Talking to Ghosts (14 page)

Somewhere in the apartment a mobile was ringing. Vilar wondered where the sound was coming from and quickly realised it was the pocket of his jacket, hanging in the hall where he had left it the night before. Given that it was Saturday and almost 9.00 a.m., he assumed that it was Morvan and felt that strange quaking in his heart he always felt whenever the retired
gendarme
called or he found an email from him on his computer.

A woman's voice. He did not know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

“Commandant Vilar?”

Vilar confirmed that it was he.

“Lieutenant Domergue, with the
police judiciaire
in Marseille. Sorry to call you on your mobile, but it was the only contact number I had. You requested information on Nadia Fournier and her parents, Souad and Michel Fournier? In relation to a homicide?”

“Yes, and—”

“I'll fax the paperwork through on Monday, but since it sounded urgent I took the liberty of calling.”

The voice was gentle, a little indistinct, but there was something firm and resolute about the tone.

“Let me give you the bullet points: Nadia Fournier has a record here for prostitution and drugs offences. It started when she was sixteen. She had run away from home – it was almost a year before we tracked her down.”

“She ran away?”

“Yes. Does that surprise you?”

“Do you know why she ran away?”

“Yes, I'll explain in a minute. She was found working for a pimp, a Tunisian, a violent little shit who kept his girls drugged up so they were easier to control. He's dead now … A bullet in the head, looks like he stepped on the toes of some Russian mobsters. Good riddance … Anyway, she was in a terrible state when we picked her up, but even then she was determined not to go home, which brings us to the reasons why she ran away in the first place, and I have to say the whole story's pretty vile.”

Vilar sighed. Apparently the woman wanted to impress him with her diligence. He rummaged for paper and pen and sat in an armchair, scribbling notes. He stretched his bare feet into a patch of sunlight on the carpet.

“Her father, Michel Fournier, was a professor of maths at Aix University. And a serious alcoholic. It seems he took an unhealthy interest in his daughter's virginity. When he was pissed, he'd harass her and beat his wife, Souad, a primary school teacher in Marseille, her maiden name was Kaci. An all-round decent bloke. The upshot was that Souad committed suicide in '87. A year later Nadia took off. Left one hell for another.”

“And no charges were ever brought against this guy Fournier?”

“Of course there were. From what I've read, he claimed that Nadia wasn't his daughter, that he'd brought her up, that's all. The case was dismissed shortly before the mother's suicide. Anyway Nadia retracted her statement, she was no longer a minor at the time, and then in 1990 she disappeared. So as you can guess, as far as we're concerned it's a cold case. Took me four days to dig this stuff up from under all the dust. But the fact that Fournier was a left-wing councillor and pretty well known – and that people still remember the case – made it not too hard to put together some bits and pieces.”

“You know what happened to Fournier?”

“No. We've got nothing on him, so, well … You asked for
information, I've given you everything I've got. We're snowed under just now, so anything we can let slide, we do.”

For a few minutes they bitched about the job, about how they were worked to the bone, then wished each other all the best and hung up. Vilar sat for a few moments, pen in hand, feeling the cool morning breeze from the window on the back of his neck, unable to think about anything.

He was postponing the moment when he would have to get up, get his things, get into the car and drive to Morvan's, convinced it would lead nowhere, that Morvan would show him photographs from C.D.s, magazines, internet sites, a catalogue of heinous acts in which the former
gendarme
thought he recognised Pablo. It had happened before: a year ago, he had shown Vilar a photograph released by Interpol of a young boy picked up by the police in Milan, an amnesiac, clearly a victim of abuse, who was all but mute but managed to stammer a few words in French, and it was true that Vilar had felt his heart stop when he saw the tanned face, the big dark eyes, the heavy lips half open in silent surprise. But he had quickly come back to earth when he summoned an image of Ana and realised this boy's face had looked nothing like hers. Pablo had always had his mother's eyes. This was why when he stared into Ana's eyes, he could still lose himself, despite the silence between them like a glass wall, despite the distance that separated them.

