Don't Turn Out the Lights

by Bernard Minier

  To Servaz the word sounded somewhat suspicious. Cured … The language of shrinks and doctors. He didn’t trust any of them. He looked at the white plain, wondering when this snowy season would end. And suddenly he understood that this icy plain was the reflection of his brain: something inside him had frozen after Marianne’s death. His soul was waiting for a thaw; his soul was waiting for the spring.

  * * *

  The Cactus was not the sort of bar you would find in a guidebook, but it had a loyal clientele who chose to go there the way cats decide to live in a particular place. And it had a story. It had been built by the previous owner, an indomitable man who chose who he wanted to frequent his establishment, any hour of the day or night: whores, trannies, yobs – and cops. In a neighbourhood that wasn’t particularly fond of the police.

  Upon his death he had left the bar and its legacy to his employee, and since then the patronne – who wrote poetry when the mood took her – steered her ship with a steady but gentle hand, knowing that those who came on board also did so for her sake.

  Desgranges was sitting in his usual place, with a big glass of beer in front of him. Servaz felt a few gazes upon him as he sat down, friendly as a polar bear’s: he knew that the police could also discriminate against their own kind, that they would treat those who cracked like pariahs. He noticed, too, that nothing had changed: the same old faces perched in the same spots.

  ‘You’re looking good,’ said the policeman soberly.

  ‘I spend my time sweeping dead leaves, doing sport and resting…’

  A chuckle reached him from across the table.

  ‘This business with the key came along at just the right time, it looks like. It’s good to see you, Martin.’

  Servaz did not respond to the expression of affection. It was pointless. ‘And how are you doing?’ he asked instead.

  ‘Not bad, not bad. I’ve been assigned to Gambling. You want to hear my latest adventure? A gallodrome…’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘The Maracaña of cock-fighting, old man. In Le Ginestous, among the Rom … A ring with terraces for spectators, a treatment room for injured fowl, another one that’s air-conditioned for the bloody birds before they enter the arena. They even had fucking moving walkways, like in a gym, that worked with a washing-machine motor, so the champions could exercise their little claws. They were not in a good way, the champions, when we found them … It was downright foul, forgive the pun. Bloody bastards…’

  Servaz recalled reading about it in the paper.

  ‘To the health of cops who fly to the rescue of cocks,’ he said, raising his glass.

  ‘And who fly at their abusive handlers,’ added Desgranges.

  ‘Do you still keep a copy of all your cases?’ asked Servaz.

  Desgranges nodded. He reached for the cardboard folder next to him.

  ‘You’re in luck. They could have given it to someone else. I had a look at it before coming … Martin, have you any idea how many dodgy suicides there have been over recent years in Toulouse? You know as well as I do how fine the boundary is between suicide and crime in this city.’

  Desgranges had lowered his voice. Servaz nodded: he knew what his former colleague was referring to. The 1980s and 90s. The darkest pages in the city’s history. ‘Suicide’ was the word that had shown up inexplicably time and again in autopsy reports. The list was as long as a day during Ramadan: young women who disappeared between their workplace and their home, prostitutes whose murders in windowless Toulouse hotel rooms were never solved, botched autopsies, slapdash instructions, more cases dismissed than you could count, others filed away without follow-up, crazy rumours about corrupt policemen and magistrates, prostitution and drug networks involving celebrities, ultra-violent S&M parties, sex, porn, violence, murders … In all, over one hundred unsolved cases between 1986 and 1998 had fallen under the jurisdiction of the Toulouse county court alone. Murders written off as suicide. The individuals implicated had been cleared, but the suspicion still hovered, nauseating and indelible. It was as if behind each pink brick city wall, behind each doorway in the sun there was a wall, a doorway, of shadow.

  ‘When gathering facts, before concluding that it was suicide, the cops who were first on the scene initially thought it was a murder, given the very unusual circumstances. Consequently they placed a number of things under seal, and among these was…’

  Desgranges reached into the cardboard folder and took out a pink notebook.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A diary.’

