The Circle

by Bernard Minier

  With her heart in her throat, convinced he was going to wake up any second, she pushed back the sheet, slipped out of the bed, and took a step towards the window.

  Her heart stopped beating.

  It wasn’t possible …

  She could see a sunny clearing and the woods beyond. Like in a fairytale from her childhood, the house was all alone in the middle of a forest. She could see tall grass, poppies, yellow butterflies fluttering everywhere. Even through the window she could hear the twittering of birds welcoming the new day. All these months of hell below ground when the simplest, most beautiful life was just there, so near.

  She looked at the bedroom door beckoning irresistibly. Freedom was just beyond that door. She glanced at the bed. He was still sleeping. She took a step, and then another one, then a third, and she went around the bed and her torturer. The doorknob turned soundlessly. She couldn’t believe it. The door opened. A corridor. Narrow. Silent. Several doors to the right and to the left, but she went straight ahead, and came out in the big dining room. She instantly recognised the big wooden table, dark as a lake, and the dresser, the stereo, the big fireplace, the chandeliers, and before her eyes there were the platters of food, and the flickering candles, and in her ears there was the music, in her nostrils the smell of the food. The nausea returned. Never again … The shutters were closed, but the sun outside carved long slices of light through the slits.

  The vestibule, the front door – just there, to her right, in the shadow. She took two more steps. She could tell that the drug he had given her had not quite stopped working. It was as if she were moving through water, as if the dense air were resisting her. Her gestures were heavy and clumsy. Then she stopped. She couldn’t go out like this. Naked. She looked behind her and her belly contracted. Anything rather than go back into that room. There was a throw on the sofa. She grabbed it and draped it around her shoulders. Then she went to the front door. Like the rest of the house, it was old, made of rough wood. She lifted the latch and slid back the bolt.

  The sunlight blinded her, the birdsong burst into her areas like a clanging of cymbals, flies assailed her with their buzzing, the smell of grass and woodland hurt her nostrils, the heat caressed her skin. For a fraction of a second her head was spinning, she blinked, dazzled, breathless. She felt dizzy with the onslaught of the heat, the light, the life. But fear returned at once. She had very little time.

  There was an outbuilding on the right, a sort of former barn that was open and half collapsed, with exposed beams. Inside was a pile of old household devices, tools, a woodpile, and a car …

  She hurried towards the car, barefoot over the ground already warm with the sun. The door on the driver’s side opened with a creak and for a moment she was afraid the noise would wake him. Inside it smelled of dust, leather and motor oil. She groped about, her hand trembling, but there was no key. She searched in the glove box, beneath the seat, everywhere. In vain. She went back out. Run away. Don’t wait … She looked around her. A track suitable for motor vehicles: no, not that way. Then she saw the beginning of a vague footpath in the dappled light of the forest. Yes. She ran in that direction, and realised how weak she was and how poorly her legs responded. But hope was filling her with a new energy.

  The undergrowth was cooler but just as noisy. She ran along the path, and several times she scraped the soles of her feet on sharp pebbles or thorns, but she didn’t care. She crossed a little wooden bridge above a stream that flowed through the shade with a clear ripple. The loosely fitted planks vibrated as she ran over them.

  Then she began to suspect that something was wrong.

  On the ground, in the middle of the path, a bit further along …

  A dark object. She slowed her pace and went closer. An old cassette player playing music. She recognised it immediately, and started with horror. She had heard it hundreds of times. She sobbed. It was unfair. Infinitely cruel. Anything, but not this …

  She froze, her legs shaking. She couldn’t go on that way, nor could she go back the way she had come. On her right, there was a gully, wide and deep, with a stream flowing by at the bottom.

  She rushed to her left, climbed over an embankment and hurried along a faint path through the ferns.

  She followed the path, running breathlessly, glancing over her shoulder, but she saw no one. The undergrowth was still bursting with birdsong, and the sinister music was audible behind her, carried by the echo, like an omnipresent threat.

