The Circle (64 page)

Servaz looked at Hugo's eyes. The gleam deep inside. Like embers poked and kindled beneath the ash, like a fire burning for a long time.

‘And then I saw her change. It was as if someone else had taken

her place. She wasn't the Claire I knew … the Claire I knew encouraged me to write and swore to me she had never seen such a talented student. She sent me twenty texts a day to tell me she loved me and that nothing would ever keep us apart, that we would grow old together and still be as much in love as we had been on the first day. And she would quote authors and poets who spoke about love, and she'd make up songs about us, or she'd find a name for every part of my body as if it were the map of a country that belonged to her. And she wasn't afraid to say, “I love you” again and again, a hundred times a day … Suddenly that Claire ceased to exist. She was …
gone.
And the one who replaced her looked at me as if I were a monster, an enemy. She was afraid of me.'

Hugo's words hung suspended. Every one of them seemed to find an echo in Servaz's heavy heart.

‘She wanted to call the police. I did everything I could to dissuade her; I couldn't stand the idea that my brothers and sisters might go to prison. Or the thought that they'd have to pay all over again, what with everything they had already been through. I didn't know what to do. I told her I would convince them to stop, that it was all over, there would be no more victims, but she didn't have the right to do that to them after what she had already done. She didn't want to listen, it was as if she'd gone mad, she was deaf to all my arguments. We started to quarrel; I pleaded with her. And then suddenly she came out with it: she told me she didn't love me any more anyway, it was all over between us, she loved someone else. She'd been meaning to tell me, soon. She spoke to me about this guy, the MP: she said she was madly in love with him, she was sure of him. I wanted to protect her and all she could think of was to send us to prison and get rid of me! I couldn't let her do that. I was furious, I was drunk with anger. I told myself: what kind of woman can swear to a man on everything she holds dearest that she will love him until the end of time, then the next day she loves someone else? What kind of woman can be so wonderful and then suddenly as ugly as can be? What kind of woman can play with people like that? And I thought: the kind who leaves children to die because she's a coward. She was young and beautiful and carefree, and only thought about herself. All the remorse eating away at her, her guilt, it was all show. As was her love. A lie. She lied to herself the way she lied to others. That night I understood that
Claire Diemar was nothing but selfishness and pretence. That she would always be poison for anyone who crossed paths with her.'

‘So you hit her,' said Servaz. ‘You found a rope and tied her up before you put her in the bath. And you turned on the tap.'

‘I wanted her to understand before she died what the children had been through because of her. For once in her life she would know all the harm she had done.'

‘Well, she got the picture, that's for sure,' said Servaz. ‘And then you threw the dolls into the swimming pool and sat there by the water. Why the dolls? Was it because they symbolised your drowned schoolmates floating to the surface?'

‘Whenever I went to her place, that collection of dolls gave me the creeps.'

‘And then?'

Hugo raised his head and looked at them.

‘What then?'

‘You were in a state of shock, paralysed by what you'd done, still under the effect of alcohol and drugs: who came that night to take Claire's laptop and empty her mailbox and make it look as if someone else was trying to cover their tracks? Who put Mahler on the stereo, who was there?'

‘David.'

Servaz slammed his fist on the table so hard that he made the others in the room jump. He stood up and leaned over the table.

‘You're lying! David just committed suicide trying to save you – you, his brother, his best friend, and you're already defiling his memory? That night, David left the pub after you did, he was on the bank's video surveillance cameras on the other side of the square. He even attacked me so that he could steal the recordings! But the CD, that wasn't him. When I asked him about it, right before he died, he just stared at me: he didn't know what I was talking about!'

Hugo remained silent. He seemed shaken.

‘All right,' he said finally in a dead voice, a voice filled with self-disgust. ‘David just came out of the pub that night. He wanted to stop me from telling Claire everything. I sent him packing and he went back inside. He only stole the recordings to make sure no one could find out about the Circle, and because it reinforced the theory that someone else was guilty.'

