Talking to Ghosts (29 page)

He turned off the T.V., irritated by the very things that had drawn him to the film. The plot seemed hackneyed now, the scenery grandiose. He got up and stood for a few moments in the middle of the room, arms hanging by his sides, unsure, his mind a blank. He ran a finger over the picture frame from which Pablo smiled out, his head resting on Ana's shoulder.

“I'm here, I'm right here with you.”

Early in the afternoon, he managed to speak to Daras, who informed him that Sandra de Melo was nowhere to be found. Her sister had indeed spoken to her on the telephone the night before, but she noticed nothing out of the ordinary. The boy had not turned up at school.

“She can't have disappeared into thin air, not with a kid,” Daras said. “She has to resurface.”

Resurface. Archimedes' principle as life force.

“Obviously. Though that would require the people who are hiding her to let us know. If they're as scared as she is, they won't say a word. We've seen it before. They'll think they can protect her better than we can.”

“Well, we haven't done such a great job up until now. We just have to hope this guy isn't planning to destroy everything in his wake. You saw what he did to the Sofiane kid last night. And still we've got nothing on him. We've been chasing a shadow for the past two months.”

“And the shadow is chasing me. But I'd like to see exactly whose shadow it is.”

“The two-man theory?”

“Laurent doesn't go for it.”

Daras sighed.

“Laurent doesn't go for much these days. Things are bad with him just now.”

“I think his mother's on the way out.”

“Yeah. He mentioned something about it once,” Daras said. “He doesn't confide in me. I'm just some stupid bloody woman.”

They said nothing for a few seconds.

“So what are you up to?” Daras said eventually. “You getting some rest?”

Vilar hesitated.

“I'm staying put. Though I feel fine. I'll be in tomorrow. I'll call you later.”

They hung up at the same time. Sandra would turn up, sure. Vilar thought about the little clown. She would not be able to stop herself. It was almost 4.00 p.m. He went into the kitchen to drink what was left of the coffee. The sky was leaden – he had not noticed while he was in the living room, where the shutters were closed, but now through the kitchen window he could see the wind whipping at the trees.

He pulled on a jacket with lots of pockets, slipping a blister pack of tablets into one of them in case the pain came back. He was about to leave when he took out his mobile and called Ana. His heart pounded a little as he listened to it ring. The click made him start.

He could leave a message after the beep.

Vilar reminded himself that it was August. Holidays. Other climes. She had said something about Tuscany.

Traffic was light on the boulevard and he could easily keep an eye on what was going on behind. Several times he changed his speed to see whether anyone was tailing him, but there was nothing. He parked fifty metres from the block where Sandra de Melo lived and walked, taking a roundabout route. He rang the bell for the caretaker, flashed his warrant card and demanded that he hand over the keys. Dressed in shorts and vest with a pair of canvas slippers on his feet, the man said nothing, did not even respond to Vilar's greeting, simply gave him a suspicious, hostile look. As he went back into his apartment to collect the keys, a wolfhound – or maybe it was a Malinois – came and sat in the doorway, ears pricked, nose to the ground, staring up at Vilar with eyes that burned in the half-light with an unsettling golden glow. He could hear a T.V. somewhere. An American crime drama. The sirens of a police car.

“He's not generally dangerous,” the caretaker said without much conviction, nudging the dog with his foot. “Depends on the person.”

He held the keys out to Victor who thanked him and turned on his heel. He had already gone down a couple of steps when he heard the caretaker's voice:

“You planning to be long?”

He turned. The man had spoken through the half-closed door.

“I don't know. Why? Do you really need to know?”

Vilar went back up to the landing. He thought he saw the caretaker ease the door close. The dog poked its nose between its master's legs.

“I thought you didn't want to talk to me,” Vilar said. “Or that you didn't like the look of me – you didn't even fucking say hello … And me, I don't like to impose.”

