Paris Noir: Capital Crime Fiction (31 page)

Farida had a point and her colleagues all giggled, Sylvie included. They could laugh, now that the nightmare was over, A nightmare for Paris’s female population that had been going on since the end of November, with the discovery – by her own father – of Estelle Magd’s body, raped, her throat slit, in her home. After years of bewildering judicial negligence and bureaucratic incompetence, the police had finally made the link between different cases that had strange similarities. Examining magistrates working on rape and murder cases that bore the hallmark of the same sexual criminal had agreed to share the evidence in their possession. Now DNA test results were being compared in public and private laboratories all over France. Mainstream newspapers and magazines had got hold of the story, at the risk of unleashing a panic: a bloodthirsty wolf, a psychopathic killer – he was North African, Egyptian to be precise, they said (on account of a footprint discovered in a pool of blood, the second toe longer than the big toe) – was terrorising Paris, slitting the throats of lone, pretty young women in car parks or in their homes. A steady stream of suspects were questioned but to no avail, photos on file of thousands of offenders were shown to the only survivor who’d been able to get a good look at the killer, but in vain. Photofits of the olive-skinned man followed, none of them reliable. Gossip and fanciful accusations threatened to jam the switchboard of the Paris murder squad headquarters, women trembled with fear, and gallant men saw their colleagues of the supposedly weaker sex all the way home at night…

And twenty-four-year-old Julie Coray, a striking brunette from Rennes who’d recently arrived in Paris, landing this rather well-paid job as graphic designer for the French edition of Reader’s Digest Select Editions, would shudder every evening as she inserted her key in the lock of her small studio flat, on the top floor of a dilapidated building on rue Cels.

From the neighbouring desk, Robert Flageul – usually in charge of rewriting dramatic first-hand accounts and other ‘human interest stories’ that the review pre-digested each month with the aim of bringing tears to pensioners’ eyes – cut in, addressing the picture editor: ‘Plus you had it all wrong, Sylvie. ‘The beast of Bastille’, ‘the east Paris killer’, it’s all just tabloid cliché, I shouldn’t have to tell you that. The first crime attributed to this Guy Georges was Pascale Escarfail, the humanities student, murdered on the 24th of January ‘91 in her flat in the fourteenth arrondissement, on rue Delambre, just round the corner from Julie, which is a long way from Bastille, and more south than east. And other times he rampaged through the thirteenth, the tenth, the nineteenth… His turf seems pretty vast to me. Not to mention the assaults he must have committed before they’d made the link with him…’

Back in design, Julie Coray saw that her boss, the magazine’s art director, wasn’t yet back from his lunch with an illustrator at the Japanese restaurant next to the motorway, below the RER station. Knowing Gilles – a cigar-smoker and something of a foodie, too – he wouldn’t return before 3 p.m., so she had time to make a call before carrying on with the layout. Julie rang the mobile number of Claire, her best friend, a Breton like her. Claire Le Flohic was in her sixth year of medicine and was doing her internship at Cochin Hospital.

She answered after the fourth ring. ‘Oh, it’s you? Your name didn’t come up… You’re lucky I answered, I was about to reject the call, I’m on duty till tonight.’

‘I’m calling from the land line, at the magazine. Did you hear the news?’

The young intern answered in a voice quivering with excitement: ‘You bet! In fact, I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone but I’d known for two days they were going to get him. My cousin’s working at the Nantes lab that found the killer’s DNA. They’d been on the case for weeks, they compared it manually with 3,500 specimens before they found it. Suddenly there it was, just like that, bingo! They couldn’t believe their eyes! Amazing…!’

