Alex (30 page)

The hotel owner is standing in the doorway when Camille and Louis arrive. As soon as he understands the situation, Louis steps in front. He’s used to such situations – he wants to talk to the hotelier first; if he lets Camille do it, within half an hour there’ll be a civil war.

So Louis, looking compassionate and sympathetic, takes the owner aside, leaving a passage open. Camille follows a local officer, the man who was first on the scene.

“I saw at once it was the girl from the missing persons appeal.”

He’s waiting for congratulations, but they don’t come; the little man isn’t exactly friendly, he walks quickly and he looks as if he’s self-sufficient, completely withdrawn. He refuses to take the
lift, so they take the concrete stairwell no-one uses and it echoes like a cathedral.

In spite of everything, the officer adds, “We didn’t let anyone in. We waited for you to get here.”

Things play out curiously. Since the room is still cordoned off waiting for forensics and Louis is downstairs distracting the owner, Camille is alone as he steps into the room, as if he is a family member visiting someone on their deathbed and – out of respect for his privacy – he is being left alone with the deceased for a moment.

In places with no grandeur, death is always rather mundane. This young woman is no exception. She’d rolled herself up in a sheet and later the convulsions wound it tighter, such that she looks like an Egyptian corpse about to be mummified. One hand hangs languidly over the edge of the bed, terribly feminine and human. Her face is bruised. Her eyes are open, staring fixedly at the ceiling. At the corners of her lips, there are traces of vomit, most of which is probably still in the mouth. The whole scene is unutterably painful.

As with any death, the room seems to be pervaded by a sense of mystery. Camille remains on the threshold, though he is well used to bodies; he’s seen a lot in his time – hardly surprising since he’s been in the force twenty-five years – one day he’ll have to work out the figures, but it must be the equivalent of a village. There are some that have an effect on him and some that have none. The subconscious decides. This one is painful. It hurts. He doesn’t know why.

His first thought was that he always arrives too late. This is why Irène died; his instinct had been wrong, he’d been too mule-headed, he got there too late and by then she was dead. But no,
now that he’s here he knows that’s not it, that history doesn’t mindlessly repeat itself, that no dead girl can take the place of Irène. First and foremost because Irène was innocent; this is not something he can believe about this girl.

And yet he’s troubled, and he can’t explain why.

He senses, he knows, that there’s something he hasn’t understood. Maybe even right from the start. And this girl has taken her secrets with her. Camille would like to go over, to take a closer look, lean over her, to understand.

He hunted her while she was alive; now here she is lying dead and still he knows nothing about her. How old is she? Where is she from?

And, incidentally, what was her real name?

Beside him on a chair is her handbag. He takes a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and snaps them on. He picks up the bag, opens it – it’s amazing all the stuff women keep in their handbags – he finds her I.D. card, opens it.

Thirty years old. The dead never resemble the living they once were. He looks at the official photograph, then back at the dead girl on the bed. Neither of these faces is anything like the countless sketches he did in the past few weeks based on the E-FIT. And so the girl’s face remains elusive. Which is her real face? The stamped image of her on the I.D. card? She could be about twenty in the picture; the hairstyle is dated, and she is not smiling, simply staring ahead vacantly. Or is it the E-FIT of the serial killer, cold, hard, fraught with menace, printed out a thousand times? Or is it the lifeless face of the dead girl lying on the bed whose body, as though disconnected from her, is haunted by unspeakable pain?

Camille finds her eerily like a painting by Fernand Pelez, “The
Victim”: the staggering effect of death when it strikes.

Fascinated by her face, Camille forgets that he still does not know her name. He peers at the I.D. card again.

Alex Prévost.

Camille repeats the name to himself.

Alex.

Laura is gone and with her Nathalie, Léa, Emma.

She is Alex.

Or rather she was … She was.

