Hysteria: An Alexander Gregory Thriller (The Alexander Gregory Thrillers Book 2)

by LJ Ross

  “She sleeps a lot,” Segal replied. “It’s part of her physical recovery. But, yes, a psychiatrist visited her today, and has a scheduled appointment every morning until her speech returns.”

  If it returns, Gregory thought. Nothing was certain, when it came to matters of the mind.

  “Until she speaks, we have only the information from the crime scene and a few witness statements, which isn’t much,” Segal said. “We need something to work with.”

  “How do you imagine we can help?” Douglas asked. “We profile criminals, but we can’t wave a magic wand.”

  “It would be helpful to know what kind of personality would do such a thing,” the prosecutor replied. “Her wounds…it was as though a wild animal had inflicted them. We need to know who would attack in such a way.”

  Gregory huffed out a laugh.

  “Without any of her personal history, how can we be sure she doesn’t have enemies?” he said. “The attack might have been a punishment or gang-related in some other way. Does she have any history of drug abuse?”

  “There was nothing in her system when she was taken to hospital, and the witnesses we interviewed said she was clean,” Durand replied, and then pulled a face. “On the other hand, it’s unlikely they would be forthcoming, if they feared incriminating themselves. It isn’t unheard of, within the fashion world…”

  “So drug abuse remains a possibility,” Gregory said, and guessed it was something the police tolerated, so long as things didn’t get out of hand. “It may also have been a jealous lover or colleague, a stalker, somebody she rejected…”

  “Alongside many other possibilities,” Douglas agreed. “The manner of the attack was brutal and possibly vengeful but, without speaking to the victim, it would be impossible for either of us to produce a meaningful profile at this stage.”

  Caron nodded thoughtfully.

  “And, if we make it possible for you to meet with Camille tomorrow, do you agree to stay and assist the investigation?”

  “Regrettably, I’m due to fly to Boston on Friday morning and must return to London before then,” Douglas said, then cast a sideways glance towards his friend. “How about you, Alex?”

  Gregory’s lips twisted into a reluctant smile. He couldn’t deny his interest had been piqued by the case, as well as his compassion. For any person to be rendered mute by such severe trauma was a cause of great sadness, and he yearned to help her—not merely so she could confirm her identity to the police and help to find the person responsible, but before any temporary damage became permanent and she was consigned to a life of silence.

  He thought of his commitments back at Southmoor Hospital, but he wasn’t due back in his office until the following week, as Douglas was very well aware. He’d hoped to spend a few days exploring Paris after the conference, taking leisurely strolls around its parks and museums, and had booked a few days’ leave.

  Perhaps another time.

  “Yes,” he said eventually. “I’ll try to help.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Later, Gregory accompanied his friend to the Gare du Nord train station, where Bill Douglas was due to catch the six-thirty Eurostar back to London. The air was crisp as it whipped through the side streets and both men turned their collars up against the wind.

  “What do you make of it all?” Douglas asked, as they wandered past the Pompidou Centre towards the 10th Arrondissement.

  Gregory laughed and stuck his hands in his pockets.

  “Which part?” he said. “The part where we were frog-marched to Police Headquarters by a bloke who looked a lot like Jean Reno’s shorter, hairier brother—or the part about the impossibly beautiful model who can no longer speak? Because, as far as the first part goes, I’ve had warmer welcomes.”

  Douglas chuckled.

  “His manner leaves something to be desired,” he agreed, diplomatically. “All the same, it’s an interesting case. Selective mutism is rare in adults, don’t you think?”

  Gregory side-stepped a man on a Segway, who appeared to have enjoyed a liquid lunch and was now veering all over the pavement.

  “Selective mutism is certainly more common in children, but the causal factors are the same in adults,” he said. “It’s an extreme anxiety disorder, leading to a selective inability to vocalise in certain social settings, despite no physical impediment to the vocal cords. It can strike at any time, including after a severely traumatic experience.”

  “Are we sure she isn’t suffering from aphasia?” Douglas wondered aloud, referring to the impairment of language skills following a brain injury. “That could also account for the lack of speech.”

  Gregory thought back to Camille’s medical notes contained in the police file, a copy of which now rested inside the briefcase he carried.

  “She suffered a blow to the side of her head. It’s possible that was sufficient to cause the level of brain injury usually associated with a neurological loss of speech, but aphasia is far more common following a stroke. There was some swelling on her MRI scan, but nothing like the levels we’d normally see in aphasiac cases.”

  “Mmm,” Douglas said, as they waited to cross the road. “And we don’t know whether the person who’s tending to her is a specialist when it comes to speech therapy?”

  “The psychiatrist is a man by the name of Ernesto Gonzalez, originally from Brazil. I’ll look him up this evening and see what I can find out,” Gregory said, following his friend’s train of thought. “But they haven’t asked me to take over any part of her care, Bill. They’ve asked me to come on board as a profiler.”

  “Things can change,” was all Douglas said.

  Up ahead, the lights of the station glowed brightly against the darkening sky, and their footsteps slowed.

