Night

by Bernard Minier

  He had even got back in touch with Irène Ziegler, the gendarme who had helped him track Hirtmann in the past. She was no further ahead than he was. She had, however, exhibited no lack of ingenuity in trying to find him. She explained to Servaz how, for example, she had cross-referenced the files of missing young women all over Europe with the concert halls performing Mahler’s music, but she’d met a dead end there, too. Julian Hirtmann had vanished from the face of the earth. And Marianne along with him. And so, after months of frustration, he had eventually concluded she must be dead; perhaps they both were – in an accident, a fire, who knew? He resolved to erase them from his memory. And he had more or less succeeded. Because time had done its work, as always. Two years, three, four, five … Marianne and Hirtmann had vanished into the mist. Shadows, the trace of a smile, a voice, a gesture – little more.

  And now everything that had been so painfully erased was resurfacing. The black heart that had been waiting in the past to come and beat again in the present. And infect his every thought.

  ‘Bonjour,’ said Kirsten in French.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Sleep well?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m checking a file.’

  ‘What sort of file?’

  He explained to her what the 440 was. She told him they had roughly the same sort of newsletter in Norway.

  He closed the 440 and typed something on his keyboard. Read the result of his search.

  Scrolled down the screen.

  ‘There are 116 nursery schools in Toulouse,’ he said, finally. ‘And roughly the same number of primary schools. I counted them.’

  She raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Do you think he’s already in school?’ she asked, somewhat surprised.

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘And do you intend to show the photograph to every school?’

  ‘It would take weeks. And besides, we would need a requisition.’

  ‘A what?’

  Servaz winked at her and picked up his telephone.

  ‘Roxane, can you come? Thank you.’ Turning to Kirsten he said, ‘When a child is involved, and no crime has been committed, we can’t search just like that without permission. It really falls under the remit of the unit for the protection of minors in each département.’

  She wondered if it was this complicated in her country. Roxane Varin came in two minutes later. A rather pretty little woman with round cheeks and a brown fringe, Kirsten had seen her during the meeting. She reminded her of the French actress Juliette Binoche. She was wearing a denim shirt over a pair of skinny grey jeans.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, giving Servaz a kiss on the cheek.

  She shook Kirsten’s hand somewhat timidly. Kirsten thought perhaps she was more at ease with children than with adults. Roxane was holding the photograph of Gustav and collapsed in the last free chair.

  ‘I’ve launched a search with the bureau of academic affairs to see if he’s enrolled,’ she said. ‘They’re the ones who keep track of this sort of thing. Unfortunately there are no photographs in the pupil database. They can search using the first name, as it’s an unusual one,’ she added, not hiding her scepticism that anything would come up.

  ‘What’s the pupil database?’ asked Servaz.

  ‘A computer application: it’s used to manage and monitor a pupil’s school career for the first stage of their education – from nursery school to the end of primary school, when they’re ten years old, or thereabouts.’

  ‘For every school? Both public and private?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And do you have access to it?’

  Kirsten saw her smile. A pretty smile, which lit up her gaze.

  ‘No. No administration outside the Éducation Nationale has access. With the exception of the local council, who enrol the children. And even then, there’s some data the council doesn’t see – for example if the child requires psychological support. The problem is that first and last names are visible up to the level of the regional education authority, but they disappear from the database at the level of the national authority in order to protect confidentiality.’

  She turned to Kirsten and summed up in English what she had just said – with frequent hesitations and corrections and a few frowns of incomprehension on the part of the Norwegian visitor.

  ‘The second problem is that the data is not kept beyond the child’s enrolment in primary school. Once they leave, everything is erased.’

  Again, she translated as best she could. Kirsten nodded.

  ‘Naturally, I also sent a standard search request with a photograph, which will be transmitted to the schools, I hope, once the pupil database comes up negative. How long that will take is another story.’

  She stood up.

  ‘Do you really think the boy is here, Martin?’

  Her tone conveyed the same scepticism as that of his colleagues during the meeting. Servaz did not answer. He merely took the photograph that Roxane handed him and placed it in full view on his desk. He seemed lost in thought. Roxane shot a look and a smile at Kirsten then went out, shrugging her shoulders. Kirsten returned her smile then looked at Servaz, who was gazing out of the window with his back to her.

  ‘Do you feel like going for a little walk?’ he asked suddenly.

  She stared at Servaz’s back.

  ‘Do you know “The Purloined Letter”, by Edgar Allan Poe?’

  He had quoted the title in English, having found it the night before on the Internet. Now he turned around.

  ‘Explain,’ she said.

  ‘Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio: Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than excessive cleverness. A sentence from Seneca that is the epigraph to the story. “The Purloined Letter” tells us that very often the thing we are looking for at some distance is right there in front of our nose.’

  ‘Do you really think that Gustav might be here?’ she echoed Roxane’s question.

  ‘In the story, the police cannot find a letter in an apartment because they assume it is well hidden,’ he continued, ignoring her interruption. ‘Dupin, Poe’s character, has understood that the best way to hide the letter is to leave it on the desk in plain sight: it has simply been folded backwards, and marked with a different seal and different handwriting.’

