“This girl is a murderer, Jean,” Camille says.
“Maybe she is a murderer,” Le Guen says. “We’ll know for sure when the test results come back. For the moment, you know as well as I do that’s just pure speculation.”
“As speculation goes, it’s pretty watertight.”
“O.K., so maybe you’re right … what does it change?”
Le Guen looks to Louis for support. It’s an embarrassing situation, but Louis is a nice boy from a good family. He was educated at the best schools; one of his uncles is an archbishop and another is a far-right member of parliament, so he’s long since learned to distinguish between the ethical and the practical. Besides, he was taught by Jesuits. He knows everything there is to know about duplicity.
“The divisionnaire’s question seems pertinent,” he says in a measured tone. “What does that change?”
“Louis, I thought you were smart,” Camille says. “It changes the approach.”
Everyone is staggered. Even Armand, who is busy scrounging a cigarette from someone at the next table, whips round in surprise.
“The approach?” Le Guen says. “What the fuck are you on about, Camille?”
“You really don’t get it, any of you,” Camille says.
Usually they joke and piss around, but this time there’s something in Camille’s voice.
“You don’t get it.”
He takes out his notepad, the one in which he’s constantly sketching. To take notes (he rarely takes notes, trusting everything to memory), he turns it round to write on the back of the pages he’s drawn on. A bit like Armand. Except that Armand would write on the spine too, if he could. Louis catches a glimpse of a drawing of some rats. Camille really is one hell of an artist.
“I’m finding this girl really interesting,” Camille explains calmly. “Honestly. This thing with the sulphuric acid, too, that’s interesting. Don’t you think?”
And when the question elicits no response:
“So I did a little bit of research. It needs some refining, but I think I’ve got the essentials.”
“Come on,” Le Guen says, exasperated. “Spit it out.”
Then he picks up his glass of beer, drains it in one gulp and gestures to the waiter to bring another. Armand gestures Me too.
“March 13 last year,” Camille says, “a certain Bernard Gattegno, forty-nine, is found dead in a Formule 1 motel near Étampes. Death caused by the ingestion of sulphuric acid, 80 per cent concentration.”
“Oh, shit …” Le Guen says, horrified.
“Given the state of his marriage, it was put down to suicide.”
“Let it go, Camille.”
“No, no, it’s funny, you’ll see. Eight months later, on November 28, Stefan Maciak, a café owner from Reims, is found murdered. The body was found in the café the following morning when they opened up. Post-mortem findings: he was beaten and tortured using sulphuric acid, same concentration. Poured down his throat. Proceeds of the theft, about 2,000 euros.”
“Can you really imagine a girl doing something like that?” Le Guen says.
“And can you really imagine committing suicide by drinking sulphuric acid?”
“But what the fuck has any of this got to do with our case?” roars Le Guen, slamming his fist down on the table.
Camille holds up his hands in surrender.
“O.K., Jean, O.K.”
In the sepulchral silence, the waiter comes back with a beer for Le Guen and one for Armand, wipes down the table and clears away the empty glasses.
Louis knows exactly what is going to happen; like a music hall magician he could write it down, put it in an envelope and hide it somewhere in the café. Camille will return to the attack. Armand finishes his cigarette with relish – he’s never bought a pack of cigarettes in his life …
“One little thing, Jean …”
Le Guen closes his eyes. Louis smiles to himself. In the presence of the divisionnaire, Louis only ever smiles inwardly, that’s the rule. Armand goes with the flow; whatever the situation he’d offer thirty to one on Camille.
“If you could just clear something up for me,” Camille says. “Guess how long it’s been since we had a murder involving sulphuric acid … Go on, guess …”
Right now the divisionnaire is in no mood for guessing games.
“Eleven years – I’m talking unsolved cases, obviously. From time to time we’ve had villains use acid as part of their M.O., but it’s secondary, an artistic touch, you might say. But we catch them, we arrest them and we bang them up – the decent, upstanding vengeful public won’t stand for it. No, in the last eleven years, when it comes to sulphuric acid, the police have been remorseless and unbeatable.”
