by Michel Bussi
There was no doubt about it.
It was the ogre. The ogre of the forest.
43
He’s been snoring for the past ten hours.
Want to kill
He’s not snoring anymore. He’s sleeping on his side. His feet are a bit cold. There are traces of drool and blood on the pillowcase.
Convicted: 336
Acquitted: 341
www.want-to-kill.com
It was a bloodbath.
That wasn’t an expression, it was literally what Marianne Augresse saw in the little bathroom with peeling wallpaper. The hip bath—of the kind popular in the 1960s—had rusty taps and mouldy joints, and in the bottom of the tub was a puddle of blood, nearly two centimeters deep, the plughole blocked with hair.
It wasn’t difficult to figure out the cause: a wounded man had been lying there, he’d been put in the tub, washed and dried, which couldn’t have been easy in such an old-fashioned bath, its sides nearly a meter high.
Timo Soler, without a doubt.
Now they could be practically certain that someone had helped him. Helped him wash. Helped him dress.
Helped get him out of there, before they arrived.
Marianne would soon have confirmation of this: a dozen men were searching the one-bedroom flat on the fifth floor of the building on Rue de la Belle-Etoile. Timo and his accomplice had left in a hurry. The apartment had been left as it was, as if they’d popped out to the shops and would return any moment now with a baguette and a newspaper: a pile of clothes at the foot of the bed, dirty dishes in the sink, bowls on the table, radio playing quietly, shoes scattered in the hallway.
As if they’d be back soon.
Yeah, right! thought the captain. Soler had once again slipped through their net. Again, their attempt to catch him had ended in complete failure, even if, this time, she didn’t see how she could have done things any differently. Her men had approached Soler’s apartment with caution. They’d closed in gradually on the block, then the building, then the stairway. And yet the wounded robber had managed to flee before the first police car had even reached the area.
Why? Timo Soler had called Larochelle less than an hour before. According to the surgeon, Soler’s suffering had become unbearable, but he refused to go to hospital or even to leave his hiding place. Soler had given his address to the surgeon: he was ready to pay a lot of money—a LOT—for a discreet home visit from the doctor. So why clear off fifteen minutes later, before a single policeman had even set foot in the quarter?
Men wearing gloves sifted through the clothes on the bed. The dressing gown was completely red. Trousers, underpants, T-shirts, all covered with blood.
Had the doctor not sounded convincing on the phone? Had Timo Soler, after hanging up, suddenly become suspicious?
It was strange.
Marianne Augresse surveyed the flat with more concentration. Her eyes flickered from place to place: the tea towels hanging from a peg, the socks drying on the rack, the newspapers piled under the living room table. Something about this set-up bothered her, something that didn’t quite add up, a collection of insignificant details that, when you put them together, gave you the impression that you could view Soler’s flight—the way he was living, the way he had found to survive, hidden away and wounded all these months—in another light.
The solution was here, close by, the captain felt sure of it. But she couldn’t put her finger on the one thing that would illuminate the whole mystery.
She cursed again as she bumped into Constantini, who was casually shining the Polilight under the sofa. Was she the only one who could sense that something was not right?
That was strange too.
She became even more convinced that the answer was here, staring her in the face, like some familiar but forgotten word, nagging at your brain, on the tip of your tongue. She was looking around the kitchen again, mechanically opening the fridge, the cupboards, when her phone rang.
Lieutenant Lechevalier.
She didn’t let him speak.
“Get yourself here, JB, we need you.”
“Isn’t Papy there?”
“No, the stubborn bastard left for Potigny about an hour ago. You know, the village where the Lukowiks, Alexis, and Timo grew up? He thinks the stash is hidden there and, like an idiot, I gave him permission to go and search the place. I’m going to be reamed out for this by Judge Dumas, even if there was no way I could have known what would happen this morning. Anyway, it’s too late for Papy to come back. And the forensics boys have to do their thing now. All they need to do is search the streets of Le Havre and follow the drops of Soler’s blood.”
“Before the seagulls lick it up. Did you know they’ve become carnivores, from eating the corpses of illegal immigrants floating in the port?”
Marianne Augresse ignored this.
“Where are you?”
“Boulevard Clemenceau. We’ve just arrived at Dragonman’s flat. He was living on the twelfth floor.”
He was living . . .
The use of the past tense made a bomb explode somewhere inside her skull. A brief, intense pain. More brain cells giving up the ghost, probably. Marianne was finding it increasingly hard to keep everything separate in her mind, to concentrate simultaneously on both cases: the murder of Vasily, the escape of Timo Soler. And yet she had to keep switching between the two.
“What about the school, JB?”
“Manéglise, you mean, this morning? I don’t know how to put this, but it gave me a strange feeling.”
Marianne spoke louder.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, it just made me uneasy. You know, turning up at a school at eight-thirty, just before class starts, and standing in the playground being stared at by all those little kids as if I was some kind of pervert, when I can’t even take my own children to school because of this shitty job . . . ”
The captain sighed.