  ‘Why do you have it?’

  ‘When I wanted to restore the belongings to the family, I called Célia’s parents. They came to get them. I gave them everything except this.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just in case … I was intending to get beneath the surface a bit more but, when they proved it was a suicide, I dropped it.’

  ‘But you still kept the diary.’

  ‘Yes. I wanted to check something, and then I no longer had the time.’

  ‘What did you want to check?’

  ‘I told you: I only had time to start nosing about a little before they concluded it was suicide. It only took me a few hours to identify all the names in here. All except for one: Moki.’

  ‘Moki?’

  ‘Yeah. All the others were Célia’s friends, colleagues and relatives. Except this one.’

  Their gazes met: Servaz was on the alert. How many cases like this one, sleeping in cardboard boxes, kept their secrets locked forever in the pages of a forgotten case file? He tasted longing in his mouth.

  ‘Well! It’s been ages,’ said the patronne, standing above him. ‘Back from the dead?’ He wondered if even she was in the know. Did he have the depressive’s mark of infamy on his forehead? But her pretty smile was full of warmth. He realised that he had missed a lot of things here; he ordered a steak and salad.

  Desgrange’s podgy fingers turned the pages of the notebook.

  ‘Here. Look.’

  He spun the diary around in front of Servaz and read, ‘Moki, 16.30’, ‘Moki, 15.00’, ‘Moki, 17.00’, ‘Moki, 18.00’ …

  ‘Are you sure it’s a person?’

  Desgranges raised his eyebrows.

  ‘What else could it be? In any case, none of Célia’s acquaintances was able to tell me who it was.’

  ‘And that’s all?’

  Desgranges smiled. ‘What did you expect?’

  ‘Have you got a theory?’

  ‘A married man,’ answered Desgranges immediately. ‘The times indicated are typical for an affair. That must be the nickname she gave him. One thing is certain: the guy never turned up. Which also supports the theory of a married man.’

  ‘It could be anything,’ said Servaz. ‘A place, a bar, a fashionable new sport—’

  ‘There’s something else.’

  A fleeting thought crossed Servaz’s mind: he hadn’t felt this alive in a long time. Desgranges took a receipt out of the folder and slid it across the table.

  ‘Not long before committing suicide, Célia bought a few things that were … of a rather particular nature.’

  Servaz leaned closer. A receipt. The Toulouse gunsmith. He read: Guardian Angel, defence bomb, pepper cartridges … Apparently, Célia Jablonka had wanted to protect herself, not commit suicide.

  He narrowed his eyes to read the date on the receipt: roughly two weeks before her suicide.

  ‘That’s strange, for someone who wanted to end their life, don’t you think?’ he said.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Desgranges, doubtfully. ‘Who knows what goes on in people’s heads? If depressive people behaved logically, we would understand them better.’

  ‘It does give the impression, all the same, that she was afraid of something.’

  ‘That is indeed the impression it gives.’ Desgranges stabbed his fork in his salad. ‘But it’s still only an impression.’

  Servaz got the message. In every investigation there were always elements that looked meaning
ful and then turned out to have nothing to do with the case.

  In the long run an investigation was like deciphering a new alphabet: some words were more important than others but at the start you had no way of knowing which these were.

  Suddenly Desgranges frowned.

  ‘This business with the key, it bothers me. Do you think that the person who sent it to you knows something?’

  ‘Maybe they just want us to reopen the investigation somehow. But there’s another question: how did they get the key?’

  ‘By staying at the hotel,’ said Desgranges.

  ‘Exactly. Do you think they keep a list of people who have lost or forgotten to hand in their key?’

  ‘I’d be surprised, but it might be worth a try.’

