The Circle

by Bernard Minier

  ‘None,’ he said again. ‘No guarantee. Everything depends on whether I believe you or not. Everything depends on me, Élisabeth. But you don’t have much choice, anyway, do you?’

  She looked at him with a brief flash of anger and hatred. She must have said that sentence so often that, even coming from someone else’s lips, she recognised it. The words of someone with the upper hand. Now the roles were reversed, and she was cruelly aware of it. She had been in his place when she ran the Wargnier Institute with Dr Xavier – threatening and cajoling her patients, making them see just what they had to win or to lose, telling them exactly what he had just told her: that everything depended on her.

  ‘Unlike you, I have not had any news from Julian Hirtmann,’ she replied, and he could sense a frustration and sadness in her voice that were not feigned. ‘He hasn’t tried to get back in touch. I’ve waited a long time for a sign. Something … You know as well as I do that there is nothing easier than to get a message to a prisoner. But it has never happened. I do, however, have some information that might interest you.’

  He held her gaze, all his senses on the alert.

  ‘Computer once a week and access to the daily papers, we agree on that?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Someone came here before you, someone who wanted to know exactly the same thing. And, oddly enough, she came by today.’

  ‘Who was it?’ he asked.

  She flashed him a vicious smile. He got up.

  ‘Anyway, all I have to do is ask the director,’ he said.

  ‘Fine. Sit down and I’ll tell you. But don’t forget your promise.’

  He had someone else to see. In the juvenile wing. It was perfectly illegal, and he knew it. But Servaz had his contacts at the prison, and the director would not be informed about this meeting. That was why he had asked the magistrate for permission to question Lisa Ferney: to gain access to the prison.

  Walking along the corridors, he thought about what she had just told him. Someone had been there before him. Someone he hadn’t seen in a long time. Once again he saw himself in the avalanche.

  The guard unlocked the door and Servaz gave a start. Good Lord! The hollow cheeks, the red-rimmed eyes, the desperate gaze. He knew Hugo had been placed in an individual cell, but suddenly he was frightened for him. If Marianne saw her son in this state, she would be terrified.

  Servaz went back out and pulled the door behind him.

  ‘I want him under special surveillance,’ he said to the guard. ‘Remove his belt, his shoelaces, everything. I’m afraid he might do something stupid. This kid will be getting out of here soon. It’s only a question of time.’

  He thought again about what Lisa Ferney had said: ‘Last week there was a girl who hanged herself. It was her seventh attempt … And yet they left her alone, with no surveillance.’

  The guard simply smiled at him.

  ‘Fuck, do I make myself clear?’ said Servaz.

  The guard gave him an indifferent look, then nodded. Servaz told himself he would have a word with the director before leaving, then he went into the cell.

  ‘Hello, Hugo.’

  No answer.

  Just as he had done with Élisabeth Ferney, he pulled up a chair and sat down.

  ‘Hugo,’ he began, ‘I’m really sorry about … this.’ He made a gesture that took in the room and everything around it. ‘I did everything I could to persuade the judge to let you go, but the accusations are too serious … at least, for the time being.’

  Hugo stared at his hands. Servaz looked at the boy’s nails: so bitten they were bleeding.

  ‘There is some new evidence … there’s a good chance you won’t be here very much longer.’

  ‘Get me out of here!’

  His scream took Martin by surprise. Hugo’s eyes were pleading, full of tears, his lips trembling.

  ‘Get me out of here, please.’

  Yes, he thought. Don’t worry. I’m going to get you out of here. But you have to be strong, kid.

  ‘Listen to me,’ said Servaz. ‘You have to trust me. I’m going to help you get out of here, but you have to help me, too. I have absolutely no right to be here: you’ve been indicted, and only the magistrates are allowed to talk to you, in the presence of your lawyer. I could be severely punished for this. But there is new evidence. So the judge will be obliged to reconsider his position. Do you understand?’

  ‘What new evidence?’

  ‘Do you know Paul Lacaze?’

