Camille (25 page)

The car drifts into the slow lane, half straddling the hard shoulder and crawls along while Camille recovers the phone, but all the while his brain is working overtime.

What does he know about Anne?

Her daughter. Her brother. Her job at the travel agency.

What else?

His internal alarm manifests itself as a tingling between the shoulder blades.

His mouth is suddenly dry.

Having finally succeeded in retrieving the mobile, Camille keys “Wertig & Schwindel” into the search engine. It is a difficult name to type, but he manages.

He nervously drums his fingers on the steering wheel, waits for the company website to load – a picture of palm trees and beautiful beaches – as an articulated lorry overtakes him with a deafening roar. Camille swerves a little, his eyes still focused on the tiny screen: “
ABOUT US, A WORD FROM OUR C.E.O
.” – who gives a shit? – finally, he comes to a diagram of the company hierarchy. General Manager, Jean-Michel Faye, in his thirties, overweight, balding, but with a typical managerial smugness.

As he joins the Périphérique, Camille is scrolling through the long page of contact details searching for Anne. Thumb pressed firmly on the forward arrow, he flicks through a series of photographs, somehow manages to skip the letter F and by the time he has scrolled back, he can hear a siren behind him. He pulls over as far as he can, the police motorcycle passes and signals for him to turn off the motorway. Camille drops his mobile. Shit.

He pulls over onto the verge. Cops are a fucking pain in the arse.

*

The studio is a bachelor pad, with none of the accessories a woman might expect: no hairdryer, no mirror. There is no tea, either. Anne finds the mugs and chooses one bearing a Cyrillic inscription:

Мой дядя самых честных правил,

Когда не в шутку занемог

She finds some herbal tea, long past its best-by date and utterly tasteless.

Almost immediately she realises that in this house, she has to rethink every gesture, make a little extra effort in order to do the simplest thing. Because in the home of a man who is four foot eleven, everything is a fraction lower than expected: the door handles, the drawers, the light switches . . . All around her are tools for climbing – stairs, stools, stepladders – because, strangely, nothing is quite at Camille’s height either. He has not dismissed the possibility of sharing this space with another person and so everything is positioned midway between what is comfortable for him and what would be acceptable to someone else.

This realisation is like a knife in her heart. She has never pitied Camille – that is not the kind of response he evokes in people – no, she feels moved. She feels guilty, she feels it more here than elsewhere, more now than ever, guilty of monopolising his life, of dragging him into this business. She struggles not to cry; she has decided she is done with tears.

She needs to get a grip. She tips the herbal tea into the sink, angry at herself.

She is wearing her purple tracksuit bottoms and a polo-necked jumper; they are the only things she has here. The blood-stained clothes she was wearing when the paramedics brought her in have been taken away, and Camille decided to leave the things he brought from her apartment in the wardrobe at the hospital so that if anyone noticed her absence, it would look as though she had just popped out for a minute. He had parked next to the emergency exit of the A. & E. department, Anne had slipped out behind the reception desk, got into the car and lay down on the back seat.

He has promised to bring her some clothes tonight. But tonight seems an eternity away. This is the question that must have haunted soldiers who went to war: am I going to die today?

For all Camille’s fine promises, she knows the man is coming. The only question is: when? Ever since Camille left, ever since she has been pacing this room, she has been drawn to the looming presence of the forest.

In the dawn light, it looks almost surreal. She turns away, goes into the bathroom, but each time she is drawn back to the forest. A ridiculous image flashes into her mind: Drogo in
The Tartar Steppe,
staring from the remote forward outpost across the desolate wasteland, waiting for the enemy.

How does anyone come out alive?

*

Cops are not stupid.

