Camille puts on his shoes, puts on his jacket, picks up his car keys, and an hour later he is slowly driving through the sleepy streets on the outskirts of the forest of Clamart.
A turning on the right, one on the left and straight ahead, the road running beneath the tall trees. The last time he was here, he had his service revolver wedged between his thighs.
Fifty metres ahead he sees the building. The headlights are reflected in the grimy windows. Tall, narrow windows in serried ranks like the ones you find in factories. Camille stops the car, turns off the engine, leaving the headlights on.
That day, he had a doubt: what if he was wrong?
He turns off the headlights and climbs out of the car. The night is chillier here than it is in Paris, or perhaps he is simply cold. He leaves the car door open and walks towards the house. It must have been about here that the helicopter suddenly came down through the treetops. Camille was nearly knocked over by the roar, the downblast, and he began to run. At least that’s how he remembers it. It’s so long ago it’s difficult to remember anything.
The studio is a single-storey outbuilding, once the home of the caretaker of the property, long since dead. From a distance, it looks like a hut, with an open veranda on which you might expect to see a rocking chair. The path Camille is walking on is one he has taken hundreds of times as a child, as a teenager, when he came to visit his mother, to watch her work, to work alongside her. As a boy, he had never been drawn to the forest; the most he would do was take a few cautious steps – he always said he preferred to stay indoors. He had been a solitary boy. He made a virtue of necessity, since he found it hard to make friends, given his height. He didn’t like being the constant butt of jokes. He preferred not to play with anyone. The fact was, the forest had scared him. Even now, the tall trees … Camille is fifty years old, or very nearly, so he’s a little old to be scared of the Erl King. But he is no taller now than he was at thirteen, and however much he tries he still finds the darkness, the forest, this isolated house disturbing. This is where his mother worked, but it is also where Irène died.
47
In the hotel room, Alex has folded her arms across her chest. She will call her brother. When he recognises her voice, he’ll say: “Oh, it’s you … what do you want this time?” He’ll be angry from the start, but it can’t be helped. She picks up the hotel telephone, checks the sticker to see what she has to do, dials 0 to get an outside line. She spotted a place where she can meet him – it’s very close to the industrial estate; she jotted down the address. She rummages for it now, finds it, takes a deep breath and dials his number. Voicemail. Surprising – he never turns off his mobile, not even at night; he always says that work is sacred. Maybe he’s going through a tunnel, or maybe he left his mobile on the hall table, who knows? It doesn’t matter: she leaves a message. “Hi, it’s Alex. I need to see you. It’s urgent. Meet me at eleven thirty at 137, boulevard Jouvenel in Aulnay. If I’m late, wait for me.”
She’s about to hang up, then says, “But don’t keep me waiting.”
*
Now she is once again caught up in the atmosphere of the room. Alex lies on the bed and daydreams for a while – the time passes slowly, her dreams come naturally, logically following on one from another. From the next room she hears the muffled sound of the T.V.; people don’t realise how loud their television is, how annoying it can be. She could have it silenced if she wanted. She could get up, go next door and knock, a man would open, surprised; he would be an ordinary man like those she’s killed – how many? five, six, more? She would smile sweetly, the way she does, say, “Hi I’m next door,” nodding towards her room. “I’m all alone, can I come in?” The astonished man would stand aside to let her in and she would immediately say, “Would you like me naked?” in the same tone as one might say, “Could you pull the curtains?” The man’s jaw would drop in amazement. He’d be in his thirties, with a bit of a paunch, obviously – they’re all the same; all the men she killed had a bit of a belly, even Pascal Trarieux – may the Devil in His Infinite Cruelty torture him – with him it was the beer. She would open her bathrobe and ask: “So what do you think?” It would be wonderful to do that for once, just for once. To open her bathrobe, stand naked and ask, “So what do you think?” and be sure of the reaction, be certain that the man would open his arms wide and she could melt into his arms. In real life, what she would say is: “Would you mind turning off your T.V.?” The man would stammer an apology and fumble clumsily for the off button, flustered by this miraculous apparition. He is bent over, his back is to her – if she wanted she could grab the aluminium bedside lamp and bring it down with both hands just behind his right ear; nothing could be simpler. Once he’s dazed, it would be child’s play; she knows where to strike to stun him and line up the next blow; tie him up using the sheets, tip half a litre of concentrated acid down his throat and that’s that, there’s no more noise from the T.V., the guy’s not likely to turn up the sound now, and she can have a peaceful night.
*
This is the sort of thing Alex daydreams about as she lies on the bed, hands behind her head. She lets herself drift. Memories of her life flood back. She has no regrets: one way or another, she had to kill these men; she needed to make them suffer, needed to watch them die. No, she doesn’t regret any of them. In fact, there could easily have been more, many more. This is simply how the story took its course.