“Spare me your whining, JB! Did you find out anything there?”
“Nothing definite. Vasily Dragonman was the only school psychologist working in the northern sector of Le Havre. He was responsible for three cantons, fifty-eight communes, twenty-seven schools, and more than a thousand kids. He gave them all a test, then followed about thirty more closely because the test results suggested they were troubled.”
Despite herself, Marianne thought about the Weber case, the psychologist murdered outside his office one morning in Honfleur in 2009. He’d been seeing more than fifty patients—several hundred if you went back four or five years—from schizophrenic teenagers to frenzied alcoholics. So many potential culprits who might have killed him in a fit of insanity, for a forgotten prescription, for a secret they regretted telling him, for a meeting he’d refused to attend. Each and every one of those fifty patients whose names were in Weber’s diary had a very clear motive for killing the psychologist.
Did that hold true for Vasily too? Did he look after other problem children whose parents drank, hit them, touched them? Had he found out family secrets that were so sordid that every adult denounced by those children might want him dead?
About thirty kids, the captain repeated in her head. But Vasily had come to see her about only one of them.
She asked again.
“I’m not talking about the other schools, I’m talking about Manéglise. Tell me.”
“The headmistress struck me as being quite nice. She had a row with Dragonman yesterday, but she seemed genuinely upset by his death. She’s the one who gave me his address. He obviously kept all his files at home. He had an old laptop, but he tended to print everything: interviews, reports, prescriptions for doctors, and that’s without even mentioning the kids’ drawings, whole exercise books filled during meetings. I’m outside the building now. It’s going to take a while to go through all his stuff.”
&nb
sp; “We’ve no choice, JB. Concentrate on the file for Malone Moulin, to start with.”
Suddenly Vasily Dragonman’s hazel eyes appeared superimposed on the gray Le Havre sky, which she saw through the dirty window of the kitchen. Eyes sparkling mischievously, the eyes of a free mind still in touch with childhood. A little voice hissed at Marianne that he had died precisely because of that, because of the treasure map on which he’d sketched the ravings of a child.
The captain stayed like that for a moment, watching the clouds slowly being stretched into filaments by the wind, until the memory of Vasily faded and she found herself once more looking through the kitchen cupboards. Dozens of tins, packets of pasta, colored sauces in glass jars.
And still that same impression, that certainty that this decor, these objects concealed something obvious that she couldn’t pin down.
She wasn’t focused enough.
She blamed herself for not having been able to disregard all those stories about secret maps, pirates and ghosts. She’d long ago learned to forget such tales and legends, to leave them behind as she climbed the ladder of the police hierarchy, to renounce the role of the clever girl in the detective teams of her childhood, all those idols to whom she owed her vocation: George, the tomboy in the Famous Five; Velma, the brain of the gang in Scooby-Doo; Sabrina, the least feminine of Charlie’s Angels.
Although she was still gorgeous, thought Marianne, much more than she was . . .
“Marianne?” JB asked, concerned.
The captain’s gaze, still drifting around the kitchen, suddenly halted on a roll of kitchen paper, hanging from a dispenser.
Her heart sped up. In a fraction of a second, everything became clear. She understood what had been bothering her about Timo Soler’s flat all this time.
She watched all the other officers as they searched every square centimeter of the apartment.
All of them were men.
Of course . . .
“Marianne?”
The captain forced herself to arrange the clues in her head. It all fit, there was no doubt: behind the apparent disorder, the dilapidated apartment, and the smell of damp, everything was tidy. Neat. Ordered. Almost tasteful. No man on the verge of dying would have felt the need to do that. Nor would another man, an accomplice. Certainly not Alexis Zerda.
It was so obvious: how had they not thought of it before?
She stared at the socks drying on the rack.
This flat had been occupied by a couple.
A woman had lived here with Timo Soler. His girlfriend, his mistress, his wife? It made no difference. But it was thanks to this woman that he’d survived. It was because of her that they’d escaped once again.
To die somewhere else, the two of them together?
She almost screamed, forgetting the mobile phone in her hand.
“Search everything! I want proof that a girl was living here.”
* * *
A good fifteen minutes had passed. Marianne had asked JB to go upstairs to Vasily Dragonman’s flat, start sorting through his archives, and keep her abreast of any developments. She had then followed the location of patrols in the Neiges quarter on her iPad. The GéoPol app looked like a video game, a sort of sophisticated Pac-Man where the police vehicles had to drive along as many roads as possible without ever colliding.
In which of those streets was Timo Soler hiding? At the back of a car, covered with a blanket, his girlfriend at the wheel? The existence of the girl was no longer a theory; those searching hadn’t had much difficulty in locating proof of a female presence in the flat. Long hair, pale chestnut, found in the shower; lipstick stains on a glass; a pair of lace panties fallen behind the bathroom cabinet.
Very sexy. Size 8.
The captain’s glare had been enough to dissuade her men from making any salacious comments about this unknown woman, whom they guessed was slim, probably young and pretty.