  “I wonder if she was talkative before her attack,” Gregory mused. “What I really need to find out is whether Camille can’t speak or whether she won’t speak. In cases of selective mutism, severe panic causes a kind of freeze in their brain, inhibiting speech. Usually, they’re still able to talk amongst their most trusted friends or family.”

  “Which, in this case, we can’t find,” Douglas reminded him.

  “Exactly, which doesn’t help us one little bit. On the other hand, given what the police told us about her lack of official paperwork, it’s possible she could be choosing not to talk for fear of reprisal.”

  They had reached the entrance of the station, and people milled around, scurrying back and forth as they went about the business of living.

  “If anyone can bring her out of it, you can,” Douglas said, giving him a bolstering slap on the back. “I’ll be in Boston from tomorrow night, but I’ll have my mobile with me, if you need to call.”

  He turned to leave, then swung back around again.

  “Earlier, at the Sorbonne, you were about to tell me something,” he said. “Was it important?”

  Gregory glanced up at the large iron clock hanging from the rafters above their heads, and schooled his features into a neutral expression, hating himself more with every day the truth was left unsaid.

  I went against every professional code and treated my own mother, before she died.

  She never recognised me, not once.

  If anybody knew, I’d be struck off.

  “I can’t remember,” he said. “It mustn’t have been important.”

  With a light shrug, Douglas disappeared into the crowd, leaving Gregory to stare at his retreating back as the distance between them grew even greater than before.

  * * *

  Alex took his time heading back to his hotel in St Germain-des-Prés, which was on the south side of the river in an area known as the Latin Quarter. It was a cool, thirty-minute walk from the Gare du Nord, but he welcomed the night air as it burned his cheeks, making him feel alive. There was no moon that night, but the city was illuminated by a thousand twinkling lights, guiding the way as he strolled along tree-lined avenues.

  The journey took him past the medieval cathedral of Notre-Dame
, which had recently been ravaged by a catastrophic fire that destroyed its spire and most of the roof, while the rest of the world watched in horror from their living room sofas. As Gregory paused to look up at its charred façade, he wondered why it was that people mourned beautiful things—and beautiful people—more than the average, everyday beings that accounted for most of the world’s suffering.

  Don’t be a hypocrite, his mother’s voice whispered in his ear. You’re one of them.

  Much as it troubled him to admit it, he supposed that was true. Despite the shadows of his childhood, Alexander Gregory was a tall, good-looking man who never needed to look far to find company if he sought it—which he rarely did. There had been no barriers to entering his chosen profession, and he knew that the skin he wore, and the bones that held it all in place, were considered attractive by some. It was an odd psychological quirk, proven time and again, that people ascribed positive characteristics to those they considered physically attractive; it was a form of wish fulfilment that had allowed many an attractive rapist and murderer to escape detection, because people simply couldn’t believe that a person who seemed so appealing on the outside could be a festering mass of dark thoughts and deeds on the inside.

  When he thought of his own life, he suspected there had been plenty of times when his outward appearance had oiled the wheels of fortune; countless tiny, seemingly insignificant moments that could have ended very differently, had he been a different man. It was impossible to know for certain, and his ego wanted to believe that his clinical skills alone would have elicited the same results, regardless of other factors weighing in his favour.

  But the truth, he suspected, was somewhere in the middle.

  With these sobering thoughts circling his mind, Gregory crossed over the river and paused for a moment to admire the blazing lights of the Eiffel Tower’s hourly show, reflected in the inky-blue depths of the Seine. But after the lights faded to darkness, he turned away from the road leading to his hotel and found himself wandering through the myriad network of small alleyways that criss-crossed the Latin Quarter, with no particular route in mind.

  He wasn’t ready to be alone just yet, especially not with himself.

  * * *

  The neon sign read, ‘JAZZ TONITE’.

  The club was a tiny, nondescript affair, with a black-painted door. A couple stood outside, smoking and kissing intermittently, while a bouncer leaned back against the stone wall and played on his phone. Alex watched them from the other side of the street, undecided about whether to go inside, until the door opened and a brief snatch of music burst out into the night, tempting him to step into the road and out of his comfort zone.

  The bouncer gave him a quick pat-down, then jerked his head towards the door.

  “Pas de photos,” was all he said, before returning to his phone.

  When Alex pulled open the heavy black door, he found himself at the top of a narrow stairwell leading down to the basement level, punctuated by a series of red-tinted nautical lamps. He smiled, wondering what the Health and Safety Officer back at Southmoor Hospital would have said about it, then continued towards the sound rising up from the gloom.

  When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he made his way through another doorway leading to the main bar area, which was much larger than he expected. It had formerly been a cellar of some description, and its stone ceilings were low and arched, like miniature versions of the catacombs that ran beneath the oldest parts of the city. There was a bar at one end and a small stage at the other, with room enough for a piano and two other people, at most. A number of scarred wooden bistro tables had been crammed into the remaining space, each occupied by two or three people whose faces were lit by a single flickering tea light. He watched their shoulders jiggle up and down in time to the pianist, who was trilling out his own jazz version of ‘Johnny B. Goode’.

  “Oui, monsieur?” said the barman.