When Camille gets out of the car (he has to launch himself, legs extended, like a child getting down from a booster seat), the motorcycle officer immediately recognises him as Commandant Verhœven. He and his partner are patrolling a specific area but he offers Camille an escort as far as Porte de Saint-Cloud – though not before issuing a warning: “You do realise that using a mobile telephone while driving, regardless of the reason, is extremely dangerous,
commandant
. Being a detective with the
brigade
does not give you licence to endanger other motorists, even in an emergency.” The police escort saves Camille almost half an hour. He carries on jabbing at the keypad on his phone, though more discreetly. He is approaching the banks of the Seine when the officer gives him a wave and drives off. Camille immediately puts his glasses on, and though it takes him ten minutes, he discovers that the name Anne Forestier is not on the list of employees at Wertig & Schwindel. Then again, when he looks more closely, he realises that the web page has not been updated since 2005, at which point Anne would still have been living in Lyons.

He pulls into the car park, gets out of the car and is climbing the stairs to his office when his mobile rings

Guérin. Camille turns on his heel and heads back outside to take the call; he does not need anyone overhearing his conversation with Guérin.

“Thanks for getting back to me,” he says, trying to sound cheerful.

He is brief and to the point, no need to panic his colleague, but better to be honest:
the reason I called is because I need a favour, let me explain
, but there is no need, Guérin already knows the story, Commissaire Michard has also called and left a message, probably for the same reason. And in a few minutes he will call her back, at which point he will have to tell her that there is no way he could have been the one to tell Camille about the robbery at the Galerie Monier:

“I’ve been on holiday for the last four days, buddy . . . I’m calling you from Sicily.”

Jesus fucking Christ! Camille could kick himself. He says
thanks, no worries, it’s nothing serious, yeah, you too
, and hangs up. His mind is already racing ahead, because Guérin’s call did nothing to stop the prickling sensation between his shoulder blades or the dry mouth, which in him are clear signs of professional agitation.

“Good morning,
commandant
!” It is the examining magistrate.

Camille comes down to earth with a bump. He feels as though he has spent the past two days inside a giant spinning top whirling at terrifying speed. This morning he is all over the place, the spinning top is behaving like a free electron.

“
Monsieur le juge
. . .”

Camille flashes the broadest smile he can summon. Anyone else in Juge Pereira’s shoes might assume that Camille has been desperately trying to get in touch, that he was at this moment coming to find him and that his sudden appearance is a huge relief; flinging his arms wide, Camille nods enthusiastically at this fortuitous meeting of great minds.

The great mind of the judiciary does not seem quite as enthusiastic as Camille. Pereira coldly shakes his hand. Camille is swept along in the wake of the spindle-shanked magistrate, but already it is too late, the
juge
strides solemnly onward and mounts the stairs, it is obvious from his attitude he does not wish to discuss the matter.

“
Monsieur le juge
?”

Pereira stops, turns and feigns surprise.

“Could I speak to you for a moment?” Camille says. “It’s about the robbery at the Galerie Monier . . .”

*

After the balmy heat of the bathroom, the chill air in the living room marks a return to the real world.

Camille reeled off extremely detailed, highly technical instructions about the wood-burning stove which Anne promptly forgot. Picking up a poker, she lifts off the cast-iron lid to toss in more wood, but one of the logs is too big and by the time she has forced it in, the room is filled with acrid smoke. She decides to make a cup of instant coffee.

She cannot seem to get warm, the cold has seeped into her bones. Her eyes are drawn back to the forest as she waits for the water to boil . . .

Then she settles herself on the sofa to leaf through one of Camille’s sketchpads – she is spoiled for choice, the room is littered with them. Faces, figures, men in uniform, she is startled to recognise a fat
gendarme
with a bovine expression and dark circles under his eyes, the man who was standing guard outside her hospital room, the one who was snoring loudly as she made her escape. In the drawing, he is on guard duty. With three deft strokes, Camille has captured him perfectly.

