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

by LJ Ross

  “It’s something to bear in mind,” Gregory corrected. “I wouldn’t say it was confirmation of anything.”

  But Segal was undeterred.

  “Is there anything else you can tell us?”

  Gregory had the unpleasant feeling he was being told to dance to an invisible fiddle, and his eyes flashed a warning.

  “I told you at the start, I’m not clairvoyant. Profiling isn’t a replacement for police work.”

  He swept a hand around the room.

  “Somebody could have watched Camille through the window, but that’s speculation, not evidence. Have you made enquiries at the office building over there?”

  Three heads turned to look out of the window, and Durand made a hasty note.

  “The statements gathered from the people in Camille’s life are also incomplete,” Gregory said. “There’s no information about their impressions of her as a person; nothing but a bland recollection of dates and times. In our current predicament, we need all the information we can get, which will also help her psychiatrist to know how to speak to her and begin to draw her out.”

  Bernard exchanged a word with Durand, instructing him to begin a process of re-interviewing witnesses, and Gregory was surprised once again by the chain of command that removed the police inspector’s ability to take charge of his own investigation.

  “If no obvious traces of the assailant have been found, that would suggest a careful personality, somebody who took the time to plan and make provision; he or she would have to bring a bag, unless they were also staying at the hotel.”

  Durand was a quick study.

  “We’re in the process of completing background checks on all the people staying at the hotel,” he said. “It will take time, for some of them.”

  “What are you saying?” Bernard demanded. “You think this is an inside job?”

  He made a scoffing sound in the back of his throat.

  “The attack was sadistic, monsieur. The act of a raging madman, not somebody who planned ahead.”

  Gregory gave a slight shake of his head.

  “The two aren’t mutually exclusive,” he said, and began to pace around the room, getting a feel for the space before coming to stand beside one of the mirrored panels, which had been broken—presumably when Camille’s head had been thrust against the glass. “Ever heard of the BTK killer?”

  He referred to the infamous American serial killer whose moniker stood for ‘Bind, Torture, Kill’.

  “He planned meticulously, stalking his victims, learning their routines before choosing the moment to strike. It’s a method he perfected over a number of years, during which time he could go for long periods without activity. He isn’t the only example of how control can be exercised along with a complete lack of it.”

  “You think somebody could be targeting models like Camille?” Bernard asked him. “If that’s the case, we have a much bigger problem than we thought.”

  Segal let out a muttered expletive, no doubt thinking of the bureaucratic circus that would ensue, if that prediction turned out to be correct.

  “Anything is possible,” Gregory said. “But it would be unsafe to speculate without knowing more about the victim, as I’ve already told you. To determine whether the attack was opportunistic, or targeted, we need to know more about Camille. The majority of attackers are known to their victims, and cases of stranger-attacks are relatively rare by comparison. Let’s rule out the first option, before we jump to the second.”

  He turned to Mathis Durand, who was scratching the top of his head with the chewed end of a biro.

  “When we’re done here, I think it’s time I paid Camille a visit.”

  “She still hasn’t spoken,” Durand warned him.

  “Then there’s nothing to lose.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The wound was long and jagged.

  It ran like a fault line across Camille Duquette’s face; an angry, purpling welt that ruptured her flawless skin almost from lip to hairline. Gregory’s eyes followed the line of it from his position beside her bed, where he and Durand were seated on a couple of chairs they’d dragged in from the small kitchen-diner next door.

  “Elle a été comme ça pendant la majeure partie de la journée,” the nurse told them.

  “She says Camille’s been like this for most of the day,” Durand translated, needlessly.

  The nurse was one of two capable-looking women of around sixty who had been hired by Maison Leroux at great expense to provide round-the-clock care.

  Gregory leaned forward, resting his forearms lightly on his knees.

  “Camille?” he said softly, and reverted to French. “Camille, tu m’entends?”

  He could feel Durand’s eyes boring into the side of his skull and, assuming correctly that his cover was now blown, surrendered himself to speaking fluently.

  “Can you hear me, Camille? My name is Alexander Gregory. I’m a psychologist, from England.”

  Her eyes remained closed, but her lashes flickered.

  “Camille, I know you can hear me,” he said, continuing to speak in the same, even tone. “The doctors say there’s nothing wrong with your hearing, so I’d like you to listen to me, for a moment. I know you’ve been through a terrible experience, and that you’re frightened and in pain. But there are people who want to help you. Doctor Gonzalez and the police, your nurse, me…we all want to help you to find your family and the person who did this to you.”

  Her head jerked against the pillow, but her eyes remained shut.

  “What pain medication is she taking?” Gregory asked, wondering why she had been so heavily sedated. It was usual for opioids to be reduced after forty-eight hours, to minimise the potential for dependency, but the woman still seemed catatonic.

  “Doctor Gonzalez had to sedate her this morning, and gave instructions for her to remain so until he returns to check on her this afternoon,” the nurse told him, and rattled off details of the strong cocktail of drugs Camille had been prescribed.

  “What happened this morning?” Gregory prodded.