  Servaz saw his eyelids flicker. He hadn’t been an investigator for fifteen years for nothing.

  ‘You know him, don’t you? Don’t you?’

  Hugo stared again at his gnawed fingers.

  ‘Shit, Hugo!’

  ‘Yes, I know him.’

  Servaz waited in silence for him to continue.

  ‘I know he was seeing Claire …’

  ‘He was seeing her?’

  ‘They had an affair … the top-secret kind. Lacaze is married, and he’s deputy mayor of Marsac. But how did you find out?’

  ‘We found his e-mails on Claire’s computer.’

  This time, Servaz detected no reaction. Apparently, Hugo was not surprised. So perhaps he was not the one who had emptied out the mailbox.

  Servaz leaned across the table.

  ‘Paul Lacaze had a top-secret affair with Claire Diemar. An affair no one was aware of, you said so yourself. So why do you know about it?’

  ‘She told me.’

  Servaz stared at him, stunned.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Claire told me everything.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘Because we were lovers.’

  Servaz continued to stare at him as he took in the news.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking. I’m seventeen years old and she was thirty-two. But we were in love … She met Paul Lacaze before me. She had decided to break up with him. He was really in love with her. And jealous. He had suspected for some time that she had someone else. She was afraid he’d blow a fuse, that he’d cause a scandal when he found out she was having an affair with one of her students – especially an under-age one. On the other hand, given his own situation, his hands were tied. He couldn’t let it get out in the open.’

  ‘How long had it been going on?’ asked Servaz.

  ‘For a few months. In the beginning, what I told you was true: we would talk about literature, she was interested in what I was writing, she really believed in my talent and she wanted to encourage me. She invited me over for coffee from time to time. She knew it would get all the gossips’ tongues wagging, but she didn’t care: Claire was like that – she was free, she was above all that. She didn’t give a damn what other people thought. And then, gradually, we fell in love. It’s strange, because she wasn’t my type at all, to start with. But … I had never met anyone like her before.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell the magistrate, or me?’

  Hugo stared at him, his eyes round.

  ‘Are you joking? Surely you know that would’ve made me look even more suspicious!’

  He was right.

  ‘Do you think Paul Lacaze knew about Claire and you? Think carefully. It’s important.’

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Hugo again, sadly. ‘To be honest, I don’t know. She promised me she would tell him everything. We’d had a long talk about it. I was fed up with the situation; I didn’t want her to see him any more. But honestly, I don’t think she ever told him. She kept putting it off, she always found some reason to postpone it … I think she was afraid of his reaction.’

  Servaz thought about Claire Diemar’s passionate e-mails, her declarations of eternal love to Thomas999. He thought about all the cigarette stubs in the woods, the shadowy figure leaving the pub after Hugo, the kid’s statement to the effect that he had passed out and woken up in Claire’s living room. Maybe Paul Lacaze didn’t need anyone to tell him anything, after all. Maybe he already knew.

  Out in the prison car par
k, the heat struck him like an uppercut. The sun hung like a lamp in an egg-white sky and he felt as if he couldn’t get enough air. He opened all the doors of the Cherokee to try and cool down the furnace inside the car. On his left were the walls and watchtowers of the other prison, known as Muret. It was a facility for long-term detainees, unlike the remand centre he had just left, and there was not a single woman among the 600 inmates.

  There were 2,000 women imprisoned in France, spread among sixty-three of the 186 jails. Only six of them were reserved exclusively for female detainees.

  He took out his mobile and dialled a number.

  ‘Ziegler,’ said the voice on the end of the line.

  ‘I have to talk to you.’

  ‘You’re very suntanned.’

  ‘I just got back from holiday.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  He wasn’t at all interested in her reply. But not to ask would have been discourteous.

  ‘The Cyclades,’ she answered, her tone indicating that she hadn’t been taken in. ‘Sunbathing, sightseeing, diving—’

  ‘I should have called you earlier,’ he interrupted. ‘To find out how you were doing, but you know what it’s like, I’ve been … hmm … busy.’

