Camille (2 page)

Seeing the ink stains on her hand, Anne immediately worries about what damage has been done. She glances around for some way to deal with the problem and sees a large plant stand, sets the handbag down on the wooden rim, and begins to take everything out.

She is quite upset, but her fears prove unjustified. Besides, those who know Anne would find it hard to see what she might be afraid of since Anne does not have much. Not in her bag, nor in her life. The clothes she is wearing are inexpensive. She has never owned an apartment or a car, she spends what she earns, no more, but never less. She does not save because it is not in her nature: her father was a shopkeeper. When he was about to go bankrupt, he disappeared with funds belonging to some forty associations to which he had recently had himself elected treasurer; he was never heard of again. This may explain why Anne has a rather detached relationship to money. The last time she had money worries was when she was single-handedly raising her daughter Agathe, and that was a long time ago. Anne tosses the pen into a rubbish bin and shoves her mobile phone into her jacket pocket. Her purse is stained and will probably have to be discarded, but the contents are unaffected. As for the handbag, although the lining is damp, the ink did not bleed through. Perhaps Anne decides to buy a new one, after all an upmarket shopping arcade is the perfect place, but it is impossible to know since what happens next will make any plans superfluous. For now, she dabs at the inside of the bag with some wadded Kleenex and when she has done so sees that both her hands are now ink-stained.

She could go back to the brasserie, but the prospect of having to deal with the same waiter is depressing. Even so, she is steeling herself to do so when she spots a sign indicating a public toilet, an unusual facility in a small shopping arcade. The sign points to a narrow passageway just beyond Pâtisserie Cardon and Desfossés Jewellers.

At this point, things begin to move faster.

Anne crosses the thirty metres to the toilets, pushes open the door and finds herself face to face with two men.

They have come in through the emergency exit on the rue Damiani and are heading towards the Galerie.

A few seconds later . . . it seems ridiculous, and yet it is true: if Anne had gone in five seconds later, the men would have already pulled on their balaclavas and things would have turned out very differently.

Instead what happens is this: Anne pushes open the door and she and the two men suddenly freeze.

She looks from one man to the other, startled by their presence, their behaviour, by their black balaclavas.

And by their guns. Pump-action shotguns. Even to someone who knows nothing about firearms, they look daunting.

One of the men, the shorter one, lets out a moan or perhaps it is a cry. Anne looks at him; he is stunned. She turns to the other man whose face is harsh and angular. The scene lasts only a few seconds during which the three players stand, shocked and speechless, all of them caught unawares. The two men quickly pull down their balaclavas, the taller one raises his weapon, half turns and, like an axeman preparing to fell an oak tree, hits Anne full in the face with the butt of his rifle.

With all his strength.

He literally shatters her cheekbone. He even gives a low grunt like a tennis player making a first serve.

Anne reels back, her hand reaching out for something to break her fall only to find empty air. The blow was so sudden, so brutal, she feels as though her head has been severed from her body. She is thrown almost a metre, the back of her skull slams against the door and she flings her arms wide and slumps to the ground.

The wooden rifle butt has smashed her face from jaw to temple, breaking her left cheekbone, leaving a ten-centimetre gash as her cheek splits like a ripe fruit, blood spurts everywhere. From outside, it would have sounded like a boxing glove hitting a punchbag. To Anne, it is like a sledgehammer swung with both hands.

The other man screams furiously. Anne only dimly hears him as she struggles to get her bearings.

The taller man calmly steps forward, aims the barrel of the shotgun at her head, chambers a round with a loud clack and is about to fire when his accomplice screams again. Louder this time. Perhaps even grabs the tall man’s sleeve. Anne is too stunned to open her eyes, only her hands move, flailing in an unconscious reflex.

