“Good. Second thing: I need to do the accounts, so go and get me your credit-card statements.”
Camille clambered down off the sofa, took his wallet out of his rucksack, fished inside and pulled out a wad of crumpled receipts.
“You’re not going to do the accounts tonight, are you?” he said, setting the receipts on the coffee table. “Today has been tough enough already.”
“Of course I’m not,” said Irène, heading into the kitchen. “Come on, let’s have dinner.”
“You said there were three things?”
Irène stopped and turned, pretending to rack her brains.
“Oh, yes – one last thing: how do you feel about being a father?”
She was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. Camille stared at her stupidly, his eyes automatically resting on her belly which was still completely flat. He looked at her face, saw the laughter in her eyes. A baby had been the subject of long discussions. They could not seem to agree. Camille’s opening gambit was to play for time, while Irène opted for intransigence. Next Camille resorted to the question of genetics, but Irène thwarted this by providing detailed research. At this point, Camille played his trump card: he refused. Irène trumped his trump card: I’m already the wrong side of thirty … The die was cast. And now the game was won. And so, for the second time he asked himself if Irène was beautiful. The answer? Yes. He had the feeling that he would never again ask himself this question. And for the first time since he could remember, he felt his eyes well with tears, tears of sheer joy, like life itself exploding in his face.
21
Now here he was, lying in bed, one hand resting heavily on her belly. And beneath his hand, he could feel a forceful, muffled kick. Wide awake, he lay without moving a muscle and waited. In her sleep, Irène let out a soft moan. A minute passed, and another. Patient as a cat, Camille waited intently and there came a second kick, right under his hand, different this time, a sort of twisting motion like a caress. He felt as he always felt, his every thought blotted out by the absurd happiness of feeling it move, as though everything in his life had begun to move. All human life was here. It lasted only a fleeting moment before his thoughts were again interrupted by the image of a girl’s head nailed to a wall. He tried to dismiss the image, to focus on Irène’s warm belly, on all the happiness in the world, but the damage was already done.
Reality had triumphed over imagination and images began to flash through his mind, slowly at first. A baby, Irène’s swollen belly, the cry of a newborn child he could almost hear. The film began to speed up: Irène’s beautiful face when they made love, her perfect hands, severed fingers, Irène’s eyes, the ghastly rictus grin of another woman, a smile slashed open from ear to ear …
Camille woke feeling amazingly lucid. He and life had long been engaged in a battle of wills. Now, suddenly, he felt that the discovery of the bodies of these two mutilated women was about to turn a battle of wills into open warfare. The murdered women were no different from the woman he was caressing; like her, they had pale, rounded buttocks, firm youthful flesh, in sleep their faces were probably like hers, with that curious expression like a swimmer underwater, the same deep, regular breathing, the soft snore, the moments of apnoea that could panic a man who loved them as he watched them sleep; women with hair like Irène’s which curled about her heartbreakingly slender neck. Those murdered girls were no different from this woman he so loved. And yet, one day they had been – what? – invited, recruited, coerced, kidnapped, paid? However it had come about, they had been mutilated by men whose only desire was to dismember young women with smooth, pale buttocks, who had been unmoved by the pleading looks of these women when they realised they were going to die, they may simply have excited them, and so these young women who had been born to live had somehow come to die in this apartment, in this city, in this century where he, Camille Verhœven – an utterly unremarkable policeman, the runt of the brigade criminelle, a pretentious, love-struck troll – was stroking the beautiful belly of this woman who was constantly new, a miracle. Something was awry. In one last, weary flicker he saw himself devoting every ounce of his strength to two goals: first, to cherish this body he was stroking from which, in time, would emerge the most astonishing gift; second, to hunt down the men who had mutilated those women, who had fucked them, raped them, killed them, dismembered them, splattering the walls with their blood.
Just before he drifted off, Camille had time to voice one last doubt:
“I’m so tired.”
