Alex (26 page)

“We’ll wait for a bit … Pull over here.”

This wasn’t what they’d agreed. The driver got on his high horse. As he tells the story, it’s possible to imagine them: the girl
sitting silently in the back seat, the driver furious – he’s been ripped off once too often and is not about to be pushed around by a girl. But the girl doesn’t look at him, she simply says: “Don’t piss me about. Either we wait, or I’m getting out.”

No need for her to add “without paying”. She could have said “or I’ll call the police” but no, they both know she won’t; they’re both in a tricky position. They’re on equal terms. He doesn’t know what she’s waiting for. She wanted him to park facing the street; she stared at a particular spot (he points up ahead, they look, but they don’t know what they’re looking at beyond something up ahead). Was she waiting for someone to arrive? Was she meeting someone? The driver didn’t think so. She didn’t seem dangerous, more anxious. Camille listens as the driver talks about the wait. He can guess that, having nothing better to do, the driver’s imagination will have started to dream up stories about the girl, stories of jealousy, of a love affair gone wrong, wondering if she is watching for a man, or maybe a woman – the other woman, or maybe the ex has got another family; it happens more often than you’d think. He glances in the rear-view mirror. Not bad looking, this girl, or she would be if she cleaned herself up. But she’s so shattered, you have to wonder where she’s been.

They spent a long time there waiting. She was on the alert. Nothing happened. Camille knows she was watching to see whether Trarieux had realised she’d escaped, whether he was lying in wait for her.

After a while, she took out three ten-euro notes and got out of the car without a word. The driver saw her walking away, but he didn’t bother to watch where she was going. He didn’t want to hang around here in the middle of the night, so he cleared off. Camille climbs out of the car. On the night of the abduction,
they combed the area as far as here – what happened?

The other officers get out of their cars. Camille points to the buildings in front of him.

“The doorway of the building where she lived is visible from here. Louis, call in for two teams of backup now. The rest of you …”

Camille allocates their roles. Everyone’s already bustling around. Camille leans on the door of the taxi, thinking.

“Can I go now?” the driver says in a whisper, as though he’s afraid of being overheard.

“Huh? No, you’re staying with me.”

Camille looks at the guy, with that face like a wet weekend. He gives the driver a smile.

“You’ve been promoted. You’re the personal chauffeur of a police commandant. This country offers great opportunities for social mobility, or didn’t you know?”

“Very nice girl,” according to the Arab grocer.

Armand dealt with the Arab grocer. He’s always happy to deal with shopkeepers, especially grocers, which is a bonus that doesn’t come along every day. He’s a little intimidating when he conducts the interview because he looks like a homeless person, he wanders up and down the aisles, he’s quick off the mark with ominous
implications and in the meantime, he helps himself: a pack of chewing gum, a can of Coke, another can, all the while rattling off questions. The shopkeeper can see he’s stuffing his pockets with bars of chocolate, bags of sweets, biscuits, snack bars: Armand has a sweet tooth. He’s not finding out much about the girl, but he carries on – What was her name? So she always paid cash, no credit cards, no cheques? Did she come in often? How did she dress? And the other night, what exactly did she buy? – and once his pockets are full, he says “Well, thank you for your cooperation,” and goes to dump the loot in the squad car where he keeps a supply of plastic bags for such occasions.

*

Camille was the one who found Mme Guénaude. About sixty, overweight, with a hairband. She’s plump and flushed as a butcher’s wife, but she won’t look him in the eye. And she’s in a state, she’s in a real state, fidgeting like a schoolgirl who’s just been given the come-on. The sort of woman police commandants find infuriating; and precisely the sort to call the police out on the slimmest pretext, ever the self-righteous homeowner. No, she tells him, she wasn’t just the girl’s neighbour, she was … how can she put it? Did she know the girl, yes or no? It’s impossibly frustrating trying to understand her answers, which are anything but.

Within four minutes, Camille is all for having old mother Guénaude strip-searched. Gabrielle. She reeks of lies, dishonesty and hypocrisy. Of spite. She and her husband had a bakery. On January 1, 2002, God himself appeared on earth in the form of the changeover to the euro. And when He is made flesh, He doesn’t stint on miracles. Having multiplied the loaves and fishes, He now multiplies money. By seven. From one day to the next. God is a great simplifier.

