Alex (17 page)

“They’ve found the girl. She’s in Pantin. Get your arse in gear!”

*

The divisionnaire heads back to the
brigade criminelle
, a thousand things to do on the way; he’s the one who calls the investigating magistrate.

Louis drives sedately at breakneck speed. Within minutes, they’re at the scene.

The abandoned warehouse is perched on the bank of the canal, a decrepit industrial blockhouse, half ship, half factory. It’s a square, yellowish building with – on the ship side – broad gang-ways running down from each floor along the side of the building,
and on the factory side, serried ranks of tall windows. A masterpiece of 1930s concrete architecture. A monument whose lettering, all but obliterated now, reads
FONDERIES GéNéRALES
.

Everything around it has already been demolished. This is the one building still standing and probably about to be redeveloped. Decorated from top to bottom with large white, blue and orange graffiti tags, it sits enthroned above the canal like one of those Indian elephants adorned from head to foot that lumber mysteriously behind the streamers and the banners. The previous night, a couple of teenage street artists managed to clamber onto the first-floor gangway, something everyone assumed was impossible now that all the doorways have been bricked up, but a piece of cake for kids like that. They were just putting the finishing touches to their work at dawn when one of them happened to look down through the buckled glass roof and clearly saw a wooden cage dangling with a body inside. They spent the whole morning weighing up the risks before eventually putting in an anonymous call to the police. It took less than two hours to track them down to question them about their nocturnal activities.

The fire brigade and the
brigade criminelle
were called. The building has been sealed up for years – the company that bought it had everything bricked up. While one team tried to raise a ladder to the gangway, another attacked the bricked-up doorway with sledgehammers.

Besides the firefighters, there’s quite a crowd milling around outside: uniformed officers, plain-clothes officers, squad cars with lights still flashing, and the general public – no-one knows how they got here – all watching what’s going on as the police begin to seal off the area with construction barriers found on the site.

Camille scrambles out of the car – he doesn’t even need to
flash his warrant card – trips and almost falls on the gravel and the broken bricks, but regains his balance just in time, watches the firefighters doing their work for a minute, then yells: “Wait!”

He walks over. The watch commandant heads over to block his path. Camille doesn’t give him time to block anything – there’s a gap in the wall just right for a man of his size; he slips inside the building. It will take a lot more sledgehammering for anyone else to get in.

*

The interior is completely empty, vast rooms bathed in a diffuse, greenish light that falls like dust from the skylights and the shattered windows. He can hear water trickling, the rattle of loose slates somewhere above that echoes through the cavernous space. Rivulets of water snake past his feet. It’s the sort of place that would give anyone the creeps. It’s impressive, though, like a derelict cathedral, the mournful atmosphere of the end of the industrial age, but the background and the light are exactly those in the photos of the girl. Behind Camille, the sledgehammers continue to pound at the bricks; it sounds like a military tattoo.

Camille immediately shouts, “Anyone here?”

He waits for a second, then starts to run. The first room is cavernous – fifteen or twenty metres long with a ceiling at least four or five metres high. The floor is soaking wet, water seeping from the walls – the whole place is dank and cold. These were clearly storerooms, but before he even gets to the far end of the first room, he knows he is in the right place.

“Anyone here?”

He can hear it himself – his voice is different; it’s something that happens at a crime scene, a sort of tension – you can feel it in your belly, hear it in your voice. And what has triggered this
is a smell, almost drowned out by the whirling draughts of cold air. The stench of rotting flesh, of piss and shit.

“Anyone here?”

He runs. He hears quick footsteps behind him; the team have come through the wall. Camille rushes into the second room and stops dead, arms dangling, staring at the scene.

Louis has just arrived next to him. The first words he hears from Camille are:

“Fucking hell …”

The wooden cage has crashed to the ground, two of the slats ripped away. Maybe they broke during the fall and the girl finished the job. The stink of putrefaction is coming from three dead rats, two of them crushed by the crate. Swarms of flies are everywhere. There is half-dried excrement in bags a few feet from the crate. Camille and Louis look up; the rope has been eaten through by something – one end is still hanging from the pulley fixed to the ceiling.

But there’s blood everywhere, too.

And no sign of the girl.

The officers who have just arrived set off to look for her. Camille nods doubtfully; he doesn’t think there’s any point.

Disappeared.

In the state she was in.

How did she manage to escape? Forensics will tell them. How did she go, and which way? Forensics will find out. The fact remains that the girl they were trying to save has done the job herself.

