Alex (21 page)

Félix. He doesn’t tell her his surname. She immediately notices he’s not wearing a wedding ring, but there’s a white band around his finger – he’s probably just taken it off.

“What about you, what’s your name?”

“Julia,” Alex says.

“Pretty name.”

He would have said this regardless. Alex finds it funny.

He jerks his thumb back towards the restaurant.

“We were a bit rowdy …”

“A bit,” Alex says, smiling.

“It’s a boys’ night out, so …”

Alex doesn’t respond. If he carries on, he’ll just dig himself in deeper, and he realises this. He suggests a drink at a bar he knows. She says no thank you. They stroll a little way together. Alex walks slowly, takes a better look at him. He’s wearing cheap
chainstore clothes and, though he’s just had dinner, that’s not the only reason his shirt buttons are straining; he has no-one to tell him he needs to buy the next size up. Or go on a diet and take up a sport.

“No, honestly,” he says, “it’s just twenty minutes …”

He’s just mentioned that his place is not far, they could have a drink there. Alex says she’s tired, not really in the mood. They’ve reached his car, an Audi piled with junk.

“So what do you do for a living?” she says.

“Technical maintenance operative.”

Alex translates: repair man.

“Scanners, printers, hard drives …” he explains, as though somehow this makes him seem more important. Then he adds, “I’ve got a team of—”

Suddenly he realises it’s stupid to try and big himself up. Worse, it’s counterproductive.

He waves his hand. Difficult to tell if he’s brushing away the end of the sentence as though it’s unimportant, or the beginning as though he regrets saying it.

He opens the car door; there’s a cold blast of stale cigarette smoke.

“Do you smoke?”

This is Alex’s technique – she blows hot and cold. She’s a past master.

“A little,” says the guy, embarrassed.

He’s about six foot, quite broad-shouldered with light-brown hair and dark, almost black eyes. Walking next to her, she notices he’s got stubby legs. He’s not very well proportioned.

“I only smoke when I’m around smokers,” he says, ever the gentleman.

She is convinced that right now he would give anything for a cigarette. He finds her really attractive, he’s being very formal, but he can’t bring himself to look her in the eyes because he’s so turned on. It’s intensely sexual, animal; it makes him completely blind. He would be incapable of telling what she’s wearing. He gives the impression that if Alex doesn’t sleep with him right now, he’ll go home and murder his whole family with a hunting rifle.

“Are you married?”

“No … divorced. Well, separated.”

Simply from the tone of his voice, Alex translates, “I don’t know what to say – I’m getting ripped apart here.”

“What about you?”

“Single.”

This is the good thing about the truth; it rings true. He looks down, not out of embarrassment or modesty – he’s staring at her breasts. Whatever Alex decides to wear, the first thing everyone notices is her beautiful, voluptuous breasts.

She smiles and, as she leaves, she says,

“Some other time, maybe …”

He jumps at this: when, when? He fumbles in his pockets. A taxi passes. Alex hails it. The taxi pulls up. Alex opens the door. When she turns to say goodbye, he’s holding out his business card. It’s a little crumpled; it looks shoddy. She takes it all the same and, just to show how little it matters, slips it absent-mindedly into her pocket. In the rear-view mirror, she sees him, standing in the middle of the street, watching the taxi drive away.

The gendarme asked whether his presence was required.

“I’d rather you stayed …” Camille said, “assuming you can spare the time, obviously.”

In general, collaboration between the national police force and the local police of the
gendarmerie
can be a little fractious, but Camille has a lot of time for regional officers. He feels he has a lot in common with them. They tend to be opinionated, pugnacious, the sort who never give up on a lead, even a cold one. The local officer is clearly flattered by Camille’s suggestion – he’s a chief sergeant, but Camille refers to him as “
chef
” because he knows the form; the officer feels respected and he’s right. He’s forty years old and has a pencil-thin moustache, like a nineteenth-century musketeer. There’s a lot about him that’s old-fashioned – a self-conscious elegance, a stiff formality, but Camille quickly recognises that the man is really intelligent. He has a high regard for his position. His shoes are polished mirrors.

The weather is grey, maritime.

