“He seemed a lot more shifty when I met him …”
Camille remembered that Louis first met him during the investigation into the death of Pascal Trarieux.
It’s Monday, 5.00 p.m., the brigade criminelle headquarters.
Louis (Brioni suit, Ralph Lauren shirt, Forzieri brogues) is sitting at his desk. Armand is sitting next to him, his socks down around his ankles. Camille is sitting in a chair at the far end of the room, legs swinging, poring over a sketchpad as though this has nothing to do with him. Right now he’s drawing from memory a portrait of Guadalupe Victoria he once saw on a Mexican coin.
“When will the body be released?”
“Soon,” Louis says. “Very soon.”
“It’s been four days already …”
“I know, these things always seem to take a long time.”
Objectively, this is something Louis does to perfection. This consummate look of commiseration is something he must have learned early, a legacy of family, of class. Right now, Camille would paint him as Saint Mark presenting the doge of Venice.
Louis picks up his notepad, his case file, as though he wants to get the painful formalities out of the way as quickly as possible.
“O.K., then. Thomas Vasseur, born December 16, 1969.”
“I think that’s in the file.”
Not aggressive, but spiky. Irritated.
“Oh, yes, yes,” Louis says effusively. “We just need to check everything is in order. To put this to bed. From what we know, your sister killed six people, five men and one woman. Her death makes it impossible to piece together these events. We have to have something to tell the families – I’m sure you understand. Not to mention the magistrate.”
Ah, yes, the magistrate, Camille thinks. He was dying to give a press conference. It didn’t take him long to get the backing of his superiors; everyone wanted a press conference. It’s hardly a triumph, a serial killer who commits suicide – it’s not as good as an arrest – but it’s worth it from the point of view of security, public safety, civil peace and all that shit. The murderer is dead. It’s like a medieval town crier announcing the wolf is dead; everyone knows it’s not going to change the face of the world, but it affords relief, reinforces the impression that some higher power is watching over us. And the higher power in this case is revelling in it. Vidard appeared before the assembled journalists as though this was the last thing he wanted to do. To listen to him talk, you’d think that the police had the murderer cornered and she had to choose between surrender and suicide. Camille and Louis watched it on the T.V. in the local bistro. Louis was resigned about it. Camille was laughing to himself. After that moment of glory, the magistrate calmed down. In front of the cameras, he talked the talk, but now it comes to closing the investigation, it’s the brigade criminelle who have to walk the walk.
So this is about what they’re going to tell the families. Thomas Vasseur understands; he nods, still fractious.
Louis becomes engrossed for a moment in the case file, then he looks up, brushes his hair from his face with his left hand.
“So, date of birth: 16 December, 1969.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re a sales director with a games hire company.”
“That’s right. We work with casinos, bars, nightclubs; we rent slot machines. All over France.”
“You’re married with three children.”
“Yep, and now you know everything.”
Louis meticulously makes a note, then looks up again.
“So you were … seven years older than Alex?”
This time Thomas Vasseur simply nods.
“Alex never knew her father,” Louis says.
“No, my own father died young. My mother got pregnant with Alex much later, but she didn’t want to be in a relationship with the guy. He disappeared.”
“So, we might say that you were the only father she ever had?”
“I looked after her, yeah. I took charge of her; she needed it.”
Louis says nothing, allows the silence to drag on. Vasseur continues.
“Even back then Alex was … what I mean is, Alex was unstable.”
“Yes,” Louis says. “Unstable … that’s what your mother said.”
He knits his brows slightly.
“We have no record of a psychiatric episode; she doesn’t seem to have been hospitalised or sectioned.”
“Alex wasn’t crazy, she was unstable!”
“Because she never had a father …”
“Mostly it was her personality. Even as a kid, she didn’t make friends, she was withdrawn, isolated, didn’t talk much. And she was undisciplined.”
Louis gives a look that says he understands, and when Vasseur says nothing, he ventures, “She needed taking in hand …”
Difficult to know whether this is a question, a statement or a comment. Vasseur decides that it’s a question.