“Know what you are, Camille?” Le Guen sighs. “You’re a pain in the arse.”
“A good point, divisionnaire. I fully understand your reservations. But the thing is, as Danton used to say, ‘facts are stubborn things’ and those are the facts.”
“Lenin,” Louis says.
Camille turns, irritated.
“What about Lenin?”
Louis pushes back his hair with his right hand.
“Facts are stubborn things,” says Louis, embarrassed, “It wasn’t Danton who said it, it was Lenin … quoting John Adams.”
“So what?”
Louis blushes. He’s about to say something, but Le Guen gets in before he can.
“Exactly, Camille, so what? So what if there hasn’t been a murder involving sulphuric acid in ten years?”
He’s furious, his voice thunders across the terrace, but Le Guen’s Shakespearean outbursts of rage alarm only the other customers. Camille, for his part, stares modestly at his shoes, which dangle six inches off the ground.
“Eleven years, sir, not ten.”
This is one of the many failings Camille might be accused of: when he practises modesty and restraint he can be a little theatrical, a little too Racine.
“And now,” he goes on, “there have been two cases in the space of eight months. Both victims were men. In fact, including Trarieux, there have been three.”
“But …”
Louis would say that the divisionnaire “eructates” – he’s got a way with words, that boy. Only this time his eructation peters out. Because he can’t think of anything to say.
“How is this connected to the girl, Camille?” Armand says.
Camille smiles.
“At last, an intelligent question.”
Le Guen simply mutters “… a total pain in the arse.”
To show how disheartened he is, he gets up, makes a weary gesture as if to say, fine, maybe you’re right, but we’ll talk about it later, later. Anyone who didn’t know Le Guen would think he was genuinely depressed. He tosses a handful of coins onto the table and, as he leaves, raises one hand like a jury member taking the oath. From behind he’s wide as a truck; he trudges heavily away.
Camille sighs. It’s always wrong to be right too soon. “But I’m not wrong.” As he says this, he taps his nose with his finger, as though he needs to remind Armand and Louis that, in general, he’s got a nose for things. It’s just that he gets the timing wrong. Right now, the girl is a victim, nothing more. And not finding her, when that’s what you’re paid to do, would be a fuck-up, and claiming the woman is a multiple murderer would not be much of an exoneration.
They all get to their feet and head back to the station. Armand has cadged a small cigar – the guy at the next table didn’t have anything else. They leave the café and walk towards the métro.
“I’ve got the teams together,” Louis says. “The first one …”
Camille abruptly places a warning hand on his forearm as though he has just spotted a cobra at his feet. Louis looks up, listening intently. Armand is listening too, ear cocked. Camille is right. It’s like a jungle – the three men look at each other, feel the ground tremble under their feet to some deep, rumbling rhythm. As one, they turn, prepared for anything. Twenty metres away a colossal
hulk is bearing down on them at a terrifying speed. Le Guen is thundering towards them, the flying tails of his jacket making him seem even more huge, his raised hand clutching a mobile telephone. Camille fumbles for his own mobile, remembers he had turned it off. He doesn’t have time to move, to get out of the way; Le Guen is already upon them. It takes him several paces to come to a halt, but he’s calculated his trajectory with care and stops right in front of Camille. Strangely, he’s not out of breath. He jabs at his mobile.
“They’ve found the girl. She’s in Pantin. Get your arse in gear!”
*
The divisionnaire heads back to the brigade criminelle, a thousand things to do on the way; he’s the one who calls the investigating magistrate.
Louis drives sedately at breakneck speed. Within minutes, they’re at the scene.
The abandoned warehouse is perched on the bank of the canal, a decrepit industrial blockhouse, half ship, half factory. It’s a square, yellowish building with – on the ship side – broad gang-ways running down from each floor along the side of the building, and on the factory side, serried ranks of tall windows. A masterpiece of 1930s concrete architecture. A monument whose lettering, all but obliterated now, reads FONDERIES GéNéRALES.
