10
“The palette knife is used to work on the depth of a painting. Watch …”
Mama does not often take the time to offer advice. The studio smells of turps. Mama is working with reds. She applies liberal quantities – blood reds, carmines, reds dark as night. The palette knife bends under her pressure, leaving thick layers which she then spreads using lighter touches. Mama likes reds. I have a Mama who likes reds. She looks at me affectionately. “You like reds too, don’t you, Camille?” Instinctively, Camille recoils, suddenly gripped by fear.
*
Camille woke with a start shortly after 4 a.m. He leaned over Irène’s distended body, holding his own breath for a moment the better to listen to her slow, regular breathing, the faint snore of a woman grown heavy. He gently laid a hand on her belly. Only when he feels her warm skin, the smooth tautness of her belly, does he slowly begin to breathe again. Still dazed with sleep, he glances around him at the darkness, their bedroom, the window glowing faintly from the streetlights. He tries to calm his pounding heart. “Something is seriously wrong,” he thinks, noticing the beads of sweat trickling between his eyebrows and blurring his vision.
Cautiously, he gets up and goes to the bathroom where he splashes cold water on his face.
As a rule, Camille does not dream much. “My subconscious leaves me in peace,” is how he puts it.
He goes to pour himself a glass of cold milk and sits on the sofa. Everything about him feels weary, his legs are heavy, his back and neck are stiff. To relax, he rolls his head first up and down and then from side to side. He tries to dispel the image of the two mutilated girls in the warehouse apartment at Courbevoie. His thoughts circle some nameless fear.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he wonders. “Get a grip!” But still his thoughts are muddled. “Take a deep breath. Think of all the horrors you have seen, all the mangled bodies you have encountered in your career – these two may be more horrifying, but they are not the first and will not be the last. Just do your job. It’s a job, Camille, not a mission. You do what you can. You do your best, you find these guys, this guy, but don’t let this case take over your life.”
But all of a sudden the final image from his dream surfaces. On the wall, his mother has painted the face of a young girl, the face of the dead girl in Courbevoie. And the dead face comes alive, it seems to unfurl, to blossom like a flower. A dark red bloom with many petals like a chrysanthemum. Like a peony.
Camille stops dead. He is standing in the middle of the living room. He knows that something, something he cannot yet name, is happening inside him. He stands stock still. He waits, his muscles tensed, his breathing shallow, careful not to break the thread, this slender delicate thread inside him … Eyes closed, motionless, Camille probes this image of the girl’s head nailed to the wall. But in his dream the key is not her head, it is this flower … There is something else, Camille can feel it welling within him. Still he does not move, this thoughts coming in waves and ebbing into the distance.
With each new swell, some fact moves closer.
“Shit …!”
The girl is a flower. But which fucking flower? Camille is wide awake now. His brain seems to be working at the speed of light. Lots of petals, like a chrysanthemum. Or a peony.
And then suddenly a word comes on this tide of thoughts, obvious, intelligible, utterly unbelievable. And Camille realises his mistake. His dream was not about the Courbevoie murder, but the girl in Tremblay.
“It’s not possible,” Camille thinks, but he knows that it is.
He races into his study and, cursing his clumsiness, extracts the crime-scene photos from the Tremblay file. He flicks through them, looks around for his glasses but cannot find them. So he takes each photograph and holds it up to the blue light from the window. Eventually he comes to one he has been searching for. The girl’s face, her smile extended from ear to ear with a razor. He riffles through the file again and finds the photograph of the body sliced in two …
“I don’t believe it …” Camille thinks, glancing towards the living room.
He leaves the study and stands in front of his bookcase. As he shifts the pile of books and newspapers that have accumulated on the library stool in recent weeks, his thoughts tick off each link in the chain: Gwynplaine, The Man who Laughs. A woman’s head, a razor smile, the woman who laughs.
And the flower is not a peony …
Camille clambers up the library steps, his fingers running along the spines of the books. A handful of titles by Simenon, some English writers, a few Americans: Horace McCoy and next to him James Hadley Chase’s The Flesh of the Orchid.
“Not an orchid …” he mutters, placing a finger on a book and tipping it towards him. “A dahlia. And certainly not red.”
He slumps onto the sofa and stares at the book in his hand. On the cover is a young woman with dark hair, from her hairstyle it looks like a portrait from the 1950s. Automatically, he checks the copyright page: 1987.
On the back cover, he reads:
June 15, 1947, a naked, mutilated corpse is discovered on a patch of waste ground in Los Angeles, the body is that of a young woman of twenty-two: Betty Short, nicknamed “The Black Dahlia” …
He remembers the story fairly well. He flicks through the pages, here and there registering a word, a sentence, and pauses on page 87:
It was the nude, mutilated body of a young woman, cut in half at the waist. The bottom half lay in the weeds a few feet away from the top, legs wide open. A large triangle had been gouged out of the left thigh, and there was a long, wide cut running from the bisection point down to the top of the pubic hair. The flaps of skin beside the gash were pulled back; there were no organs inside. The top half was worse: the breasts were dotted with cigarette burns, the right one hanging loose, attached to the torso only by shreds of skin; the left one slashed around the nipple. The cuts went all the way down to the bone, but the worst of the worst was the girl’s face.