Twenty-four years old like Julie, Claire was a true-crime fan and passionate about forensic medicine, which she intended to specialise in. She was already pestering the professor to let her attend autopsies in criminal cases – in theory, off limits to trainees – during which Claire impressed him with her knowledge of heparic temperature, rigor mortis and dermabrasions, as well as marks from blows and wounds. The case of the ‘east Paris killer’ literally fascinated her, and Claire was convinced that she herself resembled one of the psychopath’s victims, found raped and murdered in an underground car park on boulevard Reuilly in January 1994: Catherine Rocher, a pretty, twenty-seven-year-old marketing assistant. ‘A tall girl with long brown hair, well mine’s more chestnut and
very
long, but we both have a straight nose, a long smiling face and we’re full of life! The killer goes for that kind of girl. If I were a psychological profiler, I’d infer that he’d been very unhappy when he was young, his parents probably knocked him about, he had a difficult childhood, is unemployed, has already done time for rape or assault, he lives in a squat, maybe prostitutes himself and is ashamed of it. He’s angry with the whole world and especially when he sees a beautiful girl go by, looking happy, he can’t help it, he’s compelled to follow her home, tie her up and rape her… And afterwards, he slashes her, aiming for the neck. There was blood all over the fl-’

Julie shuddered in disgust, thinking her friend a bit twisted for revelling in such macabre details. It was as if, from fantasising about this series of sexual murders, she’d begun to imagine herself as one of the victims, and got a kick out of it. ‘You’re right, I’m a real perv,’ Claire laughed.

‘Well anyway,’ Julie interrupted her, ‘it’s finally over… We can breathe…’

Through the bay window, she watched the light play on the buds of the trees on boulevard Louis Pasteur. It was a beautiful spring afternoon. This weekend, she’d go for a walk in the Bois de Boulogne, or the Luxembourg Gardens, or treat herself to a movie with Claire…

‘Don’t you believe it, darling!’ The medical student’s tone turned menacing. ‘Nothing’s over till he’s arrested! Right now the cops only have his name and his photo… And even if they catch him and he gets life without remission, he’ll be out after twenty years, you’ll see, if he doesn’t escape earlier! And then, when he’s out, he’ll start again. I’ve really studied his case: this ‘Guy Georges’, since now we know his name, is incurable. He’s not a madman, more an intelligent thug. He looks normal, maybe even likeable, it’s just he can’t resist, it’s in his past or his genes,
he has to kill.
Once a month if possible. He’s dodged the police so often he thinks he’s invincible. And at those moments, the wretched girl in front of him, tied up, weak and terrified, is just an object, not a human being. An object of rape and then murder.’

‘Claire, please stop…’

The intern chuckled. ‘OK, I’m stopping, you poor thing. But nothing’s over, you’ll see. He knows he’s a marked man, he could get even more dangerous, take a girl hostage, I don’t know… So you still have to be extra careful going home tonight, OK?’

Julie rolled her eyes and pulled a face.

‘All right, all right. And if I’m too scared when I come out of the station, I’ll call you to come and escort me to rue Cels, OK?’

The two friends burst out laughing, blew each other kisses down the phone and ended the call at the same time.

The afternoon went by like a dream. Concentrating on the Mac screen, on her photos, titles and fonts, and files to be sent to the printer, Julie wasn’t aware of time passing. It was the end of March, the days were growing longer, but eventually the light faded… At 7 p.m., Gilles stood up, put on his raincoat and waved goodbye to his assistant. ‘Right, see you tomorrow, Julie. I’ll leave you to finish off the cover. Send it to Magnus, wait for his approval, then you can go home.’

‘But…’

‘Don’t worry, you’ll be fine. See you then, bye!’

Magnus Laksson, a Finn who’d settled in the US, supervised the art direction for all the international editions. His trenchant opinions, utter lack of diplomacy, and ultra-conservative view of what
Reader’s Digest
should be in America and elsewhere, made him the
bête noire
of art directors working under him. Julie sent him the mockup of the cover accompanied by a few polite phrases in her approximate English and waited for the verdict, which, with the time difference (Laksson had no doubt gone for lunch), only arrived on her screen at 10.30 p.m., French time.

The Finn
hated
the cover.

The response, in two laconic, brutal sentences, reminded Gilles and Julie that the cover should never allude visually to the issue’s central theme but must be kept to some neutral and soothing image – and demanded a new one before the end of the day.

