by Fred Vargas
‘Go on,’ came Mathias’ voice.
Now his voice was coming back, he could speak more easily and compose his thoughts more clearly as he went along. But he still couldn’t say her name.
‘I worked out that Christophe didn’t actually mean to write “Sophia Siméonidis”. But what the hell did he write? He’d written Siméonidis 2, Siméonidis number 2, the double of Siméonidis. His father, in the review of “Elektra”, had written a rather odd phrase, something like “Sophia was replaced for three days by her understudy, Nathalie Domesco, whose pathetic imitation finished off the opera”: and imitation was an odd choice of word, as if the “double” was not just replacing Sophia, but imitating her, mimicking her, with hair dyed black and cut short, red lipstick, and a scarf round her neck-that’s how she did it. Sophia’s “double”. And “the double” was the nickname that Dompierre and Frémonville gave the understudy, probably to mock her, because she was overdoing it. And Christophe knew that, he knew her nickname, but not her name, and he found out-but too late-who she was, and I guessed it too, but almost too late.’
Marc looked towards Mathias who was sitting on the ground between Leguennec and another policeman. He also saw Lucien, who had taken a position standing behind the hunter-gatherer, providing him with a support to lean on, Lucien with his tie in shreds, his shirt filthy from the parapet of the well, his childlike face, his parted lips and frowning eyebrows. A closely knit group of four silent men, clearly outlined by the light from Leguennec’s torch. Mathias seemed dazed, but Mathias was listening. Marc had to go on talking.
‘Will he be OK?’ he asked.
‘He’ll be OK,’ said Leguennec. ‘He’s starting to move his feet now in his sandals.’
‘Ah, he’ll be OK, then. Mathias, did you go to see Juliette this morning?’
‘Yes,’ said Mathias.
‘And you talked to her?’
‘Yes. I’d felt warm, remember, when we were out in the street, the night when we found Lucien out there wandering about drunk? I didn’t have any clothes on, but I wasn’t cold, I felt some warmth on my back, I thought about it later. It must have been the engine of a car. I’d felt the warmth of her car, parked in front of her house. I understood then, when Gosselin was accused. But what I thought was that he’d taken his sister’s car out, the night of the murder.’
‘So you were in the shit, if you told her that. Because sooner or later, once Gosselin was exonerated, there would have to be some other explanation of why you felt warm. But when I came back to the house tonight, I knew all about her, I knew why she did it, I knew everything.’
Marc was scattering grass all round him, tearing up the little patch of ground he was sitting on.
‘Christophe Dompierre had tried to write “Siméonidis number 2” or Siméonidis’ double. Why? Georges had certainly attacked Sophia in her dressing-room and somebody benefited from that. Who? The understudy, of course, the stand-in, who would replace her on stage-in other words number 2.I remembered then … the music lessons … she was the stand-in, for years-under the name Nathalie Domesco. Only her brother knew about it, her parents thought she was doing cleaning jobs. Perhaps she was out of touch with them, or had quarrelled with them, or something. And I remembered something else, yes Mathias, Mathias who didn’t feel cold that night when Dompierre was murdered, Mathias who was standing in front of her gate, just by her car … and I remembered the police when they were digging under the tree, I could see them from my window, and they were only up to their thighs in the trench … so they didn’t dig any deeper than we did … someone else had dug after them, and had gone down deeper to the layer of black earth … and then I knew enough to plot the course of events, like Ahab with the whale, and like him I knew the route she had taken-and the one she would take.’
Juliette looked at the men posted around her in a semi-circle. She threw back her head and spat at Marc. Marc let his head fall onto his chest. The fair Juliette, with her smooth white shoulders, with her welcoming body and welcoming smile. The pale body in the moonlight, soft, round, heavy, and spraying foam. Juliette, whom he used to kiss on the forehead, the white whale, the killer whale.
Juliette spat again, at the two policemen holding her, then nothing came from her but loud hoarse breathing. Then a short cackle of laughter, then the breathing again. Marc could imagine her gaze fixed on him. He thought of Le Tonneau. How happy they had all been there … the cigarette smoke, the beers at the counter, the sound of clinking coffee cups. The veal casseroles. And how Sophia had sung just for them, that first night.
