Talking to Ghosts (34 page)

Vilar took out his handcuffs and showed them to the man who got to his feet, deathly pale, his face glistening.

“Couldn't you spare me that?” he whispered.

Vilar gestured for him to put his hands behind his back.

“I could, but I don't want to. I don't trust you an inch and the only respect I owe you is that set down by law for the treatment of suspects.”

The man turned around and proffered his wrists. Vilar snapped the handcuffs shut.

When they got to the station, Vilar led Lataste to his office, empty at this hour, and handcuffed him to the wall, then went to ask where he might find Daras. He was told that she had rushed off to the quai de la Souys because the headless body of a woman had been discovered on the riverbank. Vilar remembered the body that had been found by a rambler by the river behind a shopping centre in Bègles. The woman, who was very young, had been decapitated, almost certainly with an axe given the deep impact wounds on her shoulders and upper back. They had still not managed to identify her. Daras had come to the conclusion that she was probably a prostitute from Eastern Europe, but their investigations among the pimps and the working girls in Bordeaux had led to nothing more than a handful of undocumented immigrants being deported, something even the requirements of an ongoing police inquiry had been unable to prevent.

Vilar found Lataste leaning against the wall next to the metal ring to which he was handcuffed, massaging his wrist with a grimace of pain.

“O.K.,” Vilar said. “Let's get this over with quickly because I think you've wasted enough of my time already. Question one: why did you lie to me the last time we spoke?”

“Because I was scared.”

“Scared?”

“Yes, scared. Do you never get scared?”

“No. Never. Now answer my question: why did you lie?”

“When I found out Nadia was dead, I knew my whole life could come crashing down. My wife, my kids … I knew I'd ruined everything and I was terrified of losing it all … I don't know … I was trying to put on a brave face, slip through the net maybe.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-six.”

“At thirty-six, you're still behaving like a kid who thinks that if he covers his eyes no-one can see him, is that it?”

Lataste looked down. He was still rubbing his wrists. Vilar got to his feet, removed the cuffs and offered him some water. He went to fill two cups from the water cooler humming in a corner of his office. Lataste drained his cup in one. He took two or three deep breaths, then tears began to roll down his cheeks. Vilar also drank, his throat felt dry and sandy, and he went back to the dispenser. Proffering another cup, he asked Lataste what was the matter.

“Nothing,” he said with some effort, swallowing hard. “Just that cold water. It's so simple, so good.”

Vilar observed him and had the distinct impression he was witnessing a man in free fall. He had seen men fall before, but never from such a height. A slow-motion plunge that he could not bring himself to think of as tragic. He let Lataste finish the cup of water and decided not to wait until this guy collapsed in on himself like those fierce galaxies that become black holes.

“Right now, you will certainly be charged with procuring, passively at least, since in the eyes of the law you were providing accommodation to someone working as a prostitute. Secondly, I think I can say officially you are a suspect in the murder of your lover Nadia Fournier. I have to agree with your observation that your life is completely fucked. Aggravated murder can get you fifteen years because, as it turns out, being her pimp is an aggravating factor in the crime. Do you understand?”

Lataste nodded.

“I know who killed Nadia,” he said so quietly, so quickly that Vilar, sitting up in his chair, had to ask him to repeat himself.

“His name is Éric Sanz. He's married. His wife's name is Céline, he has a daughter called Manon.”

Vilar picked up the phone and called Ledru.

“O.K., I think we've got him. Éric Sanz. S-A-N-Z, yes. Can you check that immediately? And put out a call for a Céline Sanz.”

He hung up. Lataste was now staring at him, his eyes still red.

“Do tell me about it,” Vilar said, “and be very careful what you say.” He did not know how to breathe to remove the weight pressing on his chest. His heart was pounding so hard that he could feel it in his spine.

“He's this guy, he kind of stalked her. She'd slept with him once but when she told him it was over, he wasn't having it. First thing I thought was that he was the one who had killed her. That's why I was scared.”

“He knew you? He was aware of your existence?”

“In theory, no. Nadia said she had never mentioned me to him. But with a guy like that you never know. He could have decided – I don't know – to cover his tracks, to get rid of anyone who could identify him, that kind of thing happens.”

“How did she come to mention him to you? I thought she had her life pretty neatly compartmentalised?”