The portraits are moving and yet unsentimental. In some, Camille reveals himself to be a gifted caricaturist, sketches that are more cruel than comical and stripped of all illusion.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, in a sketchpad lying on the glass coffee table, she sees herself. Pages and pages of drawings, none of them dated. Her eyes well with tears. For Camille, imagining him alone here, spending whole days recreating from memory the moments they have shared. And for herself. These portraits bear no resemblance to the woman she is now, they are relics of a time when she was beautiful, before the bruises and the broken teeth, before the scars on her cheek and around her mouth, before the vacant eyes. Though Camille merely hints at the setting with a few quick pencil strokes, Anne realises she can remember the circumstances that inspired almost every drawing. Anne having a fit of the giggles at Chez Fernand the day they met; Anne standing on the pavement outside Camille’s building: she has only to turn the pages of the sketchbook to retrace the story of their relationship. Here is Anne at Le Verdun, the café where they went that second night. She is wearing a hat and smiling, she looks astonishingly self-assured and – to judge from Camille’s thumbnail sketch – she had every reason to be.

Anne sniffles and looks around for a tissue. Here is a full-length portrait, she is walking along a street near the Opéra, coming to meet Camille who has bought tickets for “Madame Butterfly”; she remembers imitating Cio-Cio San in the taxi afterwards. The pages map out their story from the beginning, week by week, month by month. Anne in the shower, or in bed; a series of pages depicts her in tears, she feels ugly, but Camille’s glance is loving and gentle. She stretches out her hand to pick up the box of tissues and finds she has to stand to reach them.

Just as she reaches for a tissue, the bullet punctures the picture window and the glass coffee table explodes.

*

Though she has feared this moment since she woke this morning, still Anne is surprised. Not by the dull crack of the rifle, but by the impact of the bullet which makes a sound as though the whole façade of the house is collapsing. She is petrified as she watches the coffee table shatter beneath her fingers. She lets out a scream and as quickly as her reflexes allow, she curls into a ball like a hedgehog. When she finally glances outside, she sees that the picture window is not shattered. The bullet has made a large, glittering hole from which deep cracks spread. How long can she hold out?

She abruptly realises that she is a sitting target. It is impossible to say where she finds the strength, but with a brutal movement she launches herself over the back of the sofa. The pressure on her fractured ribs as she rolls leaves her winded; she lands heavily, letting out a howl in pain, but her instinct for survival is stronger than the pain and she quickly huddles against the back of the sofa and immediately panics at the thought that a bullet could pass through the upholstery and hit her. Her heart is pounding fit to burst. Her whole body is shivering as though with cold.

The second shot whistles just above her head. The bullet hits the wall and Anne instinctively ducks, feeling fragments of plaster rain down on her face, her neck, her eyes. She lies flat on the ground shielding her head with her hands, almost the same position she adopted in the toilets of the Galerie Monier when he beat her half to death.

A telephone. Call Camille. Right now. Or call the police. She needs someone here. Fast.

Anne knows this is a tricky situation: her mobile is upstairs next to the bed, to get to it she would have to cross the room.

In the open.

A third bullet hits the cast-iron stove with a deafening clang that leaves her half dazed, clapping her hand over her ears as the ricochet shatters one of the pictures on the wall. Anne is so terrified that she cannot seem to focus her thoughts, her mind is swirling with images – the Galerie, her hospital room, Camille’s face, his expression grave and reproachful – her whole life flashing past as though she were about to die.

Which she is. The gunman cannot miss for ever. And this time she is utterly alone, with no hope that anyone will come to her rescue.

Anne swallows hard. She cannot stay where she is; the killer will gain entry to the house – she does not know how, but somehow he will. She has to call Camille. He told her to set off the alarm, but the scrap of paper with the scribbled code is next to the control panel on the other side of the living room.

The telephone is up on the mezzanine. She has to get upstairs.

She raises her head and glances around at the floor, at the rug strewn with pieces of plaster, but there is nothing there to help her; she will have to help herself. Her decision is made. She rolls onto her back and, using both hands, pulls off her jumper. The wool becomes caught in the splints on her fingers, she tugs and rips the fabric. She counts to three then sits up, her back against the sofa, clutching the crumpled jumper to her belly. If he fires at the sofa now, she is dead.

There is no time to lose.