Pull up more grass. By now he had made a little pile on his left.
‘She planted the tree,’ he went on. ‘She knew that the tree would worry Sophia and that she would talk about it. Who wouldn’t be worried by it? She sent the card, supposedly from Stelios. She intercepted Sophia that Wednesday night, as she was going to the station, and brought her back to the damned restaurant with some pretext or other, I don’t know what, and I don’t care how she did it, I don’t want to hear anything from her! She probably said she’d heard from Stelios, got Sophia inside, took her to the basement, killed her, trussed her up like a side of beef, and that night she drove her to Normandy, where I’m sure she put her in the old freezer down in the cellar.’
Mathias was wringing his hands. Oh God, how he had wanted that woman, in the cosy proximity of the restaurant at night when the last customers had left, or even that very morning when he had brushed against her as he helped her tidy the house. A hundred times, he had wanted to make love to her, in the cellar, in the kitchen, in the street. He had wanted to tear off the clothes that constricted him. He wondered now what obscure prudence had somehow always held him back. He also wondered why it was that Juliette had never seemed attracted to any man.
A rasping sound made him jump.
‘Make her shut up,’ shouted Marc, still looking down at the grass.
He drew breath. There was no grass left in reach of his left hand. He shifted position. To make another pile.
‘Once Sophia had disappeared,’ he went on, in a shaky voice, ‘everyone began to get worried, and she was the first to raise the alarm. Like a loyal friend. The police were sure to dig under the tree. So they did, and found nothing there, so they filled it in again. And then everyone ended up thinking Sophia had gone off somewhere with Stelios. So the … the place was ready. Now she could really bury Sophia where nobody, not even the police, would ever look for her, because they’d already done it once. Under the tree. And nobody would be looking for Sophia any more, they all thought she’d gone swanning off to some Greek island. Her body, sealed in by a beech tree nobody would touch, would never come to light. But she needed to be able to bury her unobserved, without any nosy neighbours around-without us there to see.’
Marc stopped again. It was taking him so long to tell all this. It seemed to him he wasn’t telling things in the right order, the proper sensible way. Well, the proper sensible account would have to come later.
‘She took us all off to Normandy. And that night, she got into her car, with her frozen bundle, and drove back to rue Chasle. Relivaux was away, and we like complete nitwits, were sleeping peacefully in her country cottage, a hunded kilometres away! Then she did her disgusting job, and buried Sophia under the beech tree. She’s a strong woman. In the early morning, she came back to the cottage, on tiptoe …’
Thank goodness. He’d got past the worst bit. The bit about Sophia being buried under the tree. He needn’t pull up any more grass now. It was passing. And this was Sophia’s grass anyway.
He got up and walked about slowly, wrapping the blanket around him with his left hand. Lucien thought he looked like a Sioux with his dark straight hair damp from the water and his blanket over his shoulders. He walked to and fro, without going near her, turning without letting his eyes move in her direction.
‘So she wasn’t best pleased after that, to see this niece turn up with the little one. She hadn’t expected it. Alexandra had
arranged to meet her aunt, and she didn’t accept that she had just disappeared into thin air. Alexandra was determined and headstrong, the police took it up, and they started looking for Sophia again. It was impossible and risky to try to recover the corpse from under the tree. This time she would have to produce a body, to halt the investigation before the cops started digging up the entire neighbourhood. So the woman who went to find poor old Louise under the Pont d’Austerlitz, that was her. She dragged Louise off to Maisons-Alfort and set fire to her!’Marc was shouting again. He forced himself to take deep breaths from down in his stomach, and started again. Of course, she had Sophia’s little travelling bag. She put the gold rings on Louise’s fingers, put the bag beside her in the car and started the fire. A very big fire. Because there had to be no sign left of Louise’s identity, and the police mustn’t be able to tell which day she died. It was an inferno but she knew that the basalt would survive. And the basalt would point straight to Sophia. It would talk.’
