Alex (31 page)

Camille projects himself into the future; it’s almost as though the auction is over. His thoughts turn to the proceeds and this idea of not keeping the money, of giving it away. Until now, he has refused to guess how much there will be. Though he does not want to do the calculations, his brain has already worked out the figures; he can’t help it. He will never be as rich as Louis, but even so. According to his calculations, it should raise about 150,000 euros. Maybe more, maybe 200,000 euros. He’s angry at himself for doing the maths, but who wouldn’t? When Irène died, the insurance paid off the apartment they had bought together. He immediately sold it on. With the proceeds, he bought
this apartment, took out a small mortgage which the money from the auction would comfortably repay. This kind of thought is the first flaw in his good intentions. He’d tell himself, I could just pay off the mortgage and give away the rest. Then, it would be, pay off the mortgage, upgrade the car and give away the rest. It’s a vicious circle. Until there is no “rest”. He’d end up donating two hundred euros to cancer research.

Come on, Camille thinks, shaking himself. Just concentrate on what’s essential.

Towards 10.00 a.m., he abandons Doudouche, walks through the market, and – the day is bright and mild – resolves to walk to the
brigade
offices. It’ll take as long as it takes. Camille walks as fast as his stubby legs will allow. Unsurprisingly, his determination and his resolution fade and he catches the
métro
.

*

Though it’s Sunday, Louis has said he’ll join him at the office around one o’clock.

Ever since he got there, Camille has been in silent communion with the objects laid out on the big table. It looks like a little girl’s stall at a garage sale.

The night after Alex was found dead, after her brother came to the morgue to identify the body, her mother, Mme Prévost, was asked if she recognised anything among the effects.

Mme Prévost is a small, spirited woman whose angular face is of a piece with her grey hair and her threadbare clothes. Everything about her transmits the same message:
We come from a modest background
. She didn’t want to take off her coat or put down her handbag; she was eager to be out of there.

“It’s a lot for her to take in all at once,” Armand said. He was the first to speak to her. “Your daughter committed suicide last
night after murdering at least six people – it’s a little disconcerting, to say the least.”

Camille talked to her at length in the corridor to prepare her for the ordeal; she will be confronted by so many personal things that belonged to her daughter as a toddler, as a girl, as a teenager, the things of no great value that become utterly heartbreaking the day your daughter dies. Mme Prévost steels herself, she doesn’t cry, she says she understands, but as soon as she is faced with the table full of memories, she breaks down. Someone brings her a chair. As an onlooker, such moments are painful; you shift your weight from one foot to the other, forced to be patient, to do nothing. Mme Prévost is still clutching her handbag, as though she is visiting; she sits in the chair, points to the objects: there are many that she has never seen or doesn’t remember. She often seems puzzled or uncertain, as though faced with an image of her daughter she doesn’t recognise. To her, these are like spare parts. To reduce her dead daughter to this catalogue of junk seems monstrous. Her grief turns to indignation; she turns this way and that.

“What possessed her to keep all this rubbish? Are you even sure it’s hers?”

Camille spreads his hands. Her reaction is familiar – it’s a way of defending oneself against the brutality of the situation, a reaction common to people in shock, this aggressiveness.

“Then again, this here, this is definitely hers.”

She points to the carved black wooden head. She seems about to tell a story, but changes her mind. Then points to the pages torn from various novels.

“She used to read a lot. All the time.”

*

By the time Louis arrives, it’s almost two o’clock. He starts out with the tattered pages.
Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me
,
Anna Karenina
. There are passages underlined in purple ink.
Middlemarch
,
Doctor Zhivago
. Louis has read them all.
Aurélien
,
Buddenbrooks
. One of the witnesses mentioned her having the complete works of Duras, but here there are only a couple of pages from
War: A Memoir.
Louis can find no connection between the titles; there’s an element of romanticism, which is hardly surprising – young girls and mass murderers are tender-hearted creatures.

