Irene (2 page)

Camille sat at his desk and automatically picked a pencil from among the dozen or so in the cut-glass desk tidy Irène had given him. He looked at Alice. She was not an ugly girl, rather pretty, in fact. Her delicate, sorrowful features were somewhat gaunt from
too many late nights and too little care. A pietà. She looked like a reproduction of a classical statue.

“How long have you been working for Santeny?” he asked, sketching the curve of her face with a single stroke.

“I don’t work for him!”

“O.K., let’s say two years then. So you work for him and he supplies you, is that the deal?”

“No.”

“And you still think he’s in love with you, am I right?”

She glared at him. Camille smiled and looked down at his drawing. There was a long silence. Camille remembered a favourite phrase of his mother’s: “It’s the artist’s heart that beats inside the model’s body.”

On the sketchpad, with a few deft strokes, a different Alice slowly began to appear, younger than the woman sitting opposite, just as sorrowful but not as bruised. Camille looked at her again and seemed to come to a decision. Alice watched as he pulled a chair up next to her and perched on it like a child, his feet dangling.

“Mind if I smoke?” Alice said.

“Santeny’s in deep, deep shit,” Camille said as though he hadn’t heard. “The world and his brother are gunning for him. But you know that better than anyone, don’t you?” he said, gesturing to her bruises. “Not exactly friendly, are they? So it’s probably best that we find him first, don’t you think?”

Alice seemed to be hypnotised by Camille’s shoes, which swung like a two pendulums several inches from the floor.

“He’s got no-one to turn to, no way out of this. I give him a couple of days at most. But then you haven’t got anyone either, have you? They’ll track you down … Now, where’s Santeny?”

A stubborn little pout, like a child who knows she’s doing something wrong but does it anyway.

‘O.K., never mind … you’re free to go,” said Camille, as though talking to himself. “Next time I see you, I hope it’s not at the bottom of a rubbish skip.”

At precisely that moment Armand stepped into the office.

“We’ve just found Marco. You were right, he’s in a terrible way.”

Camille looked at Armand in feigned surprise.

“Where was he?”

“His place.

Camille shot his colleague a pitiful look: even with his imagination Armand was tight-fisted.

“O.K. Anyway, we can let the girl go,” he said, hopping down from the chair.

A little flurry of panic, then:

“He’s in Rambouiller,” muttered Alice under her breath.

“Oh,” said Camille, unimpressed.

“Boulevard Delagrange, number 18.”

“Eighteen,” Camille echoed, as though repeating the number excused him from having to thank the young woman.

Without waiting for permission, Alice took a crumpled cigarette pack from her pocket and lit one.

“Those things will kill you,” Camille said.

Camille was gesturing to Armand to dispatch a squad to the address when the telephone rang. On the other end, Louis sounded out of breath.

“We’ve got a clusterfuck out in Courbevoie,” he panted.

“Do tell …” Camille said laconically, picking up a pen.

“We received an anonymous tip-off this morning. I’m there right now. It’s … I don’t know how to describe it—”

“Why don’t you give it a go,” Camille interrupted fractiously, “see what we come up with.”

“It’s carnage,” Louis said in a strangulated voice, struggling to find the words. “It’s a bloodbath. But not the usual kind, if you see what I mean …”

“I don’t see, Louis, not really.”

“It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen in my life …”

Since his extension was engaged, Camille walked to Commissaire Le Guen’s office. He knocked curtly but did not wait for an answer. He liked to make an entrance.

Le Guen was a big man who had spent more than twenty years following one diet after another without losing a single gram. He had acquired a somewhat weary fatalism which was visible in his face, in his whole body. Camille had noticed that, over the years, he had adopted the air of a deposed king, surveying the world with a sullen, disillusioned expression. Hardly had Camille said a word than Le Guen interrupted him purely on principle, explaining that, whatever it was, “he didn’t have the time”. But when he saw the slim dossier Camille had brought, he decided accompany him to the crime scene nonetheless.

On the telephone Louis had said, “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen in my life …” This worried Camille; his assistant was not given to doom-mongering. In fact he was exasperatingly optimistic, so Camille expected nothing good of this unexpected call-out. As the Péripherique flashed past, Camille Verhœven could not help but smile thinking about Louis.