Time for a little drink now. She considers pouring a small Bowmore in the plastic tooth glass, but changes her mind and swigs straight from the bottle. Alex is sorry she didn’t buy a pack of cigarettes too. After all, she is celebrating. It’s been fifteen years since she gave up cigarettes. She doesn’t know why she wishes she had bought some tonight; she never really enjoyed smoking. She did it to fit in. She was following every young girl’s dream: to be like everybody else. She has no head for whisky – even a little makes her tipsy. She hums songs to which she doesn’t know the lyrics and as she hums she packs away her things again, folds her clothes one item at a time and carefully packs them into her new travel bag. She likes things to be neat – her apartment was something to behold, all her apartments, in fact, always spotless. In the bathroom, on the little cream-coloured plastic shelf marked with cigarette burns, she arranges her toiletries: toothpaste, toothbrush. From the sponge bag, she takes out her bottle of happy pills. There’s a stray hair caught under the lid. She opens the bottle, takes the hair and lets it drop like a leaf; she wishes there were a handful of them so she could create a shower of rain, of snow; she used to do that with a friend when she was little, sit on the lawn and spray each other with a hose. This is the whisky talking, because as she does her little chores, she’s still drinking from the bottle, and though she’s been drinking slowly, she’s quite tipsy.
The tidying up now done, she finds she’s reeling slightly. She hasn’t eaten anything in a long time; a little drink and she’s all over the place. She didn’t think. This makes her laugh, a tense, nervous laugh, a worried laugh; this is how she always is: worry is second nature to her; that and cruelty. As a girl she would never have imagined she was capable of such cruelty, she thinks now as she puts her nice new travel bag into the built-in wardrobe. She was such a gentle child – everyone always said so: “Alex is so sweet, she’s absolutely adorable.” Admittedly, she was small and ugly so they always rushed to compliment her on her personality.
And so the evening passes, the hours pass.
And Alex sips and sips and in the end she cries a lot too. She wouldn’t have thought she had so many tears left in her.
Because tonight is a time of great loneliness.
48
Like a gunshot in the darkness, the wooden step cracks the moment he puts his weight on it. Camille almost topples over, steadies himself, manages to stay upright, one foot trapped by the broken floorboard. He’s hurt himself. He struggles to pull free, has to sit down. Now here he is, with his back to the studio, staring at the car, its headlights still gla
ring, exactly where he had been when he saw the emergency services arrive. He hadn’t been himself – they’d found him, distraught, in much the same place he’s sitting now. Or maybe he’d been standing against the railing a little further along.
Camille gets to his feet, walks carefully across the boards of the veranda which also creaks and threatens to give way. He can’t remember where exactly he was that night.
What’s the point of trying to remember? It kills time.
Camille turns towards the door. It was hastily boarded up, but he doesn’t need to worry since both the gabled windows have been smashed, not a single pane of glass left. He climbs over the windowsill, hops down on the other side. The old red floor tiles still gleam beneath his feet; his eyes begin to adjust to the darkness.
His heart is hammering; his legs can barely hold him up. He takes a few steps.
The whitewashed walls are covered with graffiti. People have been here, have squatted here; there’s an old mattress on the floor, ripped open now, and here and there are burned-out candles, empty cans and bottles. The wind whips through the room. Part of the roof has caved in; through it you can see the forest.
All this is terribly sad, because there’s nothing left now on which to hang his grief. Even his grief is different. Suddenly, unexpectedly, a brutal image comes back to him.
The body of Irène and the baby.
Camille falls to his knees and bursts into tears.
49
Alex slowly rolls over and over on the hotel bed; naked, silent, eyes closed, she holds her T-shirt at arm’s length, waving it like a gymnast’s ribbon, and lets the images rise to the surface: she sees them again, watches as the images flit past in a strange, random order as the T-shirt – her pennant – whirls, whipping against the walls of the room. She remembers the bloated face, the bulging eyes of the café owner in Reims whose name she can’t recall. Other memories flood back; Alex dances, she twirls and twirls and her pennant has become a weapon. Now she sees the terrified rictus of Bobby, the truck driver. At least she remembers his name. She winds her T-shirt around her fist, stabs and thrusts at the hotel room door as though planting a screwdriver in an imaginary eye. She twists her hand as though grinding it deeper. The door handle shrieks under the pressure, Alex twists savagely and her weapon plunges in and disappears. Alex is happy – she swings the weapon around her balled fist. Laughing, she skips and dances across the room, over and over she kills, over and over she sees the faces of her victims. Then finally the dance palls, the dancer tires. Did all those men truly desire her? Sitting on the bed, gripping the whisky bottle between her knees, Alex pictures what a man’s desire looks like: Félix, for example – she can see his feverish eyes. He was gagging for her. If he was sitting opposite her, she’d stare deep into his eyes; lips parted slightly she’d reach out with her T-shirt in her hands and stroke him gently, skilfully, the whisky bottle between her knees like a giant phallus, and Félix would explode, in fact that’s exactly what he did, explode in mid-air, the warhead decoupling from the rocket and flying across the room.
Alex tosses her T-shirt into the air, imagining it drenched in blood, and it lands gently like a seagull on the broken sofa next to the door.