The man holding the pump-action shotgun stops, turns, wavers: firing a gun is a sure way to bring the police running, any career criminal would tell you that. For a split second, he hesitates over the best course of action and, having made his decision, turns back to Anne and aims a series of kicks to her face and her stomach. She tries to dodge the blows, but she is trapped. There is no way out. On one side is the door against which she is huddled, on the other, the tall man balancing on his left foot as he lashes out with his right. Between salvoes, Anne briefly manages to catch her breath; the man stops for a moment, and perhaps because he is not getting the desired result, decides on a more radical approach: he spins the shotgun, raises it high and starts to hit her with the rifle butt as hard and as fast as he can.

He looks like a man trying to pound a stake into a patch of frozen ground.

Anne writhes and twists as she tries to protect herself, she slithers on the pool of her own blood, clasps her hands behind her neck. The first blow goes awry and lands on the back of her head, the second shatters her interlaced fingers.

This change of tactic does not go down well with the accomplice, since the smaller man now grabs his arm, preventing him from continuing. The tall man, unfazed, goes back to the more traditional method, aiming brutal kicks at her head with his heavy military-style boots. Curled into a ball, Anne tries to shield herself with her arms as blows rain on her head, her neck, her arms, her back; it is impossible to know how many, the doctors will say at least eight, the pathologist says nine.

It is at this point that Anne loses consciousness.

As far as the two men are concerned, the matter has been dealt with. But Anne’s body is now blocking the door leading to the arcade. Without a word, they bend down; the smaller man takes her arms and drags her towards him, her head thumping against the tiles. Once there is space to open the door, he drops her arms which fall back heavily, her languid, broken hands coming to rest in the oddly graceful pose of a painted Madonna. Had Camille witnessed the scene, he would immediately have noticed the curious resemblance between the position of Anne’s arms, her abandon, and a painting by Fernand Pelez called “The Victim”, something he would have found devastating.

The story could end here. The story of an ill-fated incident. But the taller of the two men does not see it like that. He is clearly the leader and he quickly weighs up the situation.

What is going to happen to this woman? What if she regains consciousness and starts to scream? What if she runs back into the Galerie? Worse, what if she manages to get out through the emergency exit and calls for help? Or crawls into a toilet cubicle and phones the police?

He puts his foot against the door to hold it open, bends down and, grabbing her by the right ankle, he leaves the toilets, dragging her behind him with the same ease, the same casual indifference with which a child might drag a toy.

Anne’s body is bruised and battered, her shoulder slams against the toilet door, her hip against the wall of the corridor, her head lolls as she is dragged along, banging into a skirting board or one of the plant pots in the Galerie. Anne is no more than a rag now, a sack, a lifeless doll leaving a scarlet trail that quickly clots. Blood dries fast.

She seems dead. The man drops her leg, abandoning her dislocated body without a second glance; he has no more use for her. He loads the pump-action shotgun with swift sure movements that emphasise his determination. The two men burst into Desfossés Jewellers yelling orders. The shop has only just opened. A witness, had there been one, would be struck by the disparity between their fury and the empty shop. The two men bark orders at the staff (two petrified women), and immediately lash out, punching them in the stomach, the face. The Galerie echoes with the sound of smashing glass, screams, whimpers, gasps of fear.

Perhaps it due to being dragged along the ground, to her head being bumped and jolted, but there is a sudden pulse of life and in that moment, Anne struggles to reconnect with reality.

Her brain, like a defective radar, tries desperately to make sense of what is happening, but it is futile, she is in shock, her mind literally numbed by the blows and the speed of events. Her body is racked with pain, she cannot move a muscle.

The spectacle of Anne’s body being dragged through the Galerie and abandoned in a pool of blood in the doorway of the jeweller’s has one positive effect: it lends a sense of urgency to the events.

The only people in the shop are the owner and a trainee assistant, a girl of about sixteen, thin as a leaf, who wears her hair pinned up in a chignon to give herself some gravitas. The moment she sees the two armed men in balaclavas, she knows it is a hold-up; hypnotised, sacrificed, passive as a victim about to be burned at the stake, she stands, her mouth opening and closing like a goldfish. Her legs can barely hold her up; she clutches the edge of the counter for support. Before her knees finally give way, the barrel of the shotgun is slammed into her face. Slowly, like a soufflé, she sinks to the ground. She will lie here as events play out, counting her heartbeats, shielding her head with her arms as though expecting a shower of stones.

