper napkins. He thanked Marilou for the knife which he opened up, holding the glinting blade close to his eyes.

  “Thanks for that too,” he said gesturing to the urn.

  “I didn’t touch it. It was Julien. I couldn’t do it, it’s too weird.”

  “What’s he been up to, Julien?”

  “He’s repainting his moped. He said he’ll show it to you when you come back.”

  Victor smiled. His face took on a wistful expression. Marilou came towards him, bent down and laid a hand on his arm.

  “Where did you sleep?”

  “Over there, in the vineyards, in an old trailer.”

  “Weren’t you scared?”

  “No. Scared of what?”

  “I dunno. It’s scary in the dark. There’s animals and things … Why don’t you come back? Come back with me, it’ll be fine.”

  Victor hunched his shoulders.

  “No.”

  He stared at his feet, toying with a piece of wood. The dense foliage of the trees was no longer able to bear the weight, the sweltering heat suddenly descended on them.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t stay. I’m better off out here.”

  “What happens when it rains? And when it gets cold in winter? You can’t just become a tramp. You have to stay with us and go to school. And anyway, my parents are really fond of you, I can tell. Papa doesn’t say anything, but I know he really likes you.”

  Victor struggled to his feet and put the urn back in the bag. Then he packed the food and slipped the knife into his pocket. He could feel her tapping on his leg.

  “Hey, isn’t that him?”

  A man was walking down the hill, following a vine row, heading straight for them. He was wearing a white T-shirt and a jacket with a lot of pockets. He was walking rapidly.

  Victor carefully closed the backpack and hefted it on
to his shoulder. Marilou looked at him questioningly, waiting for him to make a decision.

  “This way.”

  They took the only path not choked with brambles and emerged between two rows of vines and ran west. Victor took the girl’s hand as she bounded along the hillocks in her leather sandals.

  “Where we going?” she said.

  Victor did not answer. He ran straight ahead, bent double, then turned onto another path that ran between two vines, dragging Marilou who gave a grunt of pain or surprise, but she said nothing, did not protest. They arrived, breathless and exhausted, at a small stone hut with a pointed slate roof and a hole in the wall like an arrow slit. On the other side gaped another opening with no door. The ground was covered in plastic sacks that had once contained sulphate and over time not only the ground but the walls had taken on a bluish tinge. From here they could see nothing save the straight rows of vines, nor could they hear anything.

  Leaning in one corner was a dented old iron hoe, eaten away by rust. Victor picked up the handle, the wood was shiny and hard, and he decided to keep it. They sat by the wall and drank some water in silence, panting hard. Their feet and their ankles were grey with dust and Marilou thought they looked like socks or leggings. She licked a finger and traced dark lines on her tanned skin. Then, since neither of them had said anything, meditating on the silence, Victor said, “He’ll never find us. He’s too dumb.”

  “Yeah, but he must have followed me to get to the grave, and he knew you were living at our house. How do you think he worked that out? He can’t be as dumb as all that.”

  “You scared?”

  Marilou shook her head.

  “We’ll be fine. It’s two against one.”

  Victor stood up.

  “Let’s go. You have to get home.”

  They set off along a path rutted with tyre tracks from the tractors. They made a long detour before turning back towards the village. They passed a bottling plant and heard the hum of machinery and the clink of bottles brought from the storehouse. They saw a forklift truck working in the yard and crouched down for fear of being spotted, small amid the dark green leaves of the vines. They crossed two roads without knowing where they led. Victor kept his bearings relative to the estuary on their right, meaning they were heading towards the village.