Suddenly Juliette began to scream. Marc stood still and blocked his ears, the left with his hand, the right with his shoulder. He could hear only snatches of what she was screaming: basalt, Sophia, filth, deserved to die, Elektra, fucking critics, singing, nobody, Elektra …
‘Make her shut up!’ Marc shouted. ‘Make her shut up, take her away, I can’t stand to hear her any longer.’
There were more noises, more spitting sounds and the footsteps of the policemen who, at a sign from Leguennec, were leading her away. When Marc gathered that Juliette was no longer there, he let his arms fall. Now he could look at anything he liked, his eyes were free. She had gone.
‘Yes. She did sing,’ he said, ‘but only as a stand-in, an understudy, a second-best, and she couldn’t bear it, she needed her big break. She was mortally jealous of Sophia. So she pushed her luck, she got her poor benighted brother to attack Sophia, so that she would be able to take her place on stage, a simple idea.’
‘What about the attempted rape?’ said Leguennec.
‘The attempted rape? Well, that must have been something his sister told him to do as well, to make the attack look more convincing. The attempted rape was really nothing of the sort.’
Marc stopped speaking, and went over to Mathias, examined him, nodded and went on walking round, with long, unnatural paces, and his arm still hanging down. He wondered whether Mathias found the police blanket scratchy, as he did. Probably not. Mathias was not the sort of person to make a fuss about scratchy wool. He wondered how it was he could go on talking like this, when his head was hurting so much, when he felt so sick, how he could both know all this and tell them about it? How was it? It was because he had been quite unable to swallow the story that Sophia had killed anyone. That had to be the wrong conclusion, he was sure of that, it was an impossibility. And that meant going back to the beginning, looking at all the evidence again. If it wasn’t Sophia, it had to be someone else, there had to be another history of how things had happened. And that history was what he had been telling himself in bits and pieces earlier that day, little bit by bit, working out the path of the whale, its instincts, its desires … By the Saint-Michel fountain … its favourite haunts, its feeding grounds … By the Denfert-Rochereau Lion, that comes down from its plinth at night … the lion that walks by night, that does lion-type things without anyone seeing it, the bronze lion, like her, coming back and lying down on its pedestal in the morning, turning back into a statue once more, stable, reassuring, far from any suspicion … back in the morning on her pedestal, back behind the counter, as usual, smiling, but without having any real affection for anyone, no little pang of the heart, no, not even for Mathias, nothing … But at night, it was a different story; at night, he knew her route now, now that he was on her back. Hanging on like Ahab, gripping the back of the whale that had taken his leg.
‘Let me see that arm,’ whispered Leguennec.
‘Leave him be, for Christ’s sake,’ said Vandoosler.
‘She only sang for three nights,’ Marc said, ‘after her brother had made sure Sophia went to hospital. But the critics either ignored her or, which was worse, two of them, Dompierre and Frémonville, demolished her quite definitively. After that, Sophia changed understudies. It was all over for Nathalie Domesco. She had to give up opera, give up singing, and her fury and pride, and I don’t know what other emotions, stayed with her. After that, she just lived to take her revenge on those who had broken her career: she was intelligent, she was musical, she was mad, beautiful, and demonic, she looked so beautiful on her pedestal-like a statue, untouchable.’
‘Let me see that arm,’ Leguennec was saying again.
Marc shook his head.
‘She waited a year, so that people would have forgotten about “Elektra,” then months later, in cold blood, she killed the two critics who had massacred her. And to get Sophia, she waited fourteen years. She wanted a long time to pass, so that the murder of the two critics would be forgotten and no link found. And she waited, perhaps savouring the wait-I don’t know. But she followed her, and observed her, from the house she had bought close by, a few years later. Perhaps she even persuaded the previous owner to sell it to her, yes, it’s quite possible. She didn’t leave things to chance. She had let her hair grow back to its natural colour, which was blonde, changed her hairstyle, the years passed, and Sophia didn’t recognise her, any more than she recognised Georges. There wasn’t much risk. Top singers hardly know their understudies, and as for the extras …’
Leguennec had taken firm hold of Marc’s right arm without asking him again, and was putting on some powerful-smelling antiseptic. Marc let him do it; he couldn’t feel the arm any more.
