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Authors: Pierre Lemaitre

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BOOK: Irene
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The presence of the fake fingerprint in both cases meant there
could be little doubt that they were dealing with the same man.

There was one discrepancy: there were no signs that the Tremblay victim had been sexually assaulted. The autopsy found evidence consistent with consensual sexual activity in the week preceding death, though from the sperm samples it was impossible to determine whether she had been intimate with her killer.

The Tremblay victim had been hit using a whip, something that in principle might connect the two crimes, but the autopsy report described the blows as “slight”, of the sort indulged in by couples into S.&M.

A common link: the girl in Tremblay had been killed in a manner that several of the reports described as “brutal” (both legs had been broken with a blunt weapon like a baseball bat, she had been tortured for something like forty-eight hours before death, the corpse had been dismembered using a butcher’s knife) but the care with which the killer had drained the body of blood, washed it thoroughly and returned it to society as clean as a new pin was inconsistent with the gruesome glee with which the killer in Courbevoie had spattered walls and ceilings, taking obvious delight in seeing blood flow.

Camille picked up the photographs again. It was impossible to become inured to this ghastly smile which somehow called to mind the severed head nailed to the wall. Camille was overcome by a wave of tiredness. He closed the file, turned out the light and went to join Irène.

*

At about 2.30 a.m., he was still wide awake. Pensively he stroked Irène’s belly with his small, chubby hand. Irène’s belly was a miracle. He watched her sleep, this woman whose scent filled him just as she seemed to fill this room, to fill his whole life. Sometimes
love really was that simple.

Sometimes, as tonight, he would gaze at her, seized by the terrible feeling of this miracle. Camille found Irène incredibly beautiful. But was she really beautiful? It was a question he had asked himself twice. The first time when they had had dinner together three years earlier. Irène had been wearing a midnight-blue dress buttoned from throat to hem, the sort of dress that men cannot help but imagine unbuttoning, which is precisely why women wear them. Pinned to the breast was a simple gold brooch.

At the time he remembered something he had read long ago, something about “the ridiculous penchant of men for demure blondes”. Irène had a sensual beauty that gave the lie to such a thought. Was Irène beautiful? Yes.

The second time he had asked himself this question was seven months ago: Irène had been wearing the same dress, only the jewellery was different, she now wore the brooch Camille had given her on their wedding day. She was wearing make-up.

“Are you going out?” Camille had asked when he got home.

In fact it was not so much a question as a probing statement, something particular to him which dated from the time he had believed that his relationship with Irène was one of those interludes which life has the good grace to offer a man once in a while, and the good sense to take away again.

“No,” Irène had said, “I’m not going out.”

Her work at the editing studio left little time to make dinner. As for Camille, his working day was dictated by the sorrows of the world; he arrived home late and left early.

“You are extremely beautiful, Madame Verhœven,” Camille said, placing a hand on her breast.

“A little aperitif first,” said Irène, slipping from his embrace.

“Of course. So, what are we celebrating?” asked Camille.

“I have news.”

“What sort of news?”

“Just news.”

Irène sat next to him and took his hand.

“Looks as though it’s good news.”

“I hope so.”

“You’re not sure?”

“I’m not completely sure. I’d rather the news had come on a day when you didn’t seem so preoccupied.”

“No, no, I’m just tired,” Camille protested, stroking her hand by way of apology. “I just need a good night’s sleep.”

“The good news is that I’m not tired, but I’d happily go to bed early too.”

Camille smiled. The day had been measured out in stab wounds, difficult arrests, screaming and shouting in the offices of the
brigade criminelle
, one vast gaping wound.

But Irène was expert at making things right. She knew how to boost his confidence, how to take his mind off things. She talked about the studio, about the film she was editing (“complete rubbish, you wouldn’t believe how bad it is”). The conversation, the warmth of the apartment, the tiredness of the day slipping away. Camille felt a drowsy contentment welling up inside him. He was no longer listening to her words; the sound of her voice was enough. Irène’s voice.

“O.K.,” she said. “Let’s eat.”