Camille and Louis are lost for words, and as the vast rooms ring with shouted orders and instructions and echoing footsteps, they stare, frozen, at this strange turn of events.

The girl escaped, but she didn’t go to the police as any kidnap victim might.

Some months ago, she killed a man with a shovel and melted off half his face with sulphuric acid before burying him in a suburban garden.

Only by pure chance was his body discovered, which makes you wonder whether there are others.

And how many.

Especially since two similar deaths have been reported and Camille would stake his life on them being connected to the death of Pascal Trarieux.

The fact that she managed to escape from this horrifying situation tells you she’s no ordinary girl.

They have to find her.

And they have no idea where she might be.

“I suspect,” Camille says solemnly, “that Divisionnaire Le Guen might perhaps now have a better grasp of the scope of our problem.”

Half-conscious from exhaustion, Alex can barely take in what is happening.

Using her last shreds of strength, she manages to set the cage swinging so fast, so high, that the petrified rats have to dig their claws into the wood to hang on. She lets out a loud continuous howl. Dangling at the end of the rope, the crate rocks wildly in the icy breeze whipping through the room, like a car on a Ferris wheel before some terrible accident.

The stroke of luck that saves Alex’s life is that the rope breaks when the cage is angled downward. Eyes fixed on the fraying rope, Alex watches as the last threads snap one by one, the cable seems to writhe in pain and suddenly the crate plummets. Given the weight, the drop is lightning fast, a fraction of a second, barely enough time for Alex to tense against the impact. The jolt is brutal, one corner of the cage attempting to drive through the concrete floor; the crate quavers for a moment then topples heavily in a deafening groan of relief. Alex is pressed against the lid. In an instant, the rats scatter. Two of the planks of wood have split, but none is altogether broken.

Stunned by the force of the fall, it takes Alex a moment to surface, to regain consciousness, but the crucial information
reaches her brain: it worked. One of the slats has split almost in two, a space nearly large enough to squeeze through. Alex is suffering from hypothermia; she wonders where she will find the strength. And yet she lashes out with her feet, scrabbles with her hands and suddenly the crate comes apart. The plank above her gives way. It is as though the sky has suddenly parted, like the Red Sea in the Bible.

This triumph almost makes her mad. She is so overwhelmed by emotion, by relief, by the success of her insane plan, that rather than struggling to her feet and getting out, she stays in the cage, prostrate, sobbing. She can’t stop herself.

Her brain sends out a new signal: get out of here. The rats won’t dare attack again so soon, but what about Trarieux? He hasn’t come for some time – what if he were to turn up now?

She has to get out, get dressed, get out of here.

She begins to uncoil her body. She had hoped for deliverance; this is torture. Her whole body is rigid. She cannot get to her feet, cannot extend her legs or push with her arms, cannot get into a normal position. A hard ball of tetanised muscle. She has no strength left.

It takes a full minute, two minutes for her to get onto her knees. The effort is so excruciating it seems impossible – she howls helplessly, screams as she forces her muscles, pounds on the cage with her fists. Overcome by tiredness, she collapses again, curled into a ball, exhausted. Paralysed.

It takes every ounce of courage, of sheer willpower to try again, the unimaginable effort required to stretch her limbs, cursing the heavens, to straighten her pelvis, turn her neck … A struggle between the dying Alex and the living Alex. Slowly, her body revives. Painfully, but it revives. Eventually, chilled to the marrow,
Alex succeeds in getting into a squatting position, to slide first one leg, then the other, inch by inch over the top of the crate and tumble onto the other side. The fall is painful, but she presses her face joyfully against the damp, cold concrete and starts to sob again.

A few minutes later, she manages to crawl on all fours and fetch an old rag to drape round her shoulders. She gets as far as the water bottles, snatches one up and drains it. She catches her breath, finally manages to lie on her back. Days and days – how many days exactly? – she has been waiting for this moment, days when she resigned herself to the thought that it might never come. She could stay here until the end of time, feeling her circulation pick up, the searing blood, her joints recovering, her muscles coming back to life. Her whole body aches. This is how frostbitten mountaineers must feel when they’re found alive.

Her brain, running in the background, sends out another message: what if he comes? She has to get out of here, quickly.