Vandoosler was watching him. He would have liked to interrupt and ask questions, but he knew one shouldn’t interrupt Marc at a time like this. You don’t wake up a sleepwalker, because apparently it will make them fall over. Whether that was true or false he didn’t know, but it was certainly true of Marc. You shouldn’t wake Marc up when he was launched, trance-like, into his research. Or he too would fall over. He knew for certain that since Marc left their house that night, he had flown like an arrow directly to the target. It was just like when he was a child, and couldn’t accept something: he would run off somewhere. And when that happened, he knew from experience that Marc could travel very quickly, and become as taut as a wire until he found what he was after. Earlier in the evening, his nephew had come into the house and picked up a couple of apples, he remembered quite well. Marc hadn’t said a word. But his intense gaze, his far-off expression, his mute violence, all that had warned him. And if he hadn’t been deep in his game of cards, he should have noticed that Marc was in the process of searching, finding and homing in on his target, that he was engaged in unpicking Juliette’s logic, uncovering it … and that he knew. And now he was telling them. Leguennec probably thought that Marc was telling them all this with incredible calm. But Vandoosler knew that this unstoppable flow, sometimes smooth, but always driven onwards like a vessel by a squally wind, had nothing to do with being calm. He was sure that by now his nephew’s thigh muscles would be feeling stiff and painful, so that they would need to be wrapped in hot towels as he had often done for him when he was a boy. Everyone else thought Marc was moving normally, but Vandoosler could tell that he was as if made of marble from his hips to his ankles. If he interrupted him, he would stay paralysed like that, and that was the reason he should be left in peace to finish, to reach harbour after this infernal mental chase. His leg muscles would only be able to relax at the end.
‘She told Georges never to say a word to Sophia, because he was in trouble too,’ Marc was saying. ‘And Georges would do whatever she said. Perhaps he was the only person she ever really loved, a bit, but I’m not even sure of that. Georges believed her. She may have told him she wanted to try again to be Sophia’s understudy. He has no imagination, he never dreamed she wanted to kill Sophia, or that she had shot the two critics. Poor old Georges, he was never in love with Sophia. That wa
s a lie, a filthy lie. And that cosy little world of Le Tonneau was built on lies. Juliette was watching Sophia; she wanted to know everything about her and become her bosom friend in the eyes of the world, and then she was going to kill her!’
He was certain of himself. It would be easy to find the evidence now, and witnesses. He looked at what Leguennec was doing. He was putting a dressing on the arm. It wasn’t a pretty sight. His legs were hurting terribly, much worse than the arm. He forced them to carry him, automatically. But he was used to that, it had happened before and he knew it was inevitable.
‘And fifteen years after “Elektra”, she laid her trap. She killed Sophia, she killed Louise, put two of Sophia’s hairs in Alexandra’s car, killed Dompierre. She pretended to protect Alexandra’s alibi for the night of the murder. In fact, of course, she had heard Lucien yelling his head off in the street at two o’clock in the morning, because she had just got back from the Hôtel du Danube after stabbing that poor guy. She was sure that the alibi for Alexandra wouldn’t hold water, and that I would be bound to realise it was a lie. So she could “admit” that Alexandra had gone out, without seeming to betray her. It was disgusting, in fact worse than disgusting.’
Marc recalled the conversation at the bar: ‘You’re very kind, Juliette.’ Not for a moment had the thought crossed his mind that Juliette was manipulating him in order to incriminate Alexandra. Yes, worse than disgusting.
‘But then suspicion fell on her brother. It was getting too close for comfort. She persuaded him to run away, so that he couldn’t give anything away under questioning. And then it was an extraordinary piece of luck for her that they found the message from the man she’d killed. She was safe! Dompierre seemed to be accusing Sophia, who was dead, but was then believed alive! It was too perfect. But I just couldn’t swallow that. Not Sophia, no, Sophia would never have done those things. And what about the tree? It didn’t explain the tree. No, I couldn’t swallow it.’