  As soon as he left The Cactus, Servaz called another department at his former employers (who were still his former employers until further notice). Operational Documentation was a team of four people who were in charge of ‘live’ files, in other words all the files that dealt with people even remotely connected to ongoing procedures – witnesses, suspects, and so on – without waiting for them to be implicated. They cross-checked and cross-referenced facts (something investigators didn’t necessarily have the time or the wherewithal to do) between all of these files and the specialised brigades’ files. Operational Documentation was run by Lévêque, a chief brigadier who had once worked for the crime squad and had had both legs crushed in a hit and run accident. He had a limp, which got worse when it rained, and he’d been invalided out of active public service. After training at Europol, Lévêque had become a criminal analyst, in order to put his intuition and his experience to good use: he no longer had the right to investigate, but he made up for it by rummaging in other people’s investigations – and nothing gave him greater satisfaction than turning up a detail that his colleagues had missed: a name or a telephone number that came up in several unrelated cases; a green Clio spotted on the scene of an attack and then again at a hold-up …

  ‘Servaz here. How’re the legs doing in this weather?’

  ‘Pins and needles. And not just in this weather. How are you getting on? I thought I heard you were on sick leave.’

  ‘I am. I suppose I have pins and needles in my legs, too.’

  ‘You haven’t called just to talk about pins and needles.’

  ‘I’d like you to check a name for me.’

  ‘You just told me you were on sick leave.’ Silence on the line. ‘What’s the name?’

  ‘Moki. M-O-K-I.’

  ‘Moki? What’s that supposed to be: a person? A brand name? A goldfish?’

  ‘No idea. But if you can’t find anything, try associating it with “rape”, “domestic violence”, “harassment”, “threats”, and so on.’

  ‘I’ll get back to you.’

  * * *

  He had an answer within the hour:

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Are you trying to hurt my feelings? Your Moki didn’t show up anywhere. I processed the name everywhere, I associated it with everything I could think of – there’s nothing, Martin. And it came back to me: someone already asked me the same thing last year.’

  ‘I know. Thanks.’

  * * *

  She put her glass back down on the table, her gesture hesitant, like a captain drowning his sorrows in the storm while the bilges fill with brine with every roll of the ship. Drunk. By the time Christine realised, it was already too late; the alcohol had had the time to go from her stomach to her intestines and from there to her entire circulatory system.

  She turned to look out of the steamy window. While the snow had briefly stopped falling, a bitter wind was blowing, sweeping the white pavements of the allées Jean-Jaurès where cars were slowly making their way, wheels in the black tracks left by others before them.

  The Radio Five building was across the street, a Tom Thumb of brick among all the fifteen-storey blocks. Every time Christine looked over that way, she felt nauseous. She had thought the alcohol would anaesthetise her pain, but no such luck: it had just made her wearier and more disheartened.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ asked the waiter.

  She nodded and ordered a coffee, her voice unsteady. Her mind was wandering. She couldn’t focus. In the space of four days she had lost her fiancé and her job; she wondered if these losses were irrevocable.

  And in your opinion? said the little voice; didn’t it love rubbing salt in the wound. Maybe you supposed he would really like to spend his life with a crazy woman?

  As she stirred the sugar in her cup, she wondered whether it had all started with that damned letter. It was absurd, of course. Irrational. And yet she had the feeling that the cataclysm had begun at around that time. And then she saw her. Cordélia. Leaving the radio station, taking great strides from the rue Arnaud-Vidal onto the allées Jean-Jaurès.

  Mechanically, she checked her watch: two thirty-six. Christine watched Cordélia go alone up the pavement in the direction of the boulevard de Strasbourg and the Métro, four hundred metres away. She kept her eyes glued on the dark shape. She could feel the hatred burning inside her, like an onrush of bile. Keep calm; above all don’t succumb to impulses. But when the bundled-up figure was about to leave her field of vision, Christine grabbed her satchel from the next chair and got up.

  ‘How much for three beers, two cognacs and a coffee?’

  The bartender looked at her from over his glasses and hastily did the maths.

  ‘Twenty-one euros.’

  Her hand trembling, she pulled out a twenty and a five and left them on the counter.