  She thought she had left that threat behind her when suddenly she came right up against a sign nailed to a tree trunk, where the path she was following split in two, creating a fork among the ferns. Painted on the sign was a double arrow indicating the two options available to her. Above the arrows were two words: FREEDOM on one side, DEATH on the other.

  She sobbed again. Bent down to vomit in the ferns by the edge of the path.

  She stood up straight and wiped her mouth with a corner of the throw, which, she now realised, stank of stale air and dust and death and madness. She felt like crying, like collapsing to the ground and not moving any more, but she had to do something.

  She knew it must be a trap. One of his perverse games. Death or freedom … If she chose ‘freedom’, what would happen? What sort of freedom was he offering her? Certainly not that of returning to her former life. Would he deliver her from her prison by killing her? And what if she chose ‘death’? Was it a metaphor? For what? The death of her suffering, the end of her ordeal? She rushed off in that direction: the way that sick man’s mind worked, the offer that seemed more attractive on the surface would certainly be the worst one.

  She ran another hundred metres before she saw it: a long dark shape hanging above the path.

  She slowed down again, running less quickly, then walking – and finally she stopped altogether when she realised what it was. A cat was hanging from a branch, and the string used to strangle him was so tight that it was only a matter of time before he was decapitated. A sliver of pink tongue emerged from his white mouth, and his body was as stiff as a plank.

  She had nothing left in her stomach, but she felt the urge to vomit regardless, the taste of bile in her mouth. At the same time, an icy fear went all down her spine.

  She moaned. She felt hope fading like the guttering of a dying candle. Deep down she knew that these woods and that cellar were the last places she would ever see. There was no way out. No more today than on any other day. But she still wanted to believe, just that tiny little bit.

  Was no one else out walking in this wretched forest? She suddenly wondered where she was: was she in France, or somewhere else? She knew there were countries where you could walk for hours or even days without meeting a single soul.

  She hesitated, trying to decide which way to go. Certainly not the way that madman had chosen for her, in any case.

  She rushed into the thicket and the trees, far from any trace of a path, tripping over roots and the uneven ground, which caused her bare feet to bleed. Soon she reached another stream, full of the trunks of trees felled by a recent storm. She had great difficulty making her way between them; branches as sharp as daggers tore the flesh on her calves and her toes twisted on sharp stones and pieces of dead wood.

  There was a new path on the other side. Breathless, she decided to take it. She still hoped she might run into someone, and trying to make her way through the undergrowth was too exhausting.

  I don’t want to die.

  She ran, stumbled, continued on her way.

  She was running to save her skin, her lungs were on fire and her heart about to burst, her legs grew heavier and heavier. The woods around her were getting thicker and thicker, and the air was getting hotter. The scents of the forest mingled with the smell of her own acrid sweat, which stung her eyes. She could hear the gurgling of a nearby stream. No other sound. Silence behind her.

  I don’t want to die …

  This thought filled all the free space in her mind. Abject, inhuman fear.

 
I don’t want … I don’t want … I don’t want …

  To die …

  She could feel bitter tears streaming down her cheeks. She would have killed her father and mother to get out of this nightmare.

  And suddenly her heart leapt. There was someone, there …

  She screamed.

  ‘Hey! Wait! Wait! Help! Help me!’

  The person didn’t move, but through the blur of her tears she could see them clearly. A woman. Wearing a buttoned sundress. Oddly, she was completely bald. She used every ounce of strength to reach her, but the woman still did not move. As she got closer, her blood went thick as syrup, as she began to understand.

  It wasn’t a woman.

  A plastic dummy. Leaning against a tree trunk. Frozen in an artificial pose, like in a shop window. And she recognised the dress the dummy was wearing: it was her own, the one she had been wearing the night when … except now it was splattered with red paint.

  She felt as if all her strength were abandoning her, as if someone were sucking it out of her body. She was sure he had filled this cursed forest with a host of other traps, all equally sinister. She was the rat in the labyrinth, his toy – and he was there, right nearby … She felt her legs give way beneath her as she lost consciousness.