  “She tried to run off,” the nurse replied, in a flat, no-nonsense tone. “She was very distressed.”

  Durand reared forward.

  “What? Why wasn’t I informed of this?”

  “Doctor Gonzalez spoke to one of your superiors,” she said, and leaned forward to dab Camille’s mouth with a moist flannel. “Perhaps he forgot to tell you.”

  Durand pushed back from his chair and excused himself, already pulling out his mobile phone and muttering a stream of colourful obscenities.

  In the silence that followed, Gregory watched the nurse start to clean Camille’s wound with small pieces of gauze.

  “It needs a fresh bandage,” she tutted.

  Gregory let the woman finish her careful task, and listened with half an ear to the voluble conversation Durand was conducting with either Bernard or Segal in the hallway outside.

  “How did she try to leave?” he asked.

  The nurse rolled back her sleeve to reveal a long scratch on her forearm.

  “This happened when I tried to restrain her,” she said, with a disapproving look for the young woman who lay motionless against the white covers. “I came in at seven this morning to relieve the night nurse, who told me she’d been sleeping like a lamb all night.”

  She puffed out her ample chest.

  “Lamb? She’s more like a fox, this one,” she said, giving her patient the beady eye. “One moment, she is calm and quiet. I go into the kitchen for water and come back to find…poof! She’s out of the bed, dragging herself towards the door, shouting like a madwoman—”

  “Just a moment,” Gregory said. “She was shouting?”

  The nurse looked at him as though he were a simpleton.

  “Isn’t that what I said? I tell you, the girl was shouting and screaming like a banshee, trying to claw her way out. She could have hurt herself.”

  Durand re-joined them, wearing the look of a camel who’d bor
ne his final straw.

  “Did I hear something about shouting?” he asked.

  But Gregory was determined to ask the most important question of all, while it was relatively fresh in the woman’s mind.

  “Please, tell me, what did she say?” he asked urgently. “When she screamed, what words did she say?”

  The nurse shook her head.

  “There were no words, monsieur,” she replied. “There was only sound, like a baby’s cry.”

  * * *

  Gregory and Durand stayed a few minutes longer, while Camille remained in a fretful sleep.

  “She is still beautiful, non?”

  Gregory turned to look at the inspector, then back at the woman on the bed.

  “Yes,” he agreed quietly. “In the fickle world she aspired to be a part of before her attack, I doubt she’ll be seen as a great beauty any longer. But now, she’s something much more.”

  Durand thought about it.

  “A survivor,” he said.

  “Exactement,” Gregory murmured, with a smile.

  Durand leaned back in his chair and folded fleshy arms across his chest.

  “You were sneaky there, my friend,” he said, referring to Gregory’s fluency in French. “I ask myself whether there’s anything else you’re not telling me.”

  Gregory sighed.

  “You know about Madeleine,” he realised, and supposed his surprise at seeing her at the reconstruction earlier that day had been the giveaway. “I was planning to tell you.”

  “So? Tell me,” Durand invited. “Don’t spare any detail, either.”

  Gregory gave him a withering look.

  “I met Madeleine Paquet for the first time last night, at the Coco Caverne jazz club, where she sings using the stage name ‘Margot’. I had no idea Margot and Madeleine were the same person until she opened the door to her room at the Hôtel Violette.”

  Durand cleared his throat and prepared to ask an indelicate question with as much delicacy as he could muster.

  Which wasn’t much.

  “How well did you get to know her?”

  It gave Alex a perverse kind of satisfaction to disappoint him.

  “Not as well as you might imagine,” he said, testily. “Margot—or Madeleine—finished her set at around two, and we stayed at the club listening to the other musicians and talking until shortly after four, when the place closed. At no time did she mention her other profession, and nor did I mention my work as a criminal profiler.”

  Just two people, he thought. Enjoying one another’s company.

  “I made sure she found a taxi and was safely inside, before walking back to my hotel in the Rue Lepic.”

  “And…that’s all?”

  “Scout’s honour,” Gregory drawled. Though he’d been sorely tempted, he had to admit.

  “Quoi?”

  “Never mind,” he muttered. “I agreed to meet her tomorrow night, at her next gig. It happens to be at the Café Laurent, which is attached to the hotel where I’m staying.”

  Durand waggled a finger and let out another of his bawdy laughs that reminded Gregory of an old actor from the Carry On movies. He would have said as much, but he suspected the intrepid inspector would fail to understand the reference.

  “I see, I see,” he said, still chuckling to himself. “Do you plan to keep the date?”

  “Of course not,” Gregory said. “It would be inappropriate, given what I now know about her relationship to the investigation.”

  Durand scratched the side of his nose, then shrugged.

  “The investigation won’t last forever,” he said. “And, whether you admit it or not, you’re as human as the rest of us, mon ami.”

  Gregory couldn’t argue with that.

  “Are you happy for me to continue to work on the investigation?” he asked.

  Durand didn’t answer directly.