“What are you doing, couldn’t you sleep?”
Camille looks up, Irène is standing in the doorway in her nightdress. He puts the book down and goes to her, lays a hand on her belly.
“Go back to bed, I’ll be there in a minute.”
Irène looks like a little girl woken by a nightmare.
“I’ll be right there,” Camille says again. “Go on, back to bed.”
He watches Irène shuffle unsteadily back into the bedroom, still thick with sleep. On the sofa, the book lies open at the page he was reading. “It’s a ridiculous idea,” he thinks. Even so, he sits down and picks up the book again. He skims to find the passage he was reading:
It was one huge purpled bruise, the nose crushed deep into the facial cavity, the mouth cut ear to ear into a smile that leered up at you, somehow mocking the rest of the brutality inflicted. I knew I would carry that smile with me to my grave.
“Jesus Christ …”
Camille flicks through the book, then sets it down. Closing his eyes, he sees the photograph of Manuela Constanza, the rope marks around her ankles …
He goes back to his reading:
… her jet-black hair was free of matted blood, like the killer had given her a shampoo before he dumped her.
He put the book down again. He felt the urge to go back to his study, to look more closely at the photographs. No. It was a dream … It was bullshit.
Wednesday, April 9
1
“Come off it, Camille, you don’t really believe this nonsense?”
9 a.m. Commissaire Le Guen’s office.
Camille stared for a moment at his boss’ pendulous jowls, wondering what was in them that could be so heavy.
“The thing that surprises me is that no-one thought of it before now. You have to admit it’s unsettling.”
Le Guen listened to Camille as he read on, moving from one bookmark to the next. Then he took off his glasses and set them down in front of him. When he was in Le Guen’s office, Camille preferred to stand. Once,
he had tried sitting on one of the armchairs facing the desk, but he felt like he was at the bottom of a well lined with pillows and had to struggle to get out again.
Le Guen turned the book over, looked at the cover and frowned.
“Never heard of the guy.”
“It’s a classic, if you don’t mind my saying.”
“If you say so.”
“Have it your own way …” said Camille.
“Look, Camille, we’ve got enough shit on our plate as it is. Now obviously what you’ve just shown me is – how can I put it? – unsettling, if you like, but what is it supposed to mean?’
“It means our guy copied this book. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know. But it all fits. I’ve reread the reports. All the details that didn’t make sense during the first investigation are right here. The victim’s body sliced in two at the waist. Not to mention the cigarette burns and the rope marks around the ankles. At the time no-one could understand why the murderer washed the victim’s hair, but now it makes sense. Reread the autopsy report. People didn’t understand why some of the intestines were missing – the liver, the stomach, the gall-bladder … Well, I’ll tell you why – because it’s all here in this book. No-one could work out why there were marks” – Camille racked his brain for the precise phrase – “‘benign marks’ on the body, probably made by a whip. It’s his personal addition, Jean, no-one knows what it means” – Camille gestured to the book on which Le Guen had firmly planted his elbow – “but it’s an addition. Everything else, the shampooed hair, the missing viscera, the cigarette burns … it’s all here in this book, every detail, in black and white.”
At times Le Guen had an odd way of looking at Camille. He admired the man’s intelligence, even when it went off the rails. “Can you see yourself explaining all this to Juge Deschamps?”
“Me? No … You, on the other hand …”
Le Guen gave Camille a wounded look.
“You really think so?” Le Guen leaned over and took something from the briefcase next to his desk. “After this farrago?” He held out that morning’s newspaper.
Camille fished his glasses out of the breast pocket of his jacket, although he did not need them to see the photograph and read the headline. He put them on nonetheless. His heart had begun to beat faster, his hands were clammy.
2
Le Matin. The whole back page.
The photograph: a shot of Camille taken from above. He is looking up, he seems uncomfortable. The shot was probably taken during the press conference. The image has been photoshopped. Camille’s face looks larger than it is, his expression seems harsher.
Beneath the section header “Profile”, a headline:
PLAYING WITH THE BIG BOYS
The horrific carnage in Courbevoie recently reported in these pages has just taken a bizarre new twist. According to Juge Deschamps, the investigating magistrate, a key piece of evidence – a fake fingerprint made using a rubber stamp – links the case to another no less gruesome case from 21 November, 2001, when a grim discovery was made on a rubbish tip in Tremblay: the body of a young woman who had been tortured and then literally cut in half. The killer was never found.
For Commandant Verhœven, this is good news. As lead detective on the case, he will once again have an opportunity to prove himself an exceptional police officer. One can hardly blame him for seizing every opportunity to further gild his name.
Adopting the maxim that the less one says, the wiser one appears, Camille Verhœven has perfected the art of being tight-lipped and enigmatic. Even risking leaving journalists unsatisfied. But such things matter little to Camille Verhœven, whose sole concern is his reputation as a first-rate officer. A man of action, a man who gets results.