“It's not that,” the caretaker said. “It's just, you get so you don't trust anyone. And it was weird, that kid getting himself killed. I chucked them out of here, you know, him and his mates, twenty times I threw them out, the little wankers. Sometimes they'd get wound up, call me a dickhead, threaten to cut my wife's throat, or my mother's, threaten to fuck them, it depended … That sort of drivel. Twelve years I've lived here. I watched them grow up, every one of them. They don't scare me, they're not so tough, but when they're together they think they're big men, I don't know, they get arrogant, try to start laying down the law and I'll tell you there's been times when I wished I could get a shotgun and sort them out.”

“That bad? Did they threaten people?”

“Not really … But they were always hanging around, smoking weed and making smart remarks, and over time people feel intimidated, they're afraid to walk past, and the more people are scared of them the more they think they're gangsters. That's what they used to say, the little bastards: ‘We be gangstas' …”

The man paused, because this long speech had left him breathless.

“Obviously I feel sorry for him, and for his parents – they're good people, they worked hard for their kids. The sisters are both at college. One of them is going to be a nurse. The kid didn't deserve what happened to him. A good kick up the arse, yeah, a clip round the ear, but not that …”

“And not someone coming after him with a shotgun like you were suggesting.”

“No, of course not. That was just the anger talking … Sometimes you just have to grin and bear it.”

The man had opened the door a little wider. The dog had disappeared.

“In any case, he didn't die because he was hanging around doing fuck all,” Vilar said.

“He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He ran into a man we were already looking for … I don't suppose you saw anything unusual? I realise you've been asked that already, but you never know, if something came back to you …”

The man shook his head.

“No, nothing. But don't think I spend all day hanging out on the stairs watching people come and go. I'm responsible for taking out the bins, doing minor repairs, looking after the grounds. It's a full-time job! But the little woman on the third floor, the one with the handicapped son, I knew her. She was really sweet, very shy, and she was a pretty little thing too.”

He glanced furtively behind him as though some jealous shrew might suddenly appear and claw his eyes out.

“You don't know if she had any visitors, people who came to see her?”

“As I said, I've got too much work to be meddling in the tenants' private lives. Unless I'm asked or unless someone complains, I keep my nose out, I say good morning, I say goodnight and that's all. I know what goes on in my world, I've got a keen eye, but I'm not the type to go playing detective … I mean … sorry …”

“That's O.K., we wouldn't expect you to. I'm going to take a look round her flat. Don't worry if I'm a while. I'll bring the keys back to you.”

He walked up the stairs, watched by the caretaker, who could not seem to bring himself to close the door. Once in her apartment, he headed straight for the kitchen: as he expected, the clown was no longer lying under the table between the legs of the chairs. He went into the
boy's room but could see nothing different there. A quick tour of the other rooms gave him no more information: Sandra had been inconspicuous, stealthy in invading her own privacy. She had to be nearby. Probably upstairs with a neighbour. He felt like calling for backup, instigating another door-to-door, finding her so he could talk to her, so he could get her to talk, get her to tell him whatever it was the other guy had been trying to find out so as to be one step ahead of him; but the thought of his colleagues showing up, all that manpower combing every floor, sparking panic across the whole estate, was not bearable. He would have to play things out alone this time. No-one knew he was here apart from the caretaker who, from what Vilar could tell, was not involved. Which probably meant that for the first time in this investigation he was acting without the killer's knowledge.

He flicked off the light and sat in an armchair in the living room. Here, in spite of the loud pulsing of his heart and crackle of the nervous electricity he could feel coursing through his limbs, alternately searing and freezing, he was overcome by a torpor that kept him floating on the surface of sleep, in the shallows where dreams come skimming and where, of course, Pablo appeared and spoke to him. Pablo's voice was clear and bright, and when Vilar found the words to answer him, his own voice was tremulous with sobs.