They go to lunch. As they’re eating, Camille gets a call from the friend of his mother who organised this morning’s auction. There’s not much to say. Camille thanks him again – he doesn’t know what else to do, so he discreetly offers money. Louis can tell the friend is saying that they’ll talk about it later, that what he did, he did for Maud. Camille falls silent, they agree to meet up soon, knowing that they never will. Camille hangs up. The auction raised much more than expected: 280,000 euros. The small self-portrait alone, a minor work, sold for 18,000 euros.

Louis is not surprised. He’s familiar with prices and valuations; he has experience in such things.

Two hundred and eighty thousand. Camille can’t believe it. He tries to calculate how many years’ salary this comes to. A good many. The idea that he’s well off now makes him uncomfortable; it’s a weight on his shoulders. He stretches himself a little.

“Was it a stupid thing to do, selling everything?”

“Not necessarily,” Louis says cautiously.

Still, Camille wonders.

Freshly shaved, square-jawed, determined, eyes bright, lips thick, voluptuous, expressive. He stands ramrod straight; he would have a military air were it not for the mane of curly brown hair tied back in a ponytail. The belt with its silver buckle emphasises a bulging waistline intended to be proportional to his social standing, the product of business lunches, of his marriage, of stress, or perhaps all three. He looks as though he’s forty plus. He is thirty-seven. He’s six feet tall and broad-shouldered. Louis isn’t fat, but he’s tall – next to this man he looks like a teenage boy.

Camille met him once before, at the morgue when he came to identify the body. He leaned over the aluminium autopsy table, his expression formal, pained. He said nothing, merely nodded to indicate yes, that’s her, and the sheet was pulled up again.

That day at the morgue, they didn’t speak to each other. It’s tricky, offering your condolences when the deceased is a serial killer who has destroyed the lives of half a dozen families. It’s hard to find the words; fortunately, this is not something that police officers are expected to do.

In the corridor on their way back in, Camille is silent. Louis says:

“He seemed a lot more shifty when I met him …”

Camille remembered that Louis first met him during the investigation into the death of Pascal Trarieux.

It’s Monday, 5.00 p.m., the
brigade criminelle
headquarters.

Louis (Brioni suit, Ralph Lauren shirt, Forzieri brogues) is sitting at his desk. Armand is sitting next to him, his socks down around his ankles. Camille is sitting in a chair at the far end of the room, legs swinging, poring over a sketchpad as though this has nothing to do with him. Right now he’s drawing from memory a portrait of Guadalupe Victoria he once saw on a Mexican coin.

“When will the body be released?”

“Soon,” Louis says. “Very soon.”

“It’s been four days already …”

“I know, these things always seem to take a long time.”

Objectively, this is something Louis does to perfection. This consummate look of commiseration is something he must have learned early, a legacy of family, of class. Right now, Camille would paint him as Saint Mark presenting the doge of Venice.

Louis picks up his notepad, his case file, as though he wants to get the painful formalities out of the way as quickly as possible.

“O.K., then. Thomas Vasseur, born December 16, 1969.”

“I think that’s in the file.”

Not aggressive, but spiky. Irritated.

“Oh, yes, yes,” Louis says effusively. “We just need to check everything is in order. To put this to bed. From what we know, your sister killed six people, five men and one woman. Her death makes it impossible to piece together these events. We have to have something to tell the families – I’m sure you understand. Not to mention the magistrate.”

Ah, yes, the magistrate, Camille thinks. He was dying to give a press conference. It didn’t take him long to get the backing of his superiors; everyone wanted a press conference. It’s hardly a
triumph, a serial killer who commits suicide – it’s not as good as an arrest – but it’s worth it from the point of view of security, public safety, civil peace and all that shit. The murderer is dead. It’s like a medieval town crier announcing the wolf is dead; everyone knows it’s not going to change the face of the world, but it affords relief, reinforces the impression that some higher power is watching over us. And the higher power in this case is revelling in it. Vidard appeared before the assembled journalists as though this was the last thing he wanted to do. To listen to him talk, you’d think that the police had the murderer cornered and she had to choose between surrender and suicide. Camille and Louis watched it on the T.V. in the local bistro. Louis was resigned about it. Camille was laughing to himself. After that moment of glory, the magistrate calmed down. In front of the cameras, he talked the talk, but now it comes to closing the investigation, it’s the
brigade criminelle
who have to walk the walk.