Louis was blond, his hair parted to the side, and he had that unruly tuft genetically bestowed upon children of the privileged classes, a wayward curl constantly flicked back with a jerk of the head or a nonchalant yet practised hand. Over time, Camille had learned to distinguish the different messages conveyed by the way he pushed back his hair, a veritable barometer for gauging Louis’ moods. The right-handed variant covered a range of meanings running from “Let’s be reasonable” to “That’s simply not done”. The left-handed variant signalled embarrassment, awkwardness, timidity or confusion. Looking at Louis, it was easy to imagine him as an altar boy. He still had the youthful looks, the grace, the fragility. In short, Louis was elegant, slim, delicate, and a royal pain in the arse.

To crown it all, Louis was loaded. He had all the trappings of the filthy rich: a certain way of deporting himself, a particular way of speaking, of articulating, of choosing his words, everything in fact
that comes from the top-shelf mould marked “Rich spoiled brat”. Louis had initially excelled at university (where he had studied a little law, some economics, history of art, aesthetics, psychology), changing courses according to his whims, unfailingly brilliant, treating education as a series of inane achievements. And then something had happened. From what Camille understood, it had to do with Descartes’ dark night of the soul and the demon drink – a combination of philosophical intuition and single malt whisky. Louis had seen his life stretching out before him, in his perfectly appointed six-room apartment lined with bookshelves full of tomes on art and inlaid cabinets filled with designer crockery, the rents from his various properties rolling in like a civil servant’s salary, spending holidays at his mother’s place in Vichy, frequenting the same neighbourhood restaurants, and he found himself confronted by a personal paradox as sudden as it was strange, a genuine existential crisis which anyone other than Louis would have summed up by saying “What the fuck am I doing here?”

Camille was convinced that, had he been born thirty years earlier, Louis would have become a left-wing revolutionary, but these days ideology no longer offered an alternative. Louis despised sanctimoniousness, and by extension voluntary work and charity. He needed to find something to do with his life, his own living hell. And suddenly it became clear to him: he would join the police. Louis never doubted for a moment that he would be accepted into the
brigade criminelle
– doubt was not a family trait, and Louis’ brilliance meant that he was rarely disillusioned. He passed his police exams and joined the force, motivated partly by a desire to serve (not to Protect and Serve, but simply to serve a purpose), partly by the fear that life would soon become entirely
solipsistic and partly, perhaps, out of an imagined debt he felt he owed the working classes for not having been born one of their number. When he passed his detective’s exams, Louis found the world utterly different from how he had imagined it: it had nothing of the quaintness of Agatha Christie or the deductive logic of Conan Doyle; instead Louis found himself faced with filthy hovels and battered wives, drug dealers bleeding to death in rubbish skips in Barbès, knife fights between junkies, putrid toilets where the addicts who survived the fights O.D.’d, rent-boys selling their arses for a line of coke and johns who refused to pay more than €5 for a blowjob after 2 a.m. In the early days, Camille found it entertaining to observe Louis, the blond fringe, the florid vocabulary, his eyes filled with horror but his mind like a steel trap, as he filled out endless reports; Louis imperturbably taking witness statements in echoing, piss-stained stairwells next to the corpse of some thirteen-year-old pimp who had been hacked to death with a machete in front of his mother; Louis heading home at two in the morning to his enormous apartment on the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette and collapsing fully dressed on his velvet sofa beneath an engraving by Pavel, between the bookcase of signed first editions and his late father’s collection of amethysts.

When Louis first arrived at the
brigade criminelle
, the
commandant
did not immediately take to this smooth, clean-cut young man with the upper-class drawl who seemed unfazed by everything. The other officers on the team, who found it mildly entertaining to spend their days with a golden boy, were ruthless. Within less than two months, Louis had encountered most of the cruel pranks and hazing rituals with which groups humiliate outsiders. Louis accepted his fate without complaint, smiling awkwardly.