Everything around it has already been demolished. This is the one building still standing and probably about to be redeveloped. Decorated from top to bottom with large white, blue and orange graffiti tags, it sits enthroned above the canal like one of those Indian elephants adorned from head to foot that lumber mysteriously behind the streamers and the banners. The previous night, a couple of teenage street artists managed to clamber onto the first-floor gangway, something everyone assumed was impossible now that all the doorways have been bricked up, but a piece of cake for kids like that. They were just putting the finishing touches to their work at dawn when one of them happened to look down through the buckled glass roof and clearly saw a wooden cage dangling with a body inside. They spent the whole morning weighing up the risks before eventually putting in an anonymous call to the police. It took less than two hours to track them down to question them about their nocturnal activities.
The fire brigade and the brigade criminelle were called. The building has been sealed up for years – the company that bought it had everything bricked up. While one team tried to raise a ladder to the gangway, another attacked the bricked-up doorway with sledgehammers.
Besides the firefighters, there’s quite a crowd milling around outside: uniformed officers, plain-clothes officers, squad cars with lights still flashing, and the general public – no-one knows how they got here – all watching what’s going on as the police begin to seal off the area with construction barriers found on the site.
Camille scrambles out of the car – he doesn’t even need to flash his warrant card – trips and almost falls on the gravel and the broken bricks, but regains his balance just in time, watches the firefighters doing their work for a minute, then yells: “Wait!”
He walks over. The watch commandant heads over to block his path. Camille doesn’t give him time to block anything – there’s a gap in the wall just right for a man of his size; he slips inside the building. It will take a lot more sledgehammering for anyone else to get in.
*
The interior is completely empty, vast rooms bathed in a diffuse, greenish light that falls like dust from the skylights and the shattered windows. He can hear water trickling, the rattle of loose slates somewhere above that echoes through the cavernous space. Rivulets of water snake past his feet. It’s the sort of place that would give anyone the creeps. It’s impressive, though, like a derelict cathedral, the mournful atmosphere of the end of the industrial age, but the background and the light are exactly those in the photos of the girl. Behind Camille, the sledgehammers continue to pound at the bricks; it sounds like a military tattoo.
Camille immediately shouts, “Anyone here?”
He waits for a second, then starts to run. The first room is cavernous – fifteen or twenty metres long with a ceiling at least four or five metres high. The floor is soaking wet, water seeping from the walls – the whole place is dank and cold. These were clearly storerooms, but before he even gets to the far end of the first room, he knows he is in the right place.
“Anyone here?”
He can hear it himself – his voice is different; it’s something that happens at a crime scene, a sort of tension – you can feel it in your belly, hear it in your voice. And what has triggered this is a smell, almost drowned out by the whirling draughts of cold air. The stench of rotting flesh, of piss and shit.
“Anyone here?”
He runs. He hears quick footsteps behind him; the team have come through the wall. Camille rushes into the second room and stops dead, arms dangling, staring at the scene.
Louis has just arrived next to him. The first words he hears from Camille are:
“Fucking hell …”
The wooden cage has crashed to the ground, two of the slats ripped away. Maybe they broke during the fall and the girl finished the job. The stink of putrefaction is coming from three dead rats, two of them crushed by the crate. Swarms of flies are everywhere. There is half-dried excrement in bags a few feet from the crate. Camille and Louis look up; the rope has been eaten through by something – one end is still hanging from the pulley fixed to the ceiling.
But there’s blood everywhere, too.
And no sign of the girl.
The officers who have just arrived set off to look for her. Camille nods doubtfully; he doesn’t think there’s any point.
Disappeared.
In the state she was in.
How did she manage to escape? Forensics will tell them. How did she go, and which way? Forensics will find out. The fact remains that the girl they were trying to save has done the job herself.
Camille and Louis are lost for words, and as the vast rooms ring with shouted orders and instructions and echoing footsteps, they stare, frozen, at this strange turn of events.