  “I’ve already made a recommendation to Procureur Segal that Doctor Gonzalez be removed from his present duties,” he said. “Not only did he fail to contact me directly to report Camille’s attempt to abscond, he also failed to report that she had made her first sounds, albeit no words were spoken. In a case of this sensitivity, where each piece of information must be treated as valuable, it was a serious failing on his part.”

  He nodded towards the woman on the bed.

  “Besides, Gonzalez has had three days to try to assess her speech and reverse the trauma, with no progress whatsoever.”

  Gregory was a strong proponent of slow and steady progress with patients in general, but it was equally true that speedy action was sometimes required.

  “Would you like me to help you find another specialist?” he asked, already wondering who he might know and could recommend to the police.

  Durand merely smiled.

  “I’ve already found one.”

  The penny dropped, very quickly, and Gregory held up his hands.

  “Now, wait, just a minute. I agreed to help as a profiler, not as a psychologist. She needs intensive therapy, which I can’t possibly provide—”

  “You said yourself, the victim is the most important clue of all,” Durand argued.

  Gregory had to give him points for that.

  “I did, and I still believe that. But, if I take Camille Duquette on as a patient, I’d need to seek permission from my employer back in the UK. Even if they agree, I would owe Camille a duty of care that might conflict with my work as a profiler.”

  Durand considered the point, and then gave another one of his maddening shrugs.

  “The most important thing is to get her to talk,” he said. “If you can help us to do that, you can leave the rest in our hands.”

  Gregory looked over at the sleeping beauty and found himself wondering what lay behind her eyes, which he knew from her photographs to be a deep, aquamarine blue. If he took her on as a private patient, he could authorise a reduced level of medication that would relieve any physical discomfort without leaving her comatose. Perhaps then she might open her eyes and consider talking to him.

  He came to a decision.

  “I’ll agree to work with her for the rest of this week, with the proviso that you find a more appropriate long-term clinician to take over her care.”

  Durand held out his hand.

  “Agreed.

  CHAPTER 8

  When it became clear that no further progress would be made with Camille that day, Gregory gave instructions for her medication to be reduced to a more appropriate level, leaving Durand to break the bad news to Doctor Gonzalez. Once that unenviable task was complete, they left Camille in the capable hands of her nurse and went off in search of other clues to her identity.

  The sun had dipped low in the sky by the time they emerged from the apartment building, and the two men decided to walk the short journey to the Champ de Mars, which was the large park running from the foot of the Eiffel Tower all the way to the École Militaire, on the south side of the Seine. It also happened to be the chosen venue for that evening’s catwalk show, and an enormous marquee had been erected similar to the one at the Jardin des Tuileries, on the other side of the river.

  As they rounded a corner, Gregory stopped and stared.

  It shouldn’t have been beautiful, he thought, but it was. With shards of hazy afternoon sunlight filtering through its latticed iron beams, Gustave Eiffel’s tower was an impressive sight to behold.

  “Do you ever get tired of looking at it?” Gregory asked of his surly new friend.

  Mathis Durand tipped his head up to look, then made a sound a bit like a raspberry.

  “Pas mal,” he declared. “Me, I would like to see the Burj Khalifa, in Dubai. They say it’s the tallest building in the world.”

  Gregory smiled and thought there was a saying about familiarity breeding contempt, and perhaps that was true. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d admired the Tower of London or Big Ben.

  “Tell me about the people we’re going to see,” he said, as they entered the park
and spotted a large white tent taking up an area of grass in the central walkway.

  Durand rubbed his hands together to warm them, then stuck them in his armpits.

  “During Fashion Week, there are a number of different venues each night,” he said. “They don’t belong to one fashion house in particular, though they pay to reserve the best spaces, such as here in the Champ de Mar.”

  Gregory read between the lines.

  “To reserve one of the better spots, you’d need to have plenty of money,” he said. “I take it Maison Leroux isn’t doing too badly?”

  Durand nodded.

  “It’s a newer label, but fast-growing and with plenty of private backing,” he explained. “Armand Leroux was a financier before he retired, and Gabrielle’s father is in the oil business. For them, it’s always the best of everything.”

  Gregory nodded and thought of his own father, who had been a banker and now lived a very comfortable life in a large house overlooking Lake Geneva, or so he’d heard.

  He hadn’t set eyes on the man in more than twenty years.

  “Scandals like these can work both ways,” Durand continued. “It can help to drum up a bit of extra publicity, but it can also scare people away. To Leroux, Camille may be both an asset and a liability.”

  “Which is why they’ve squirrelled her away,” Gregory muttered.

  They passed a small news stand, featuring several papers and magazines displaying Camille’s picture, taken from the publicity photo in her police file. The story of her attack and subsequent silence no longer occupied a full-page spread, and had instead been relegated to a smaller column, but at least her ordeal was still newsworthy.

  The privilege of beauty, in action.

  “I take it nobody has come forward yet following the police appeal?” he asked. “Nobody claiming to know Camille?”

  Durand shook his head.

  “We’ve had the usual crazies,” he said, and Gregory’s lips twitched. “Strange women claiming to be her mother, old men claiming to be her husband or father, but none of them check out. It’s always the same with cases like these—it’s a question of sorting through all the bullshit.”