Vidard the magistrate is delighted. The suicide is the logical outcome of his astuteness, his skill and his single-mindedness. As with all vain men, what he owes to chance and circumstance he attributes to his talent. Unlike Camille he is jubilant. Discreetly so. The more reserved he is, the more triumphant he obviously feels. Camille can see it in the set of his mouth, the shoulders, in the purposeful way he slips on his protective gear. It’s bizarre, seeing Vidard in a surgeon’s mask and blue overboots.

He could simply have viewed the scene from the corridor, given that the forensics team are already at work, but no – a thirty-year-old multiple murderer, especially a dead one, like a hunting scene, is something that demands to be seen up close. He’s satisfied. He steps into the room like a Roman emperor. Leaning over the bed, his lips twitch as though to say
Good, good,
and as he leaves his expression reads
Case closed
. For Camille’s benefit, he points to the crime scene investigators.

“I want the result as soon as, understood?”

Which means he wants to hold a press conference. Quickly. Camille agrees. Quickly.

“Of course,” Camille says, “we’ll get to the bottom of this.”

The judge is about to leave. Camille hears the cartridge enter the barrel.

“We need this to be over and done with,” says the magistrate. “For everyone’s sake.”

“You mean for me?”

“If you want me to be frank, then yes.”

He peels off his protective suit as he says this. The cap and the overboots are ill-suited to the dignity of his words.

“You have demonstrated a singular lack of clear-sightedness in this case, Commandant Verhœven,” he says at length. “You were constantly overtaken by events. Even the identity of this girl we owe not to you but to her. You were saved by the bell, but you were lucky; had it not been for this … fortunate ‘incident’,” he nods towards the room, “I’m not at all sure you’d still be on the case. I strongly feel you simply don’t have …”

“… the stature?” Camille supplies. “Say it, sir, it’s on the tip of your tongue.”

Exasperated, the magistrate takes several steps down the corridor.

“That’s you all over,” Camille says. “You don’t have the bottle to say what you think, or the honesty to think what you say.”

“Very well then, I’ll tell you exactly what I think …”

“I’m shaking in my boots.”

“I think that you’re no longer fit to handle serious cases.”

He takes a moment to make it clear that he’s thinking, that being an intelligent man, aware of his importance, he never says anything lightly.

“Your return to work has been less than stellar. You might perhaps wish to take a step back.”

In the first instance, everything was shipped off to the forensics lab. and when they were done, the stuff was left in Camille’s office. It might not seem like it, but it takes up a lot of space. Armand had them bring in a couple of tables and cover them with a sheet, push back the desk, the hat stand, the chairs, the sofa, and then lay everything out carefully. It feels strange, looking at all these childish things and realising they belonged to a woman of thirty. As though she never grew up. Why would anyone want to keep a cheap pink hair slide with a paste diamond, or a cinema ticket?

All of these things were picked up at the hotel four days earlier.

After leaving the dead woman’s hotel room, Camille went back down to the foyer where Armand was taking a statement from the receptionist, a young man with his hair gelled into a side flick as though he’d just been slapped. For ostensibly practical reasons, Armand has set himself up in the dining room where hotel guests are having breakfast.

“You don’t mind, do you?” he said, and without waiting for a response helped himself to a pot of coffee, four croissants, a glass of orange juice, a bowl of cereal, a boiled egg, two slices of ham and a couple of portions of cheese. As he eats, he questions the
receptionist, and he’s clearly listening carefully since, even with his mouth full, he’s capable of correcting the man.

“Earlier you told me it was eight thirty yesterday evening.”

“Yes,” the receptionist says, astonished by this scrawny man’s appetite, “but five minutes either way, it’s hard to say …”

Armand nods that he understands. When he’s finished the interview, he says, “I don’t suppose you’d have a cardboard box or something?” He doesn’t wait for an answer; instead he lays out three paper napkins, tips out a whole basket of bread and croissants onto them and ties them up in a bow; it looks like a gift. To the worried receptionist, he says, “For later … what with all the work we’ve got on, we won’t get to break for lunch.”

It is 7.30 a.m.

