‘No particular reason … Did you know something terrible happened in this refuge ten years ago? Something horrible …’
She shuddered. He had said it in such a strange voice: deeper, more serious. As if he enjoyed it. It was getting darker and darker. She wanted to go back inside.
‘What was this horrible thing you refer to?’
‘A woman was raped. By two skiers. In front of her husband … It went on almost all night until the two guys collapsed with tiredness.’
She felt a twist of apprehension in her belly.
‘That’s horrible,’ she said. ‘Did they catch them?’
‘Yes. A few days later. They both had police records as long as your arm. And you know what? Their sentences were reduced for good conduct.’
‘And the woman, did she die?’
‘No, she survived.’
‘Do you know what happened to her?’
He shook his head in the thickening gloom.
‘They say her husband committed suicide. But it’s probably some stupid rumour. People around here love rumours. Thanks for the cigarette,’ he said in his soft, sibilant voice. ‘And for the rest.’
‘What rest?’
‘The two of us here, quiet, speaking freely … I fancy you.’
He took a step closer. She looked up at him, not liking what she saw.
It was as if the night that was moving through the tree trunks had poured brutally into his pupils, devouring the entire iris. His dark, opaque gaze was like a bottomless well of such pure, avid carnality that she recoiled.
‘Hey, watch it,’ she heard herself saying.
‘Watch what, Emmanuelle?’ She hated the way he said her name. ‘You’ve been making eyes at me for a while now.’
‘What?’
There was something wilder, more violent, in the burned man’s voice now, and her heart started racing.
‘Are you out of your mind!’
She saw anger replace the animal lust in his gaze. Then the mocking little smile returned. His lips parted, pulling at the scars around his mouth, and she waited to hear the words that would demean her, reduce her to less than nothing, but they didn’t come. He merely turned on his heels and headed with a shrug to the door of the refuge.
She could feel her pulse beating all the way into her throat. The bird shrieked again deep in the woods, and a chill ran from her neck all the way down to the base of her spine, like an electrical impulse. She hurried to join the others.
Beltran watched the blonde woman removing her boots at the entrance. She had been outside with the burned guy for more than five minutes, and her cheeks were as red as the checks on the tablecloth where he had his elbows. Something had happened out there, something she didn’t seem to have found amusing or even remotely pleasant.
‘Everything all right?’ he asked.
She replied with a nod, but her expression indicated quite the contrary.
Emmanuelle Vengud spread her sleeping bag on a mattress in silence, off to one side. There wasn’t enough room on the bunks and she had difficulty putting up with smells and snoring at night. And besides, she didn’t want to sleep near the man with the burned face. Six days out of seven she was a chartered accountant. She worked at home, in a quiet study. This was her first time at a spa and her first time ski-touring in a group. She had thought everyone would be tired when they got to the refuge – too tired to talk, in fact – but they wouldn’t stop chatting. Especially the three men.
‘You say they raped her in front of a guy?’ asked the one in his fifties whose name was Beltran.
‘Yup, after they tied her up, there.’
The burned man pointed to the central beam that held up the roof of the refuge. He refilled their glasses.
‘To a torture post, in other words,’ said the guide, looking disgusted, knocking back his drink as if it were water.
‘And when did this happen?’ asked Beltran.
‘Ten years ago.’
The burned man gave a sadistic smile. He had not removed his hood, no doubt to hide a scalp that was bare in places, or deeper wounds, thought Beltran.
‘On 10 December, to be precise.’
‘Today is 10 December,’ pointed out the brunette, with a catch in her voice. She had short hair and a suntanned face. Her name was Corinne.
‘I’m joking,’ he said, winking at her.
No one seemed to think it was funny, and silence fell over the room.
‘Where did you hear that story?’ asked Beltran eventually.
‘Everyone knows it.’
‘I didn’t know it,’ said Corinne, ‘and I’m from around here.’
‘I mean all the guides know, the mountain people. You’re a dentist.’
