Authors: Pierre Lemaitre
The macho, casually sexist “obviously” appeals to Madame Roman. She is a single woman, close to retirement age; her chubby, doll-like face makes her look like a child who has aged prematurely. She has a slight limp; some problem with her hip. From what little Camille has seen, she is terrifyingly methodical, with every last detail arranged and classified.
She screws up her eyes and gives Camille a knowing look, turns and hands him the spare key . . .
“Nothing serious, I hope?”
“No, no. [Camille gives her a broad smile.] Nothing serious. [He nods towards the key.] I’ll keep this until she gets back . . .”
It is impossible to say whether this is a statement, a question or a request; Madame Roman hesitates. Camille makes the most of this brief pause to give her a grateful smile.
*
The kitchenette is immaculate. Everything in the little apartment is carefully arranged. Women and their obsession with neatness, thinks Camille. The large living room is partitioned and one half serves as a bedroom. The sofa converts into a double bed with a huge dip in the middle, a yawning chasm that draws them in so they end up sleeping on top of each other. It has its advantages. And a bookcase is lined with a hundred paperbacks – a selection that defies logic – and a few knick-knacks that, when he first visited, struck Camille as rather tawdry. He told her he found the place a little sad.
“I had very little money,” Anne had said, suddenly tight-lipped. “Besides, I can’t really complain.”
Camille tries to apologise, but Anne cuts him dead.
“This is the price of divorce.”
When she has something serious to say, Anne stares at you defiantly, as though prepared for a confrontation.
“When I left Lyons, I left behind everything I owned. This furniture, these ornaments, I bought second-hand here in Paris. I didn’t want things anymore. I don’t want things anymore. Maybe one day, but right now this place suits me.”
This place is provisional – this is Anne’s word. The apartment is provisional, their relationship is provisional. This is clearly why they go so well together.
“The thing that really takes time after a divorce is the clear-out,” she says.
That nagging obsession with neatness.
Her blue hospital gown looks like a straitjacket, so Camille has decided to bring her some clothes. He thinks it might cheer her up. He even thinks that, if all goes well, she might go for short walks along the corridor, or downstairs to the little shop on the ground floor.
He made a mental list, but now that he is here, he cannot remember a single thing. Oh, yes: the dark-purple tracksuit. By association of ideas, he suddenly remembers a pair of trainers, the ones she uses for jogging, well worn, the soles still caked with sand. After that it’s more difficult. What else?
Camille opens the small wardrobe. For a woman, Anne has very few clothes. A pair of jeans, he thinks, but which? He takes a pair. A T-shirt, a thick jumper. After that it all seems too complicated. He gives up and stuffs what he has into a sports bag with a random assortment of underwear.
He remembers her papers.
Camille goes over to the bureau. Above it a tarnished mirror that probably dates from when the apartment was built. Into one corner of the frame, Anne has slipped a picture of Nathan, her brother. He looks about twenty-five in the photo, an unprepossessing boy, smiling and withdrawn. Perhaps because he knows a little about him, Camille finds that there is something otherworldly about the face. Nathan is a scientist. From what Camille knows, he is pretty disorganised and tends to run up debts. Anne is forever bailing him out. Like a mother. “Actually, that’s what I’ve always been to him,” she says. She has always been there for him. She smiles, as though amused, but in fact it is worry. The studio flat, the university fees, the holidays, Anne has financed everything; it is hard to tell whether she is proud or dismayed. In the photograph, Nathan is standing in a little square that could be in Italy, the sun is shining, everyone is in shirtsleeves.
