‘Drop it. I don’t want to hear it.’
‘Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.’
He sighed, then swivelled around again.
‘Noticed what?’
‘That he’s changed.’
Espérandieu didn’t answer.
‘He doesn’t even bother with us now.’
‘Give him time. He’s only just come back to work.’
‘And that woman, what’s she doing here?’
‘The Norwegian? You heard the same thing I did.’
‘The fact remains that he only has time for her.’
‘Are you jealous?’
He saw Samira frown.
‘Fuck, you can be such a cretin sometimes. Don’t you think it’s strange how he’s more trusting around a stranger than with us?’
‘I don’t know.’
Samira shook her head.
‘It scares me, it really does. Fuck, even if it’s not him, they’re going to give him a really hard time. It’s a foregone conclusion.’
‘Unless they do find who did it,’ snapped Vincent.
‘Oh yeah? And what if they find out that person is him?’
The next day, Olga Lumbroso, deputy public prosecutor at the county court in Saint-Gaudens, looked exhausted. She did not hide her weariness. A case like this was every investigating magistrate’s dream – but as it happened, the magistrate who was officiating in that position at the county court in Saint-Gaudens was not even an investigating magistrate. Lumbroso had just listened to the gendarme seated across from her, she had read his report, and in her opinion the young judge who ordinarily dealt in family law was not cut out to deal with this matter. She had merely been assigned to the case in the absence of an actual investigating magistrate. When the court reopened in 2014, a major regional newspaper had published a triumphant headline about ‘the return of law and order to Comminges’, but since then the little court had merely been getting by.
There were eleven civil servants in all, and their workload was getting heavier by the day; the files piled up and they shared them out as best they could. And now they’d been landed with this whacking great case.
‘A policeman, you said?’
‘Or someone posing as one,’ specified Morel.
The woman across from him went back to reading the report.
‘And he came out of the forest at three o’clock in the morning, when it was several degrees below zero, to shoot this Jensen guy, then vanished into thin air?’
She had read that part of the report the way she would have read a fairy tale to her son.
‘I know, I know. I thought the same as you: put like that, it seems insane. But that is what happened.’
She closed the file and placed her freckled hands on it firmly, as if it might open again against her will.
‘This is a matter for the court of appeal,’ she said decisively. ‘We have neither the technical nor the human resources to deal with a case like this here. I’m going to call Cathy d’Humières in Toulouse. In my opinion, they will refer the case to the Inspectorate.’
The policemen’s police. Morel nodded cautiously. The whole business smelled of sulphur, shit and trouble. And a load of bloody great hassle as well. The deputy prosecutor across from him was well aware of this.
‘How many people know about the weapon and holster?’
‘Too many,’ he replied. ‘There were masses of people at the crime scene. We tried to limit the damage, but it’s impossible to say who heard what.’
He saw her frown.
‘So, sooner or later, there’ll be a leak to the press.’ She reached for her telephone. ‘We have to act quickly. At least show we haven’t been caught unawares, and that we got onto it right away.’
She paused for a second.
‘But, in any case, let’s not kid ourselves: the storm is coming, and it will sweep everything in its wake. A cop playing avenger in the night: what a shambles. The press will have a field day.’
In Toulouse, Cathy d’Humières was at Les Sales Gosses dining on a perfectly cooked egg and a souris d’agneau when her mobile rang in her handbag.
The presiding magistrate of the Toulouse county court had risen through the ranks, having started at the bottom as public prosecutor in Saint-Martin-de-Comminges, where the case of the decapitated horse and the holiday camp had earned her a passing notoriety.
Physically, she was something of a cliché: a stern face, aquiline profile, sparkling gaze, thin mouth and wilful chin. Most of the people who did not know her found her intimidating; those who did know her either admired her or feared her, frequently both at the same time. And there was a third category: those she had humiliated – primarily people who were incompetent or scheming – and who despised her.
