*
He’s a man of about forty. He was out walking his dog, a creature currently sitting at his feet and looking like something that God cobbled together on an off-day. Camille and the dog stare at each other. The mutual loathing is instant. The dog growls then scurries to its master’s feet whimpering. But of the two of them, it is the dog’s owner who seems most surprised to find Camille standing in front of him. He glances at Louis, astonished that a short-arse like this could be a police commandant.
“Commandant Verhœven,” Camille says. “You want to see the warrant card or are you going to take my word for it?”
Louis is lapping this up. He knows what’s coming next. The witness will say:
“No, no, it’s fine … It’s just—”
“Just what?” Camille will interrupt.
The witness will dig himself deeper.
“I wasn’t expecting, you know … it’s just …”
At that point, there are two possible scenarios. Either Camille keeps up the pressure, forces the guy to keep digging until at last he begs for mercy – he can be ruthless. Or he gives up. This time, Camille gives up. They’re dealing with a kidnapping. This is serious.
So: the witness was out walking his dog and he saw a woman kidnapped. Right before his eyes.
“Nine o’clock exactly,” Camille says. “You’re sure about the time?”
The witness is like most people – when he talks about something, he’s really just talking about himself.
“Certain. I have to be home at half-past to watch the car crashes on ‘No Limit’. So I always take the dog out just before.”
They start with a physical description of the perpetrator.
“Thing is, I saw him only in profile. But he was a big guy, a big lunk, you know.”
He clearly thinks he’s being helpful. Camille stares at him, already exhausted. Louis takes over the questioning. Hair? Age? Clothes? Didn’t really see, hard to say, ordinary.
“O.K. What about the vehicle?” Louis does his best to sound encouraging.
“A white van. The sort a tradesman would drive, you know.”
“What kind of tradesman?” Camille interrupts.
“Um … I don’t know what kind – a tradesman, you know.”
“What makes you say that?”
It’s obvious Camille is trying to catch him out. The guy stands there, his mouth hanging open.
“Well they do, don’t they, tradesmen,” he mumbles. “They’ve all got white vans.”
“Yes, they do,” says Camille. “In fact, they tend to paint their name, address and phone number on the side. Free advertising. So what did he have painted on the side of his van, this tradesman of yours?”
“Well, that’s the strange thing: there was nothing on the side of the van. At least I didn’t see anything.”
Camille takes out his notebook.
“Let me get this down. So, we’re saying an unknown woman kidnapped by an unknown tradesman in a vehicle with no distinguishing marks – am I missing anything?”
The dog owner panics. His lip is quivering. He turns towards Louis: come on, help me out here, please.
Camille snaps his notebook shut, and turns away. Louis takes over. Their sole witness statement doesn’t amount to much, but they’ll have to make do. Camille overhears the rest of the interrogation. Make of the vehicle? (“A Ford maybe … I don’t know much about cars. I haven’t owned one for years …”) But the victim was definitely a woman? (“Absolutely, positively.”) The description of the aggressor remains vague. (“He was alone, I know that; I didn’t see anyone else.”) All that’s left is the M.O.
“She screamed, she was struggling … so he thumped her in the stomach. He didn’t pull his punches. In fact that’s when I screamed. I was trying to scare him, you know …”
Every detail is like a knife in Camille’s heart, as though every word is directed at him. A shopkeeper had seen Irène the day she was snatched: it was exactly the same – he had nothing to say, he hadn’t seen anything or hardly anything. Same deal. We’ll see. He comes back.
“Where were you standing exactly?”
“Over there.”
Louis looks at the ground. The guy points.
“Show me.”
Louis closes his eyes. He knows what Verhœven is thinking; it’s something he wouldn’t do. Flanked by the two policemen the witness drags his dog along the pavement then stops.
“About here …”
He thinks, turns one way then the other, pulls a face. Yeah, about here. Camille wants confirmation.
“Here? Not further back?”