Tuesday, April 8
1
On the métro he read the papers, and his fears – or, as with any hypochondriac, his diagnosis – were confirmed. The media had already made the link with the Tremblay murder. The speed with which the story had reached the papers was as astounding as perhaps it was inevitable. Stringers were hired to coax information from local police stations and it was common knowledge that many officers leaked stories to particular papers. Even so, Camille took a moment to try and work out the route the story would have taken since mid-afternoon the day before, but soon realised it was hopeless. The facts were as they were. The papers had revealed that the police had linked the Courbevoie killings, about which they had few details, with the Tremblay murder, on which, by contrast, they all had thick files. The headlines crackled with lurid sensationalism, the subs had clearly had fun: “the wreath of severed fingers”, “the tremblay butcher strikes in courbevoie”, or “tremblay terror linked to courbevoie carnage.”
He stepped into the mortuary and headed for the viewing suite.
*
Maleval, with his occasionally inventive bluntness, considered that the world was divided into two categories: cowboys and Indians, a somewhat simplistic version of the distinction people made between introverts and extroverts. Camille and Doctor Nguyên were both Indians: silent, patient, sharp-eyed and attentive. They were men of few words, and could make themselves understood with a simple glance.
Perhaps the Vietnamese refugee and the pocket-sized policeman shared a solidarity born of adversity.
Évelyne Rouvray’s mother looked like a yokel just up from the country. She was wearing a curious get-up which was not quite her size. To Camille, she seemed smaller now, and older. Grief, probably. She stank of alcohol.
“This won’t take long,” Camille said.
They stepped into the viewing room. On the table, covered by a white sheet, lay something that now vaguely resembled a human body. Camille helped the woman shuffle towards the table and nodded to the man in the white coat to carefully pull back the sheet to expose the face but not the neck, beyond which there was nothing to see.
The woman stared blankly, her face expressionless. The head lying on the table looked like a theatre prop with death coiled inside it. The head did not look like anything or anyone, but the woman said “yes”, a simple, bewildered “yes”. And she had to be caught before she collapsed.
2
There was a man waiting in the corridor.
Like everybody else, Camille tended to judge men against his own height. To him, the man did not seem particularly tall – five foot six, perhaps. What immediately struck him were his eyes. He was about fifty, the sort of person who looks after himself, keeps himself in shape and runs twenty-five kilometres on Sundays rain or shine. A perceptive man. Well dressed, but not ostentatious. In his hands he held a pale leather folder; he was waiting patiently.
“Dr Édouard Crest,” he announced, proffering his hand. “I’ve been appointed by Juge Deschamps.”
“Thanks for coming so quickly,” Camille said, shaking the man’s hand. “I requested you because we need someone to draw up a psychological profile of these guys, of what motivates them … I’ve run off copies of the preliminary reports.” Camille handed the doctor a folder and watched closely as he leafed through the first pages. “Handsome man,” Camille thought, and immediately, inexplicably, he thought of Irène. He felt a fleeting wave of jealousy which he quickly dismissed.
/> “Timeline?” he asked.
“I’ll let you know after the autopsy,” Crest said. “It will depend on the evidence I can pull together.”
3
At a glance, Camille knew that what was to come would be grotesque. Having to confront the horror of what had been done to Évelyne Rouvray’s head was one thing, but performing an autopsy that resembled a ghoulish jigsaw puzzle would be something else entirely.
Usually, the corpses taken from the drawers of a mortuary fridge stirred a terrible feeling of pain, but that very pain was somehow alive. To suffer, one had to be alive. This time, the body appeared to have dissolved. It arrived as a series of packages, like slabs of tuna weighed out at a fish market.
On the stainless steel tables of the autopsy room lay shapeless masses of different sizes. Not all the parts had been removed from the drawers, but already it was difficult to imagine how these pieces had ever been one body, let alone two. It would never occur to someone at a butcher’s stall to mentally reconstruct the slaughtered animal.