She was about to get up, then suddenly seemed to remember something.

“Two things, before I forget. Three things, actually.”

“Shoot,” Camille said, draining his glass.

“Françoise has invited us to dinner on the 13th. Does that work?”

“Works for me,” Camille said after a moment’s thought.

“Good. Second thing: I need to do the accounts, so go and get me your credit-card statements.”

Camille clambered down off the sofa, took his wallet out of his rucksack, fished inside and pulled out a wad of crumpled receipts.

“You’re not going to do the accounts tonight, are you?” he said, setting the receipts on the coffee table. “Today has been tough enough already.”

“Of course I’m not,” said Irène, heading into the kitchen. “Come on, let’s have dinner.”

“You said there were three things?”

Irène stopped and turned, pretending to rack her brains.

“Oh, yes – one last thing: how do you feel about being a father?”

She was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. Camille stared at her stupidly, his eyes automatically resting on her belly which was still completely flat. He looked at her face, saw the laughter in her eyes. A baby had been the subject of long discussions. They could not seem to agree. Camille’s opening gambit was to play for time, while Irène opted for intransigence. Next Camille resorted to the question of genetics, but Irène thwarted this by providing detailed research. At this point, Camille played his trump card: he refused. Irène trumped his trump card: I’m already the wrong side of thirty … The die was cast. And now the game was won. And so, for the second time he asked himself if Irène was beautiful. The answer? Yes. He had the feeling that he would never again ask himself this question. And for the first time since he could remember, he felt his eyes well with tears, tears of sheer joy, like life itself exploding in his face.

21

Now here he was, lying in bed, one hand resting heavily on her belly. And beneath his hand, he could feel a forceful, muffled kick. Wide awake, he lay without moving a muscle and waited. In her sleep, Irène let out a soft moan. A minute passed, and another. Patient as a cat, Camille waited intently and there came a second kick, right under his hand, different this time, a sort of twisting motion like a caress. He felt as he always felt, his every thought blotted out by the absurd happiness of feeling it move, as though everything in his life had begun to move. All human life was here. It lasted only a fleeting moment before his thoughts were again interrupted by the image of a girl’s head nailed to a wall. He tried to dismiss the image, to focus on Irène’s warm belly, on all the happiness in the world, but the damage was already done.

Reality had triumphed over imagination and images began to flash through his mind, slowly at first. A baby, Irène’s swollen belly, the cry of a newborn child he could almost hear. The film began to speed up: Irène’s beautiful face when they made love, her perfect hands, severed fingers, Irène’s eyes, the ghastly rictus grin of another woman, a smile slashed open from ear to ear …

Camille woke feeling amazingly lucid. He and life had long been engaged in a battle of wills. Now, suddenly, he felt that the discovery of the bodies of these two mutilated women was about to turn a
battle of wills into open warfare. The murdered women were no different from the woman he was caressing; like her, they had pale, rounded buttocks, firm youthful flesh, in sleep their faces were probably like hers, with that curious expression like a swimmer underwater, the same deep, regular breathing, the soft snore, the moments of apnoea that could panic a man who loved them as he watched them sleep; women with hair like Irène’s which curled about her heartbreakingly slender neck. Those murdered girls were no different from this woman he so loved. And yet, one day they had been – what? – invited, recruited, coerced, kidnapped, paid? However it had come about, they had been mutilated by men whose only desire was to dismember young women with smooth, pale buttocks, who had been unmoved by the pleading looks of these women when they realised they were going to die, they may simply have excited them, and so these young women who had been born to live had somehow come to die in this apartment, in this city, in this century where he, Camille Verhœven – an utterly unremarkable policeman, the runt of the
brigade criminelle
, a pretentious, love-struck troll – was stroking the beautiful belly of this woman who was constantly new, a miracle. Something was awry. In one last, weary flicker he saw himself devoting every ounce of his strength to two goals: first, to cherish this body he was stroking from which, in time, would emerge the most astonishing gift; second, to hunt down the men who had mutilated those women, who had fucked them, raped them, killed them, dismembered them, splattering the walls with their blood.

