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

by LJ Ross

  His eyes strayed back to the stiff figure on the floor, and he wondered who Juliette Deschamps had really been. The apartment didn’t seem to fit with her public persona—which spoke of decadence and grooming—and he puzzled over it, until he remembered his conversation with Durand the previous day, and of a silver locket with a picture of a small girl inside.

  “Have you informed her next of kin?” he asked the men gathered inside the doorway.

  Three heads turned in his direction, not counting the forensics staff.

  “Yes,” Durand said. “I’ll be paying her mother and father a visit after we finish here.”

  “Did Juliette have any children?”

  Segal laughed at that.

  “I don’t see any crib, do you?”

  “No,” Gregory murmured, looking around the four empty walls. “I don’t.”

  He wandered over to the sofa and imagined what the room would look like when it was transformed into a bed.

  Where were the blankets? Where did she keep her special things?

  He opened the doors of both wardrobes, which were fashioned out of heavy pine and laden with clothes—some of which she probably hadn’t bought and had probably never worn. A woman of her status within the fashion industry was accustomed to receiving gifts from designers, in exchange for modelling their creations at events and around town. The wardrobes were a trove of colours and textures, of shoes and bags—but there was no hidden shoebox containing her most precious possessions; those, as they would later learn, Juliette had left at her mother’s home for safekeeping.

  All except one.

  A large wicker trunk stood in the corner of the room, and Gregory flipped open the lid with a gloved fingertip. Inside, there was a mound of pillows and a duvet, on top of which rested a soft toy in the shape of a puppy, and a silver-framed picture of Juliette smiling as she cradled a baby in her arms.

  “Ah, God,” he muttered, reaching for the memory Juliette had taken to bed with her each night to send her to sleep.

  I smiled when you were born, too.

  Gregory almost dropped the frame and spun around to look over his shoulder.

  But it was only Inspector Durand.

  “It gets to all of us, sometimes,” he said, with a meaningful look towards the body in the centre of the room. “Twenty-three years, and I still feel it.”

  Gregory was about to correct him, and then snapped his mouth shut. If Durand wanted to think it was the sight of death that struck fear and loathing into his deepest soul, he’d let him.

  “I found this,” he said, pointing at the frame.

  Durand looked at the picture and let out a soft expletive.

  CHAPTER 22

  Hélène Deschamps was clearing away the lunch plates when the intercom buzzed.

  Anais ran to the door as she always did, expecting it to be one of her grandmother’s friends who often came bearing small trinkets or sweets—or perhaps the tall, red-headed woman she called Maman.

  “Attends, Anais!”

  Hélène hurried to prevent the little girl from reaching up and turning the handle, but she was a moment too late and it swung open to reveal two strange men in the doorway. One was tall and smartly dressed, with dark, curling hair and green eyes. The shorter man was scruffy, smelled strongly of nicotine, and might as well have had ‘POLICE’ tattooed across his forehead.

  Her hand reached out to draw the little girl back against her body, in a protective gesture.

  “Mrs Deschamps?” Durand asked.

  “Yes,” she said, beginning to feel light-headed. “Is it Arthur? Has something happened? Please, tell me.”

  Durand pulled out his identification and gave her time to check it.

  “It isn’t your husband, Madame. Do you mind if we come inside? These things are best spoken of in private.”

  Hélène pinned a smile on her face and turned to her granddaughter.

  “Anais? Why don’t you go and play in your room, petite?”

  She waited until the little girl trotted out of earshot, then led them into the sitting room, where she sat down and gripped the edge of the sofa.

  “Please. Just get it over with.”

  “We’re very sorry to tell you that your daughter, Juliette, was found murdered this morning,” Durand said quietly. “Our deepest condolences to you and your family.”

  The words were spoken with such breath-taking simplicity that, at first, Hélène was unable to comprehend what he had told her.

  She began shaking her head from side to side.

  “Juliette? No. No, she’s at work today, for Maison Leroux. There must be some mistake.”

  “I’m sorry, there’s no mistake,” the inspector said, as gently as he could. He’d been called upon to perform this painful duty many times before and there was no ‘good’ or ‘right’ way to convey the very worst news a parent could ever receive. It was best to do it as quickly and cleanly as possible.

  “Can we call your husband, or perhaps another family member, Madame?”

  She shook her head dumbly.

  “Arthur—he won’t—he won’t be able to manage…” Her voice faltered, and she let out a gut-wrenching sob as reality crashed through her defences like a wrecking ball. “I need—I need my sister to come.”

  Durand put an urgent call through to Juliette’s aunt, who happened to live nearby and was prepared to defer her own grief to come to the aid of her family.

  “How did it happen?” Hélène spoke in an odd, distant voice, as tears fell silently down her face.

  “It’s still very early in the investigation,” Durand told her. “We’re gathering evidence at the moment.”

  “She—Juliette often has strange people writing to her agent,” Hélène whispered. “She says it’s a hazard of the job, to have people become infatuated and send her love letters. I told her—I told her it was dangerous.”