Camille goes into the conference room which Louis has requisitioned to take witness statements. He’s questioning the chambermaid who found Alex’s body, a woman of about fifty, with a pale, careworn face. Usually she does the evening shift, cleaning up after dinner, then goes home, but sometimes, when they’re short-staffed, she has to come back at 6.00 a.m. to do the bedrooms. She is a heavy-set woman and suffers from lumbago.

Her instructions are to leave the bedrooms until late morning, and even then she knocks loudly and waits, because the things she has walked in on … She could tell some stories, but the presence of the officer who’s just come into the room and is watching them intimidates her. He doesn’t say anything, he just stands there, hands in the pockets of the coat he hasn’t taken off since he arrived; the man is obviously either sick or sensitive to the cold. But this morning, she made a mistake. Room 317 was on her list – the guest had already checked out which meant she could clean the room.

“It wasn’t properly written,” she explains. “I thought it said 314.”

She is quite vehement; she doesn’t want to be blamed for all this. It’s not her fault.

“If the room number had been properly written, none of this would have happened.”

To calm her, reassure her, Louis places a neatly manicured hand on her arm and closes his eyes; sometimes he looks just like a cardinal. For the first time since she went into room 314 by mistake, the chambermaid realises that above and beyond the confusion with the numbers which she keeps harping on about, there is a thirty-year-old woman who committed suicide.

“I realised at once that she was dead.”

She falls silent, struggles to find the right words; she’s seen a lot of dead bodies in her time. But still, it’s unexpected every time. It knocks the wind out of you.

“It gave me such a shock.”

She claps her hand over her mouth at the thought. Louis silently sympathises. Camille says nothing; he watches, waits.

“A beautiful young girl like that. She seemed so alive …”

“You thought she seemed alive?”

It is Camille who asks this.

“Well no, not there in the room … That’s not what I meant …”

And when the two men don’t respond, she carries on; she wants to do the right thing, wants to help. Because of the mix-up with the room numbers she’s convinced they’re going to try to blame her for something. She has to stand up for herself.

“When I saw her the night before she seemed so alive – that’s what I meant to say. It was the way she walked; she seemed so gutsy. I don’t know how to explain it.” She becomes irritated.

Louis says calmly, “Where did you see her walking the night before?”

“On the road there outside the hotel. She was taking out bin bags and …”

She doesn’t get a chance to finish the sentence; the two men have already disappeared. She watches them run for the exit.

On the way Camille nabs Armand and three officers and they all rush outside. To right and left, on either side of the street about fifty metres away a refuse truck is emptying containers hurriedly loaded by the operators; the policemen all shout but, at that distance, they can’t hear. Camille and Armand run up the road, waving their arms; Louis runs the other way, all three of them brandishing their warrant cards; the other officers blow their whistles as hard as they can; the effect is to completely paralyse the dustmen: they all stop in mid-action. The policemen keep running, panting and out of breath. It’s not often a refuse collector gets to see the police trying to arrest a bin.

The dazed chambermaid is led outside, like a celebrity surrounded by fans and paparazzi. She points to the spot where she was standing when she saw the girl the night before.

“I was on my moped, over there, and she was here – well, more or less here; I can’t say exactly.”

Some twenty containers are wheeled as far as the hotel car park. The manager immediately panics.

“But you can’t—”

“What
exactly
can’t we do?” Camille interrupts him.

The manager gives up; this is not going to be a good day: rubbish containers emptied all over the car park, as if a suicide wasn’t enough.

Armand is the one who finds the three bin liners.

He’s got flair. Experience.

On Sunday morning, Camille opens the window for Doudouche because she loves to watch the market. After he finishes breakfast – it is not yet 8.00 a.m. and he slept very badly – he goes into one of the long periods of indecision that he has always suffered from, where all the possible solutions balance each other out, where to do or not to do something seems equally valid. The difficult thing about these periods of uncertainty is that deep down he knows which solution he will choose. Pretending to deliberate is simply a means of masking a dubious decision with a semblance of rationality.

Today is the day his mother’s paintings are being auctioned. He told himself he wouldn’t go. Now he knows he won’t.