The Circle (14 page)

Elvis's gaze clouded over.

‘What are you getting at? That was a long time ago.' His eyes were darting back and forth. ‘What happened last night? Some woman got attacked, is that it?'

Servaz saw a newspaper lying on the rolling table next to the bed. It took him half a second to grasp what he was seeing. And less time than that for the blood to drain from his face:

YOUNG PROFESSOR MURDERED IN MARSAC

Policeman who solved St-Martin case placed in charge of investigation

Shit! He paid no further attention to Samira's questions or Elmaz's answers as he grabbed the paper. He turned the pages, looking for the article.

There were only a few lines, on page 3. It explained that ‘
Commandant Servaz, from the Toulouse Criminal Affairs Division, the
officer who led the investigation into the Saint-Martin murders during the winter of 2008, the most significant crime in recent years in the Midi-Pyrenees region, has been entrusted with the investigation into the murder of a Marsac professor from an elite lycée in the region.'
A bit further on, the author of the article specified that the young woman had been found at home, ‘
tied up and drowned in her bath
'. At least the press department had not mentioned the detail of the torch – no doubt to be able to trip up all the crazies who would be calling in the hours to come. But they had handed the journalists his name on a platter. Brilliant. Servaz felt his anger welling up. He would like to get hold of the moron who had passed on the information. An involuntary leak – or had it been orchestrated? Could it have been Castaing himself?

‘What time did the argument take place?' Samira was asking.

‘Half past nine, ten o'clock …'

‘Were there any witnesses?'

A hoarse guffaw, followed by a cough.

‘Dozens!'

‘And before that, what were you doing?'

‘Are you deaf? I was drinking, and eyeing up that girl. Dozens of people saw me, I tell you. I know I made mistakes in the past. But shit, those girls I assaulted, what were they doing out at night, huh? In Albania, women don't go out at night. They're respectable.'

Samira Cheung chose a spot at random and jabbed her index finger into the Albanian's side. Hard. Servaz saw Elvis wince with pain. He was going to intervene when Samira removed her finger.

‘Your alibi had better be solid,' she said in an ugly, cold voice. ‘You really have a problem, Elvis. I don't suppose you're impotent, are you? Or maybe you're a repressed fag … Yes, that's it. Of course that's it. Did you enjoy taking showers in the nick?'

Servaz watched as the man's face was transformed, his gaze turning as black as a pool of oil, no light in his eyes. In spite of the heat in the room, it was as if icy water were trickling down his spine. His pulse began beating faster. He swallowed. He'd seen that sort of look before, a long time ago.
He had been ten years old
… The little boy in him could not forget. Once again he thought about the men who had shown up in the garden of his family home one July evening. Two men like this one, wolves, lost creatures with empty gazes. He remembered his mother, crying and begging, and his
father, tied to a chair. And little Martin, locked in the cupboard beneath the stairs, hearing everything, guessing everything – and how many times had he come across people like them since he had joined the police? Suddenly he was desperately in need of air, he had to get out of that room, that hospital. He began running towards the toilets before the nausea had time to overwhelm him.

‘It's not him.'

Servaz nodded. They were heading back up the corridor towards the lobby. He had a terrible desire to smoke, but there were no smoking signs everywhere, constantly calling him to order.

‘I know,' he said. ‘His alibi is solid and, in any case, I don't see how he could have emptied Claire Diemar's mailbox at the lycée, or why he would have followed Hugo and drugged him.'

‘That guy should not be out of jail,' said Samira as they walked past the cafeteria.

‘There are no laws about putting people in prison just because they're dangerous,' he said.

‘He'll do it again, sooner or later.'

‘He served his sentence.'

Samira shook her head as they crossed the lobby.

‘The only valid therapy for his sort is chopping off their balls,' she decreed.

Servaz looked at his assistant. Apparently she wasn't joking. With relief he saw the glass doors coming closer and dug his hand in his pocket, but there was one last no smoking sign on the other side – he felt as if he were an adolescent again, on the running track, his lungs on fire, sure he would never manage to run the last twenty metres.