Camille Verhœven has his principles and he has his role models, though the latter are not to be found among his colleagues on the Quai des Orfèvres. Oh no, that would be too ordinary for a man who sees himself as extraordinary. His role models are more likely to be Sherlock Holmes, Jules Maigret and Sam Spade. Or even Rouletabille. He enthusiastically cultivates the logic of the first, the tenacity of the second, the world-weary manner of the third and any and all of the virtues of Gaston Leroux’s hero. His discretion is legendary, but those who have been able to get close to him soon realise that he aspires to mythical status.
His ambition may be overweening, but it is based on solid foundations: Camille Verhœven is a skilled professional. And a police officer whose career has been unusual.
The son of the artist Maud Verhœven, Camille once dabbled in painting himself. His father, a retired pharmacist, comments simply: “He wasn’t inept …” What remains of his earlier vocation (a few Japanese-inspired landscapes, some painstaking, rather heavy-handed portraits) are safely filed away by his devoted father. Aware perhaps of his limitations, or finding it difficult to make a name in his own right, Camille chose instead to study law.
At the time his father hoped he might become a doctor, but young Camille did not feel it necessary please his parents. He studied neither art nor medicine, instead opting for a Masters in Law and graduating magna cum laude. There can be no doubt he was a brilliant scholar: he had the choice of a career in academe or being called to the bar. Instead, he decided to enrol in the École nationale supérieure de la police. His family are perplexed:
“It was a curious choice,” his father said thoughtfully. “But Camille always was a curious boy.”
Curious indeed: the young Camille confounded all expectations and succeeded against all odds. He clearly enjoys turning up where he is least expected. One imagines that the recruiting board must have needed some persuading to accept a candidate who is barely four foot eleven, requires a specially adapted vehicle, and must depend on those around him to accomplish many everyday tasks. But Camille, who knows what he wants, achieved first place in the entrance exam, and, as though this were not enough, he went on to be top of his class. It was the start of a glittering career. Already circumspect about his reputation, Camille Verhœven sought no preferential treatment; indeed he has volunteered for some of the most gruelling postings in the Paris suburbs, knowing that sooner or later they would lead him to the brigade criminelle.
It so happened that Commissaire Le Guen, a friend with whom he worked previously, wielded considerable influence within the brigade. And so, after only a few years working in suburban sink estates, where he is remembered as being affable if not particularly outstanding, our hero found himself leading a team within the brigade criminelle where he finally showed what he is capable of. I say “hero”, because already the word was being bandied about. Who first suggested it? No-one knows. But it is true that Camille Verhœven proved himself equal to the depiction. He continued to be a diligent and conscientious officer and managed to solve a number of high-profile cases. He would say little, allowing his actions to speak for him.
If Camille Verhœven tends to keep the world at arm’s length, he is also content to think of himself as indispensable and enjoys cultivating an air of mystery. Both within the brigade criminelle and without, all that is known about him is what he is prepared to tell. Behind this façade of modesty is a shrewd man: he is only too happy to show his reticence and his discretion on national television.
Currently, he is leading the investigation into a bizarre and shocking crime which he has described as particularly “feral”. No further details are forthcoming. But the word – as short, powerful and effective as the hero himself – makes it clear that we are dealing not with routine misdemeanours but with heinous crimes. Commandant Verhœven, who understands the power of words, is a past master in the art of understatement and feigns surprise when the media time-bombs he leaves in his wake explode. A month from now our hero will become a father, but his child will not be his only gift to posterity: already he is what they call “a consummate professional”, the sort of man who, with infinite patience, fashions his own legend.
3
Camille folded the newspaper carefully. Le Guen was u
nsettled by his friend’s sudden calm.
“Just let them get on with it, Camille, do you hear me?”
And, since Camille said nothing: “You know this hack?”
“He ambushed me yesterday. I don’t know anything about the guy, but he seems to know a lot about me …”
“He certainly doesn’t seem to like you very much.”
“I don’t give a shit about that. What bothers me is the snowball effect – now every other reporter will jump on the bandwagon and—”
“And the juge wasn’t exactly ecstatic about the T.V. coverage last night … The case is barely underway and you’re already all over the media. I know it’s not your fault, but this article …”
Le Guen gingerly picked up the newspaper and held it at arm’s length, like a sacred icon. Or a lump of dog shit.
“A full page! With your photo and everything …”
Camille stared at Le Guen.
“There’s only one thing to be done, Camille, and you know it as well as I do – we have to solve this case, and fast. Very fast. The connection to the Tremblay case should help matters and—”
“Have you read it, the Tremblay case file?”
Le Guen scratched his cheek. “Yeah, I know, there’s not much to go on.”
“Not much? That’s a euphemism. We’ve got fuck all. And what little we do have only complicates things. We know we’re dealing with the same guy, if it is just one person, and that is far from certain. In Courbevoie, he rapes his victims every which way; in Tremblay, no signs of sexual assault – can you see the connection? In Courbevoie he dismembers the victims using a butcher’s knife and an electric drill, in the earlier case he takes the trouble to wash the intestines – or at least those he left behind. Please feel free to stop me when you see a connection. In Courbevoie …”
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