The girl escaped, but she didn’t go to the police as any kidnap victim might.
Some months ago, she killed a man with a shovel and melted off half his face with sulphuric acid before burying him in a suburban garden.
Only by pure chance was his body discovered, which makes you wonder whether there are others.
And how many.
Especially since two similar deaths have been reported and Camille would stake his life on them being connected to the death of Pascal Trarieux.
The fact that she managed to escape from this horrifying situation tells you she’s no ordinary girl.
They have to find her.
And they have no idea where she might be.
“I suspect,” Camille says solemnly, “that Divisionnaire Le Guen might perhaps now have a better grasp of the scope of our problem.”
II
26
Half-conscious from exhaustion, Alex can barely take in what is happening.
Using her last shreds of strength, she manages to set the cage swinging so fast, so high, that the petrified rats have to dig their claws into the wood to hang on. She lets out a loud continuous howl. Dangling at the end of the rope, the crate rocks wildly in the icy breeze whipping through the room, like a car on a Ferris wheel before some terrible accident.
The stroke of luck that saves Alex’s life is that the rope breaks when the cage is angled downward. Eyes fixed on the fraying rope, Alex watches as the last threads snap one by one, the cable seems to writhe in pain and suddenly the crate plummets. Given the weight, the drop is lightning fast, a fraction of a second, barely enough time for Alex to tense against the impact. The jolt is brutal, one corner of the cage attempting to drive through the concrete floor; the crate quavers for a moment then topples heavily in a deafening groan of relief. Alex is pressed against the lid. In an instant, the rats scatter. Two of the planks of wood have split, but none is altogether broken.
Stunned by the force of the fall, it takes Alex a moment
to surface, to regain consciousness, but the crucial information reaches her brain: it worked. One of the slats has split almost in two, a space nearly large enough to squeeze through. Alex is suffering from hypothermia; she wonders where she will find the strength. And yet she lashes out with her feet, scrabbles with her hands and suddenly the crate comes apart. The plank above her gives way. It is as though the sky has suddenly parted, like the Red Sea in the Bible.
This triumph almost makes her mad. She is so overwhelmed by emotion, by relief, by the success of her insane plan, that rather than struggling to her feet and getting out, she stays in the cage, prostrate, sobbing. She can’t stop herself.
Her brain sends out a new signal: get out of here. The rats won’t dare attack again so soon, but what about Trarieux? He hasn’t come for some time – what if he were to turn up now?
She has to get out, get dressed, get out of here.
She begins to uncoil her body. She had hoped for deliverance; this is torture. Her whole body is rigid. She cannot get to her feet, cannot extend her legs or push with her arms, cannot get into a normal position. A hard ball of tetanised muscle. She has no strength left.
It takes a full minute, two minutes for her to get onto her knees. The effort is so excruciating it seems impossible – she howls helplessly, screams as she forces her muscles, pounds on the cage with her fists. Overcome by tiredness, she collapses again, curled into a ball, exhausted. Paralysed.
It takes every ounce of courage, of sheer willpower to try again, the unimaginable effort required to stretch her limbs, cursing the heavens, to straighten her pelvis, turn her neck … A struggle between the dying Alex and the living Alex. Slowly, her body revives. Painfully, but it revives. Eventually, chilled to the marrow, Alex succeeds in getting into a squatting position, to slide first one leg, then the other, inch by inch over the top of the crate and tumble onto the other side. The fall is painful, but she presses her face joyfully against the damp, cold concrete and starts to sob again.
A few minutes later, she manages to crawl on all fours and fetch an old rag to drape round her shoulders. She gets as far as the water bottles, snatches one up and drains it. She catches her breath, finally manages to lie on her back. Days and days – how many days exactly? – she has been waiting for this moment, days when she resigned herself to the thought that it might never come. She could stay here until the end of time, feeling her circulation pick up, the searing blood, her joints recovering, her muscles coming back to life. Her whole body aches. This is how frostbitten mountaineers must feel when they’re found alive.
Alex Page 13