Later – it is completely dark now – her neighbour has turned off his T.V. and gone to sleep, without knowing what a miracle it is still to be alive in a room next to Alex.
Standing in front of the washbasin, as far back as possible so she can see herself full length in the mirror, naked, serious, a little solemn, Alex gazes at herself. Nothing more, just gazes at herself.
So this is Alex; this is all there is to her.
It’s impossible not to cry when you are face-to-face with yourself.
Something inside her snaps. She feels a crack open up, feels herself sucked inside.
This image of her in the mirror is so powerful.
Suddenly she turns away, her back to the mirror; she gets down on her knees and without a second’s hesitation, she brutally slams her head back against the edge of the washbasin, one, two, three, four, five times, each time harder than the last, each time exactly the same part of her skull. It makes a terrible clanging noise, like a gong, because Alex does it with all her strength. The last blow leaves her dazed, disoriented, in tears. There are cracked and broken things inside her head, and not just today. They’ve been broken for a long time. She staggers to her feet, totters to the bed and collapses. Her head is incredibly sore; the pain comes in steady waves; she squeezes her eyes shut, wonders whether she’s bleeding into the pillow. Using her left hand, she reaches out as precisely as she can, grabs the bottle of barbiturates and lays it on her belly; with infinite care (her head is agony) she pours the contents into her hand and swallows all the pills at once. She props herself awkwardly on her elbow, turns towards the nightstand, reeling, picks up the whisky gripping it tightly; she drinks straight from the bottle, she drinks and drinks for as long as her breathing will allow. In a few short seconds, she downs half the bottle, then she lets it go and hears it roll away across the carpet.
Alex falls back in a heap on the bed.
With great difficulty she suppresses a wave of nausea.
She dissolves into tears, though she doesn’t realise that.
Her body is here, but her mind is already elsewhere.
It curls into a ball. Everything coils around her life; what remains turns in on itself.
Suddenly her brain is seized by panic, but it’s purely neuronal.
What will happen now concerns only this mortal coil; these last moments, the moments from which there is no way back. Alex’s mind is already elsewhere.
If there is an elsewhere.
50
The place has been turned upside down. All the exits have been blocked, the car park cordoned off; there are police cars, flashing lights, uniforms. To the hotel guests it almost looks like a T.V. series, except that it’s not night. In crime series, scenes like this almost always happen at night. It’s 7.00 a.m., the time when it’s all go, when everyone’s racing to catch a flight. For more than an hour the manager has been apologising profusely to the guests, giving all sorts of assurances. One wonders what he’s promising them.
The hotel owner is standing in the doorway when Camille and Louis arrive. As soon as he understands the situation, Louis steps in front. He’s used to such situations – he wants to talk to the hotelier first; if he lets Camille do it, within half an hour there’ll be a civil war.
So Louis, looking compassionate and sympathetic, takes the owner aside, leaving a passage open. Camille follows a local officer, the man who was first on the scene.
“I saw at once it was the girl from the missing persons appeal.”
He’s waiting for congratulations, but they don’t come; the little man isn’t exactly friendly, he walks quickly and he looks as if he’s self-sufficient, completely withdrawn. He refuses to take the lift, so they take the concrete stairwell no-one uses and it echoes like a cathedral.
In spite of everything, the officer adds, “We didn’t let anyone in. We waited for you to get here.”
Things play out curiously. Since the room is still cordoned off waiting for forensics and Louis is downstairs distracting the owner, Camille is alone as he steps into the room, as if he is a family member visiting someone on their deathbed and – out of respect for his privacy – he is being left alone with the deceased for a moment.
In places with no grandeur, death is always rather mundane. This young woman is no exception. She’d rolled herself up in a sheet and later the convulsions wound it tighter, such that she looks like an Egyptian corpse about to be mummified. One hand hangs languidly over the edge of the bed, terribly feminine and human. Her face is bruised. Her eyes are open, staring fixedly at the ceiling. At the corners of her lips, there are traces of vomit, most of which is probably still in the mouth. The whole scene is unutterably painful.
As with any death, the room seems to be pervaded by a sense of mystery. Camille remains
on the threshold, though he is well used to bodies; he’s seen a lot in his time – hardly surprising since he’s been in the force twenty-five years – one day he’ll have to work out the figures, but it must be the equivalent of a village. There are some that have an effect on him and some that have none. The subconscious decides. This one is painful. It hurts. He doesn’t know why.
His first thought was that he always arrives too late. This is why Irène died; his instinct had been wrong, he’d been too mule-headed, he got there too late and by then she was dead. But no, now that he’s here he knows that’s not it, that history doesn’t mindlessly repeat itself, that no dead girl can take the place of Irène. First and foremost because Irène was innocent; this is not something he can believe about this girl.
And yet he’s troubled, and he can’t explain why.
He senses, he knows, that there’s something he hasn’t understood. Maybe even right from the start. And this girl has taken her secrets with her. Camille would like to go over, to take a closer look, lean over her, to understand.
He hunted her while she was alive; now here she is lying dead and still he knows nothing about her. How old is she? Where is she from?
Alex Page 23