  “We’ll be looking into every possible angle,” Durand assured her. “And we’ll be speaking to her agent too. In the meantime, if you feel able, can you tell us when you last saw Juliette?”

  Hélène closed her eyes, battling the tears that continued to fall like rain.

  “Yesterday,” she managed. “She came for lunch and to see Anais, then left in the early evening.”

  “At what time?”

  She gave a small shake of her head, as if to clear it.

  “Seven-thirty or thereabouts.”

  “How did she seem to you?” Gregory asked, watching closely for any signs of shock. It was important to elicit facts, but not at the expense of her wellbeing.

  Hélène thought back to the previous day, and of the ugly row they’d had in the kitchen.

  You’re no mother, Juliette…

  It would be better if you left…

  The memory of what she’d said was enough to elicit a guttural cry of pain, the sound of an animal in deepest torment, and both men surged forward to help as Hélène slumped forward and almost fell to the floor.

  “I didn’t mean it,” she whispered. “Good God, I didn’t mean what I said.”

  “What, Madame? What was said?”

  But Hélène only shook her head, thinking of all the times she’d cut her daughter out; all the times she could have encouraged Anais to be more affectionate towards her. She raised tear-drenched eyes to look around the room at the fussy curtains and ornaments she polished religiously each week, but there wasn’t one picture of her daughter so that Anais would be reminded of who had birthed her and loved her every day since. Not one image of her beautiful girl.

  Hélène staggered off the sofa and rushed towards a dresser in the corner of the room.

  “Madame Deschamps! Please, sit down, you don’t look well—”

  She was almost hysterical now, dragging open drawers so their contents fell onto the floor, and Gregory looked to Durand for his approval before rising to help.

  “Madame,” he said, in the same neutral, unthreatening tone he used with all his patients. “What
are you looking for?”

  “Juliette,” she muttered. “Her pictures. I know…I know they’re here somewhere. I put them in an album to show Anais, one day. I must find them.”

  “You could find them later, surely?”

  “No!” she shouted, and then held a hand to her lips. “I must find them now. There should be pictures of her, so Anais can see, and be proud.”

  As proud as she was.

  “You can tell Anais all about Juliette—and share your happy memories.”

  Hélène nodded mutely, and although she still searched the cupboard, her hands were less frantic than before.

  “Can you tell me a happy memory you have of Juliette?” Gregory asked.

  She closed her eyes and an image of Juliette popped into her mind, when she’d been around eight or nine years old. Arthur hadn’t been too bad, and so the three of them had boarded the train to Versailles and spent a summer’s day wandering the grounds and boating on the lake. She remembered her daughter laughing as she splashed in the water fountains—innocent and free, and giggling as she dabbed ice cream on her father’s nose.

  So long ago.

  “Her laughter,” Hélène whispered, staring off into the distance.

  They all turned to hear the soft pitter-patter of small feet approaching down the hall.

  “Grand-mère?”

  With a monumental effort, Hélène drew herself up, using the tissue Gregory offered to dry the worst of the tears from her face before facing the child. With a shaking hand, she reached for a large scrapbook at the bottom of a pile of old newspapers, and held it carefully in her arms, as if it would break.

  “Viens-ici, Anais,” she beckoned the little girl forward when she appeared in the doorway. “Come and see your Maman. Come—come and sit with me, and see how lovely she was.”

  Both men knew there would be very little else Hélène Deschamps could tell them about Juliette, not as grief and shock began to take hold, but Durand ventured to ask one more question.

  “Who is Anais’s father, Hélène?”

  The woman looked up from the scrapbook, then at the little girl who was happily turning the pages and pointing at her Maman, asking when she would be seeing her again.

  “I don’t know,” she said honestly. “Juliette never told me, and she didn’t list a name on the birth certificate either. We used to argue about it, but now I’m glad. I wouldn’t want anybody to come and take Anais away from us.”

  Gregory watched the rosy-cheeked toddler and thought of how hard it must have been for Juliette to leave her.

  “Why didn’t Juliette keep Anais with her?”

  Hélène sighed deeply.

  “She couldn’t. When Anais was born, we had very little. We lived in a bad part of the city, with barely enough to pay the bills, let alone feed another mouth. When Juliette told us the news, I was angry,” she admitted. “I felt she’d wasted her life, and would regret it. God forgive me, I encouraged her to go to the clinic…but she ignored me, and I’ve never been so relieved.”

  She looked down at the girl resting in the crook of her arm and smoothed a hand over the top of her silky head.

  “We were prepared to struggle, but then Juliette came home one day with an offer from Gabrielle Leroux which changed everything. They wanted to make her a model, and the money…it was too much to ignore. Juliette took it, and so did we.”

  So did I, she amended silently. And punished Juliette for every cent I took, for every time my pride was hurt.

  She looked down at the scrapbook lying open on her lap and wept.

  * * *

  Gregory and Durand said little as they descended the lift from the Deschamps’ apartment, and even less as they walked out into the mid-afternoon sunshine that bathed Paris in a golden light, which seemed so incongruous given their present sadness.