Cathy d’Humières took out her phone and listened to the deputy prosecutor from Saint-Gaudens without saying a word. When Olga Lumbroso had finished, she simply said, ‘Fine, send the file on to me.’
A new wrinkle appeared on her brow.
‘Your favourite dessert?’ suggested the waiter.
This was a mixture of banoffee pie and feuillantine with Carambar ice cream.
‘No, not today. A double espresso. No, make that a triple. Thank you. And do you by any chance have an aspirin?’
‘Do you have a headache?’
She smiled at the young man’s perspicacity.
‘Not yet. But I feel one coming on.’
‘You’ll have to change your report,’ said Stehlin; he had just got back from another meeting with the prosecutor.
Servaz said nothing.
‘Sooner or later, they’re going to take an interest in you – and your movements that night. If they find out you went to Saint-Martin, and you didn’t mention it, can you imagine the consequences?’
‘I know.’
‘Good job I haven’t sent it yet, that report …’
Servaz felt a surge of anger. He had immediately perceived Stehlin’s wariness when he got back from the court. As if they had said things there which had changed his point of view. Shouldn’t he have started by giving the benefit of the doubt to his subordinate, someone he’d been working with for years? Servaz wondered what would happen if things really got out of hand. Would Stehlin fight his corner, or would he instead try to cover his arse and think of his own career? Stehlin was fair, unlike Vilmer, his predecessor, and Servaz got along well with him. But it was when things got rough that you judged your friends, and your bosses, too.
‘Martin …’
‘Yes?’
‘Two nights ago, in Saint-Martin, did you see him or not?’
‘Jensen? No.’ He hesitated. ‘That is, I did see someone, but I’ll say it again: I ran after someone who could have been Jensen. But he vanished into the forest behind the thermal baths. That was after midnight. I went back to my car and found a note on my windscreen.’
‘A note? You didn’t mention that last time.’
‘Yes. It said, “Were you afraid?”’
‘Good God.’
Stehlin looked as if he had seen his wife’s ghost; she had died two years earlier.
‘Jensen was killed by a cop’s weapon,’ he said. ‘They’re going to be looking for a motive. And the one that will immediately capture their attention is yours.’
Servaz stiffened. He thought about the first thing he had done when he’d found out that Jensen had been killed with a police weapon: he went to make sure his own gun was still where it belonged.
‘What? What motive?’
‘For Christ’s sake, Martin! The man shot you in the heart and you almost died! You told me yourself when you came out of the coma that you were convinced he was the one who had murdered the woman in Montauban. And he’s threatened your daughter!’
‘He just made an allusion to—’
‘And you went running back to Saint-Martin double-quick,’ Stehlin said. ‘In the middle of the night, goddammit. And you saw Jensen a few hours before he was shot. Bloody hell!�
�
So there it was: Stehlin had shown what was really on his mind. Servaz could hear the tone of fear in his boss’s voice. This wasn’t the first time he had found him too cautious, too fearful, and he suspected him of wanting to avoid making waves at any cost – even if it interfered with the smooth running of his department. Suddenly Servaz was absolutely convinced that Stehlin would not hesitate to dump him in order to save his own skin. He looked at him. His boss’s complexion was ashen; he’d already gone back into his shell.
‘I will assume my responsibility,’ he said firmly.
‘I want a new report without any grey areas,’ said Stehlin, looking up at him as if he were waking up. ‘You have to write exactly what happened.’
‘May I remind you whose idea it was not to mention my trip to Saint-Martin?’ replied Servaz, standing up and pushing back his chair a bit too aggressively.
Stehlin did not react. Again, he was elsewhere. Probably busy thinking about securing his own interests. Thinking about the consequences for his career, which thus far had been pleasantly linear and on the rise.
How to cut off the rotten branch before it contaminated the whole tree.
How to build a firewall between himself and Servaz.
‘Well?’ asked Kirsten when they were on the terrace at the Cactus.