‘Well she might have been my patient. What was her name?’
‘No idea.’
‘Can’t we talk about something else?’ interrupted Emmanuelle brusquely.
Her voice expressed a mixture of annoyance and something deeper: fear. Suddenly there was a loud noise on the roof above them. Emmanuelle and the others jumped and looked up. Everyone, except the burned man.
‘What was that?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Don’t tell me you didn’t hear it.’
‘Hear what?’
‘The loud noise on the roof.’
‘It was probably a mound of snow,’ said the young guide.
‘A mound of snow doesn’t make a sound like that.’
‘Then a branch that broke under the weight of the snow,’ said Corinne, shooting a scornful look at Emmanuelle.
They fell silent for a moment. The wind was blowing against the shingles outside; the flames were hissing in the stove.
‘She wasn’t just raped,’ continued the burned man in the shadow of his hood, in his curious sibilant voice. ‘They were tortured, too, she and her husband. All night long. Left for dead. It was a guide who found them the next morning. A friend of mine.’
Emmanuelle could see Corinne’s eyes shining with curiosity – as well as desire for the guide.
‘That’s horrible,’ she said, but there was something else in her voice, an undertone that said to the guide, ‘It’s so exciting to be talking about this here with you, knowing we’re going to sleep near each other …’
She was in her mid-forties, her hair styled in a short, tousled, blunt cut, almost a man’s cut, over her ears. She had a dark complexion and her eyes were hazel and slightly slanting. She could not stop brushing her elbow against the guide’s, and Emmanuelle saw her foot beneath the big table doing the same thing. She felt her cheeks flush. Were they going to do it here, tonight, in front of everyone?
‘The worst of it,’ added the guide, ‘was that—’
‘Enough, for Christ’s sake!’
She saw the other four turn and look at her. The young guide was smiling, mockingly.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘I think everyone must be tired,’ said Beltran. ‘Why don’t we call it a night?’
Corinne shot him a look of irritation. She and the guide had not flirted enough.
‘Good idea,’ said the man with the burned face, in his cold, high-pitched voice.
‘I’m going to have one last smoke before I turn in,’ said the guide, getting to his feet. ‘Care to join me?’ he asked Corinne.
She nodded with a smile and followed him. She was at least fifteen years older than him. Bitch, thought Emmanuelle.
‘It was pretty scary all the same, that story,’ said Corinne, once they were outside.
He smiled and took a cigarette from the packet. She held her hand out to take it, but he moved it away from her fingers to place it between his lips and pretend to suck the filter end. Now it was her turn to smile. She did not take her eyes off his fine lips, red as fruit in the middle of his blond beard. He slipped the cigarette into her mouth and brought the quivering flame of the lighter closer, never taking his eyes off her.
‘Matthieu, that’s your name, right?�
�� she asked.
‘Yup.’
‘I don’t like sleeping alone, Matthieu.’
They were very close; not as close, however, as she would have liked, because of the cigarettes. She was divorced, free to do as she pleased, and she didn’t refrain from enjoying her freedom whenever the opportunity arose.
‘You’re hardly alone,’ he answered. ‘You’ll have three guys around you.’
‘I mean alone in my sleeping bag.’
Almost simultaneously they moved their cigarettes to one side and their faces came closer together. She could feel his breath on her face, with its faint smell of wine.
‘You want to do it with the others sleeping right next to you,’ he said. ‘That’s what turns you on.’
It wasn’t a question.
‘I hope at least one of them won’t be asleep,’ she replied.
‘Why don’t we do it here, right now?’
‘It’s too cold.’
She looked deep into his eyes. His gaze was vacant, devoid of any expression; it filled almost her entire field of vision and yet she could see something moving in the thicket behind him, in the angle between his neck and his shoulder: a moving shadow.
‘What was that?’
‘What?’ he said as she slipped out from between him and the wall.
‘I saw something.’