  “The world continues to turn,” Durand said, as they clambered inside his trusty Citröen. “We should not punish ourselves for continuing to breathe.”

  Through the windscreen, Gregory saw a large billboard advertising a luxury brand of underwear. A famous French footballer posed beside a lithe, half-naked woman who looked up at him with slumberous eyes.

  The woman was Juliette Deschamps.

  “Yes,” he said wearily. “Life goes on, Mathis. But a little girl lost her mother today.”

  Durand started the engine and pulled out into the main road, narrowly avoiding a collision with an oncoming car. Horns blared, and the air turned blue with phrases Alex had never heard before.

  “Are you trying to kill us both?” he asked.

  Durand gave one of his enigmatic smiles.

  “Not yet, mon ami.”

  The traffic was light as they made their way back to the 7th Arrondissement, where Gregory was due to see Camille for their next session while Durand went back to the business of investigating Juliette’s murder. But first, they had to make a pit-stop to see Leon, whose exploits in the matter of Camille’s forged identity papers had not been forgotten—though the events of the morning had delayed his appointment with the Brigade Criminelle.

  As they crossed the river and pootled along the Quai Voltaire which ran parallel to the water, Durand began to roll a cigarette—handily using his forearms to steer the wheel as he performed a task that clearly could not wait—and shaved another few years off Gregory’s life in stress alone.

  “What do you make of all this?” Durand asked, once he’d lit the rollie and cracked the window open. “Do you think we’re looking for the same person in both cases?”

  Gregory shaded his eyes against the dappled light which filtered through the trees lining the road and tried to visualise the sort of person capable of inflicting the brutality they’d seen that day.

  “Both victims are—or were—successful models,” he said. “That much is obvious and, on the face of it, we could be looking for a sexually-motivated killer. However, there was no evidence of sexual assault in Camille’s case, and no obvious sign of it in Juliette’s case, though we won’t know for sure until the pathologist’s report comes through.”

  “We haven’t found any evidence of harassment—or at least nothing out of the ordinary,” Durand said, tapping the ash from his cigarette out of the window. “Although it’s still early days in the case of Juliette—and, as for Camille, we’re still waiting to hear from the digital forensics team to see if anything can be traced from the memory card of her phone. Only then will we know whether there was anything incriminating.”

  Gregory nodded, and wondered what constituted ‘ordinary’ harassment.

  “I’m cautious about speculating at this point, but I can make some general remarks from what we’ve seen,” he said. “If we assume the perpetrator is the same person in both cases, we also have to assume they’d be as careful not to leave trace DNA at Juliette’s apartment, as they were when they visited Camille.”

  Durand made a murmuring sound of agreement.

  “To protect themselves in such a way would take planning. They’d need to bring a bag of some kind, containing overalls, gloves…that sort of thing.”

  Gregory nodded.

  “Which brings me to the point: there’s a contradiction between the careful, organised planning it would have taken to protect themselves from detection, and the frenzied, disorganised way this person attacked both women. The nature of the injuries was similar in both cases, but the execution was much bolder, and much less cautious with Juliette than with Camille.”

  Durand glanced across at Gregory.

  “You think the man—the person we’re looking for, is losing control?”

  “I think there was a clear escalation in violence with Juliette,” Gregory replied. “If it’s the same person in both cases, then, yes, I think they’re getting a taste for violence and it’s making them greedy.”

  Durand swung his car onto the Boulevard Saint-Michel and found a parking spot near the Jardin du Luxembourg, another leafy park that had belonged to a palace of the same name befor
e being made public.

  “Leon has his studio near here,” the inspector said. “But we have to walk the rest of the way because the road is closed. There’s a march taking place this afternoon.”

  Gregory raised an eyebrow, thinking of the recent ‘yellow vest’ movement that had turned Paris into an urban battlefield. Civil unrest still bubbled beneath the surface of that fine city, the like of which hadn’t been seen for decades.

  “What’s the cause?” he asked.

  “Women’s rights,” Durand replied, and slammed the car door shut.

  CHAPTER 23

  The studio where Leon photographed some of the world’s most beautiful people was one of those shabby-chic affairs Gregory had seen on the cover of Interior Design Monthly, or some equally tedious publication he’d thumbed through while waiting to be called into a dental appointment. The building was classical, like much of Paris, but the interior consisted of a duplex penthouse with acres of glass and steel, and was styled to within an inch of its life to mimic the kind of minimalist, renovated warehouse apartment Gregory happened to own on the banks of the Thames, back in London.

  His furnishings, though, had been sourced from a popular brand of wallet-friendly Scandinavian homewares—and the lack of adornment came from a disinclination towards clutter rather than an eye for feng shui.

  They were admitted by a tall, slender man who introduced himself as Raoul, and who disappeared into the kitchen after threatening to bring them both a cup of kombucha.

  “Changed your mind about that photoshoot, Doctor?”

  The disembodied voice came from somewhere above them, where Leon leaned against a galleried landing rail and gave them both a lazy smile.

  “I see you’ve brought company with you, so perhaps not,” he added. “I thought our appointment had been cancelled, Inspector.”