  Her gaze wandered over the crowd on the pleasant terrace of the Basque Bar, in the shade of the trees on the place Saint-Pierre in Toulouse.

  ‘You don’t have to apologise, Martin. I could have called you, too. And what you did for me … that favourable report you wrote … They had me read it, you know,’ she lied. ‘I should have thanked you for it.’

  ‘All I did was tell them what happened.’

  ‘No. You told it from a certain point of view, in a way that exonerated me. It’s always a question of point of view. You kept your promise.’

  He shrugged, embarrassed. A waitress wove her way between the tables and set a coffee and a Perrier down before them.

  ‘How’s the new job going?’

  It was her turn to shrug.

  ‘Roadside tests, the odd fight between two drunks in a bar, burglaries, vandalism, or some guy caught selling dope outside the lycée … But now I can see how privileged I was at the crime investigation division. The station is run-down, the housing is unfit, absurd decisions are taken by superiors who are completely out of touch … Are you familiar with the syndrome of the “wriggling gendarme”?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The eggheads who oversee us have decided that the most urgent thing is to equip our offices with new chairs. The only problem is that the armrests are not set wide enough apart for gendarmes wearing a holster. As a result, all of us spend our time wriggling just to fit.’

  The image made him smile. But not for long.

  ‘You went to see Lisa Ferney yesterday,’ he said. ‘Why was that?’

  ‘I … I read in the paper that Hirtmann had been in touch with you, that he wrote you an e-mail … I …’ She was hesitating. ‘Ever since what happened in Saint-Martin, I haven’t stopped … thinking about him. Like I just told you, there’s not much excitement at the gendarmerie. So, to pass the time, I’ve been compiling as much information as I can find on Hirtmann. It’s become a sort of obsession … a sort of hobby. Like electric trains, stamp collections or butterflies, know what I mean? Except that the butterfly I dream of pinning to my board is a serial killer.’

  She took a sip of water. Servaz observed her. She still had the little tattoo on her neck – a Chinese ideogram – and a discreet piercing in her left nostril. Not really your standard-issue look for a gendarme. He couldn’t say he didn’t like it. He appreciated Irène Ziegler. He had enjoyed working with her.

  ‘You mean you collect everything that has been written or said about him?’

  ‘Yes. Something like that. I try to see how much of the information overlaps, to see where it might lead. Up to now, I haven’t had much success. It’s as if he’s disappeared from the surface of the planet. No one knows if he’s alive or dead. So when I got back from holiday and I saw he’d been in touch with you, I immediately thought of Lisa Ferney. And went to see her.’

  ‘It might be a hoax,’ he said. ‘Or a copycat.’

  She saw him hesitate.

  ‘But there’s something else,’ he added.

  She didn’t respond. She thought she knew what he was going to say, but she couldn’t tell him what she had found on his computer.

  ‘A biker who matches Hirtmann’s description, speaking with an accent that could be Swiss, was seen at a service station on the A20 motorway. The images from the surveillance camera at a tollbooth a bit further south confirmed the shop manager’s testimony. If it’s him, he was headed for Toulouse at the time.’

  ‘When was this?’ she asked, even though she already knew the answer.

  ‘Roughly two weeks ago.’

  She looked around her, as if Hirtmann might be there, somewhere in the crowd, watching them. Most of the customers were students; the terrace, with its pink brick walls, Virginia creeper and stone fountain, was just like a little square in Provence. She recalled the exact contents of the e-mail. She would have liked to tell him what she thought – but again, she couldn’t, not without confessing to him that she had hacked into his computer.

  ‘This e-mail,’ she said on the off chance. ‘Have you got a copy of it?’

  He reached into his jacket, pulled out a sheet of paper folded in four and handed it to her. She took the time to reread a text she already knew by heart.

  ‘This must have you on edge.’

  He nodded. ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘Mmm.’ She pretended to go on reading.