“Exactly.”
“Your mother wasn’t enough.”
“It’s no substitute for a father.”
“Did Alex ever talk about her father? I mean, did she ask questions? Ask to see him?”
“No, she had everything she needed at home.”
“You and your mother.”
“My mother and me.”
“Love and discipline.”
“If you want to put it like that.”
*
Divisionnaire Le Guen deals with Vidard. He acts as a screen between him and Camille. He has all the necessary attributes: the stature, the forbearance, the patience. Whatever one may think of the magistrate, and he can certainly be unpleasant, Camille really is a liability. For several days now, since the girl’s suicide, there have been rumours. Verhœven isn’t the man he used to be; he’s impossible to work with; he can’t handle large-scale investigations. Everyone is talking about him, the story of a girl who wasted six people in two years can’t help but attract attention – even leaving aside how she went about it – and it’s true that it looks as though throughout the investigation Camille was behind the curve. Right to the end.
Le Guen rereads the conclusions in Camille’s final report. They had a meeting an hour ago.
“Are you sure about this, Camille?” Le Guen says.
“Absolutely.”
Le Guen nods.
“If you say so …”
“Listen, if you prefer, I can …”
“No, no, no,” Le Guen cuts him short, “I’ll take care of it. I’ll see the magistrate myself and explain. I’ll keep you posted.”
Camille throws up his hands in surrender.
“Come on, Camille. What the hell is the deal with you and magistrates? You’re always at loggerheads with them from the start – it’s as though you can’t help it.”
“You’d need to ask the magistrates.”
Behind the divisionnaire’s question is an awkward implication: is it Camille’s height that means he constantly has to challenge authority?
*
“So this Pascal Trarieux, you knew him at school?”
Thomas Vasseur throws his head back and puffs impatiently as though blowing out a candle on the ceiling. He makes it clear he’s finding it hard to keep a grip; he mutters a firm, curt “yes”, the sort of yes usually designed to deter someone from asking any more questions.
This time, Louis doesn’t hide behind the case file. He has an advantage, since he is the one who interviewed Vasseur a month ago.
“When I first interviewed you, you said, and I quote: ‘Pascal was always busting our balls about this girlfriend of his, Nathalie … Though I suppose at least he had one for once.’”
“So … ?”
“And we now know that this Nathalie was in fact your sister Alex.”
“You might know that now, but I had no idea at the time.”
When Louis says nothing, Vasseur feels obliged to elaborate a little.
“You have to realise, Pascal was a complicated guy. He never really had girlfriends. Actually, I thought he
was just bragging. He talked about this Nathalie girl all the time, but none of us ever got to meet her. We laughed about it, to tell you the truth. I for one never took it terribly seriously.”
“But you’re the one who introduced Alex to your mate Pascal.”
“No I didn’t, and he wasn’t a mate.”
“Really? So what was he then?”
“Listen, I’m going to come clean with you. Pascal was a fucking moron; the guy had the I.Q. of a sea urchin. O.K., so I knew him at school, he was a childhood friend, if you prefer – I used to run into him now and again. But he wasn’t what you call ‘my mate’.”
Here, he laughs quite loudly to emphasise how ridiculous the idea is.
“You ran into him now and again …”
“From time to time I’d see him in the bar when I stopped in to say hi. I still know a lot of people in Clichy. I was born there, he was born there, we went to school together.”
“In Clichy.”
“Exactly. You might say we were friends back in Clichy. Will that do you?”
“That’ll do nicely, thank you.”
Louis worriedly buries himself in the case file again.
“So were Pascal and Alex also ‘friends back in Clichy’, as you put it?”
“No, they weren’t ‘friends back in Clichy’ and you’re starting to piss me off with this whole thing about Clichy. If you …”
“Calm down.”
Camille says this. He doesn’t raise his voice. Like a kid with his crayons in the corner, they had forgotten he was there.
“We ask the questions. You answer them.”
Vasseur turns towards him, but Camille does not look up; he goes on sketching. He simply adds,
“That’s how things work round here.”