“No, no,” the witness says triumphantly.
Louis comes to the same conclusion as Camille.
“He kicked her too,” the man says.
“I can see everything,” Camille says. “So, you were standing here, about … what?” He glances at the witness. “Forty metres away?”
Yeah, the guy’s happy with the estimate.
“You see a woman being beaten up and yelled at forty metres away and you have the balls to … scream.”
He looks up at the witness, who is blinking rapidly as though overcome with emotion.
Without a word, Camille sighs and walks off, giving a last parting glare at the mutt who looks about as courageous as his master. It’s obvious that he’d like to put a bullet in them both.
He feels – he gropes for the word – a sort of distress, a sort of … electric feeling. Because of Irène. He turns, looks at the deserted street. And, finally, he feels the shock. He understands. Until now, he has done his job, technically, methodically, in an organised manner, taking the initiatives expected of him. But only now, for the first time since he got here, does he realise that on this very spot, less than an hour ago, a woman screamed, was beaten, bundled into a van; that right now she is being held somewhere, terror-stricken, possibly being tortured, that every second matters and here he is working on auto-pilot because he’s trying to remain detached, to protect himself, because he doesn’t want to do his job, this job he chose to do. The job he chose to continue doing after Irène died. You could have done something else, he thinks, but you didn’t. You’re here right now and there is exactly one reason for you to be here: to find the woman who’s just been kidnapped.
Camille feels a wave of dizziness. He puts a hand out and steadies himself against a car; with the other hand he loosens his tie. Being in this situation is probably not the best idea for a man so easily crushed by disaster. Louis has just come over to him. Anyone else would ask, “Are you O.K.?” Not Louis. He stands beside Camille, stares into the distance as though patiently, feelingly, anxiously awaiting a verdict.
Camille shrugs off the dizziness and turns to the forensics officers working about three metres away.
“What have we got?”
He walks over to them, clears his throat. The problem with a crime scene in the middle of the street is that you have to collect everything and then try to figure out which bits are connected to your case.
One of the officers, the taller of the two, looks up:
“Couple of cigarette butts, a coin …” he peers at the plastic evidence bag lying on his briefcase, “foreign, a métro ticket and, if we move a bit further away, I can offer you a used Kleenex and a plastic ballpoint cap.”
Camille picks up the plastic envelope with the métro ticket, holds it up to the light.
“And he obviously knocked her about a bit,” the officer continues.
There are traces of vomit in the gutter which his colleague is collecting using a sterile spoon.
There’s a commotion at the barriers. A group of uniformed officers have just turned up. Camille does a head count. Le Guen’s sent him five officers.
Louis knows what he has to do. Three teams. He’ll fill them in on the preliminary details; they need to cover the area – not that they’ll get much at this time of night – and get the word out; it’s textbook with Camille. One of the officers will stay beh
ind with Louis to interrogate the residents, get the curtain twitchers nearest to the crime scene to come down.
*
Just before 11.00 p.m., Louis the Charmer has found the only building in the street that still has a concierge living on the ground floor – a rarity in Paris these days. Seduced by Louis’ elegance, she allows them to use her lodge as an incident room. Just one look at the commandant’s height, and the ageing concierge feels a twinge of compassion. The man’s handicap is like an abandoned animal; it touches her. She covers her mouth with her fist – my God, my God, my God. The very sight moves her to pity, her legs give way, she feels faint, makes you sick just to think of it. She glances surreptitiously at the commandant, screwing up her eyes, as though he has an open wound and she can feel his pain.
In a stage whisper, she asks Louis:
“You want me to get a little chair for your boss there?”
It’s as though Camille is suddenly shrinking, as though something has to be done.
“No, thanks,” Louis the Dutiful says, closing his eyes. “We’ll be fine as we are, but thank you so much, madame.”
Louis flashes her a dazzling smile. So she brews up a big pot of coffee for everyone.