A chill went through Servaz's veins.

‘And the cigarette butts they found at Claire's place, in the woods?' he said. ‘Before he died he told me that it was his DNA on them.'

‘He disapproved of my affair with Claire. He despised her. Or maybe he was jealous, I don't know. But what I do know is that he was there, sometimes, spying on us from the woods and smoking one cigarette after the other. David could be like that.'

‘Who was it, then?' insisted Servaz, even if he was more and more afraid to hear the answer. ‘Who came to clear up after you? Who put the CD in that fucking stereo?'

Another beep in his pocket. He took out his mobile. There were two messages. At this time of night? What could be so urgent? He opened the inbox. The number was not one he recognised. He opened the first message. And fear rushed through him again.

‘Margot!' he shouted, leaping up from his chair.

The SMS was signed, ‘J H'.

And it said:

Take care of your loved one.

He hunted feverishly for Samira's number, then pressed the call button.

‘Boss?' said Samira, surprised.

‘Go and find Margot! Run! Hurry!'

He could hear her trotting across the grass, then running on the gravel. He heard her race up the steps to the dormitory, pound on the door and say: ‘It's Samira!' He heard the door open and a familiar voice answer, a sleepy voice, a voice that felt like balm on a wound. Then Samira's voice on the phone again, breathless.

‘She's fine, boss. She was asleep.'

He took a deep breath, looked at the others who were staring wide-eyed at him.

‘Please, do me a favour. Stay with her tonight, take the other bed. You understand?'

‘Copy,' said Samira. ‘I'll sleep in her room.'

‘Lock the door.'

He closed his mobile, puzzled and relieved at the same time. He looked again at the text message.

‘What's going on?' asked Ziegler, who was on her feet now, too.

Servaz showed her the message.

‘Oh, shit,' she said.

‘What?' said Servaz. ‘What is it?'

‘He's going to go after Marianne.'

‘What's this about my mother?' said Hugo suddenly from the other side of the table.

They looked at him.

‘She's the one who put on the CD, isn't she?' said Servaz in a flat voice.

‘Tell me what the fuck is going on!'

Servaz showed him the screen of his mobile and saw Hugo go pale.

‘Fuck,
this time it's really him!'
shouted Marianne's son. ‘He's going to punish her for taking his place. Yes, she's the one who put on the CD, before she rang you. I called her for help, that night. I told her it was too late, because they had seen me from across the street. She knew the gendarmes would show up any minute. So she had this idea. She remembered your investigation, all those articles she'd read in the paper at the time: Hirtmann, the Institute, your shared love of Mahler. So she came as quickly as she could, and she put the CD in the stereo and left again right away. She was crying. She told me over the phone to try and empty Claire's mailbox. I didn't see the point, I was in a daze, but I did it and then I wiped the keyboard. If the gendarmes had found her there, she would simply have told them the truth: that I had called her for help. But they took a while to get there. They didn't know they were going to find a corpse … and they'd probably all been watching the football. That's what saved us. They showed up right after she left. Then she called you. She figured that if they gave the investigation to you, and you found the CD, she might be in with a chance to make you doubt my guilt. And then she sent you that e-mail from a cybercafé.'

Everything that had happened that week, everything Servaz had been through was coming to the surface. The manager of the Internet café had told him it was a woman who came in. Hugo and Margot had hung out together. Hugo must have told his mother what Margot's favourite music was. And who else would have had the chance to fiddle with his mobile, enter a fake contact, while he was asleep? Who had been careful to avoid aiming straight at him with the rifle? Who had calmly carved the letters on the tree trunk during the night? He thought back to what he had said to Espérandieu over
the phone in the car park: ‘The Mahler CD was in the stereo before the investigation was even assigned to us.' And for good reason.

‘What are you waiting for?' screamed Hugo, shoving back his chair, which fell noisily to the floor. ‘Don't you get it? Don't you see what's happening? He's going to kill her!'