Vilar put the memory of last year out of his mind. He ran a hand over his face. In the back of his throat he felt a desperate urge to smoke. He closed his eyes and took deep breaths, shrugging off the torrent of unanswered questions. He leapt to his feet, his heart beginning to race: maybe this time Morvan really had a solid lead. He felt a familiar lump in his throat, and the three or four deep breaths he took were not enough to ease his grief, his pain.

“Pablo …”

He felt no calmer as he drove toward Morvan's place, but he was happy to be on the move, to be heading towards something he refused to think of as hope – he knew it was a counterfeit, like an artificial flower one feels the need to reach out and touch to dispel the illusion.

He drove, letting the mild morning breeze rush into the car, going over in his mind the various pieces of evidence he had about Nadia Fournier's death. He would pay another visit to Sandra de Melo, he decided, because she hadn't told him the truth, and because right now there was some guy roaming the streets of Bordeaux who might make her pay dearly for her tact.

He thought about calling Daras to let her know, but gave up on the idea because by now he was driving into Angoulême, and as he did so he felt himself entering the glass bubble into which he sometimes drifted, a place beyond ordinary space and time.

He found a parking space thirty metres from Morvan's house on a narrow street in the upper part of town. The sun beating down on the yellow stone facades dazzled him, making him squint, screwing up his face so much it hurt. He pressed the doorbell twice, impatient to be in the semi-darkness of the house, behind its closed shutters. He waited for a minute and rang again, assuming that Morvan was in the small back garden where he tended his rose bushes with painstaking care.

He listened but could not hear the slightest movement inside. He felt sweat trickling down his back, his forehead hurt from squinting into the sun. He glanced towards the street, stepping back to check the parked cars, and spotted the red Peugeot 306 the former
gendarme
had driven ever since Vilar first met him.

He did not bother to ring again, but pushed the door, which had not been properly closed and now swung open onto a dark hall, filled with the boxes of books and files that Morvan was forever promising he would sort out some day. Vilar closed the door behind him. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness of the house, still cool from the night, he walked down the hall towards the area Morvan had his office, in one corner of the living room.

He called out at the doorway, expecting no reply, and noticed that the lamp on the desk was on and the two large computers in sleep mode, displaying the same mountain scene. There was a faint smell of coffee. Vilar saw a red bowl and, next to it, a few crumbs of bread. The desk, which usually groaned under the weight of notebooks, maps,
memo pads, diaries, pens and C.D. cases, was bare. All the tools of the former
gendarme
's trade had vanished. It had been a thorough cleanup. Vilar was about to click the mouse to wake the computer, but his finger hovered over it. There might be fingerprints everywhere.

He moved through the house, flinging open doors. Not a trace of Morvan, nothing of the usual chaos, nothing that gave him the slightest clue as to what had become of him. Everything was filed away, with the obsessive neatness of an ex-soldier. The bed was immaculately made and the wardrobe, where everything was neatly piled and lined up as if for inspection, smelled of lavender. He had not really been expecting to find anything, but he would press on, in the teeth of the evidence, if it meant him getting even a few millimetres closer to Pablo.

Vilar was relieved not to have discovered Morvan's dead body and tried to feel hopeful that they might still find him alive, though every step he took in the empty house persuaded him otherwise. He had to believe the link was not yet broken, to maintain the dream that one day he might reach out his hand and clasp his son's. And perhaps also because he had more respect for the man than he realised. In the kitchen nothing was out of place. The half-full cafetière was cold, in the sink there was one plate and a glass. The bathroom smelled of lavender and soap. Two towels were spread out, dry and a little rough.