He was ripped from this desolate happiness by the soft creak of a door being opened above or below him, and he held his breath for a long moment in the half-light, not knowing the time, refusing to check his watch, then he drifted off again, vainly trying to reconstruct the heart-rending illusion of the dream.

He was woken with a start by something moving. At first he thought he was at home in his bedroom, but he quickly came to himself. He did not know how long he had slept. It looked dark outside: no light filtered through the shutters. He could not possibly have slept for five hours. The darkness was such that he could not read his watch.

He had heard nothing, yet he was convinced there was someone in the apartment, perhaps even in the room. He sat, motionless, breathing through his mouth.

Behind him. Sitting in this armchair, there was nothing he could do.

When the light was flicked on it felt as though he had been electrocuted: his heart stopped, his brain was little more than a feverish pulp. Sandra de Melo screamed, her finger still on the light switch. She was deathly pale and stared at him terrified and gasping for breath.

He stood up, tried to calm his nerves, fumbled for words. Here he was standing before the woman he had come to find and yet, dazed with sleep, he did not know what to do.

She took a step towards him.

“What the hell are you doing in my flat? I thought you were him!”

Her shrill, hoarse voice cracked. Her tousled hair framed a face that looked drawn, the eyes ringed with dark circles.

“Jesus!” he said.

“Don't scream at me like that. I've been looking for you, and looking for him. Where did you get to? What's with your little game of hide-and-seek?”

“Oh? You think I'm the one playing hide-and-seek? So what are you playing at? I'm betting you have no right to be here.”

“Calm down …”

“I will not calm down! That guy the other night, he was coming here to kill me, wasn't he? He slit that boy's throat just like that, just because the kid got in his way! Bloody hell, that's a good enough reason not to sleep soundly in your bed, don't you think? And what about my son? Did you even stop to think about him?”

He let her finish. He felt the knife wound throbbing in his back. He could hear the two of them breathing, hear as they struggled to swallow. Sandra sighed.

“I came to pick up some things for José. Is that O.K.? They're in his room.”

She did not give him time to answer. She walked down the corridor and he followed her. She rummaged through a wardrobe, took out some T-shirts and some underwear, which she stuffed into a plastic bag.

“What do you want to know?”

“Where have you been hiding?”

She closed the wardrobe door.

“I'm thirsty. There's cold water in the fridge. You want some?”

She took out two cans of sparkling water and offered one to Vilar.

They opened them without a word and drank in long gulps. Sandra sat down, wedged between the table and the wall behind her, and Vilar lowered his stiff body into a chair.

“Now that's what I call thirsty,” Sandra said, “but to answer your earlier questions, I've been staying upstairs with a neighbour, Madame Fadlaoui. José's asleep right now. He knows her, he's calm when he's around her.”

“And he has his clown …”

“You thought about that? You noticed I forgot it when I left?”

“Who is this guy you're so terrified of?”

“His name's Éric. He's the one who killed Nadia.”

“How do you know that? What's his surname, this Éric? Do you know where we can find him? You were happy to feed me Thierry Lataste's name without worrying whether that might make him a suspect. Were you trying to confuse me? Why should I believe you now?”

“Because I'm telling the truth. And I didn't lie to you about Thierry. I just told you about him, and left you to make up the rest. I didn't tell you about Éric because I was scared of him, that's all.”

“Éric what? Is that even his name?”

“Yes. At least I think so … Just Éric. Nadia used to talk about him and that's what she called him and it never occurred to me to ask her his surname or his address. He's not exactly the kind of guy you would want to drop in on. But he killed Nadia, I know that much. I've no proof, but I know it's true. He's sick in the head. A vicious thug who can't control himself. She was terrified of him. He wouldn't let her go. Told her he was in love with her. He wanted them to go off and live in the Antilles together … I don't know, he was planning to open a restaurant, or manage one, or something – I don't remember. It was some idea he had. But Nadia, she wouldn't even talk about it. And then recently, he got it into his head that the kid was his.”