Julie didn’t dare disturb Gilles at home so, valiant Breton that she was, she laboured over a new version of the cover which took until twenty-five past midnight, sent it to the US and shut down her computer. If she stayed to wait for the American reaction, she’d miss the last train home from Bagneux. And she didn’t have enough money on her for a taxi to Montparnasse at the night rate, which was at least sixty francs. Julie ran down the empty corridors, her coat under her arm, to the foyer where the North African night watchman, deep in a sports paper, nodded at her vaguely. She raced down the front steps and set off across a deserted Bagneux, in the glow of the streetlights, into an icy wind she hadn’t expected. Anticipating going home much earlier, Julie had even put on a miniskirt today, something she hadn’t dared do in four months, terrified by the possibility of a nocturnal encounter with the Ripper. But the morning news had reassured her on that score…

Her heels clicked on the tarmac, she ran through the labyrinth of narrow streets, lined with peaceful small pensioners’ houses, as far as the main road which she crossed, defying the red pedestrian signal, between two cars hurtling at well over 50 miles an hour which honked warnings at her. The train indicator board in the empty station showed the Paris train was at the platform.

‘Oh no,’ Julie groaned, inserting her season ticket into the machine.

The ‘doors closing’ signal sounded as she reached the platform. She ran as if her life depended on it, leapt between the sliding doors, forcing her way through, and she was inside, panicky and breathless, frantically tugging at the handle of her bag which was wedged between the strips of rubber, as the train pulled away.

The few passengers in the compartment stared at her briefly before falling back into the apathy of exhausted workers or depressed night owls. She flopped onto a seat, her heart thudding, and watched vaguely as the suburban lights and bare station platforms slipped past. Ravenous (she hadn’t eaten since midday), sleepy, her head nodding, she nearly dozed off and missed her stop. Denfert-Rochereau. She jumped up and just made it through the hissing doors.

Because she’d got on at the end of the train, Julie, walking along the platform towards the exit, came first to the narrow staircase that led directly to the square, in the former railway station converted to a regional express station. Which would mean having to cross the vast Denfert-Rochereau traffic intersection in the wind and cold… Julie opted for the next exit, which connected to the Métro, lines 4 and 6, and would bring her out of the station as close to her home as possible, with only rue Froiaevaux to walk up to rue Cels.

In the bowels of the empty station, she used her ticket again to exit the row of ticket barriers and turned, following signs to the Porte d’Orléans line. It was a complicated network of corridors but the young provincial woman was becoming familiar with it. At the next intersection she had to turn left, then sharp right towards the escalator. It was in this last corridor that she saw him.

Julie considered herself good at remembering faces, and she’d studied the photofit of the ‘east Paris killer’ in the media many times. The only difference was that the man had grown a thin moustache. Everything else matched the description given by the survivor. In his thirties, tall, athletic-looking, lithe, the dark skin of a North African. Closely cropped hair, practically shaved. Their eyes met just as he drew level with her. For that fraction of a second, Julie detected the glimmer of interest in the man’s eyes, saw the quick, sidelong glance at her slender legs below her miniskirt. She hurried on, short of breath, looking down, her expression as neutral as possible. Her heart was pounding wildly. What an appalling coincidence, what terrifying bad luck… Just as long as he didn’t turn round now and follow her! Julie didn’t dare look over her shoulder. She let her shaky body be carried by the escalator, praying she’d find an RATP employee still at the ticket window. It was almost one in the morning. The last trains had probably all left. She pushed the heavy glass door and saw with annoyance that the ticket office was closed, the blind was down, the lights out. Now she only had to walk up the last flight of steps to the square, where the wind was gusting hard and clouds scudded across the sky, revealing glimpses of a perfectly round, wan moon. It illuminated the powerful musculature of the Denfert Lion, which watched over the middle of the square in bronze impassivity.

On the other side of avenue General Leclerc, one of the severe twin buildings of the former ‘Barrière d’Enfer’ tollgate housed the entrance to the sinister Catacombs – the place where, in 1785, the Prefect Lenoir dumped millions of skeletons, hauling them from the charnel house of the Innocents in macabre cartloads and filling the air of Les Halles with a foul stench. Julie turned left, walked past the gate to the little park and reached the corner of rue Froiaevaux, just before the taxi rank where one solitary vehicle was waiting. After crossing the road, attempting to look natural, she half turned round.

The olive-skinned man was there, standing at the top of the station steps, lighting a cigarette and looking to left and right. He saw the trembling young woman’s silhouette and, putting away his lighter, strode deliberately in the direction Julie had taken.