There was a crack of thunder, then lightning; there were lights, flashing and glowing and swirling. The rain was pouring down the windscreen, messages crackled on radios, there were sirens and speed, and the road rushing by as if it were a fast-running river; the night spreading all around. Various sounds in his head, fear, his muddled conscience. The terrifying certainty that they would get there too late.

Driving through Marsac in a fog … The lake … With Ziegler and Espérandieu, driving along the east shore, then the north shore, Vincent at the wheel. The vehicles from the gendarmerie were already there. Half a dozen of them. They went in through the wide open gates. In the house all the lights were on, both downstairs and up. Light was streaming from every window, illuminating the garden. There were gendarmes everywhere; Servaz had called them from the prison, almost an hour earlier. He leapt out of the car and hurried towards the entrance, running up the steps. The front door, too, was wide open.

‘Marianne!' he called.

He rushed into the deserted rooms.

He came upon Bécker, the captain who had been at Claire's house at the very beginning, speaking earnestly with other officers he didn't know.

‘Well?'

‘She's nowhere to be found,' answered Bécker.

He went through the curtains dancing in the wind, and out onto the terrace, facing the lake brimming with rain in the darkness.

Where had she gone? He called her name. Again and again. He met the gendarmes' puzzled gazes. She would show up any second now, and ask them what was going on, and he would hold her in his arms and kiss her, and would absolve her for her betrayal and her sins. They would watch as the police cars drove away, and then they would open a bottle of wine. Then she would ask him to forgive her – it was her own son, after all – and they would make love.

No, it wouldn't happen like that; he had to tell her that Hugo would be staying in prison. And it was his fault. He knew this would keep them apart, forever, that after this there would be no going back. He felt the despair descend upon him. But at least she would be alive.
Alive
… He went down onto the soaking lawn, his shoes sinking into the spongy grass, and he approached the gendarmes who were searching through the shrubbery. He turned round: the glow from the revolving lights, on the far side of the house, seemed to rebound from the belly of the clouds, enhancing the black form of the big house with its bright windows. But beyond the pools of light on the grass, there was only darkness.

‘She's not here,' said one of the gendarmes.

‘Are you sure?'

‘We've searched everywhere.'

He pointed to the end of the garden near the woods, where he had found the carved letters. Even though he knew, now, that it was not Hirtmann who had carved them.

‘Go and have a look over there. There's a spring, and a long fallen log. Check the entire area.'

He went back inside. Where had she got to? Had Hirtmann taken her with him? The thought of it made him feel sick.

‘Martin …' said Ziegler tentatively.

‘Was everything like this when you arrived?' he asked Bécker.

‘Yes. The doors and windows were open. All the lights were on. Ah … and there was some music.'

‘Music?'

He froze. Bécker pressed the button on the stereo and the music filled the room. Full blast.
Mahler.
Brass and strings raging throughout the house, booming in every room thanks to the speaker system, punctuated by the shrill chiming of the triangles, the deeper voice of the cellos, the entire orchestra hurtling towards the ultimate catastrophe.

Servaz gasped. He recognised the piece: the Finale from the Sixth Symphony, the music of defeat – his defeat, a piece that Adorno himself had referred to as, ‘All is bad that ends badly.'

He slid down the wall to the floor. His entire body was trembling. The gendarmes looked at him, failing to understand. They stopped the music, and then they heard him sobbing. They were embarrassed: a cop was not supposed to cry, at least not in front of his colleagues,
not when he was on duty. A moment later they heard him scream with laughter, and they told themselves that he'd gone mad. It wouldn't be the first time. They weren't robots; they had to deal with all the shit in the world; they were living sewers, they collected shit and took it as far away as possible from the rest of the population. But really it was never all that far. The shit always came back in the end.

And then they realised he had a piece of paper in his hand. They looked at each other, dying to move closer so they could read it, but they didn't dare.