  13

  Elvis

  Servaz parked on the lower level of the car park and headed towards the lifts. The University Hospital Centre at Rangueil rose like a fortress on top of a hill to the south of Toulouse. To reach it from the car park, which was halfway up, you had to take a lift then walk over a long footbridge hanging several metres above the trees, with an impressive view over the university buildings further down and the outskirts of the city. As was often the case, the external aesthetics had been given priority over the internal infrastructure. The hospital might employ 2,800 doctors and 10,000 staff members, and treat over 180,000 patients a year, the population of a medium-size city, but Servaz had already noticed that many services were cruelly lacking, and not only medical ones.

  He went quickly from the sole cafeteria where staff, visitors and patients in hospital gowns mingled, and down the long corridor to the inner lifts. Contemporary artwork from charitable donations tried in vain to brighten the walls: art has its limits. Servaz noticed the door to the chapel, with the chaplain’s visiting hours posted on it. He wondered how God could find his place in this world where human beings were reduced to plumbing, taken apart and put back together like an engine, and sometimes sent to the scrap heap, but not before a few spare parts had been salvaged in order to repair other engines.

  Samira was waiting for him in front of the lifts. He was tempted to light a cigarette, but his gaze landed on the no smoking sign on the wall.

  ‘Crash,’ he said, in the lift.

  ‘Huh?’ asked Samira; her gun, strapped to her waist, was attracting considerable attention.

  ‘A novel by J.G. Ballard. The marriage of surgery, mechanics, mass consumerism and desire.’

  She stared at him blankly and he shrugged. The doors opened on the next floor and they heard a voice shouting, ‘Bloody wankers, you got no right to keep me here against my will! Call that fucking doctor, I want to see him right away!’

  ‘Is that our Elvis?’ asked Servaz.

  ‘Could well be.’

  They turned right, then left. A nurse headed them off. Samira waved her warrant card.

  ‘We’re here for Elvis Konstandin Elmaz.’

  The woman’s face hardened. She pointed to a frosted glass door at the end of the corridor, just past a bed on wheels where an old man waited with a tube in his nose.

  ‘He needs to rest,’ she said sternly.

  ‘So it seems,’ said Samira ironically.

  The woman gave them a look full of scorn then walked away.

  ‘Fuckin’ hell! The pigs, all we needed!’ exclaimed Elvis when they entered the room.

  The air was warm and damp despite a fan struggling in the corner. Elvis Konstandin Elmaz was sitting bare-chested at the head of the bed. He was watching television with the sound off.

  ‘One for the money, two for the show,’ hummed Samira, swaying her hips and taking a few dance steps. ‘Hiya, Elvis.’

  Elvis took his time to inspect the female cop, and he frowned at what he saw: that day, Samira was wearing half a dozen necklaces over a T-shirt which proclaimed LEFT 4 DEAD.

  ‘Who the fuck’s this, then?’ he said to Servaz. ‘You call this a cop these days? Fuckin’ hell, what’s the world coming to!’

  ‘Elvis Elmaz?’

  ‘No, Al Pacino. What d’you want? You’re not here about my complaint.’

  ‘No, we’re not.’

  ‘Course not. Doesn’t take long to see you’re from the KFC.’

  Yobs had adopted the name of the famous fast-food chain as a nickname for the parent company – in other words the Criminal Division. Elvis Konstandin Elmaz was small and very sturdy, with a skull that was perfectly smooth, a strip of beard over his thick jaw, and a tiny cubic zirconia stud in his ear. Unless it was actually a diamond. A bandage was wrapped several times around his muscular torso, from his lower belly to his diaphragm. Another one circled his right biceps.

  ‘What happened to you?’ asked Servaz.