She adds a spoonful of mocha to Camille’s cup.
The teams all hard at work, Camille sips his coffee under the compassionate eye of the concierge. Louis is thinking. That’s his thing: Louis is an intellectual; he thinks all the time. Tries to understand.
“Money … ?” he ventures carefully.
“Sex …” Camille says, “madness …”
They could reel off the whole litany of human passions: the urge to destroy, to possess, to rebel, to dominate. They have seen a lot in their time, these men. Now here they are standing in this concierge’s lodge … Standing idle.
*
They’ve combed the area, brought down the neighbours, checked witness statements, hearsay, various opinions, they’ve rung doorbells on the strength of hunches which proved to be unfounded: it’s taken most of the night.
And so far: nothing. The kidnapped woman obviously doesn’t live in the area, or at least not in the immediate vicinity of the kidnapping. No-one seems to know her around here. They have three descriptions of women who might fit the bill: women who are away on holiday, on business …
Camille doesn’t like the sound of any of this.
3
She is woken by the cold. And the bruises, because it was a long journey and being tied up, she couldn’t stop herself from rolling around and slamming into the sides of the van. Then, when the van eventually came to a halt, the man opened the door, bundled her into a sort of white plastic tarp, tied it, then slung her over his shoulder. It’s terrifying being reduced to a piece of cargo and terrifying too to realise you’re at the mercy of a man who can sling you over his shoulder. It’s not hard to imagine what he might be capable of.
He took out her gag, but he took no care putting her on the ground or dragging the tarpaulin down the stone stairs. Her ribs banged against every step and it was impossible to protect her head. Alex screamed, but the man just kept moving. When she hit the back of her head a second time, she passed out.
Impossible to know how long ago that was.
Now, there’s no sound, but she feels an acute cold in her shoulders, in her arms. Her feet are frozen. The packing tape is wound so tight it’s cutting off her circulation. She opens her eyes. Or tries to open them, since her left eye is stuck shut. And she can’t open her mouth. A thick strip of duct tape. She doesn’t remember that. Must have happened while she was unconscious.
Alex is lying on the ground on her side, arms tied behind her back, feet lashed together. The hip bearing all her weight is painful. She regains consciousness slowly, like a coma patient; her whole body aches as though she’s been in a car crash. She tries to work out where she is, rocks her hips and manages to turn over onto her back. Her shoulders hurt. Her left eye finally comes unstuck, but it registers nothing. I’m blind in one eye, Alex thinks, panicked. But after a few seconds, the half-open eye sends a blurred image that seems to come from a planet light years away.
She sniffles, empties her mind, tries to think rationally. It’s a warehouse or a storeroom. A large, empty space, diffuse light pouring in from above. The ground is hard, damp; there is a stench of dirty pools of rainwater. This is why she feels so cold: the place is sodden.
The first thing she remembers is a man pressing himself against her. A strong, pungent smell, the smell of animal sweat. At terrible moments, the things you remember are often trivial: he tore out my hair; this is the first thing she thinks. She pictures her skull with a large bald patch, a whole fistful of hair yanked out, and she starts to cry. In fact, it’s not really this thought that makes her cry, but everything that has happened, the exhaustion, the pain. And the fear. She cries and it’s hard to cry with the packing tape over her mouth. She chokes, starts to cough, but finding it difficult to cough she starts to suffocate; her eyes fill with tears. She retches, feels her stomach heave. It’s impossible to throw up. Her mouth is filled with a sort of bile that she is forced to swallow. It takes forever. It makes her feel nauseous.
Alex struggles to breathe, to understand, to make sense of things. Despite the desperate situation, she tries to calm herself a little. Calm is not always enough, but without it, you’re doomed. Alex tries to relax her body, slow her heartbeat. Tries to understand what is happening to her, what she’s doing here, why she is here.