He went back and sat down at the computers, his head whirling with theories and questions. Morvan had spent a dozen years investigating paedophile networks and missing children, he had insisted that they meet in person, and Morvan was not the sort of man who insisted without reason, he was not impulsive, quite the contrary, he was quick to dash false hopes, quick to remember that he had to stick to the facts, follow the evidence, take no shortcuts …

Morvan was not here, and he had not nipped out to buy cigarettes – which he got by the carton for free from a friend who worked in Customs. Vilar could not imagine why this man might have disappeared, still less who might stand to gain, unless he really had found an important lead. Besides, no-one knew whether he worked alone or in a team, or whether he shared information with officers who were still
on the force – something that would make his abduction, his death, pointless and deeply dangerous to anyone involved.

Unable to restrain himself, Vilar found a tissue and gently pressed
ENTER
on both keyboards. The hard drives whirred, and he heard the fans purring.

He felt his heart stop and lurch into his throat.

On an open document, written in huge letters, was the message:

I'VE GOT THE BOY COME AND GET HIM!

He jumped to his feet, backed away from the desk, then turned to look at the screen, reading and rereading these two lines as though some encoded meaning might suddenly be revealed. He stood in the middle of the room, gasping for breath, his mouth open, whispering his son's name over and over: “Pablo”, until his mouth was dry and he had to go to the kitchen and take a long drink from the tap. He had never felt so thirsty. He filled his mouth with water, spat it out, gulping more until he could not breathe.

When finally he stood up again, he felt faint and had to lean on the kitchen table.

“Pablo,” he whispered again as he trudged back to the computers. He felt as though his son were the prisoner of this message and for an instant was gripped by the sort of fantasy that children have when they imagine actors trapped inside the TV and want to prise off the screen to let them out. He reached a hand towards the desk and exhaled violently, realising that he had been holding his breath for some time.

He explored the hard drives. Nothing. Everything had been erased, including the encrypted files Vilar knew about. He stared at the Welcome screen, at the flock of sheep on a mountain slope. He slumped back in the chair and closed his eyes. To get Morvan's passwords, someone had tortured him, forced him to talk. Vilar glanced around him, looking for some sign of a struggle, some clue as to what might have happened. No. That was stupid. There would be nothing, of course.

Someone had meticulously planned all this. Someone who was no doubt plotting his next move. Suddenly, it occurred to Vilar that the room might be bugged, that they might be watching him, and he peered into the shadowy corners of the room, studied everything on the desk looking for any sort of recording device, and once again felt like a fool and realised that this was an obvious mistake. He listened, watched, trying to detect the slightest movement in the air, searching for some trace of the man who had been here, who had probably sat in the chair where he was sitting, hoping that a whiff of cigarette smoke, a smell of aftershave or sweat, might cause whoever had abducted Morvan and his secrets to materialise.

For a long time he sat motionless, barely breathing, doing what he had been doing for almost five years: longing for some ghost to appear, believing that sometimes the air can still quiver with a long vanished presence. Nothing.

He went outside and phoned Daras. She only listened, did not ask for any details, simply said she would contact a
commissaire
she knew in Poitiers, who would send some people over, that they would somehow square things later. She made him promise to keep her posted, said, “Take care,” and hung up.

An hour later a team turned up at the house, a young officer and two forensic officers from
l'Identité judiciaire
who wanted to know what they should be looking for.

Vilar explained everything: that the retired
gendarme
had disappeared some time between 9.00 a.m. and noon with all his research files, the evidence he had compiled over years, his work on Pablo's kidnapping; that they had agreed to meet this morning; that the hard drives had been wiped, including encrypted files; the message on the computer screen. The officer nodded, taking notes on a pad, asking no questions.

One of the forensics team was already pulling on his gloves, and the other was slipping on a pair of paper overboots.

“Can you tell me where exactly you've been in the apartment, what items you've touched?”

“The kitchen tap, I pressed the
ENTER
keys on both computers, but I used a Kleenex. I was careful not to contaminate the scene.”

The technicians set to work, suggesting that the policemen might like to step into the garden for a while. Vilar picked up the tissue once more, so that he could raise the blinds and open the French door. The officer held out a packet of cigarettes.