  ‘As if you didn’t know. I got stabbed, mate. Three times in my belly and once in my arm. It’s a miracle those fuckers didn’t kill me. “No vital organs were touched, it’s a miracle, Mr Elmaz,” so that pompous doctor said. He doesn’t want to let me out before tomorrow; he says if I move around too much it could open again. I’m no doctor, he’s the one who knows. But I’ve got pins and needles in my legs and the food here is worse than in the slammer.’

  ‘Those fuckers?’ asked Samira.

  ‘There were three of them. Serbs. In case you didn’t know, those fucking Serbs and us Albanians, not a good mix. Serbs are all scum.’

  Samira nodded. She had heard the same refrain from the other side. And she didn’t say it, but she also had a little bit of Bosnian blood in her veins, and probably Italian blood as well: her family had been around …

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘We started arguing inside the caff, and then we went out on the pavement. I’d had a few, I have to admit.’

  He looked at each of them in turn.

  ‘Except that that midget had two mates and I didn’t know. Before I could do a thing they laid into me and then cleared off. And I was lying on the pavement pissing blood. I really thought that this time I was done for. I suppose there must be a god for bad guys, too. Babe, you wouldn’t have a cigarette, would you? I’d kill my own mother for a fag.’

  Samira resisted the temptation to lean over and prod his ribs through the bandage with her index finger.

  ‘Can’t you see the sign?’ she said nastily. ‘No smoking. What was the reason for the altercation?’

  ‘Altercation … Fuck, listen to the way you talk, love! I told you: I’m Albanian, they were Serbian.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  They saw him hesitate.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘A woman, for fuck’s sake. This bird had been sniffing around me.’

  ‘Ah, she was with them?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Pretty?’

  Elvis Konstandin Elmaz’s face lit up like a Christmas tree.

  ‘Better than that! A real stunner. And classy, too. You had to wonder what she was doing with those three losers. I couldn’t help looking at her, shit. Eventually she noticed, and she came over for a chat. Maybe she wanted to annoy them, who knows? Maybe she was afraid of them, or she’d had an altercation, as you say … That’s when things got out of control.’

  ‘So you ended up in casualty last night, you were operated on during the night and you’ve been stuck here ever since?’

  A little gleam lit up his brown eyes.

  ‘What’s the big deal? You don’t give a damn about my story, do you? It’s what happened afterwards that you’re intereste
d in. Something’s happened.’

  ‘Monsieur Elmaz, you got out of prison four months ago, is that correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You have been convicted of theft, along with violence, abduction, sexual assault and rape …’

  ‘So what’s all this about? I served my time.’

  ‘Every time, it was young, pretty, brown-haired women you went after.’

  Elvis’s gaze clouded over.

  ‘What are you getting at? That was a long time ago.’ His eyes were darting back and forth. ‘What happened last night? Some woman got attacked, is that it?’

  Servaz saw a newspaper lying on the rolling table next to the bed. It took him half a second to grasp what he was seeing. And less time than that for the blood to drain from his face:

  YOUNG PROFESSOR MURDERED IN MARSAC

  Policeman who solved St-Martin case placed in charge of investigation

  Shit! He paid no further attention to Samira’s questions or Elmaz’s answers as he grabbed the paper. He turned the pages, looking for the article.

  There were only a few lines, on page 3. It explained that ‘Commandant Servaz, from the Toulouse Criminal Affairs Division, the officer who led the investigation into the Saint-Martin murders during the winter of 2008, the most significant crime in recent years in the Midi-Pyrenees region, has been entrusted with the investigation into the murder of a Marsac professor from an elite lycée in the region.’ A bit further on, the author of the article specified that the young woman had been found at home, ‘tied up and drowned in her bath’. At least the press department had not mentioned the detail of the torch – no doubt to be able to trip up all the crazies who would be calling in the hours to come. But they had handed the journalists his name on a platter. Brilliant. Servaz felt his anger welling up. He would like to get hold of the moron who had passed on the information. An involuntary leak – or had it been orchestrated? Could it have been Castaing himself?