After she was widowed, Mme Guénaude started renting out all her property cash in hand – she only did it to be obliging, she insists. “If it was just me …” She wasn’t here the day the police flooded the area questioning witnesses. “I was staying at my sister’s.” Still, when she got back and found out that the girl the police were looking for looked astonishingly like her former tenant, she didn’t call them. “I couldn’t be completely sure that it was her. I mean obviously, if I’d known …”

“I’m going to have you banged up,” Camille says.

Mme Guénaude turns pale; the threat has clearly had its effect. To set her mind at rest, Camille adds, “With all the money you’ve got put by, you’ll be able to buy all those little extras from the prison canteen.”

While she was living here, the girl called herself Emma. Why not? After Nathalie, Léa, Laura, Camille is ready for anything. Mme Guénaude needs to sit down to look at the E-FIT. She doesn’t sit down; she collapses. “Yes, that’s her, that’s definitely her. Oh I’ve come over all queer …” She clutches her chest, and Camille thinks she might be about to join her husband in the kingdom of the wicked. This Emma only stayed for three months, never had anyone round, and she was often away, in fact just last week she’d had to leave urgently; she’d just come back from a temporary job in the provinces – she had a crick in her neck, she’d taken a tumble – she said she was going to the south of France, paid two months rent, a family emergency, she’d said; she was very put out at having to leave so quickly. The former baker rattles off her story – she doesn’t know what else to do to satisfy Commandant Verhœven. Had she the nerve, she’d offer him money. Looking at the little policeman with his cold eyes, she vaguely senses that this isn’t relevant. In spite of the jumble
of information, Camille manages to piece together the story. Mme Guénaude points to the sideboard; there’s a scrap of blue paper in the drawer with her forwarding address. Camille is in no rush – he has no illusions, but he opens the drawer just the same as he extracts his mobile from his pocket.

“Is this her handwriting?”

“No, it’s mine.”

“I expected as much.”

He dictates the address over the telephone and waits. In front of him, above the sideboard is a framed picture of a stag standing in a woodland glade.

“He looks completely stupid, that stag of yours …”

“My daughter painted it,” Mme Guénaude says.

“You’re a menace, the whole lot of you.”

Mme Guénaude racks her brains. Emma worked for a bank – she can’t remember which one … a foreign bank. No surprise there. Camille continues with his questions though he already knows the answers: in return for asking no questions, Guénaude was taking an extortionate rent; this is the implicit contract when you rent on the black market.

The address is phony; Camille hangs up.

Louis arrives with two forensics officers. The landlady feels so weak she can’t go upstairs with them. She hasn’t managed to find a new tenant. They already know what they’ll find in Emma’s apartment: Léa’s fingerprints, Laura’s D.N.A., traces of Nathalie.

“Oh, I forgot,” Camille says on his way out of the door. “You’ll also be charged as an accessory to murder. That’s murders, plural.”

Though she’s already sitting down, Gabrielle Guénaude steadies herself with a hand on the coffee table. She is sweating, almost in agony.

“There is something!” she suddenly shouts after them. “The removal man, I know him.”

Camille hurries back.

“Just boxes and flat-pack furniture – she didn’t have much, you understand,” Mme Guénaude says, pursing her lips. They immediately get in touch with the removal company; the secretary isn’t very helpful: no, she simply can’t give out such information without knowing who she’s dealing with.

“O.K.,” Camille says, “I’ll come and pick up the information in person. But I should warn you, if I have to put myself out, I’ll close the place down for a year, I’ll slap you with a tax inspection that goes back to your first year in kindergarten, and you I personally will throw into prison for obstruction of justice, and if you’ve got kids, they’ll be taken into care by social services.”

Though it’s a ridiculous bluff, it works: the secretary becomes flustered, gives the address of the storage unit where the girl left her stuff and her name: Emma Szekely.

Camille has her spell it.

“Beginning S, Z, right? O.K., I want no-one opening that lockup, you got me? No-one. Is that clear?”

The place is ten minutes away. Camille hangs up and screams upstairs:

“I need a team, right now!”