He turned around reluctantly and gazed out at the dark forest.
‘There’s nothing there.’
‘I’m sure I saw something! There, in the woods.’
Her voice trembled with panic now.
‘I told you, there’s nothing. You saw a branch moving with the wind, that’s all.’
‘No, it was something else,’ she insisted.
‘Then it was an animal … Shit, what are you playing at?’
‘Let’s go in,’ she said, tossing her cigarette butt into the snow.
‘There’s someone out there,’ she said.
They all looked at her; behind her, the guide rolled his eyes towards the ceiling.
‘I saw someone,’ she said again. ‘There was someone out there.’
‘Shadows,’ said the guide, walking in front of her to join the others. ‘Shadows in the forest, trees moving in the wind. There’s no one’s there. Honestly, who would be out in the forest on a cold evening like this? And what for? To steal our iPhones and our skis?’
‘I’m sure I saw someone,’ she said, annoyed, having lost all desire to flirt with this imbecile.
‘Let’s go and see,’ said Beltran. ‘Do we have torches?’
The guide sighed, went over to his bag and took two out.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
The two men headed out of the door.
‘I was right,’ said the guide. ‘There’s no one.’
The beams of their torches danced among the trees, a jerky, strobe-light ballet, revealing the frightening depths of the forest. And in those depths, night was endless. Like snow, night levels everything; it absorbs, conceals …
‘There are footprints here. They look recent.’
Reluctantly, the young guide went closer. There were indeed deep footprints at the edge of the forest. A few metres from the refuge, where the snow was thickest, where Corinne thought she had seen something. The snow sparkled in the light from their torches.
‘So what? Someone came through here. These prints could even be from yesterday. With the cold, nothing moves, perhaps they’re not as recent as all that.’
Beltran look at the guide and pulled a face. He didn’t like it, but the young man was probably right. If that nutter hadn’t told his story, they wouldn’t all be imagining things.
‘Right, shall we go back?’ said the guide.
Beltran nodded. ‘Yeah, let’s go back.’
‘We didn’t see anything, okay? No footprints. No reason to frighten the others.’
18
Strong Sensations
Kirsten went back to the hotel room shortly before midnight. She stepped into the shower and soaped herself for a long time under the steaming spray. Martin had left her in the centre of town before heading home, because she had told him she needed to get some fresh air.
When she came out of the shower she picked up her phone, which she had left charging, and went back to sit on the toilet seat.
‘Hey, Kasper,’ she said when he picked up.
‘So, how’s it going?’ asked the cop from Bergen.
Servaz was smoking a cigarette outside his building on the place Victor-Hugo. If he looked up he could see his own balcony and the light in the living room and, from time to time, a figure walking past the picture window: Margot.
He smoked and thought about Gustav.
He thought again of what the headmistress had said: ‘What is your tie to this boy?’ and the terrible doubt, the dreadful apprehension that had come to him in the car and which had been secretly sapping his efforts to get at the truth: Was Marianne already pregnant before Julian Hirtmann abducted her? No, it was impossible. And yet he could not help but take out the photograph at every opportunity to look at the boy’s face. He would rather not count how many times he had done so today, because he would have realised he was on the verge of some sort of madness. What was he looking for in the boy’s features? A resemblance, or the absence of one; proof that Hirtmann really was the father?
He had the photograph in his hands at that very moment, and despite the dim light on the square, he was looking at the boy looking back at him when his telephone vibrated somewhere in his trousers. He checked the bright screen: he didn’t recognise the number.
‘Hello?’
‘So, how is that heart doing?’
He gave a start and looked around him at the deserted square, the empty pavements. There was no one in sight, with or without a telephone.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘That was quite a night you had, wasn’t it, Martin? On that railway carriage …’
He knew that voice, he’d heard it somewhere before.
‘Who’s speaking?’
A small motorbike went by, the loud backfiring of its motor drowning out the voice on the telephone, so he couldn’t be completely sure of what he heard next.
