The bucket has been lowered barely a metre when Blanchard suddenly notices a commotion among the people on the bridge. They are babbling to each other, pointing to the bucket. Three or four people shout something to him, flailing their arms. As the bucket hits the water, the people shout more loudly and Blanchard realises that something is wrong. Without quite knowing why, he yells to the operator to stop. Half submerged, the bucket comes to a halt. Blanchard stares at the bridge, trying to work out what the people are shouting. One of the men at the front mimes pulling on a rope and Blanchard assumes they are telling him to raise the bucket. Irritably, he tosses away his cigarette. He is a foreman, not used to being interrupted in his work. He is uncertain what to do. Now everyone on the bridge is imitating the first man, pumping their hands and yelling, so finally he gives the order. The bucket emerges from the water, sways for a moment, then hangs, motionless. Blanchard steps forward, gestures to the crane operator to bring the bucket closer so he can see what is going on. As soon as he sees what is inside, Blanchard realises the magnitude of the problem. In the bucket, half buried in black sludge, is the naked body of a girl.
Early statements described the woman as being between twenty-five and thirty. Camille spread out a dozen large photographs on his desk. Even in life, it was clear she had not been particularly beautiful. Her hips were broad, her breasts small, her thighs flabby. She looked like a rough draft, as though Nature had put her together without really paying attention, combining elements of large and small: a broad backside and the dainty feet of a Japanese girl. The woman must have been using a sunbed: analysis of the epidermis indicated her colouring was unlikely to have come from natural sunlight. Distinct tan lines indicated that she had been wearing a bikini. There were no obvious signs of violence to the body apart from a red scratch extending from the waist to the hipbone. Traces of cement indicated that the body might at one point have been laid on a concrete surface. Her face had been softened by time spent in muddy water. She had thick, dark eyebrows, a wide mouth and shoulder-length brown hair.
Led by Lieutenant Marette, the investigation determined that the woman died of strangulation after being subjected to depraved sexual abuse. Although the killer had been savage, the body had not been mutilated or dismembered. The victim had been raped and sodomised and then strangled.
Camille was making slow progress through the case file. From time to time he looked up, as though trying to commit the information to memory before moving on, as though hoping it might trigger some insight. Nothing came. The case file was crushingly sad. It told him nothing, or almost nothing.
The autopsy report did little to enhance his mental picture of the victim. She was about twenty-five, five foot six, weighed 58 kilos and had no distinguishing marks or scars. The tan lines left by the U.V. lamp indicated that she had worn sunglasses and sandals as well as a bikini. She was not a smoker, and had never borne a child or had a miscarriage. Though neat and well-groomed, it was evident that she did not worry unduly about her appearance.
*
There was no indication that she had been wearing jewellery that might have been taken by the killer, and she was not wearing nail polish or any other form of make-up. She had eaten about six hours before her death. Her last meal included beef, potatoes and strawberries, and she had drunk a considerable amount of milk.
The body had been half buried in the silt for some twelve hours before being discovered. There were two points which intrigued the investigating officers, two unusual details for which the report offered no conclusions beyond what was self-evident.
The first was that the body had been discovered, partially covered in mud, lying in the bucket of the dredger. The presence of mud in the bucket was surprising since the body had been placed there before dredging began. The bucket had been lowered into the canal, but it had not gone deep enough to account for the mud. The only possible conclusion – however implausible – was that the killer had dumped the mud into the bucket after putting the body there. What motive could a killer have had for doing such a thing? Lieutenant Marette offered no answer, he simply drew attention to the anomaly.
On closer consideration, the entire crime scene seemed curious. Camille tried to picture it in his mind, considered every possible solution and concluded that the murderer would have been faced with a bizarre problem. After hoisting the body into the bucket of the crane (which, according to the report, was suspended about five feet above the ground), he would have had to scoop mud from the canal (samples of the mud conclusively proved its provenance), and then tipped it over the body. The quantity of mud involved would have required the killer to make several trips, assuming he was using a household bucket or something of the kind. The investigating officers at the time were undecided as to what this ritual might mean.
Camille felt a strange tingling down his spine. This detail was unsettling. He could see no logical reason why the killer would have done what he did – unless he were recreating a scene from a book.
The second peculiar detail was something Louis had highlighted in his summary report: an unusual mark on the body of the victim. At first glance, it looked like the sort of birthmark one might find on any body. Indeed initial reports had described it as such. The investigation had been done in haste. Photographs had been taken at the scene, the usual overview and close-up shots, the usual measurements. The body had only been properly examined after it arrived at the mortuary. According to the autopsy report, the “birthmark” was in fact a fake. About five centimetres in diameter, with a brownish pigmentation, it had been applied using a paintbrush and common acrylic paint. The shape was vaguely animal. Various detectives – according to the dictates of their subconscious – had favoured a pig, or perhaps a dog. One of the team well-versed in zoology – an officer named Vaquier – had gone so far as to imagine a warthog. The “birthmark” had been painted over with a clear, matt varnish containing a siccative of the kind used for finishing paintings. Camille considered this detail carefully. It was a technique he himself had used when working with acrylics. Later he had given them up in favour of oils, but he still remembered the varnish he used, the heady solvent fumes, at once pleasant and sickly, which could provoke crippling, crushing headaches if used – as it said on the label – over prolonged periods. To Camille, this could mean only one thing. The murderer had wanted to ensure that the “birthmark” was not washed away while the body was submerged in the mud and water.