  ‘Oh, you really are crazy, you know,’ she said in English. ‘What are you driving at?’

  ‘Replace the desk in Poe’s story with Saint-Martin-de-Comminges, where everything began. You said so yourself: Hirtmann came back through the region on several occasions. Why did he do that?’

  ‘Because of you. Because he’s obsessed with you.’

  ‘And what if there was another reason? More compelling than just some obsession with a cop. A son, for example.’

  Kirsten didn’t reply. She was waiting for what came next.

  ‘A son in disguise, but in plain sight, like the purloined letter on the desk in the short story. Simply give him a different surname. But he goes to school, and he is raised by someone who looks after him when Hirtmann is not there, which means most of the time.’

  ‘And no one would notice?’

  ‘Notice what? A boy like any other. Going to school.’

  ‘True. But wouldn’t anyone at the school wonder who this child is?’

  ‘Maybe the people who take him to school have passed themselves off as his adoptive parents? I don’t know, something like that.’

  ‘Saint-Martin, you said?’

  ‘Saint-Martin.’

  ‘Why there in particular?’

  Why there indeed? Just supposing Hirtmann came back to the region to see his son, why would Gustav necessarily be in Saint-Martin? Why not just anywhere in the region?

  ‘Because Hirtmann spent several years in Saint-Martin.’

  ‘Locked up in an asylum.’

  ‘Yes. But he had accomplices on the outside, people like Lisa Ferney.’

  ‘The head nurse a
t the Wargnier Institute, am I right? She worked there. She wasn’t simply living here.’

  He paused to think. Why had he always assumed that Hirtmann must have other accomplices? Accomplices that his associates didn’t find at the time? He knew that his reasoning had no logic to it. Or that, at best, his logic was skewed, and he was seeing signs and coincidences where there were none – the way paranoid people did. Nevertheless, his mind kept swinging back to Saint-Martin, magnetised like the needle of a compass.

  ‘Saint-Martin, that’s where you nearly got killed, isn’t it?’ Kirsten asked.

  She was well informed. He nodded.

  ‘I’ve always thought there was someone else there who helped him,’ he said. ‘The way he escaped that night. On foot over the mountains – his car was wrecked in an accident – in the middle of a snowstorm. He couldn’t have got very far without help.’

  ‘And so it could be this accomplice who is raising Gustav?’

  Her tone was no less sceptical than Roxane’s.

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘You do realise that’s a very thin lead to go on?’

  ‘I know.’

  They came off the motorway at Montréjeau, leaving the monotony of the plain behind them, and began to head up into the mountains.

  They went through a dogleg tunnel and when they emerged at the other end they saw it below the stone parapet: Saint-Martin-de-Comminges, population 20,863. The road went back down and they entered the town.

  The pavements were thronged with people: skiers who had come back down by gondola from the ski resort at the top of the mountain; guests from spas who had forsaken the hot springs for the cafés and restaurants in the centre of town; families with children and pushchairs. Servaz wondered whether Hirtmann could have walked along these streets without being noticed. His face had been on the front page of all the local and even national newspapers, and it was not a face you could easily forget. Might he have resorted to cosmetic surgery? Servaz didn’t know much about it, but he had heard that they could work miracles nowadays.

  As they parked in front of the town hall and got out of the car (he could hear the roar of the waterfall that left a vertical silver line against the wooded flank of the mountain), he felt a little shiver go all down his spine: it would be just like Hirtmann to come back to the scene of the crime and mingle incognito with the crowd. The thought caused him to cast his gaze over the square, the café terraces, the bandstand, and the faces. Beyond the roofs, draped in its cloak of fir trees, the mountain contemplated their arrival with the same indifference with which it had greeted the crimes of the winter of 2008–9.

  ‘What are we doing here?’ he asked, suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘If we’re both here, it’s because he wants us to be. Why? Why did he bring us together?’

  She gave him a questioning look before they entered the town hall.

  There was a different mayor now. He was a young man, tall and corpulent, with a thick beard that hid much of his face and huge bags under his pale, rather watery eyes. It was hard to determine just what colour his beard was: somewhere between brown and ginger, with white streaks in the middle.

  ‘Servaz: that name rings a bell,’ he said, in a strident voice.

  He took the cop’s hand in his huge paw, which was damp and cool. Then he flashed his most charming smile at Kirsten. Servaz looked at his hands: no wedding ring. The big man observed him again.

  ‘My assistant told me you are looking for a child,’ he said, turning around and striding ahead of them into an office that was impressive in size, well lit and aired by two tall French windows with a balcony that offered a view on the highest summits of the range.

  There were advantages to being mayor in Saint-Martin.

  He went to sit back down at his desk. Servaz placed the photograph of Gustav on the desk before taking a seat.

  ‘He may have been at school here,’ he said.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you. We’re in the middle of the investigation.’

  The mayor shrugged and typed on his computer keyboard.

  ‘If he is here, he should show up in the pupil database. Come and have a look.’

  They got up and walked around the desk to stand behind him. From his desk drawer the mayor took a sort of plastic key with a little digital screen in the middle, and gave them a quick course on the database.