Officer Constantini, with the aid of his Polilight, had found blood on the landing, then on the top three steps of the staircase, but not on those below. Marianne had sent three men, each equipped with a Black Light lamp, to search for other stains outside the building, in the parking lot, and on the road, to give them some clue as to which direction the fugitives might have taken when they fled.
Although Marianne didn’t really believe this would work.
The lovebirds had flown the coop.
In Marianne’s mind, the two cases jockeyed for attention. Between barked orders, her thoughts drifted ceaselessly to Malone Moulin, to Vasily Dragonman. When she turned back to the windows of the flat, the childlike face of the school psychologist continued to smile at her from the sky, slightly blurred, his beard, eyelashes and hair whitened by the clouds, as if the photograph of him had been artificially aged. Proof that Vasily’s charm would have survived the passing of time, thought Marianne, troubled by the images that haunted her mind.
If she’d been alone, she would have collapsed in tears. No, a face like that shouldn’t vanish before the years had patiently sculpted it. No, such sparkling eyes should not be extinguished in a single night.
She suddenly thought back to Angie’s odd questions, on the phone, a while earlier.
Are you sure that . . . that it’s him?
After all, there was still hope. There was no categorical proof that the corpse found burnt to a cinder beneath the motorbike was that of Vasily Dragonman. He probably wasn’t the only person in Le Havre to own a Guzzi California.
“Phone call for you, Captain.”
Officer Bourdaine stood motionless in a corner of the room, like a decorative fig plant that might be real or fake. Marianne turned her back to the policeman, observing, in the distance, the immense skeletons of the cranes on the port.
“Captain Augresse.”
“It’s Ortega. I’m at the morgue. It didn’t take as long as expected, Marianne.”
“What didn’t?”
“We got lucky. We found his medical file straight away. His dentist was Kyheng Soyaran, on Rue Sery. They knew each other well; they went to medical school together. He sent me X-rays of his teeth by email. It took less than five minutes. Comparing them took a bit longer, but . . . ”
“Comparing them to what?”
“To the jaw of the man under the motorbike. What did you think I was talking about, Marianne? Surely you knew his teeth were still intact?”
Marianne Augresse swallowed.
“So? Just tell me, for Christ’s sake!”
“There’s no doubt. Same jaw, same teeth, one hundred percent. There’s no need to wait for the DNA results. The dead man at Cap de la Hève is definitely your school psychologist, Vasily Dragonman.”
44
Little hand on the 12, big hand on the 6
I looked in poems
For ways to tell you I love you
I found some wise words
Much too long for a child of three, like me
Curled up between the wall and the toilet bowl, Malone did not have much space.
Not that he cared. He had remembered Friday’s story, the one for the green planet, Venus, about love. The one where he flew away with his mother at the end.
But before he could succeed, he had to escape the ogre, the one with the earring and the tattoo. Thankfully, Malone knew the magic place where baddies couldn’t enter; Gouti had told him that secret many times. Every time they landed on the green planet.
He had to lock himself in the toilet!
Every time he went to do a pee-pee, he thought about it. He was too short to reach the bolt, but if he stood on the trashcan and stretched up on tiptoes, it was easy. That idea—of standing on the trashcan—hadn’t been in Gouti’s story; Malone had thought of it himself.
Lock yourself in the toilet.
Wait for Maman to come and get you.
Go away forever with her.
To give himself courage, Malone again unfolded the Christmas drawing that he kept in his pocket. As his small index finger touched every detail of the picture—the star, the tree with its badly colored-in needles, the presents traced in felt-tip pen—Malone thought that he mustn’t forget to put it in his hiding place later, in his album, so that no one would find it. Not Maman-da, not Pa-di, and especially not the ogre!
All the same, he took his time looking at the three figures holding hands under the tinsel.
Him. Papa.
His finger stopped on the third figure, caressing his Maman’s long hair with his fingertip, before tracing every letter, at the top and bottom of the sheet.
Noel Joyeux
N’oublie Jamais
These were the only words that he knew how to read, except for his own name. Oh, and the word MAMAN, of course.
So I looked elsewhere
And I found in my heart
The words that you taught me
When I was still little
Maman, I love you as big as that!
I say it with my arms.
“Malone, come out of there!”
Amanda’s voice was as gentle as she could make it.
“Please, Malone.”
The smell of burnt Carambar clung to the walls, to the floor, to the staircase. Persistent, almost sickening. Amanda had hoped for a moment that the scent would be enough to persuade Malone to come out of the toilet, but she had quickly understood that he wouldn’t fall for such a crude trap.
Malone had recognized Alexis. He must be going through some sort of trauma, contradictory messages colliding in his head; perhaps seeing Alexis Zerda had triggered other memories for Malone, too, the way a broken watch will sometimes start working again if it’s dropped on the floor.
Or maybe it was all in her head. Maybe that bastard, the way he looked like a vampire, had simply scared her kid.