At the time, a search on the missing persons database had produced no result. The victim’s description had been widely circulated, but nothing had been forthcoming. The victim had never been positively identified. The police investigation, despite meticulous work by Lieutenant Marette, had also led nowhere. Both paint and varnish were commonly available and so did not constitute a lead. As for the mud in the bucket, it remained unexplained. The case had eventually been closed for lack of evidence.
4
“For God’s sake, how exactly are you supposed to pronounce them?” Le Guen said, staring at the names Sjöwall and Wahlöö.
Camille did not reply, he simply opened the copy of Roseanna and read aloud:
“Page 14: ‘Death by strangulation,’ thought Martin Beck. He sat and thumbed through a bunch of photographs which Ahlberg had dug out of a basket on his desk. The pictures showed the locks, the dredger, its bucket in the foreground, the body lying on the embankment, and in the mortuary … he saw her before him as she looked in the picture, naked and abandoned, with narrow shoulders and her dark hair in a coil across her throat … She was … 5 feet, 6½ inches tall, had grey-blue eyes and dark brown hair. Her teeth were good and she had no scars from operations or other marks on her body with the exception of a birthmark, high up on the inside of her left thigh about an inch and a half from her groin. It was brown and about as large as a 10-øre coin, but uneven and looked like a little pig …’”
“O.K.… ” Le Guen murmured.
“‘She had eaten three to five hours before she die
d,’” Camille carried on reading, “‘… meat, potatoes, strawberries and milk …’ and earlier in the book: ‘It was a woman. They laid her on her back on a folded tarpaulin out on the breakwater. The deck man …’ No, forget that, here’s the bit I was looking for: ‘She was naked and had no jewellery on. The lines of her tan made it apparent that she had sunbathed in a bikini. Her hips were broad and she had heavy thighs.’”
5
Together, Louis and Maleval assembled all the information on the canal de l’Ourcq murder. The stumbling block in the investigation stemmed from an inability to identify the young victim. All records and databases had been scoured, no effort had been spared. Seeing the figure of Cob half hidden by his computer monitors at the far end of the room, Camille could not help but reflect on the paradox of a young girl disappearing without trace in a society that was now so comprehensively surveilled. Catalogues, lists, inventories, all the most significant details of our lives documented, every telephone call, every movement, every payment traceable; only a very few lives, by a series of quirks and coincidences that are little short of miraculous, elude surveillance. A woman of twenty-five who presumably had parents, friends, lovers, employers, had disappeared without trace. A month could pass without a friend becoming concerned that she had not called, a year could go by without a boyfriend, once so in love with her, worrying that she had not come back from a trip. The parents who received no postcards, whose telephone calls went unanswered, had given the victim up for dead long before she actually died. Unless the victim had been a loner, an orphan, a tearaway on the run, so angry with the world that she had severed ties with everyone she knew. Perhaps, even before she died, she had given them up for dead.
Louis had written a summary of the cases on a flip-chart – though this was hardly necessary. In a few short days, each had developed with a rapidity that made it difficult for anyone to keep up.
7 July, 2000: Corbeil, Le Crime d’Orcival (Gaboriau) Victim: Maryse Perrin (23)
24 August, 2000: Paris, Roseanna (Sjöwall & Wahlöö) Victim: ?
21 November, 2001: Tremblay: The Black Dahlia (Ellroy) Victims: Manuela Constanza (24), Henri Lambert (51)
6 April, 2003: Courbevoie: American Psycho (B. E. Ellis) Victims: Évelyne Rouvray (23), Josiane Debeuf (21), François Cottet
“The team watching Lesage’s house in Villeréal haven’t come up with anything yet,” Louis said. “They’ve done a brief search of the grounds of the house, but they say it would take months to search it thoroughly.”
“Christine Lesage is back at home now, I dropped her off earlier,” Maleval said.
Things had to be particularly grim for Élisabeth not to nip outside for a quick cigarette. Fernand had briefly absented himself, tottering off with a dignified gait. When he vanished this late in the day, he generally wasn’t seen again until the following morning. Armand did not seem unduly irritated; he had managed to snaffle his colleague’s last pack of cigarettes and had enough to tide him over until he found a fresh victim.
Two teams – Mehdi with Maleval, Louis with Élisabeth – proceeded to cross-reference the information they had on Lesage with the details of the cases at hand. The first team pored over Lesage’s schedule, the second over his accounts. Armand, with some help from Cob – who was furiously multi-tasking to deal with queries from all three teams – reviewed the five cases in the light of information given to him by his colleagues. It would take several hours to complete this complex task, but it would be crucial to the success of the next day’s interrogations. The stronger the connections, the easier it would be for Camille to put pressure on Lesage, and perhaps even get him to confess.