Finally, he looks up, holds the drawing critically at arm’s length, tilting it slightly and then, just as he peers over the sketchpad adds, “And if you kick off again I’ll charge you with Contempt of Cop.”
Camille sets the sketchpad down on the table and, just before leaning over it again, he says, “I hope I’ve been sufficiently clear.”
Louis pauses for a beat. Vasseur, caught off guard, glances from Louis to Camille and back again, his mouth hanging open. The atmosphere is like a late summer day when a storm breaks unexpectedly and you suddenly realise you’ve come out without a coat, the sky is black as thunder and you’re very far from home. Vasseur looks as though he’s about to pull up the collar of his jacket.
“So?” Louis says.
“So what?” says a bewildered Vasseur.
“So, were Alex and Pascal Trarieux also ‘friends back in Clichy’?”
“No, Alex never lived in Clichy,” Vasseur says. “We moved, she would have been, I don’t know, four or five at the time.”
“So how did she meet Pascal Trarieux?”
“I don’t know.”
Silence.
“So, your sister meets your quotes friend Pascal Trarieux by pure chance …”
“I suppose so.”
“And she tells him she’s called Nathalie. And she murders him with a shovel in Champigny-sur-Marne. And none of this has anything to do with you.”
“What do you want from me? Alex is the one who killed him, not me!”
He’s angry now, his voice becoming shrill, then suddenly he breaks off. Very coldly, he says slowly, “Why are you interrogating me anyway? Have you got something against me?”
“No,” Louis says quickly. “But you have to understand, after Pascal’s disappearance, his father, Jean-Pierre Trarieux, went looking for your sister. We know he tracked her down, that he abducted her near her home, kept her hostage, tortured her; we believe he was planning to kill her. Miraculously, she escaped … you know the rest. But this is precisely what interests us. What is surprising is that she should be going out with his son under an assumed name. What did she have to hide? But what’s even more surprising is, how did Jean-Pierre Trarieux manage to find her?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Well, we have a little theory.”
With a sentence like this Camille would have a field day; it would sound like a threat, an accusation – it would be heavy with subtext. With Louis, it’s just a statement. This is the great thing about Louis – his British officer side. Whatever has been decided is what he does. He allows nothing to distract him, to stop him.
“You have a theory,” Vasseur echoes. “Would you mind telling me what it is?”
“When he was looking for his son, Jean-Pierre Trarieux visited everyone he could think of who knew him. He showed them a poor-quality photograph of Pascal with Nathalie. That is Alex. But of all the people he spoke to, you are the only one who must have recognised your sister. And this is precisely what we think happened. We think you gave him her address.”
No reaction.
“However,” Louis goes on, “given Monsieur Trarieux’s agitated state and his explicitly hostile attitude, giving him the address was tantamount to facilitating grievous bodily harm. At the least.”
This piece of information slowly percolates around the room.
“Why would I do any such thing?” Vasseur says, seemingly genuinely curious.
“That is precisely what we would like to know, Monsieur Vasseur. His son, Pascal, had – as you put it – the I.Q. of a sea urchin. The father was not much more evolved and you didn’t have to be a genius to work out what his intentions were. I said that this was tantamount to getting your sister beaten up, but in fact anyone would have realised that he might well have killed her. Is that what you wanted, Monsieur Vasseur? For Jean-Pierre Trarieux to kill your sister? To kill Alex?”
“What proof have you got?”
“Aha!”
This is Camille again. It begins as a roar of joy and ends with an appreciative laugh.
“Ha, ha, ha! I love it!”
Vasseur turns to look at him.
“When a witness asks what proof we have it means he’s not disputing our conclusion,” Camille says. “He’s just trying to wriggle out of it.”
“Right.” Thomas Vasseur has just made a decision. He does so calmly, placing his hands flat on the desk in front of him. He leaves them there and stares at them as he says, “Could someone please tell me what I am doing here?”
The voice is powerful, the sentence thundered like an order. Camille gets up, no more sketching, no more cunning, no more proof: he strides over and stands in front of Vasseur.