Dr Crest and Dr Nguyên shook hands as if they were at a conference. The delegate for lunacy greeting the delegate for atrocity. Then Dr Nguyên put on his glasses, checked the tape recorder was working and decided to begin with the stomach.
“The deceased is a Caucasian woman aged approximately …”
4
Philippe Buisson de Chevesne was not the best in the business, but he was certainly one of the most tenacious. The message “Commandant Verhœven does not intend to speak to the press at this stage of the investigation” did not faze him.
“I’m not asking for a press statement. I just want a couple of minutes of his time.”
He had begun calling late the night before. He began again first thing in the morning. At 11 a.m., the switchboard informed Camille of his thirteenth call. The switchboard sounded tetchy.
Buisson – who in his by-line dispensed with the aristocratic “de Chevesne” – was not exactly a star reporter. He did not have what it took to be a great journalist, but he was nonetheless a successful journalist because he focused his formidable instincts on the story in hand. Perhaps because he was aware of both his strengths and limitations, Buisson chose to cover lurid crime stories, a choice that proved astute. He was no stylist, but he was an effective writer. He had made a name for himself covering a number of high-profile cases where he had succeeded in digging up a few minor details. A little news and a lot of showmanship. Buisson was no genius, so he milked this formula assiduously. The rest had been down to luck, which clearly favoured heroes and scumbag journalists equally. Buisson had stumbled upon the Tremblay murder and had been among the first to realise its true implication: a vast readership. He had covered the case from beginning to end, so it had been no surprise to see him show up in Courbevoie now that the two cases had been linked.
Camille spotted him as soon as he came out of the métro. A tall guy, trendy, in his thirties. A nice voice he had a tendency to overuse. A little too much charm. Cunning. Intelligent.
Camille immediately shut down and quickened his pace. “I just need a couple of minutes …” Buisson said, buttonholing Camille.
“If I had two minutes, I’d be happy to give them to you …”
Camille was walking briskly, but given his height, walking briskly meant walking at the unhurried pace of a man like Buisson.
“You’d be wise to make a statement, inspecteur. Otherwise the hacks are likely to write up any old shit …”
Camille stopped.
“You’re behind the times, Buisson. No-one’s called me ‘inspecteur’ for years. As for reporters writing any old shit, is that a promise or a threat?”
“Neither – obviously it’s neither.” Buisson smiled.
Camille had stopped, and this was his mistake. One point to Buisson. Camille realised this. The two men eyeballed each other.
“You know how it is,” Buisson went on. “If they’ve got nothing to go on, journalists tend to invent things …”
Buisson had been known to divorce himself from the sins he ascribed to others. From the look in his eyes, Camille suspected he was capable of anything, of the worst excesses and possibly more. The difference between a good predator and a great predator is instinct. Buisson clearly had the perfect genetic make-up for the job.
“Now that the Tremblay case has come up—”
“News travels fast …” Camille cut him short.
“Well, I covered the Tremblay case, so obviously I’m interested.”
Camille looked up. “I don’t like this man,” he thought. And immediately he sensed that the antipathy was mutual, that unwittingly they had developed a low-grade repugnance for each other that neither would ever shake.
“You’ll get nothing out of me I haven’t told the rest of the press,” Camille snapped. “You want a comment? Ask someone else …”
“Don’t you mean someone higher up?” Buisson peered down at the commandant.
The two men stared at each other for a moment, astounded by the rift that had suddenly opened up between them.
“I’m sorry,” Buisson muttered.
Camille, for his part, felt strangely relieved. Sometimes contempt is a consolation.
“Listen,” Buisson went on, “I’m really sorry … a slip of the tongue …”
“I didn’t notice,” Camille interrupted.
Then he walked off, the journalist trotting after him. The atmosphere between the two men had shifted considerably.
“You could at least tell me something. What have you come up with so far?”
“No comment. We’re proceeding with our investigation. For further information, contact Commissaire Le Guen. Or the procureur.”