Think. She is in pain, but something else is bothering her; her bladder is full and compressed. She’s never been very good at holding on when it comes to peeing. It takes less than twenty seconds to decide: she lets go and pisses herself for a long time. This loss of control is not defeat, because she made the choice. If she hadn’t, she would have gone on suffering, squirming and writhing maybe for hours, and in the end it would come to this. And given the circumstances, she has greater things to fear: the need to piss is an unnecessary hindrance. Except that a few minutes later, she is even colder and this is something she hadn’t thought of. Alex is shivering and she no longer knows whether it is from cold or from fear. Two images come to mind: the man in the métro, at the far end of the carriage, smiling at her; and his face as he holds her pressed against him, just before he shoves her into the van. She was badly hurt when she landed.
Suddenly, some way off, a metal door clangs and echoes. Alex immediately stops crying, alert, frantic, about to crack up. Then, she manages to heave herself back onto her side and closes her eyes, steeling herself for the first blow, because she knows he will beat her; that is why he abducted her. Alex has stopped breathing. In the distance she hears the man approaching, the footsteps heavy and deliberate. Finally he stops in front of her. Through her eyelashes she can see his shoes, sturdy, well-polished shoes. The man says nothing. He towers over her, silent, stands there for a long moment as though watching her sleep. At last, she makes a decision, opens her good eye wide and looks up at him. His hands are behind his back, his face bent towards her. It is impossible to make out what he’s thinking, and he simply bends over her as he might bend over a thing. From below, his head is impressive, his thick black eyebrows casting shadows that partly hide his eyes, but mostly it is his forehead, bigger than the rest of his face; it seems out of proportion. It makes him look retarded, primitive. Pig-headed. She racks her brains for the word. Doesn’t find it.
Alex wants to say something. The tape makes it impossible. In any case, the only words that would come out would be “Please, I’m begging you …” She tries to think what she might say to him if he unties her, to come up with something that does not make it sound as if she is pleading, but she can think of nothing: no questions, no demands, nothing but this entreaty. The words won’t come; Alex’s brain is frozen. And the baffled thought: he’s abducted her, tied her up, dumped her here – what is he going to do to her?
Alex cries; she can’t help herself. The man walks away without a word. He goes to
the far corner of the room. With a sweeping gesture, he pulls away a tarpaulin; it’s impossible to tell what it was covering. And that magical incantation begins again: please don’t let him kill me.
His back to her, bent double, the man staggers backwards, both hands dragging something heavy – a crate? – that screeches against the concrete floor. He’s wearing dark grey cotton trousers and a striped jumper, large and baggy, that looks as if he’s had it for years.
After moving backwards for several metres he stops, looks up at the ceiling as though calculating something, then stands, hands on his hips, as though wondering how best to proceed. Finally he turns and looks at her. He comes over, crouches down, his knee close to her face, reaches out and suddenly slashes the tape binding her ankles. Then his fat hand grips the tape at the corner of her mouth and rips it savagely away. Alex howls in pain. He manages to haul her to her feet with one hand. Not that Alex weighs much, but even so, one hand. A wave of dizziness courses through her – standing sends blood rushing to her head and she falters again. She barely comes up to the man’s chest. He grips her shoulder hard and turns her round. She doesn’t have time to say anything before he cuts the tape around her wrists.
Alex summons all her courage; she doesn’t think, she simply says the first words that come to her.
“Please, I’m b— b— begging you …”
She barely recognises her own voice. And she’s stammering, like a child, like a teenager.
They’re standing face to face. This is the moment of truth. Alex is so terrified at the thought of what he might do to her that suddenly she wants to die, right here, wants him to kill her right now. What she fears most is this waiting, which her imagination fills with images of what he might do to her. She closes her eyes and sees her body, pictures it as though it is no longer a part of her, a body lying as she was a moment earlier: it is mutilated, bleeding profusely, in excruciating pain; somehow it is not her, but it is her. She sees herself lying dead.
Alex Page 3