  ‘It is protected, of course.’

  On the computer screen they saw the words ‘Login’, ‘ID number’ and ‘Password’.

  ‘I have to enter my ID number. Then the password, which consists of my personal four-digit code, and the six-digit number that appears on this security key. And the login address is different for every regional authority.’

  Servaz watched him click on ‘Enrolment and Admissions’.

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘We only have his first name.’

  The mayor swivelled his seat round to look at them, puzzled. His watery gaze went from one to the other.

  ‘Are you serious? Just the first name? Up to now I’ve always had first and last name. Besides, look: there is an asterisk. The last name is a required field.’

  Roxane’s mistake. No sooner had they begun than they had come up against a brick wall.

  ‘His name is Gustav,’ said Servaz. ‘Surely you must have archives somewhere, with the classes over the last couple of years: there aren’t that many schools in Saint-Martin.’

  The mayor paused and thought.

  ‘Do you have a requisition?’ he asked suddenly.

  Servaz took it from his pocket.

  ‘I should be able to find out for you,’ replied the mayor. ‘Besides, Gustav is not a very common name nowadays.’

  Servaz knew it was unlikely that Hirtmann would have enrolled the child under his real name. But then, why not? Who would make the connection between a child and a Swiss serial killer? Who could ever imagine he would put his child in school in Saint-Martin? Was there any hiding place less likely to arouse suspicion than this one?

  Servaz glanced out at the square. Clouds must have appeared on the peaks, because the square was veiled in shadow and a strange greyish-green haze lay over things, as if he were looking at them through a filter. A little spot of light clung to the roof of the bandstand.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do. It might take me a few hours, all right?’

  ‘We’ll stay here.’

  There was a man down on the square. Because of the hazy light, Servaz could not see him very clearly. A tall man. In a dark winter coat. His face was turned up towards the windows of the town hall. It even seemed to Servaz that the man was looking at him.

  ‘Try Gustav Servaz,’ came Kirsten’s voice suddenly, behind him.

  Servaz gave a start and turned around briskly. The mayor was examining her again, in surprise, then he looked over at Martin.

  ‘Shall I try Gustave Servaz?’ he translated.

  ‘Yes. Gustav without the e.’

  ‘And Servaz, how do you spell it?’

  She told him.

  ‘But that’s your name!’ said the mayor, who clearly no longer understood what was going on.

  Nor did Servaz. There was a buzzing in his ears. He wanted to tell him to stop, but he nodded.

  ‘Do what she said.’

  His heart began beating more quickly. He was having trouble breathing. He looked out of the window. Now he was sure that the man was looking at him. He was standing straight and motionless right in the middle of one of the pathways on the square, his face raised towards the windows of the town hall, and adults and children alike flowed around him like a stream around a large rock.

  ‘Here we go,’ said the mayor.

  The silence lasted only a few seconds.

  ‘Servaz, Gustave: with an e,’ he announced triumphantly.

  15

  School

  Servaz felt an icy shiver. He looked outside. In the place where a sec
ond earlier the man had been standing, there was no one, other than the usual traffic of passers-by.

  Who was that child, for God’s sake?

  ‘He was enrolled at Jules Verne School until last year,’ said the mayor, as if he had heard the question. ‘But he’s not here any more.’

  ‘And you don’t know where he is?’ asked Kirsten.

  ‘What I do know,’ said the mayor in English, ‘is that he has left the region. Otherwise he would show up in the database.’

  He turned to Servaz. Servaz saw his eyes narrow; the man must be puzzled by his pallor and his haggard expression, and he must be wondering what was going on.

  ‘Show us where it is, this Jules Verne School,’ said Kirsten, pointing at the map pinned to the wall.

  In the face of Servaz’s shock and apparent paralysis, she was taking charge. He wondered how the idea had occurred to her. Clearly she was better acquainted with Hirtmann and his thought process than she let on.

  ‘Right. I’ll show you,’ said the mayor.

  They arrived at a long white avenue between two rows of ancient plane trees already leafless from the early winter. Their heavy, gnarled branches, crowned with snow, evoked living characters, like the Disney cartoons of Servaz’s childhood, their anthropomorphic nature giving them branches for arms. The snowplough had gone by and had cleared the middle of the drive that led to the school gates. They passed a little snowman, probably made by very young children, because he stood crookedly and had an oddly shaped head. He looked like a nasty, unsightly gnome.

  On the far side of the drive and the gates was an old-fashioned playground, which made Servaz think of the novel Le Grand Meaulnes and his own childhood in the southwest. How many children had passed through here? Was it here that lives were decided, as some people claimed? How many children had their first experience of life in society here in school, discovering the cruelty of their peers, or exerting their own? Servaz himself had almost no memories of this period.

  The playground was deserted; the children were in class. As Servaz and Kirsten crossed it, evanescent plumes of cold escaped their lips, and both of them were buffeted by the wind that blew the snow from the trees. A woman appeared in the covered part of the playground, tugging her coat closer around herself for warmth. Servaz gauged her to be in her fifties; her hair was dyed blonde, and she had an open but stern face.