  ‘Is it Hirtmann or not?’

  She pretended to consider the matter.

  ‘I think it sounds like him.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I told you, I’ve spent months studying his personality, his behaviour … I don’t mean to boast, but I think I know him better than anyone. This message: it rings true, there’s something there. It’s as if I can hear his voice, the way it sounded when we were in his cell …’

  ‘Yet a woman sent it, from an Internet café in Toulouse.’

  ‘A victim or an accomplice,’ she said. ‘If he’s found a woman who’s as perverted as he is, that’s very worrying,’ she added, looking at him.

  He felt a chill, despite the heat.

  ‘You say you’re bored at your new post?’ he said with a half-smile.

  She looked right at him, clearly wondering what he meant by this.

  ‘Let’s just say that it’s hardly the reason I joined the gendarmerie.’

  He paused to think, then made up his mind.

  ‘Samira and Vincent are gathering all the information they can about Hirtmann. Except that I’ve also asked them to keep an eye on my daughter. Margot is attending school at the lycée in Marsac. Like most of the students, she’s a boarder, far away from me and her mother. So she’s an ideal target.’ He realised he had lowered his voice as he said this, as if he feared that saying things out loud might make them happen. ‘Suppose I forward you all the information we get about Hirtmann? I’d really appreciate your input.’

  He saw her face light up.

  ‘A sort of consultant, is that it?’

  ‘You said so yourself: you’ve become a specialist on Swiss serial killers,’ he confirmed with a smile.

  ‘You’re not afraid you might get in trouble?’

  ‘We don’t have to go shouting it from the rooftops. Only Vincent and Samira will be in on it, and they’re the ones who will pass on the information. I trust them. And I’m interested in your point of view. We worked well together, that winter.’

  He saw that his compliment had touched her.

  ‘Who told you I’d been to see Lisa Ferney in prison?’ she asked.

  ‘She did. I went to visit her roughly two hours after you did. Great minds—’

  ‘And what did she tell you about Hirtmann?’

  ‘That she’s had no
contact with him. You?’

  ‘The same thing. You believe her?’

  ‘She looks really depressed.’

  ‘And frustrated.’

  ‘Or she’s an excellent actress.’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘How would she behave if Hirtmann was in the neighbourhood and he’d got in touch with her?’

  ‘She would probably act as if she’d had no news from him – and she would pretend to be depressed—’

  ‘—and frustrated.’

  ‘So you think that—’

  ‘I don’t think anything. But it might be a good idea to keep an eye on her.’

  ‘I don’t see how we can,’ said Ziegler.

  ‘Go and visit her regularly. She seems to be moping. Try and get closer to her. She might let something slip. Even if it’s just to give you a little something in exchange for your visits, and to be sure that you’ll come back and see her. But don’t lose sight of the fact that she’s a narcissist, like Hirtmann, and that she’ll do whatever she can to exploit your weaknesses, to get round you, and she may only tell you what you want to hear.’

  She agreed, looking preoccupied.

  ‘I wasn’t born yesterday. Do you really think that Margot is at risk?’

  It was as if a bundle of worms were writhing in his belly.

  ‘Expressa nocent, non expressa non nocent,’ he answered.

  Then he translated: ‘“Things expressed may be prejudicial; things not expressed are not.”’

  She sped through the countryside on her Suzuki GSR600, well over the speed limit, overtaking cars that seemed glued to the road. The sun shone on lush rolling green hills, and she felt full of energy and impatience. She was in on the action again.

  Hirtmann in the area …

  It should have frightened her but in fact the challenge excited her. Like a boxer training for the fight of his life who learns that his most formidable adversary, long withdrawn from competition, is on the circuit once again. Ready to put on his gloves.

  ‘The results are in from the graphology test,’ said Espérandieu.

  Servaz was watching a woman crossing the street, backlit by the setting sun. It was a fine summer evening, but he was disappointed. When the phone had vibrated in his pocket, he had hoped it would be Marianne. He’d been waiting all day for her call.