  Gregory ordered a beer and took it to the edge of the room, where he leaned against a wall and let the noise roll over him. He stayed like that for a while, content to nurse his beer and tap a finger in time to the beat, enjoying the novelty of being amongst people who were neither his patients nor his friends.

  Friend, he amended.

  To have friends, one must first seek them out and then strive to keep them. Unfortunately, life had taught him to be cautious; since being a small boy, he’d learned never to trust the words that people said, but to read the language of their bodies, which was usually a more reliable indicator of their true feelings.

  He raised his hands to clap as the pianist took a bow.

  “Et maintenant, mesdames et messieurs, je vous présente la belle Mademoiselle Margot…”

  There was rapturous applause—apparently, Mademoiselle Margot was already known to the regulars—and Alex watched a woman step onto the stage. She wore a simple black dress and, when she turned to speak to the pianist, he saw that her long legs were encased in forties-style tights, the kind with the seams running up the back. Blonde hair shimmered like a halo around her pale face, which bore no make-up except a slash of red against her lips.

  He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  “Merci bien, mesdames et messieurs,” she murmured into the microphone, and then switched to English for the benefit of any tourists and ex-pats. “I’m going to sing a little ditty to remind you of summer.”

  When she began the first husky, opening bars of ‘Summertime’, Alex felt his whole body react. Her voice seemed to soar, filling the room with a sound so deep, he might have drowned in it. He couldn’t seem to move while his body remained taut and trembling, and his fingers gripped the bottle of beer as if it were a lifeline. It had been a long time—a very long time—since he’d experienced a physical reaction so strong, and his instinctive reaction was to abandon his beer and run.

  Coward, a small voice whispered.

  And so, he stayed, mesmerised by the woman and her voice.

  Margot sang mostly with her eyes closed, but as the number drew to a close, they opened again to stare dreamily around the room. When they came to rest on him, he felt his skin prickle beneath the heat of her gaze, but he didn’t look away.

  He smiled from the shadows, and told himself that one more drink couldn’t hurt.

  * * *

  It was after two by the time Margot’s set finished.

  Gregory sipped another beer while he listened to her move seamlessly through a repertoire of old and new classics in an easy, playful style that drew in the audience and made them feel instantly at home. It was a technique he tried to teach his more antisocial patients at Southmoor, but the art of relating to one’s fellow beings remained elusive to many.

  Himself included.

  There was a difference between engaging with other people, and merely observing them. He knew almost all the accepted theories about how to form meaningful relationships; he could teach others and, from time to time, dabble a little in the pursuit. But, mostly, he held himself apart. As a skilled observer, it was easy to spot when a person was becoming too close, or too dependent, and he knew it was time to withdraw. He could recognise the signs of physical attraction, too, he thought, watching Margot thank the audience and set her microphone back in its holder with a lingering glance in his direction.

  The question was what to do about it.

  CHAPTER 5

  Thursday 26th September

  Gregory returned to his hotel room sometime after five, and gave up any prospect of sleep in favour of blasting his body with a cold shower—during which he sang a bastardised version of ‘Summertime’, badly out of key. He spent the remaining pre-dawn hours poring over the police file, memorising names and pertinent facts, writing notes and trying to recall previous cases involving a similar kind of violence.

  The decision to use a knife in Camille Duquette’s attack rather than other less personal methods was revealing. Statistically speaking, men were more likely to commit bloody crimes and didn’t tend to shy awa
y from getting their hands dirty. There were also far more reported cases of male stalkers than female, but he wondered privately whether that was more to do with men not wanting to report their experiences to the police. Men might be more likely to attack in such a way, but he’d treated several women during his time at Southmoor whose crimes had been enough to turn his blood cold. Either way, it was too early in the investigation and there were too many unanswered questions for him to form an educated view.

  Camille’s unique profession as a fashion model, and the fact that her face was now irrevocably scarred, also seemed highly significant. He would even go so far as to say ritualised, which opened up the field of enquiry even more. Whilst it was possible a man or woman had developed an unhealthy love obsession with the beautiful Camille Duquette—whether by chance, or design—and had been motivated to attack her through jealousy or rejection, it seemed equally possible that someone had resented her good fortune in being plucked from the many thousands of other young women who aspired to join the elite world of high fashion, and decided to rob her of the life she might otherwise have enjoyed.

  Spite was as good a motive as any.

  As he packed away the file and shrugged into a light woollen coat, Gregory found himself wondering how the assailant had gained entry to Camille’s hotel room. There was no evidence of forced entry recorded in the file, which begged the question of whether her would-be attacker had managed to procure a key card to the room—which was not unheard of—or clamber up to the veranda windows from the courtyard, three storeys below. Unless…

  Unless her attacker was already known to her.

  There would be no need to plan an elaborate entry if they could simply knock on her door—especially since there was no CCTV covering the corridor or service access stairs outside.

  For the right person, it would be child’s play.

  * * *

  “You look like ass, my friend.”

  These generous words were spoken by Mathis Durand, who greeted Gregory inside the reception foyer of the Hôtel Violette shortly before nine o’clock.