‘Well nothing,’ said Servaz, sitting down. ‘There’s going to be an internal investigation.’
The last internal investigation she remembered in Norway was the one that had been carried out after the massacre at Utøya, that little island where Anders Breivik had killed sixty-nine victims, most of them teenagers: to find out why the Norwegian police had arrived so late. Informed of the shooting on the island, they had taken an hour and a half to get there, leaving the adolescents at the mercy of Breivik’s lethal fury. The police had had to explain why they had gone by land and boat rather than use a helicopter, and why their boat had broken down. (It was too small for the number of passengers and the amount of equipment on board, and had begun to take on water.)
‘What did he say?’
‘That I have to file a report. In it I will explain that I met a guy who would be killed by a cop’s weapon three hours later, in the middle of the night, a guy who months earlier had landed me in hospital, and who had threatened my daughter, and whom I suspected of an unsolved murder … Give or take a few things.’
He said these words with a certain fatalism.
‘I think I’ll go back to Norway,’ Kirsten said. ‘I’ve nothing more to do here. We’ve reached an impasse.’
He looked at her. Instinctively his fingers felt for the picture of Gustav in his pocket.
‘When will you leave?’
‘Tomorrow. I have a flight at seven in the morning, with a one-hour stopover at Charles de Gaulle.’
He nodded, and said nothing. She stood up.
‘I’ll do some sightseeing in the meantime. Shall we meet for dinner this evening?’
He nodded again and watched as she walked away. As soon as she was out of sight he took out his mobile.
‘Imagination can run from normal to pathological. This includes dreams, fantasies, hallucinations, and so on,’ said Dr Xavier, sitting in his swivel chair.
‘I’m not talking about hallucinations, but amnesia,’ Servaz replied. ‘Amnesia would be the opposite of imagination, wouldn’t it?’
‘What exactly are you getting at?’
‘Just suppose … just suppose I went to Saint-Martin one night, and I thought I did one thing but in fact I did something else, far more serious, and I forgot what it was …’
There was a pause behind him.
‘Can you be a bit more precise?’
‘No.’
‘Okay. There are several forms of amnesia. The ones that might correspond to what you are describing – at least based on the little information I have – are: partial amnesia, which is a disturbance of the memory in a given time lapse, generally following a head injury or mental confusion … Did you hurt your head on the night in question?’
‘No. At least not to my knowledge.’
‘Okay, sure. Then there is the second form, lacunar amnesia, which is based on one or more very precise events. The same goes for elective amnesia. This type of amnesia can be observed in patients presenting, um, neurosis or a psychiatric disturbance.’
Xavier paused.
‘Finally, there is anterograde amnesia, which means an inability to create memories. This thing you think you did and have forgotten—’
‘No, no. I don’t think I did it. It’s a purely hypothetical question.’
‘Right, okay. But this “purely hypothetical question”: does it have anything to do with the fact that two nights ago a man was killed not far from here with a policeman’s gun?’
Five p.m. When he left Dr Xavier’s surgery, evening was already falling in the streets of Saint-Martin, and the air was fragrant with the smoke from wood-burning stoves, fir trees on the nearby mountain, and car exhaust fumes. A few snow flurries whirled in the cold air. The sculpted wooden balconies, the imitation chalet pediments, and the dark little cobblestoned streets gave this part of the town a fairy-tale atmosphere that was both childlike and sinister. He had left his car by the river, and in the darkness he felt the damp chill rising from the fast-moving waters below the promenade.
When he sat behind the wheel of his car, for a moment he froze. What was that? There was a smell inside the car. Like a trace of aftershave. He turned to look behind him, but of course there was no one. He leaned towards the glove compartment: his gun was still there, in its holster.
He drove out of town and was about to turn off by the sign pointing to the valley and the motorway when he felt an itch at the back of his head. He drove past the sign. And the following exit, which led to the campsites and a small industrial estate. He took the third exit. Immediately afterwards the road began to climb. After two hairpin bends he could see the roofs of Saint-Martin below him.