“How old was Alex when you started raping her?”
Vasseur looks up.
“Oh, so that’s it …”
He smiles.
“Why didn’t you just say?”
*
As a child Alex kept a diary sporadically. A few lines here and there, then nothing for ages. She doesn’t even always write in the same copybook. Among the stuff in the bin bags, they found all sorts of things. An exercise book with the first six pages filled with spidery writing, a hardback notebook with a picture of a galloping horse against the sunset.
The handwriting is childlike.
Camille reads only one sentence: “Thomas comes into my bedroom. He comes nearly every night. Maman knows.”
*
Vasseur gets to his feet.
“O.K., gentlemen, if you’ll forgive me …”
He takes a few steps.
“I don’t think that’s how it’s going to go down,” Camille says.
Vasseur turns. “Really? And how is it going to go down, in your opinion?”
“In my opinion, you’re going to sit down and answer our questions.”
“Questions about what?”
“About you sexually abusing your sister.”
Vasseur looks from Louis to Camille and says in mock alarm, “Really? Is she intending to press charges?”
He’s clearly amused now.
“You’re a bunch of jokers, the lot of you. I’m not going to spill my guts to you; I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction.”
He f
olds his arms across his chest, tilts his head like an artist looking for inspiration and says in a sensual voice, “The truth is, I was very fond of Alex. Awfully fond. Enormously fond. She was an adorable little girl, you can’t imagine. A little skinny, and her face was a little plain, but she was delicious. And sweet. And, yes, unstable. You have to understand, she needed a lot of discipline. And a lot of love. That’s often the way with little girls.”
He turns to Louis, spreads his hands, palms up, and he smiles.
“You said it yourself, I was her daddy.”
Then he folds his arms again, satisfied.
“And now tell me, gentlemen, has Alex pressed charges alleging rape? Might I see a copy?”
55
According to Camille’s calculations, having cross-checked the files, when Thomas “comes into her bedroom”, Alex was not quite eleven. He was seventeen. To come to this conclusion required a number of hypotheses and deductions. Half-brother. Protector. My God, the savagery in this story, Camille thinks. And people say I’m brutal.
He comes back to Alex. They have a few childhood photographs, none of them dated, so they have to rely on the background elements (the clothes, the cars) to approximate the year. That, and Alex’s physical appearance. She grows steadily, from one photograph to the next.
Camille has spent a lot of time running through the family saga. The mother, Carole Prévost, a nursing auxiliary, marries François Vasseur, a printer, in 1969. She is twenty at the time. Thomas is born in the same year. When the father dies in 1974, the boy is barely five and probably has no memory of his father. Alex is born in 1976.
Father unknown.
“He was a useless prick,” Mme Prévost said decisively, oblivious to the pun. She doesn’t have much of a sense of humour. Then again, being the mother of a woman who’s murdered six people is hardly conducive to joke-making. Camille wanted to spare her having to see the handful of images found among Alex’s effects so he took them off the table. Instead, he asked her if she had any pictures. She brought a bundle of them. He and Louis organised them, noted the where and when they were taken, and the names of the people Mme Prévost had identified. Thomas, for his part, gave them no photographs, claimed that he had none.
The pictures of Alex as a child show a terrifyingly thin little girl, gaunt face, prominent cheekbones, eyes ringed with dark circles, lips thin and pouting. She poses awkwardly, reluctantly. One of them was taken at the seaside: there are beach balls and parasols, and the shot is backlit. It was taken at Le Lavandou, according to Mme Prévost. Both children are in the picture, Alex, aged ten, and Thomas, seventeen. He stands head and shoulders above her. She is wearing a two-piece swimsuit; she hardly even needs to wear the bikini top – it’s just for show. Her wrists are so thin, two fingers would be enough to encircle them; her legs are so skinny that her knees stick out; her feet are turned a little inwards. The fact that she looks sickly and puny might not matter were it not that her face is ugly. Even her shoulders look wrong. It’s harrowing when you know what you’re looking at.
Alex Page 25