Faignoy-lès-Reims, population 800, two streets, a square with a vast war memorial; the place is as gloomy as a wet Sunday in paradise. They head for the bistro – this is why they’ve come here. Chief Langlois parks the squad car right outside.

As they go in, the smell of soup, cheap wine and detergent
hits you in the back of the throat. Camille starts to wonder if he’s becoming hypersensitive to smell. Back at the garage, Mme Joris and her vanilla perfume …

Stefan Maciak died in November 2005. The new owner arrived shortly afterwards.

“Actually, I took over the place in January.”

All he knows is what he’s been told, what everyone knows. It even meant he dithered about whether to take the place over, because the story was big news in the area. You get burglaries, hold-ups, that kind of thing round here – even murders from time to time (the bar owner tries in vain to get Chief Langlois to back him up), but something like this … Actually, Camille hasn’t come here to listen, he’s come to see the crime scene, to get a feel for the story, to clarify his thoughts. At the time, Maciak is fifty-seven, he’s of Polish descent, single. He’s a big man, about as alcoholic as you can be when you’ve been managing bars for thirty years with no self-discipline. Not much is known about his life outside his workplace. As for sex, he paid regular visits to the local knocking shop – Germaine Malignier and her daughter, known to regulars as “the four cheeks”. Otherwise he seemed a decent enough sort of guy.

“The accounts were all in order.”

For the new proprietor, closing his eyes solemnly, this is a blank cheque for life.

“Then, one night in November …” Chief Langlois takes up the story. By now he and Camille have left the bar, having refused a drink, and they’re walking towards the war memorial, a pedestal on which stands a WWI solider leaning into the wind, about to skewer some invisible Kraut with his bayonet. “November 28, to be exact. Maciak is closing up as usual at
about ten o’clock – he’s pulled down the metal shutters and he’s started cooking himself something in the kitchen at the back of the café. He’s probably planning to eat in front of the T.V., which has been on since 7.00 a.m. But he didn’t get to eat that night, he never had time – we think he went to open the back door. When he comes back, he’s not alone. No-one knows what transpired exactly; the only thing we know for sure is that some time later, he’s hit on the back of the head with a hammer. He’s stunned, he’s badly injured, but he’s not dead – the postmortem was very clear. At this point he’s tied up using bar towels, which means this wasn’t premeditated. He’s laid out on the floor of the café, someone obviously tries to get him to tell them where his savings are, he refuses. They must have gone out through the back kitchen to the garage to get the sulphuric acid he used to refill the battery in his van. They come back and pour half a litre of it down his throat, which quickly puts an end to the conversation. They pocket the day’s takings – thirty-seven euros – go upstairs and turn the place upside down, rip open the mattresses, empty out the drawers and find his savings – 2,000 euros – hidden in the toilet. Then they just disappear, without being seen by a single soul, taking the container of acid, presumably because it had fingerprints.”

Camille is unthinkingly reading the list of names of those who fell in the Great War. Finds three men called Malignier: the name the chief mentioned earlier – Gaston, Eugène and Raymond. He’s trying to find a connection to the “four cheeks”.

“Any mention of a woman?”

“We know there was a woman, but we don’t know if she is connected to the case.”

Camille feels a little shudder down his spine.

“O.K., how do you think it happened? Maciak is closing up, it’s ten o’clock …”

“Nine forty-five,” corrects Chief Langlois.

“That doesn’t change much.”

Chief Langlois pulls a face: to his mind, it changes everything.

“Surely you understand, commandant,” he says. “A bar owner is more likely to stay open a little later than his licence permits. For him to close up fifteen minutes early is very unusual.”

A “tryst” – this is Chief Langlois’s word, his theory. The regulars had mentioned a woman coming into the bar that evening, but they’d been there since mid-afternoon and had blood alcohol levels to prove it, so unsurprisingly some reported that she was young, others said old, some claimed she was short, others said fat, a few thought there was someone with her, mentioned a foreign accent, but even those who claimed to have heard it couldn’t say where it was from. All in all, none of them knew anything beyond the fact that she chatted for a while to Maciak, who seemed all excited, that this was at nine o’clock and forty-five minutes later he closed up early, telling the regulars he was tired. We know the rest. No record of any woman – young, old, short or fat – staying at any of the hotels in the area. A call for witnesses was put out, but nothing came of it.