“On the financial front,” Louis said, laying his hands flat on the desk and nodding to each file in turn, “there are a lot of withdrawals, but the dates don’t make a lot of sense. We’re trying to work out how much money would have been needed at each stage of the crimes. In the meantime, we’re making a list of suspicious withdrawals and deposits. This is complicated by the fact that Lesage has a variety of revenue streams. There are stocks and shares sold or cashed – we have no way of knowing the capital gains involved – cash sales through the bookshop, acquisitions and sales through libraries, other antiquarian booksellers and at auctions. His expenditure is even more complicated. We may need to bring in an expert from the brigade financière.”
“I’ll call Le Guen and ask him to get in touch with Deschamps, in case we need to submit a request.”
Cob, meanwhile, had requested a third computer but, having no space on his desk, he was now forced to get up every five minutes to update the searches he was processing.
Maleval and Mehdi were both children of the digital age and rarely made their notes longhand. Camille found them huddled together at a monitor, mobiles glued to their ears so that they could make calls as soon as they found contact details for Lesage’s business associates.
“Some of the diaries go back a long way,” Maleval said while Mehdi was on hold to someone. “We’re having to ask people to check their old diaries and call us back. It’s a pretty lengthy process. Especially since—”
He was interrupted by Camille’s telephone ringing.
“I’ve just had the divisionnaire on the phone.” It was Juge Deschamps. “He’s told me about the murder on the canal de l’Ourcq—”
“Where the victim was never identified.” Camille finished the sentence for her. “I know, it complicates things.”
They talked for a few minutes about the best way forward.
“I’m not optimistic that our little tête-à-tête via the classified ads will go on much longer,” Camille said in conclusion. “Right now, our man is getting the publicity he’s always dreamed of. But I’m guessing we won’t hear from him again after the next ad.”
“What makes you say that, commandant?”
“At first it was just a hunch. But now I’m sure of it. Unless I’m mistaken, we’ve now identified all the cold cases. He’s got nothing more to tell us. Besides, it’s become a routine. He’ll get bored, he’ll get suspicious. Any routine necessarily involves risk.”
“Well, right now we have a new case. What do we do next? The media are going to be baying for our blood tomorrow.”
“Well, mine, at any rate.”
“You’ve got the press snapping at your heels, I’ve got the ministre de la Justice. We all have our crosses.”
Juge Deschamps’ tone was very different from what it had been at the start of the case. Oddly, the more the investigation flagged, the more obliging she appeared to become. It was an ominous sign and Camille made a mental note to have a word with Le Guen before he went home.
“Where do things stand with this bookseller of yours?”
“His sister seems determined to give him an alibi for every day of the year. I’ve got the whole team preparing for tomorrow’s interviews.”
“Are you expecting to hold him for the full twenty-four hours?”
“I’m hoping I can get an extension.”
“Well, it’s been a long day, and it doesn’t look as if tomorrow will be any shorter.”
Camille glanced at his watch. Immediately he thought of Irène. He told the team to call it a night.
Thursday, April 24
1
Le Matin, early edition:
PANIC AT THE BRIGADE CRIMINELLE.
TWO NEW TOMES FROM THE BACKLIST
OF “THE NOVELIST”
The Novelist keeps detectives guessing
The killer responsible for the double murder at Courbevoie on April 6 last is also suspected of having murdered Manuela Constanza, the young girl whose body was discovered hacked in two on a rubbish tip in Tremblay last November. When, some days ago, it was confirmed that in July of last year, he murdered Grace Hobson in Glasgow, in a homage to Laidlaw, a novel by the Scottish novelist William McIlvanney, the death toll of his “literary achievements” rose to four victims, all of them young, all of them “executed” in carefully staged scenes t
hat are as gruesome as they are macabre.
Today, we can reveal the existence of two further cases.
The killing of a 23-year-old hairdresser stabbed more than twenty times is a meticulous reconstruction of a scene from Le Crime d’Orcival, a classic nineteenth-century detective novel by Émile Gaboriau.
The discovery of another young woman, in August 2000, who was strangled after being subjected to horrific sexual abuse is the recreation of a scene from Roseanna, a crime novel by Swedish authors Sjöwall and Wahlöö.
In total, five novels have served as a pretext for this monstrous killing spree. Six young women have been murdered, each of them in vicious and bewilderingly violent ways.
The police – clutching at straws as the body count rises – have been reduced to attempting to contact the killer through the classified advertisements of an obscure magazine. Their most recent advertisement: “What about your earlier works …?” demonstrates the ghoulish admiration the brigade criminelle seem to have for this butcher.
In recent developments, Jérôme Lesage, a Parisian bookseller, has been held for questioning and is now the prime suspect in the case. His sister Christine Lesage, interviewed yesterday by the brigade criminelle, and devastated by her brother’s arrest, angrily commented: “Jérôme was the person who put the police on the right track when they were at a loss, and this is how they repaid him! Given that they do not have a scrap of evidence against my brother, our lawyer has demanded that he be released immediately.”
It would seem that the police have no hard evidence to implicate this convenient suspect; furthermore, their grounds for arrest amount to a series of trivial coincidences which any one of us might have experienced.
Irene Page 23