Camille noticed earlier than his colleagues that this surprising and intelligent young man had the makings of a good officer but, perhaps trusting to Darwinian selection, he decided not to intervene. Louis, with his rather British stiff upper lip, was grateful to him for that. One evening, as he was leaving the offices, Camille saw Louis dash to the bar across the road and knock back two or three shots. It reminded him of the fight scene in “Cool Hand Luke” where Paul Newman, battered, dazed and unable to land a punch, keeps getting up every time he’s knocked down until the men watching lose heart, even his opponent loses the will to fight. And indeed, faced with Louis’ professional diligence and his surprising ability to appeal to their better nature, the other officers eventually gave up. Over the years, Camille and Louis accepted each other’s differences, and since the
commandant
enjoyed an undisputed moral authority over the team, no-one was surprised that the rich kid gradually became his closest colleague. Camille always addressed Louis by his first name, as he did everyone on his team. But as time passed and the team changed, he realised that only the longest-serving members called him Camille. These days the team was mostly comprised of rookies, and Camille sometimes felt as though he had usurped a role he had never sought and become patriarch. The rookies addressed him as “
commandant
”, though he knew this was less to do with hierarchy than an attempt to compensate for the instinctive embarrassment they felt at his diminutive stature. Louis also addressed him by his surname, but Camille knew that his motivation was different: it was a reflex of his class. The two men had never quite become friends, but they respected one another, and both felt that this was a better basis for a good working relationship.

Camille and Armand, with Le Guen trailing behind, arrived at 17, rue Félix-Faure in Courbevoie shortly after 10 a.m. It was an industrial wasteland.

In its centre a small derelict factory lay like a dead insect, surrounded by former workshops that were currently being renovated. The four finished units looked as out of place as Tiki huts in a snowy landscape. All had white rendering, glass roofs, and aluminium windows with sliding panels, offering a glimpse of their vast interiors. The whole place looked deserted. There were no cars save those of the
brigade criminelle
.

Two steps led up to the warehouse apartment. From behind, Camille saw Louis leaning against a wall, spitting into a plastic bag he kept pressed to his mouth. Camille walked past, followed by Le Guen and two other officers from the team, and stepped into a room lit by the blinding glare of spotlights. When they arrive at a crime scene, rookie officers unconsciously look around for death. Experienced officers look for life. But there was no life here; death had leached into every space, even the bewildered eyes of the living. Camille had no time to worry about the strange atmosphere that pervaded the room as his gaze was immediately arrested by the head of a woman nailed to the wall.

Hardly had he taken three paces into the room than he found
himself faced with a scene he could not have imagined even in his worst nightmares: severed fingers, torrents of clotted blood, the stench of excrement and gutted entrails. Instinctively, he was reminded of Goya’s painting, “Saturn Devouring His Son”, and for an instant he could see the terrifying face, the bulging eyes, the crimson mouth, the utter madness. Though he was one of the most experienced officers on the scene, Camille felt the urge to turn back to the doorway where Louis, not meeting anyone’s eye, held his plastic bag at arm’s length, like a beggar declaring his contempt for the world.

“What the fuck is this …?” Commissaire Le Guen muttered to himself, and his words were swallowed by the void. Only Louis heard him and came over, wiping his eyes.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I walked in and had to walk straight back out again … That’s as far as I’ve got.”

Standing in the middle of the room, Armand turned towards the two men, looking dazed. He wiped his clammy hands on his trousers and tried to compose himself.

Bergeret, head of the forensics team from
identité judiciaire
, went over to Le Guen.

“I’m going to need two teams. This is going to take a while.” Then, with uncharacteristic candour, he added: “It’s not exactly your usual crime scene.”

There was nothing usual about it at all.

“O.K., I’ll leave you to it,” Le Guen said to Maleval, who had just come into the room and was already racing out, both hands clasped over his mouth.

Camille signalled to his team that it was time to man up.

*

It was impossible to imagine what the apartment had looked like before … this. Because “this” had now ravaged the place and they
did not know which way to turn. To Camille’s right, sprawled on the ground, were the remains of a disembowelled body, jagged, broken ribs poking through the stomach, and one breast, the other having been hacked off, but it was difficult to say for sure since the body of the woman – that it was a woman was the only thing that seemed certain – was smeared with excrement which only partially covered countless bitemarks. To the left was a head, the eyes burned out. From the gaping mouth snaked pink and white veins. Opposite lay a body from which the skin had been partially peeled away, deep gashes lacerated the flesh and there were yawning wounds, carefully demarcated openings in the belly and vagina, probably made using acid. The head of the second victim had been nailed to the wall through the cheeks. Camille surveyed the scene, and took a notebook from his pocket, only to quickly put it back again as though acknowledging that the task was so monstrous that all his methods were useless, every approach doomed to failure. There is no strategy for dealing with atrocity. And yet this was why he was here, staring at the nameless horror.