“Monsieur Verhœven, these cases are getting a lot of press. Editors are itching for a story. I’ll bet you that by the end of the week the tabloids will have come up with plausible suspects and published E-FIT pictures that half the population of France will swear blind is the other half. If you don’t give the papers something to work with, they’ll whip up mass hysteria.”
“If it were down to me,” said Camille curtly, “the press wouldn’t be informed until we make an arrest.”
“You’d be prepared to gag the press?”
Camille stopped again. Things had gone beyond point scoring or strategy.
“I would stop them creating ‘mass hysteria’, or in layman’s terms, publishing bullshit.”
“So we can expect nothing from the brigade criminelle?”
“On the contrary, you expect us to catch the killer.”
“So you think you don’t need the press?”
“For the time being, it means precisely that.”
“For the time being? That’s pretty jaundiced!”
“I live in the moment.”
Buisson seemed to think for a minute.
“Listen, I think there’s something I can do for you if you want. Off the record, strictly personal.”
“I’d be surprised.”
“It’s true. I can get you some P.R. I’ve just taken over writing the weekly Personal Profile, you know, full-page article, big photo, all that crap. I’ve been working on a profile of this other guy … but that can wait. So, if you’re interested …”
“Give it a rest, Buisson.”
“I’m serious! You can’t buy this kind of publicity. All I’d need from you is a couple of personal anecdotes. I’d make it a glowing write-up, I swear … and in return, you keep me up to speed on the investigation – you wouldn’t have to get your hands dirty.”
“Like I said, Buisson, give it a rest.”
“You’re a hard man to do business with, Verhœven …”
“Monsieur Verhœven!”
“If I might give you a little advice: Don’t take that kind of tone, Monsieur Verhœven.”
“Commandant Verhœven!”
“Fine,” said Buisson in a chilly tone that gave Camille pause. “Have it your way.”
Buisson turned on his heel a
nd strode off. If Camille sometimes came across as media-friendly, it was patently not down to his tact as a negotiator.
5
Given his height, Camille preferred to remain standing. And since he didn’t sit down, no-one else felt they were allowed to sit, and every new recruit adopted this implicit code: at the brigade, meetings were held standing up.
The previous evening, Maleval and Armand had spent quite a lot of time trying talking to neighbours to get witness statements. They hadn’t held out much hope, given that there were no neighbours. Especially at night, when the area was about as busy as a whorehouse in heaven. While he’d been waiting for a signal from the girls, José Riveiro had noticed no-one in the area, but it was possible that someone had passed by later. They had had to tramp more than two kilometres before they found any sign of life – a couple of shopkeepers in a residential suburb who, needless to say, could tell them nothing whatsoever about any hypothetical comings and goings. No-one had seen anything out of the ordinary, no trucks, no vans, no delivery men. No inhabitants. To listen to them, you would think the murdered girls could only have got there by the intercession of the Holy Spirit.
“Our killer was obviously careful when he picked his location,” said Maleval.
Camille studied Maleval more closely. A little comparison test: what was the difference between Maleval, leaning in the doorway fishing a well-thumbed notebook out of his pocket, and Louis, standing next to the desk, arms folded, a notebook in his hand?
Both men were well dressed, each, in his own way, was charming. The difference was sexual. Camille reflected for a moment on this curious notion. Maleval loved women. He bedded women. He never seemed to have enough. He was driven by his sexual urges. Everything about him exuded a need to seduce, to conquer. It’s not that he always wants more, Camille thought, it’s the fact that there is always some other woman to be charmed. Maleval did not truly love women, he was a skirt chaser. He had only to sense new prey and he was on the prowl, his suits were his battle fatigues. He was an off-the-peg man. The loves of Louis, on the other hand, like his elegant suits, were exquisitely tailored. Today, to greet the first rays of sunshine of the season, Louis was wearing a pale suit, a striking light blue shirt, a club tie, and as for his shoes … “The upper crust,” Camille thought. On the subject of Louis’ sexuality, however, Camille knew very little. Which is to say nothing at all.
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