The itch got worse. He hadn’t come this way in years. It was completely dark outside now. Below him the little lights of Saint-Martin on their blanket of snow looked like a river of gems in a jeweller’s window, nestled in their dark Alpine setting. He thought that this sort of landscape must seem quite familiar to Kirsten, and he suddenly had a pang of regret that she was not there.
He went through a hamlet consisting of four houses. Then a second one, a kilometre further along, full of white roofs and closed shutters. At the next fork in the road he turned left, and the road led down a gentle slope. The snowy meadows shone faintly blue in the evening light, and banks of mist were beginning to rise from the hollows. He drove down the hill and into a new village that was slightly bigger but just as sleepy as all the others. He left the village almost at once and continued on his way into the forest.
Before long he could see the ruined buildings of Les Isards holiday camp, although the rusty sign at the entrance to the drive had vanished. But he hadn’t come for the holiday camp; he drove right past. His headlights bore a tunnel of light through the fir trees, piercing the ever-denser mist, sculpting the low-lying snow-laden branches that bordered the road as if they were paper cutouts. The only other source of light was the blue gleam from the dials on his dashboard. All notion of time and space suddenly seemed abolished.
But not memory …
Images surfaced as if there were a cinema screen inside his head. Before long he entered a tunnel carved through the rock.
He wondered if the sign would still be there, right after the tunnel. It was. Fastened to the parapet of the little bridge that crossed the cascade: CHARLES WARGNIER INSTITUTE FOR FORENSIC PSYCHIATRY.
As he took the steep road, it was as if he had stepped into a time machine.
The fire started by Lisa Ferney, the head nurse, had left nothing of the walls but stumps, and when he stepped out of the car into the icy night air, they reminded him of the great standing stones at Stonehenge.
There wasn’t much left,
but you could tell how imposing the building must have been; it was like strolling through the remains of the Forum in Rome. That towering style that had been used all over the Pyrenees region, and which dated from the first half of the twentieth century, to build hotels, power plants, thermal baths, ski resorts … But this place hosted neither spa-goers nor tourists. For a few years the Wargnier Institute had housed eighty-eight extremely dangerous individuals, presenting mental health issues compounded by violence and criminality: patients who were too violent even for an ordinary psychiatric hospital, inmates whose psychoses were too serious for them to be left in prison, rapists and murderers from all over Europe whom the courts had judged insane. The Wargnier Institute was a pilot project. They had been shut away in these mountains, far out of reach of society. All sorts of treatments had been tested on them, of a more or less experimental nature. Servaz recalled that the young psychologist Diane Berg had compared them to ‘mountain tigers’. And in the middle of the pride, the alpha male.
The Lion King.
The individual at the top of the food chain.
Julian Hirtmann.
Suddenly he felt a film of ice close around his heart as he thought of Gustav, who was living within reach of one of those monsters. And of Jensen, killed by a policeman’s gun. Ghosts of the past and shadows of the present. He felt his fear growing. The stratagem was obvious: someone wanted him to take the rap.
Why had he come here? What had got into him? What was the point? And what did he hope to find? It was absolutely calm but then suddenly he heard a dull, distant sound below him in the valley. Like the hum of an insect.
Down below him a car was coming nearer.
He squinted until the headlights reappeared in the forest. For several minutes he watched their flashing progression through the trees on the road below; then they vanished into the tunnel.
He expected to see the headlights emerge 100 metres from there at any moment and come straight at him. Who could be driving along this road at this hour? Had he been followed? Not once had he looked in his rearview mirror during the entire drive between Saint-Martin and the valley: why should he?
He returned quickly to the car, opened the passenger door and the glove compartment and took his gun out of its holster. As he pulled it out he realised that his palm was damp on the grip.
Night Page 17