Alex checks: all her clothes are here. All her stuff, her bag, her papers, her money, even the wig she was wearing that night, is in the pile with Trarieux’s things. He took nothing. All he wanted was her life – well, her death. Alex gropes around, picks up her clothes, her hands shaking and weak. She keeps glancing around anxiously. The first thing she needs to do is find something she can use to defend herself in case he should come back. She rummages feebly through the tools strewn around and finds a crowbar. It was obviously used to open crates. When had he been planning to use it? When she was dead? So he could bury her? Alex puts it down next to her. She doesn’t even realise how ridiculous the situation is: were Trarieux to arrive, she wouldn’t have the strength to pick it up.

As she gets dressed, she suddenly becomes aware of her own smell: it’s sickening – she reeks of piss, of shit, of vomit and dog’s breath. She opens a bottle of water, then another, rubs herself hard, but her hands are slow. She washes as best she can, dries herself off, her limbs gradually returning to normal. She warms herself, rubbing herself down with a blanket she finds and some filthy rags. Obviously, there’s no mirror so she can’t see what she looks like. She probably has a mirror in her handbag; as she thinks this her brains sounds the alarm. Last warning: get the fuck out of here now; clear off. Right now.

The clothes immediately make her feel warmer. Her feet are swollen; her shoes pinch. It takes two attempts before she can stand, and then only barely. She picks up her bag, decides to leave the crowbar and stumbles out thinking that there are some things she will never be able to do again – fully extend her legs, turn her head, stand up straight. She shuffles forward, half-stooped, like an old woman.

Trarieux left footprints; she has only to follow them from one room to the next. She looks around, trying to find the exit he’s been using. That first day, when she tried to escape, when he caught her at the bricked-up doorway, this is what she didn’t notice: there, in the corner, the metal trapdoor in the floor. The handle is a loop of wire. Alex tries to lift it. She panics. She heaves with all her strength, but it doesn’t budge an inch. She feels tears well up again and a muffled groan comes from deep in her belly; she tries again, but it’s impossible. She already knows there will be no other way out; this was why he didn’t rush to try and catch her the other day. He knew that even if she found the trapdoor, she would never be able to lift it.

And now she feels angry, a brutal, murderous anger, a terrible
rage. Alex screams and starts to run. She runs awkwardly, as though crippled. She retraces her steps. In the distance, the rats that dared to come back see her charging towards them and scatter. Alex picks up the crowbar and three of the broken planks, and she manages to carry them because she does not stop to ask herself whether she has the strength – her mind is on other things. She needs to get out of here and nothing, absolutely nothing is going to stop her. She’ll get out of here even if it kills her. She slides one end of the crowbar into the gap between the trapdoor and the floor and puts her whole weight on the other end. When it grudgingly lifts a few inches, she slides one of the planks under it with her foot and starts again, inserts a second plank, runs to get more wood, comes back and eventually manages to wedge the crowbar vertically under the trapdoor. The gap can’t be more than fifteen inches, scarcely enough to squeeze her body through, and she knows there is a risk that the whole rickety construction will collapse, bringing the heavy manhole cover crashing down and crushing her.

Alex pauses, cocks her head, listens. This time her brain sends no message, no advice. The slightest slip, the slightest hesitation and her body might nudge the crowbar and the trapdoor will collapse. In a split second she has tossed her bag through the gap, hears the muffled sound as it lands – the hole doesn’t seem too deep. As she thinks this, Alex lies flat on her stomach and, inch by inch, she slides backwards under the trapdoor. It’s cold, but she’s sweating by the time the tip of her shoe finds a foothold, a step. She slides the rest of her body through the gap, hanging on to the edge with her fingertips then, as she turns her head, what she most dreaded happens: she accidentally nudges the crowbar: with a metallic shriek it slips and the
trapdoor slams shut with a deafening clang. She just has time to jerk her fingers away, a reflex action, a matter of nanoseconds. Alex stands, frozen, on the step in pitch darkness. She is unscathed. When her eyes adjust to the light, she picks up her bag, which is a couple of steps below. She holds her breath – she is getting out of here, she’s going to make it, she can’t believe it … A few more steps and she comes to a steel door held shut by a breeze block which takes an age to shift since she has no strength left. Then she finds herself in a corridor that smells of piss, a second stairwell which she negotiates, feeling her way with both hands like a blind woman, guided by a dim glow. This is the stairwell where she hit her head and passed out when he first brought her here. At the top of the steps there are three rungs, which Alex climbs, then a short tunnel, a sort of utility shaft that runs to a small metal plate set into the wall. Only a flicker of light comes through from outside and Alex has to feel around the edge of the plate to work out how it opens. It is simply wedged into place. Alex pulls it towards her and finds it’s not very heavy. She carefully removes it and sets it down next to her.