The doors opened at last. Heat and damp engulfed them. He stiffened. His lungs were clamouring for nicotine, demanding their poison, but there was something else … What was it? Ever since they had gone past the first no smoking sign earlier that afternoon, his unconscious had been at work – but he couldn't put his finger on what it was seeking.

‘If it's not Elmaz, then we're back to square one,' said Samira.

‘Meaning?'

‘Hugo …'

Servaz managed to check his watch as he took out his cigarette.

‘Let's go back to the office. You put pressure on the tracking service. I want results by the end of the day. If it is Hugo, can you tell me why he would have emptied out Clare's computer but not cleared his own mobile?'

She raised her hands in a gesture of ignorance. An ambulance arrived, siren wailing, and stopped in front of the barrier, waiting for it to lift.

Suddenly it dawned on him. He knew why he had been so obsessed by the no smoking signs.

As he walked across the long footbridge above the trees, he took out his mobile, found Margot's phone number and hit dial. Horrible music replied, and he made a face. He was pleased to know that Margot switched her mobile off during class, but it was bad timing. With one finger he typed a text message:

Does Hugo smoke? Call me back. Urgent.

He had just finished when his telephone began to vibrate.

‘Margot?' he said, as he reached the lifts.

‘No, this is Nadia,' said a woman's voice.

Nadia Berrada was in charge of the tracking service. He pressed the button to call the lift.

‘The computers have spoken,' she said.

His hand was suspended in mid-air.

‘And?'

‘The mailboxes had indeed been emptied, but we were able to recover the messages, both sent and received. The last one is from the day she died. It's the usual stuff: e-mails to colleagues, personal messages, announcements for staff meetings and seminars, and junk mail.'

‘Were there any messages sent or received from Hugo Bokhanowsky?'

‘No. Not a one. However, there was one correspondent who showed up on a regular basis. “Thomas999”. And his messages seem … how shall I put it?
Intimate.
'

‘Intimate in what way?'

‘Intimate enough for him to write—' She broke off before reading: ‘“Life in the future will be so much more exciting because we are in love”, “Amazing. Incredible. Miss you absolutely”, “I am the lock
and you are the key, I am yours forever, your darling, for now and all eternity” …'

‘Who wrote that, him or her?'

‘Both of them. Well, she wrote seventy-five per cent of them … He seemed slightly less expressive, but completely hooked all the same. Shit, that woman was really passionate!'

From the tone of her voice, he supposed that the e-mails had made Nadia wistful. He remembered what he and Marianne had been like … In those days there were neither e-mails nor text messages, but they had exchanged hundreds of letters in a similar vein. Glorious, lyrical, naïve, ardent, funny letters. Even though they saw each other almost every day. They had known that intensity, that fire. He was on to something – he could tell.
That woman was really passionate
… Nadia had got it spot-on. He looked at the treetops swaying in the rain beneath the footbridge.

‘Ask Vincent to get a warrant,' he said. ‘We need the identity of this Thomas999 as quickly as possible.'

‘It's already done. We're waiting for the answer.'

‘Perfect. Let me know as soon as you have it. And Nadia, please, could you take a quick look at the list of exhibits?'

‘What do you want to know?'

‘Whether there was a pack of cigarettes among the items found in the kid's pockets.'

He waited. The doors to the lift opened, but he did not go in, for fear that the metal walls would prevent the signal from getting through. Nadia came back on the line after four minutes.

‘No packet, no cigarette, no joints,' she said. ‘Nothing of the kind. Does that help?'

‘It may do. Thank you.'

While picturing Nadia rummaging through the exhibits, he'd had a thought concerning the notebook he had found on Claire's desk and the sentence written there:

Sometimes the word friend is drained of meaning, but enemy, never.

He felt a tingling at the base of his spine. Claire Diemar had written this in a brand-new notebook not long before she died, and she had left it open on her desk. Was she aware of any imminent threat? Had she made an enemy? Could this sentence have anything at all to do with the investigation? His thoughts were getting clearer. He took out his phone again.