He runs into the stairwell.

As a precaution, Alex takes the stairwell down to the car park. Her Clio starts first time. The car is cold. She looks at herself in the rear-view mirror. She looks seriously tired; she runs her finger under each eye, gives herself a smile that turns into a grimace. She pokes out her tongue, then drives to the exit.

But she’s not out of the woods quite yet. At the top of the ramp, she inserts her swipe card, the red and white barrier rises and she slams on the brakes. Standing in front of her is a policeman. He raises one arm, signalling her to stop, then he turns round, holding his arm out horizontally to stress that there’s no exit. Outside, a succession of unmarked cars drive past, sirens wailing.

In the second car, a bald guy who can barely see out of the side window. It’s like a presidential cortège. Once they’re gone, the officer waves her on. She turns right. She moves off a little abruptly, and in the boot, the two small boxes labelled
PERSONAL
rattle, but Alex is not alarmed – the bottles of acid are safely stowed. There is no risk.

Almost 10.00 p.m. It’s a fiasco. It’s been a struggle, but Camille is calm again. As long as he doesn’t think about the laughing face of the caretaker at the storage depot, an anaemic idiot in grubby Coke-bottle glasses who can’t see the blindingly obvious.

As for communication: the girl – what girl? The car – what car? The boxes – what boxes? They open the lock-up she rented and their hearts skip a beat: it’s all still there, ten taped-up boxes, the girl’s things, her personal belongings. They pounce on them. Camille wants to tear everything open right now. But they have to follow procedure – everything has to be inventoried, which is speeded up by a call to the magistrate. They carry everything away: the boxes, the flat-pack furniture. When all’s said and done, it’s not much, but they’re hopeful they’ll find personal effects, an indication of her true identity. For the investigation, this is the moment of truth.

The faint hope of getting something from the C.C.T.V. cameras placed on every level doesn’t last long. It’s not a matter of how long they keep the tapes; they’re dummy cameras.

“You could say they’re just for decoration,” the supervisor says, laughing.

*

It takes all night to draw up the inventory and for forensics to take
essential samples and prints. First they deal with the furniture, run-of-the-mill stuff you could buy anywhere: bookshelves, a kitchen table, a bed, a mattress – the techs went to town on it with their cotton swabs and tweezers. After that, the contents of the boxes are catalogued. Sportswear, beachwear, summer clothes, winter clothes.

“This is all chainstore stuff you could buy anywhere in the world,” Louis says.

Books, almost two boxes full, all paperbacks: Céline, Proust, Gide, Dostoievsky, Rimbaud. Camille scans the titles:
Journey to the End of the Night
,
Swann in Love
,
The Counterfeiters
. Louis meanwhile looks pensive.

“What is it?” Camille says.

Louis doesn’t answer straight away.
Les Liaisons dangereuses
,
The Lily of the Valley
,
The Red and the Black
,
The Great Gatsby
,
L’Étranger
.

“It’s like a schoolgirl’s reading list.”

He’s right. The choices seem studied, representative. All the books have obviously been read and reread – some are literally falling to pieces. Whole passages are underlined, sometimes right up to the last page. In the margins there are exclamation marks, question marks, large crosses, small crosses, mostly in blue ballpoint; in some places the ink has almost bled through.

“She reads what she’s supposed to read – she wants to be a good girl; she’s diligent.” Camille raises the stakes. “Emotionally immature?”

“I don’t know. Regression, maybe.”

Camille doesn’t always understand what Louis says, but he gets the nub of it. The girl’s not all there.

“She seems to have a little Italian and a little English. There’s a handful of foreign classics that she’s started but hasn’t finished.”

Camille spotted this too. The copies of
I promessi sposi
,
L’amante senza fissa dimora
,
Il nome della rosa,
and
Alice in Wonderland
,
The Portrait of Dorian Gray
,
Portrait of a Lady
and
Emma
are all in the original language.

“The girl in the Maciak case … someone mentioned a foreign accent, didn’t they?”

A sheaf of tourist brochures confirm their theory.

“She’s not dumb, our girl – she’s studied, and she speaks a couple of languages – not fluently, certainly, but it implies she went abroad on language courses … can you see her with Pascal Trarieux?