Just before he drifted off, Camille had time to voice one last doubt:

“I’m so tired.”

Tuesday, April 8
1

On the
métro
he read the papers, and his fears – or, as with any hypochondriac, his diagnosis – were confirmed. The media had already made the link with the Tremblay murder. The speed with which the story had reached the papers was as astounding as perhaps it was inevitable. Stringers were hired to coax information from local police stations and it was common knowledge that many officers leaked stories to particular papers. Even so, Camille took a moment to try and work out the route the story would have taken since mid-afternoon the day before, but soon realised it was hopeless. The facts were as they were. The papers had revealed that the police had linked the Courbevoie killings, about which they had few details, with the Tremblay murder, on which, by contrast, they all had thick files. The headlines crackled with lurid sensationalism, the subs had clearly had fun: “the wreath of severed fingers”, “the tremblay butcher strikes in courbevoie”, or “tremblay terror linked to courbevoie carnage.”

He stepped into the mortuary and headed for the viewing suite.

*

Maleval, with his occasionally inventive bluntness, considered that the world was divided into two categories: cowboys and Indians, a somewhat simplistic version of the distinction people made between introverts and extroverts. Camille and Doctor Nguyên were both Indians: silent, patient, sharp-eyed and attentive. They were men of few words, and could make themselves understood with a simple glance.

Perhaps the Vietnamese refugee and the pocket-sized policeman shared a solidarity born of adversity.

Évelyne Rouvray’s mother looked like a yokel just up from the country. She was wearing a curious get-up which was not quite her size. To Camille, she seemed smaller now, and older. Grief, probably. She stank of alcohol.

“This won’t take long,” Camille said.

They stepped into the viewing room. On the table, covered by a white sheet, lay something that now vaguely resembled a human body. Camille helped the woman shuffle towards the table and nodded to the man in the white coat to carefully pull back the sheet to expose the face but not the neck, beyond which there was nothing to see.

The woman stared blankly, her face expressionless. The head lying on the table looked like a theatre prop with death coiled inside it. The head did not look like anything or anyone, but the woman said “yes”, a simple, bewildered “yes”. And she had to be caught before she collapsed.

2

There was a man waiting in the corridor.

Like everybody else, Camille tended to judge men against his own height. To him, the man did not seem particularly tall – five foot six, perhaps. What immediately struck him were his eyes. He was about fifty, the sort of person who looks after himself, keeps himself in shape and runs twenty-five kilometres on Sundays rain or shine. A perceptive man. Well dressed, but not ostentatious. In his hands he held a pale leather folder; he was waiting patiently.

“Dr Édouard Crest,” he announced, proffering his hand. “I’ve been appointed by Juge Deschamps.”

“Thanks for coming so quickly,” Camille said, shaking the man’s hand. “I requested you because we need someone to draw up a psychological profile of these guys, of what motivates them … I’ve run off copies of the preliminary reports.” Camille handed the doctor a folder and watched closely as he leafed through the first pages. “Handsome man,” Camille thought, and immediately, inexplicably, he thought of Irène. He felt a fleeting wave of jealousy which he quickly dismissed.

“Timeline?” he asked.

“I’ll let you know after the autopsy,” Crest said. “It will depend on the evidence I can pull together.”

3

At a glance, Camille knew that what was to come would be grotesque. Having to confront the horror of what had been done to Évelyne Rouvray’s head was one thing, but performing an autopsy that resembled a ghoulish jigsaw puzzle would be something else entirely.

Usually, the corpses taken from the drawers of a mortuary fridge stirred a terrible feeling of pain, but that very pain was somehow alive. To suffer, one had to be alive. This time, the body appeared to have dissolved. It arrived as a series of packages, like slabs of tuna weighed out at a fish market.

On the stainless steel tables of the autopsy room lay shapeless masses of different sizes. Not all the parts had been removed from the drawers, but already it was difficult to imagine how these pieces had ever been one body, let alone two. It would never occur to someone at a butcher’s stall to mentally reconstruct the slaughtered animal.

BOOK: Irene
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