The owner of the jeweller’s stifles a scream when she first sees Anne being dragged along the ground, skirt rucked up to her waist, leaving a wide, crimson wake. She tries to say something, but the words die in her throat. The taller of the two men is stationed at the entrance to the shop, keeping lookout, while the shorter man rushes her, aiming the barrel of his shotgun. He jabs it viciously into her belly and she only just manages not to vomit. He does not say a word; no words are necessary. Already she is working on automatic pilot. She clumsily disarms the alarm system, fumbles for the keys to the display cases only to realise she does not have them on her, she needs to fetch them from the back room; it is as she takes her first step that she realises she has wet herself. Her hand trembling, she holds out the bunch of keys. Though she will not mention this in her witness statement, at this moment she whispers to the man “Don’t kill me . . .” She would trade the whole world for another twenty seconds of life. As she says this, and without having to be asked, she lies down on the floor, hands behind her head, whispering fervently to herself: she is praying.

Given the viciousness of these thugs, one cannot help but wonder whether prayers, however fervent, serve any practical purpose. It hardly matters: while she prays, the two men quickly open the display cases and tip the contents into canvas bags.

The hold-up has been efficiently planned; it takes less than four minutes. The timing is perfectly judged, the decision to enter the arcade through the toilets is astute, the division of roles between the men is professional: while the first man ransacks the cabinets, the second, standing squarely in the doorway, keeps one eye on the shop and another on the rest of the arcade.

The C.C.T.V. camera inside the shop will show the first robber rifling through cases and drawers and grabbing anything of value. Outside, a second camera films the doorway and a narrow section of the arcade. It is on this footage that Anne’s sprawled body can be seen.

This is the point at which the meticulously planned robbery begins to go wrong; this is the moment on the camera footage when Anne appears to move. It is an almost imperceptible movement, a reflex. At first, Camille is hesitant, unsure what he has seen but, studying it with care, there can be no doubt . . . Anne moves her head from right to left, very slowly. It is a gesture Camille recognises: at certain times of the day when she needs to relax, she arches her neck, working the vertebrae and the muscles – the “sternocleidomastoid”, she says, a muscle Camille did not know existed. Obviously, on the video the gesture does not have the tranquil grace of a relaxation exercise. Anne is lying on her side, her right leg is drawn up so the knee touches her chest, her left leg is extended, her upper body is twisted as though she is trying to turn onto her back, her skirt is hiked up to reveal her white panties. Blood is streaming down her face.

She is not lying there; she was thrown there.

When the robbery began, the man in the doorway shot several quick glances at Anne, but since she was not moving, he focused his attention on watching the arcade. Now he ignores her, his back is turned, he has not even noticed the blood trickling under the heel of his right shoe.

Emerging from her nightmare, Anne struggles to make sense of what is going on around her. As she looks up, the camera briefly captures an image of her face. It is heartrending.

When he comes to this moment on the tape, Camille is so shocked he twice fumbles with the remote control before he manages to stop, rewind and pause: he does not recognise her. He can see nothing of Anne’s luminous features, her laughing eyes in this bruised, bloody face swollen already to twice its size, in these vacant eyes.

Camille grips the edge of the table, he feels an overwhelming urge to weep because Anne is staring straight into the lens, gazing directly at him as though she might speak, might beg him to come to her rescue; he cannot help but imagine this, and imagination can be devastating. Imagine someone you love, someone who relies on you for protection, imagine watching them suffer, watching them die and feel yourself break out in a cold sweat. Now, go one step further and imagine in that moment of excruciating terror, this person crying out to you for help and you will wish you could die too. This is how Camille feels, staring at the video monitor, utterly helpless. There is nothing he can do save watch, because it is all over . . .

It is unendurable, literally unendurable.

He will watch this footage dozens of times.