Camille goes through the bureau. The right-hand drawer is empty, in the one on the left are a number of creased envelopes, a couple of receipts from clothes shops, restaurants and a pile of brochures bearing the logo of her travel agency, but there is no sign of what he is looking for: her
carte vitale
, and her mutual insurance policy. They must have been in her handbag. Under the travel brochures he finds her sports clothes. He goes through the pile again. He expected to find pay slips, bank statements, utility bills for the water, the electricity, the telephone. Nothing. He turns around. His eyes are drawn to the small statue, a copy of an Egyptian cosmetic spoon in the Louvre, the dark wooden handle carved into the naked figure of a young woman swimming, with hair and eyes outlined in black paint. And a perfect arse. Camille gave it to Anne as a present. He bought it in the Louvre. They had been to see the Leonardo exhibition, Camille had spent the whole time explaining the paintings, his knowledge of the subject is encyclopaedic, he could talk for ever about them. In the gift shop, they had seen the carved copy of this girl from the late Eighteenth Dynasty, with her perfectly curved
derrière
.
“I swear, Anne, it’s just like yours.”
Anne had smiled as though to say “I wish! But thank you for saying so . . .” Camille was adamant. She wondered whether he was being serious. He leaned towards her and whispered insistently.
“Honest to God.”
Before she had time to say anything, he had bought it, and that night he had undertaken a professional comparison of the two arses. At first, Anne had laughed a lot, then she moaned and gradually one thing led to another. Afterwards, she had cried; she sometimes cries after they make love. Camille thinks this probably has something to do with clearing out.
Just now, the carved figure looks lonely on the shelf; there is a broad space between it and the collection of D.V.D.s at the other end. Camille spins around, surveying the room. His talent as an artist comes from his unerring sense of observation and he quickly arrives at a conclusion.
Someone has been in the apartment.
He goes back and peers into the right-hand drawer of the bureau: it is empty because her personal papers have been taken. Camille goes back to the front door and examines the lock. Nothing. So it can only have been one of the gang who found Anne’s address and her keys in the handbag he picked up as he left the Galerie Monier.
Is this the same man who was in the hospital last night, or have they divided up the work?
Their determination to hunt her down seems absurd and out of all proportion to the situation. We’re missing something, Camille thinks, not for the first time; there is something about the case we don’t understand.
From the sheaf of personal documents they have, the gang probably know everything about Anne, they know where they are going to find her in Paris and in Lyons, they know where she works, they know every place she might go to hide.
With all this information, tracking her, finding her, becomes child’s play.
Killing her becomes an exercise in style.
The moment Anne sets foot outside the hospital, she is dead.
He cannot tell the
commissaire
that the apartment was searched without admitting that he knows Anne intimately and that he has lied to her from the start. Yesterday, it was no more than a slight misgiving. Today, no more than a suspicion. To his superiors, it would be indefensible. A forensics team could be sent in, but given the sort of men they are dealing with, they would find nothing. Not a trace.
There is more: Camille entered the apartment without authorisation, without a search warrant, he gained admittance because he lied to get the key, because Anne sent him to pick up her social security documents, Madame Roman would be able to testify that he has regularly been in the apartment . . .
The catalogue of his lies is becoming dangerously long. But it is not this that terrifies Camille. It is knowing that Anne’s life is hanging by a thread. And he is utterly powerless.
*
7.20 a.m.
“No, it’s not a bad time.”
If a co-worker says this when you phone at 7.00 a.m., ask no questions. Especially when that co-worker is the
commissaire
.
Camille starts to fill her in on what has been happening.
“Where’s your report . . .” the
commissaire
interrupts.
“I’m working on it.”
“And . . .?”
Camille starts again from the beginning, groping for words, trying to remain professional. The witness was hospitalised and, from the available evidence, it would appear that one of the armed gang infiltrated the premises, made his way to her private room and attempted to kill her.
“Hold on a minute,
commandant
, I’m not sure I follow you. [She enunciates each word as though her formidable intellect were banging against a brick wall.] The witness in question, Madame Foresti, she . . .”
“Madame Forestier.”
“If you prefer. The witness maintains she saw no-one come into her room, am I right? [She does not give him time to answer.] And the nurse claims that she saw someone, but in the end she’s not sure, is that it? So, first off, who is this ‘someone’? And even if it is one of the gang, did he go into the room or didn’t he?”
There is no point wishing Le Guen were still in charge. If he were still
commissaire
, he would be asking the same questions. Ever since Camille requested that this case be assigned to him, everything has gone wrong.