‘Are you at your desk?' he asked when Espérandieu picked up.

‘Yes, why?' said his assistant.

‘Could you run a sentence through Google?'

‘Through Google?'

‘That's what I said.'

‘Like some sort of quote?'

‘Uh-huh.'

‘Hang on … Okay, go ahead, I'm listening.'

Servaz repeated the sentence.

‘What is it? For some quiz show?' joked his assistant. ‘Wait … aren't you the one who studied literature?'

‘Out with it.'

‘Victor Hugo.'

‘What?'

‘It's a quotation. From Victor Hugo. Would you care to explain?'

‘Later.'

He hung up. Victor
Hugo.
Could it be just a coincidence? Claire Diemar had not written anything else in the notebook and she had left it in plain sight. She was referring to an
enemy
… Hugo? Servaz was aware that they were dealing with Marsac, a university town, a place, as Francis had pointed out, where people had a sense of discretion as well as of malicious gossip, where daggers were drawn but with elegance and refinement – and where any direct accusation would be seen as an unforgivable breach of taste. He must not forget that he was dealing with scholars, with people who liked puzzles, allusions, hidden meaning; people who liked to show how subtle they could be, even in dramatic circumstances. The sentence had not been written in the notebook by chance.

Could it be that Claire, in an allusive, indirect way, had indicated the name of her enemy – even that of her future killer?

Hirtmann

Back at the Criminal Division, Servaz went straight to Espérandieu's office.

‘How is the kid doing?'

His assistant removed his headphones, where the lead vocalist from Queens of the Stone Age was singing ‘Make It Wit Chu', and shrugged.

‘He's calm. He asked me if I had something to read. I gave him one of my comics. He didn't want it. I should remind you that his detention ends in six hours.'

‘I know. Call the prosecutor. Ask for an extension.'

‘On what grounds?'

It was Servaz's turn to shrug his shoulders.

‘I don't know. Pull something out of your bag of tricks.'

Once he was in his office, he hunted in his drawers for a moment before he found what he was looking for. A telephone number. In Paris. He looked at it, thoughtfully. He had not called this number in a long time. He had hoped he would never have to; he had hoped the whole business was behind him.

Servaz looked at the time, and dialled. When a man's weary voice answered, he introduced himself.

‘It's been a long time,' said the voice on the other end of the line ironically. ‘To what do I owe the honour, Commandant?'

He explained what had happened the night before and finished with the discovery of the Mahler CD. He was expecting the man to say, ‘You called me for
that
?' but he did no such thing.

‘Why didn't you call me at once?' he asked instead.

‘For a CD found at a crime scene? It probably has nothing to do with it.'

‘A crime scene where, as if by chance, the son of one of your former acquaintances has been found, where the Toulouse crime
squad has, quite logically, been put on the case, and the victim happens to be a young woman in her thirties who has the same profile as his other victims? And where, to top it all off, the music that Julian was playing the night he killed his wife was playing? You must be joking!'

Servaz noticed the use of ‘Julian'. As if after all this hunting for the man, his pursuers had ended up fraternising with him. He held his breath. The cop was right. He had had exactly the same hunch when he first saw the CD, and then he'd moved on to something else. But seen from this angle, the elements fitted together in a disturbing way. He told himself that to grasp all this so quickly the guy at the other end of the line must really know his stuff.

‘It's always the same old story,' sighed the voice on the line. ‘People get in touch when they have the time, when they've put aside their ego, or when all the other trails have gone cold.'

‘And do you have anything new at your end?'

‘You'd like me to say that I do, wouldn't you? I'm sorry to disappoint you, Commandant, but we have so much information that we're drowning in it. As if it were pouring down on us. Most of it is so far-fetched that we don't even check it any more, other leads have to be checked all the same, and it all takes a great deal of time. He's been spotted all over the place: Paris, Hong Kong, Timbuktu … One witness was certain he was a broker at the casino in Mar del Plata where he plays every evening, another saw him at the airport in Barcelona, or in Düsseldorf, there's a woman who suspects her lover is Hirtmann …'