“We should have widened the search area,” the chief says, dispensing with the usual litany about lack of resources.

For the moment, all that can be said with certainty is that there was a woman in the area. Beyond that …

Chief Langlois permanently looks as though he’s standing to attention. He is stiff, wooden.

“Something bothering you,
chef
?” Camille says, still looking down the names of those who fell in the Great War.

“Well …”

Camille turns towards Langlois and, without waiting for a response, he carries on. “The thing I find surprising is the idea of trying to get someone to talk by pouring acid down his throat. If they were trying to shut him up, it would make more sense, but to get him to talk …”

For Langlois, this is a relief. His rigid posture relaxes a little as though for a moment he’s forgotten he’s on parade – he even clicks his tongue – a mannerism hardly in accordance with police regulations. Camille is tempted to call him to order, but he suspects that in his career path, Chief Langlois never ticked the box marked “humour”.

“I thought that too,” he says at length. “It’s curious … At first glance, the crime looks like the work of a prowler. The fact that Maciak opened the back door hardly proves that he knew the person; at best all it proves is that the person was persuasive enough to get him to open up – it would hardly be difficult. So, it could be a prowler. The café is deserted, no-one saw him enter, he picks up the hammer – Maciak had a small toolbox under the bar – he stuns Maciak, ties him up; that is compatible with the report.”

“But since you don’t believe the acid was used to try and make him tell where he’d hidden his savings, you presumably favour a different theory …”

They leave the war memorial and walk back to the car. The wind has come up a little and with it the late-season cold. Camille pushes down his hat and buttons his coat.

“Let’s just say I’ve found a more logical one. I don’t know why
acid was poured into his mouth and down his throat, but to my mind it has nothing whatever to do with the burglary. As a rule when thieves are inclined to murder, they favour the direct route: first they kill, then they search, then they leave. Vicious thugs torture their victims using orthodox means, which though they may be excruciating, are standard techniques. But this …”

“So, what do you think the acid was for … ?”

Langlois looks dubious for a moment, then comes to a decision.

“I believe it was a sort of ritual. What I mean is …”

Camille knows exactly what he means.

“What kind of ritual?”

“Sexual …” Langlois ventures.

Smart guy, the chief.

Sitting next to each other, the two men stare through the windscreen at the rain streaming down the war memorial. Camille explains the sequence of events they’ve established: Bernard Gattegno, March 13, 2005; Maciak later that year on November 28; Pascal Trarieux, July 14, 2006.

Chief Langlois nods.

“What links them is that the victims are all men.”

This is what Camille thinks too. The ritual is sexual. This girl, if it is her, despises men. She seduces men she meets, perhaps she even chooses her victims and, at the first opportunity, she bumps them off. As for the sulphuric acid, they’ll understand that once they’ve arrested her.

“That’s one crime every six months,” Chief Langlois says. “But geographically it’s one hell of a hunting ground.”

Camille agrees. The chief doesn’t simply put forward very plausible hypotheses, he also asks the right questions. But as
far as Camille knows there’s nothing to connect the victims: Gattegno, a garage owner in Étampes; Maciak, a bar owner in Reims; Trarieux, unemployed in Paris. Apart from the fact that they were killed in very much the same way and apparently by the same hand.

“We don’t know who this girl is,” Camille says, as Langlois starts the car to drive back to the train station. “All we know is that, if you’re a man, you’re better off not crossing her path.”

When she arrived, Alex checked in to the first hotel she found. It’s opposite the station. She didn’t get a wink of sleep. When it wasn’t the racket of the trains, the rats were still haunting her dreams, something that would happen no matter what hotel she was in. In the last dream, the fat black rat was at least three feet tall, and it poked its snout, its whiskers into Alex’s face, its black beady eyes piercing her; she could see the slavering jaws, the razor-sharp teeth.

The following morning, she found exactly the place she was looking for in the Yellow Pages. The Hôtel du Pré Hardy. Luckily, they had a number of rooms available and the prices were reasonable. It proved to be a nice hotel, very clean, if a little far from the centre. Alex likes the city; the light is agreeable, and she has been going for walks, as though this is a holiday.