  ‘Keep the change.’

  The wind was howling as she emerged into the cold, but the alcohol kept her warm. There were very few pedestrians. She could see Cordélia a hundred metres further on; she readjusted the shoulder strap of her satchel and began walking quickly, her gaze trained on her target; careful not to go flying in places where the slush and melted snow had frozen.

  When Cordélia reached the entrance to the Métro station – outside the former Hôtel de Paris, rebaptised Citiz Hotel – Christine was already crossing the central reservation, near the big well that overlooked the open-air atrium. She reached the top of the steps just in time to see Cordélia head down the escalator to the platform for line A. She followed in turn, down the slippery concrete then the escalator leading to the lower level. Cordélia was going through the turnstile. From where she watched, Christine could see her cheeks flushed with cold, her shameless young bitch profile, and her long slender form. Hatred and anger burned inside her. When she reached the turnstiles, she glanced down at the platform below her and saw that the intern was headed in the direction of Basso-Cambo.

  Now things were getting tricky: if she went down onto the platform right away, Cordélia might see her. She let a crowd of passengers go by. When the train pulled in two minutes later, she hurried through the turnstiles and down to the platform. As expected, Cordélia entered the train without looking behind her. Christine boarded two doors further down. She stayed by the window, hidden by a young man who was listening to Zebda full blast in his headphones, and another man in his forties who would have to choose between rapid weight loss or a bed in the operating theatre for heart surgery. Christine was aware, however, that if Cordélia was the kind who liked to look around at other passengers, she would eventually see her.

  She glanced over to where the intern was standing and what she saw reassured her.

  Totally indifferent to everything around her, the gangly girl was tapping away at great speed on her mobile. Two stations further along, she saw Cordélia put her smartphone away and move closer to the doors: Esquirol. Christine did not know where the young woman lived, but it couldn’t be in that neighbourhood. It was too expensive. Unless she still lived with her parents. The most probable theory was that she was going to meet someone. The neighbourhood was popular with the city’s young crowd.

  She suddenly wondered why s
he had decided to shadow Cordélia. She had given in to an impulse. Maybe it was time now to think about the situation she was in. The truth was she had no idea what she was doing. And she was probably acting against her better judgment. Still, when the girl got out at place Esquirol, Christine followed her.

  When Christine found herself at street level, she saw Cordélia a hundred metres ahead of her. She followed in her footsteps, keeping well behind. Cordélia went through the door to the Unic Bar. She walked over to a table where three young adults sat, a boy and two girls. They were all dressed in the same way: black clothes, silver necklaces and bracelets, Goth make-up, red or purple hair; even the boy had black pencil around his eyes.

  Christine looked around.

  Opposite the brasserie were a boulangerie-pâtisserie and a waxing salon: not the sort of place where she could hang out. If she stayed on the pavement, they would eventually notice her. The only decent lookout was a little café next to the one where Cordélia had gone in – but the risk of being noticed was even greater, because the two enclosed terraces were separated by a single transparent glass wall. Christine spun around.

  Think. She glanced cautiously in Cordélia’s direction: the young woman had draped her long black coat over the back of the chair, so she would surely be there for a while.

  Christine walked up the rue d’Alsace-Lorraine, a major shopping street, with lots of clothing boutiques. Two hundred metres further along, she went into one of the boutiques, found a winter parka with a hood as unattractive as it was warm and comfortable, and hurried to the till. Not four minutes later, she went back out with the hood pulled up over her hair, the belt tied around her waist, and her coat inside her satchel. She had chosen a colour that wouldn’t draw attention, avoiding the reds and yellows that were trendy that winter. Couldn’t you have found something uglier? said the sarcastic little voice.

  Back on the place Esquirol, she made sure Cordélia was still there, and she went into the adjacent café without removing her hood. She ordered a hot chocolate. The waiter had only just returned with her order when she saw Cordélia get up, put on her coat and kiss her companions.