“I’m telling you he was there!” Camille is insistent. “The nurse glimpsed the barrel of a shotgun . . .”
“Oh, well that’s just perfect!” the
commissaire
says admiringly. “She ‘glimpsed’, did she . . .? So, enlighten me, has the hospital filed a report?”
From the moment the conversation began, Camille knew how it would end. He tries his best, but he does not want to cross swords with his superior officer. She earned her promotion. And if Camille’s friendship with Le Guen made it possible for him to be assigned the case, it will not protect him for long – in fact, it will probably work against him.
Camille feels a prickling in his temples, a wave of heat.
“No, there’s no official police report. [Don’t let yourself get riled, be patient and calm, polite and persuasive.] But I am telling you the guy was there. He didn’t think twice about going into a hospital carrying a loaded weapon. From the nurse’s description, it could possibly be the pump-action shotgun used in the armed robbery.”
“‘It could possibly be’ . . .”
“Why won’t you believe me?”
“Because in the absence of an official complaint, a witness, a shred of proof or a single scrap of tangible evidence, I’m having a little trouble imagining a common-or-garden robber going into a hospital to murder a witness, that’s why!”
“A ‘common-or-garden robber’?” Camille chokes on the words.
“O.K., I’ll grant you the raid was pretty violent, but . . .”
“‘Pretty’ violent?”
“
Commandant
, are you going to repeat everything I say with quote marks? You are requesting police protection for this witness as though she were a supergrass in a mafia trial!”
Camille opens his mouth. Too late.
“I’ll let you have one uniformed officer. Two days.”
It is a despicable response. If she had refused to assign anyone, she would have been held responsible if anything happened. Assigning a single unarmed
gendarme
to stop a determined killer is like offering someone a beach windbreak to stop a tsunami.
“What possible threat can Madame Forestier be to these men, Monsieur Verhœven? From what I’ve heard, she witnessed an armed robbery, not a mass murder! By now they’ll know that, although she was injured, they didn’t kill her – I’m inclined to think they’re relieved.”
This seemed logical at the beginning. But there is something not quite right about the case.
“So, this informant of yours, what does he have to say?”
Precisely how we make our decisions is one of life’s mysteries. At what point do we become aware that we have decided? It is impossible to know what role the subconscious plays in Camille’s response, but it comes without a flicker of hesitation.
“Mouloud Faraoui.”
Even Camille flinches when he hears himself say the name.
He feels a sickening lurch, the almost physical sensation of a moving rollercoaster, knowing the trajectory he has put himself on by mentioning this name is a blazing arc headed straight for a brick wall.
“So Faraoui is out on parole?”
And before Camille has time to respond:
“And while we’re at it, what the hell has he got to do with this thing?”
Good question. Like doctors, criminals tend to specialise: armed robbers, fences, burglars, forgers, con men, racketeers, they all live in their separate worlds. Mouloud Faraoui is a pimp, so it would be astonishing for his name to crop up in an armed robbery.
Camille knows him vaguely, their paths have crossed once or twice, and Mouloud is a little too high-profile to be a snitch. Mouloud Faraoui is a sadistic thug, he controls his turf with brute violence and has been implicated in several murders. He is cunning, vicious and for a long time it proved impossible to make any charges stick. Until he found himself on a trumped-up charge for something he did not do: thirty kilos of ecstasy in a holdall in the boot of his car with his prints all over the bag. A textbook stitch-up. Though he swore blind that the holdall was one he used at the gym, he found himself banged up in a cell nursing a frenzied rage.
“Sorry?”
“Faraoui! What the hell has he got to do with this case of yours? And you said he’s your cousin? Well, that’s news to me . . .”
“No, he’s not my cousin . . . Look, it’s complicated, it’s a six-degrees-of-separation thing, if you know what I mean . . .”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t know.”
“Look, I’ll deal with it and I’ll get back to you.”
“You . . . you’ll ‘deal with it’?”
“Are you going to repeat everything I say with quote marks?”