‘… both nearly fried …’
‘Jensen?’
‘Because of you, I look like Freddy Krueger, for fuck’s sake.’
Servaz held his breath and listened carefully.
‘Jensen? Where are you? They told me you were undergoing treatment at a spa, and that—’
‘Exactly. Last stage of my rehabilitation. Ever hear of Saint-Martin-de-Comminges? I saw you there today, my friend. Going in and out of the town hall.’
The figure down on the square, in a black coat, face turned up, while the passers-by streamed around him … And yet that man had seemed tall whereas Jensen was short.
‘What do you want?’
A moment of silence.
‘We have to talk.’
Servaz resisted the desire to hang up. To hell with him. He had to keep away from that guy, at any cost. He had been cleared, it was legitimate self-defence, but he was sure that the disciplinary inspectors were still sniffing around, waiting for him to slip up. He moved into the shadow of the arcade that ran around the market, as if he wanted to hide from anyone who might be looking his way.
‘Talk about what?’
‘You know.’
He closed his eyes and clenched his jaw. The man was bluffing.
‘I’m sorry, but I have other things to do.’
‘Your daughter, I know …’
This time, he felt a familiar heat radiating from his solar plexus: anger.
‘What did you say?’
‘How long does it take to get to Saint-Martin? I’ll wait for you outside the thermal baths at midnight. See you later, amigo.’
There was a short silence.
‘And say good evening to your daughter for me.’
Servaz looked at his phone, wishing he could hurl it against
the concrete wall of the market. Jensen had hung up.
He drove there far too quickly. The motorway was deserted, apart from a few heavy goods vehicles whose rear lights were all too suddenly upon him.
He thought he probably ought to file a report. What would he put in it? That he’d had no choice because Jensen had mentioned his daughter? No police disciplinary body would be prepared to accept such an excuse. He simply shouldn’t have gone there, they would say. He should have informed his superiors and he should not have acted alone. For goodness’ sake, Martin … Now what was going to happen? What did Jensen want with him?
As soon as he left the motorway he was deep in dark countryside, where any link with those beyond it slackened, and the moon was often the only visible light. Then the mountain darkness engulfed him. He drove up the same broad valley as before, as if he were speeding through great ruined temples, crushed by a double presence: the night, and the mountains.
The streets of Saint-Martin were deserted when he arrived; there wasn’t a soul in sight, and almost every window was dark. In this provincial sleep there was something of a foretaste of death. But he was no longer afraid of death. He had looked it in the face.
He parked at the entrance to the vast esplanade. There was no one in sight. On his left were the dark trees and bushes of the public gardens, where someone could easily hide; on his right, the colonnade of the thermal baths.
Suddenly he wished he could run away. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to talk to Jensen without a witness; it was a very bad idea.
Say good evening to your daughter for me.
He got out.
He closed the car door as quietly as possible. Everything was silent. He expected to see Jensen emerge from behind a column; if he’d been in a film, that’s what would have happened. Instead, Servaz scrutinised the bushes and shadows in the public garden opposite him. The wind had dropped and the bare branches of the trees were as inert as the limbs of a skeleton.
He walked further onto the esplanade.
‘Jensen!’
The call reminded him of another identical one, on a stormy night, and fear came over him. That time, too, he had left his gun in the glove compartment. He was tempted to go back to his car but instead, he kept heading towards the buildings and the colonnade on his right. The moon was the only witness to his movements. Unless … He shivered, thinking that Jensen might be so nearby. He had a flashback: the rain pouring on the roof of the carriage, the lightning in the sky, and Jensen turning around, the flame bursting from the barrel of his gun and a projectile piercing his heart. He had felt almost nothing at the time … as if someone had simply punched him in the chest … Was he going to shoot him, like last time? How is that heart doing? Jensen had not been charged with the three rapes. Why did he want to see him now? And why didn’t he show his face?
Night Page 14