So this is about what they’re going to tell the families. Thomas Vasseur understands; he nods, still fractious.

Louis becomes engrossed for a moment in the case file, then he looks up, brushes his hair from his face with his left hand.

“So, date of birth: 16 December, 1969.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re a sales director with a games hire company.”

“That’s right. We work with casinos, bars, nightclubs; we rent slot machines. All over France.”

“You’re married with three children.”

“Yep, and now you know everything.”

Louis meticulously makes a note, then looks up again.

“So you were … seven years older than Alex?”

This time Thomas Vasseur simply nods.

“Alex never knew her father,” Louis says.

“No, my own father died young. My mother got pregnant with Alex much later, but she didn’t want to be in a relationship with the guy. He disappeared.”

“So, we might say that you were the only father she ever had?”

“I looked after her, yeah. I took charge of her; she needed it.”

Louis says nothing, allows the silence to drag on. Vasseur continues.

“Even back then Alex was … what I mean is, Alex was unstable.”

“Yes,” Louis says. “Unstable … that’s what your mother said.”

He knits his brows slightly.

“We have no record of a psychiatric episode; she doesn’t seem to have been hospitalised or sectioned.”

“Alex wasn’t crazy, she was unstable!”

“Because she never had a father …”

“Mostly it was her personality. Even as a kid, she didn’t make friends, she was withdrawn, isolated, didn’t talk much. And she was undisciplined.”

Louis gives a look that says he understands, and when Vasseur says nothing, he ventures, “She needed taking in hand …”

Difficult to know whether this is a question, a statement or a comment. Vasseur decides that it’s a question.

“Exactly.”

“Your mother wasn’t enough.”

“It’s no substitute for a father.”

“Did Alex ever talk about her father? I mean, did she ask questions? Ask to see him?”

“No, she had everything she needed at home.”

“You and your mother.”

“My mother and me.”

“Love and discipline.”

“If you want to put it like that.”

*

Divisionnaire Le Guen deals with Vidard. He acts as a screen between him and Camille. He has all the necessary attributes: the stature, the forbearance, the patience. Whatever one may think of the magistrate, and he can certainly be unpleasant, Camille really is a liability. For several days now, since the girl’s suicide, there have been rumours. Verhœven isn’t the man he used to be; he’s impossible to work with; he can’t handle large-scale investigations. Everyone is talking about him, the story of a girl who wasted six people in two years can’t help but attract attention – even leaving aside how she went about it – and it’s true that it looks as though throughout the investigation Camille was behind the curve. Right to the end.

Le Guen rereads the conclusions in Camille’s final report. They had a meeting an hour ago.

“Are you sure about this, Camille?” Le Guen says.

“Absolutely.”

Le Guen nods.

“If you say so …”

“Listen, if you prefer, I can …”

“No, no, no,” Le Guen cuts him short, “I’ll take care of it. I’ll see the magistrate myself and explain. I’ll keep you posted.”

Camille throws up his hands in surrender.

“Come on, Camille. What the hell is the deal with you and magistrates? You’re always at loggerheads with them from the start – it’s as though you can’t help it.”

“You’d need to ask the magistrates.”

Behind the divisionnaire’s question is an awkward implication:
is it Camille’s height that means he constantly has to challenge authority?

*

“So this Pascal Trarieux, you knew him at school?”

Thomas Vasseur throws his head back and puffs impatiently as though blowing out a candle on the ceiling. He makes it clear he’s finding it hard to keep a grip; he mutters a firm, curt “yes”, the sort of yes usually designed to deter someone from asking any more questions.

This time, Louis doesn’t hide behind the case file. He has an advantage, since he is the one who interviewed Vasseur a month ago.

“When I first interviewed you, you said, and I quote: ‘Pascal was always busting our balls about this girlfriend of his, Nathalie … Though I suppose at least he had one for once.’”