“It's complicated … I … She knew his ex-wife, Éric had nothing to do with her anymore, and she and the kid were having a rough time of it. Nadia asked me if I could find the wife somewhere to stay because they were living in a trailer in Mérignac. She had a job – I think she worked as a cleaner at the airport. Since I've got a mate who works at Habitat Girondin, I gave him a call and he managed to sort something. His company had just evicted a family with two years' rent arrears in Mérignac, so as long as she was prepared to take the apartment as is, with no work done on it, he was prepared to let her have it straight away. And—”

“This mate's name?”

“Why do you want to know? You're not going to hassle him, are you?”

“Like I said, we cross-check everything. Mate's name?”

“Jérôme Fontan.”

Vilar wrote down the name on a piece of paper already criss-crossed with notes.

“What did Nadia tell you about this guy Sanz?”

“She said he was really violent, that he'd beaten her in the past … That he'd been banged up for it … For that kind of thing, I mean. She said he was a bit sadistic in his tastes. He liked to humiliate people, and when that wasn't enough, when he got pissed off about something, he'd lash out. And he'd got the idea into his head that he was going to take her away somewhere, some island, and run a bar or a restaurant, I don't remember. Some friend of his had money invested over there – Martinique, I think it was. He used to hassle her about that. She was completely petrified of him, she thought about leaving the area to get away from him, but it was difficult, what with her son. She managed to postpone this whole Martinique thing by saying she had to put her son first, and that seemed to work, Sanz didn't push it, but she knew it wouldn't last, that he'd always find some new way to try to persuade her. One day, he even told her that the kid was his son. It was another idea he got into his head. Apparently he wouldn't stop talking about the kid.”

Vilar tried to remember the face of the boy, Victor. He remembered the frail body lying in a hospital bed, the trembling figure standing next to the coffin as it rolled towards the crematorium furnace in the whirring silence. But no face appeared on the moving screen of memory.

“What did Nadia think about that? Did she think it was possible?”

“She never said anything to me. All I know is she got scared, she thought he was losing it, he was completely obsessed. I told Nadia I'd help her, told her I knew people all over the place and I could find her a place to live, even a job, in Brittany or Normandy for example, I've got a couple of friends in senior positions who would have been able to
pull some strings. But she wasn't sure. She was waiting until she'd saved enough money to leave and start over. Nadia liked to dream, she was always coming up with these hare-brained ideas. She thought it was possible to start your life over, to begin again from scratch. That's what she wanted for the kid …”

He trailed off, shook his head angrily, staring into space. He spoke of Nadia warmly, almost tenderly.

“How did you feel when you heard that she'd been killed?”

Lataste did not answer immediately. He snorted and shrugged.

“I was afraid, I think. Not so much for me, I mean, not for my own safety, but for the life I'd built with Mireille, my daughters … I knew it was the beginning of the end … That one way or another this whole affair would catch up with me.”

“So why make things worse by withholding evidence?”

“I don't know. I panicked. I was trying to plug the holes on a sinking ship.”

Vilar looked at the man slumped in the chair, hands folded in his lap, and remembered the arrogant executive who had welcomed him in his hallway that first time, who had tried to send him packing him like some vacuum cleaner salesman. He remembered the body in the morgue, and the man's impassiveness even in the face of the cold rage and the contempt of his wife and he felt an urge to grab him by the scruff of the neck and slam him against the wall just as he had that day in order to take him down a peg or two. He forced himself to take a deep breath, to stare at a poster on the wall in which an emerald river snaked through thick jungle, and he told himself that one day he would canoe through that lush vegetation. So he stifled the rage welling inside him and found the strength to say in a flat voice:

“If you'd said something sooner, a woman wouldn't be in a coma in intensive care right now, an officer with the
police judiciaire
would not have been abducted; instead, we know that Éric Sanz abducted them. And I can tell you right now, that if anything fatal happens to either of them, you'll pay for it, and you'd better hope you don't run into me in a corridor, or even in jail, because I'll smash your fucking face. Do you
understand? Doesn't matter that I'm police, doesn't matter about the law, I'll make you pay for your lies and your silence and I'll do everything in my power to have you formally charged with procuring, for obstruction of justice and for sheltering a criminal, since by your silence, as you yourself just admitted, you protected him. And if either of the people I've just mentioned dies, we can add manslaughter. You were scared you might fuck up your life? Congratulations, job done.”

“Why are you talking to me like that? What did I ever do to you?”

“To me? Nothing. I don't give a fuck. No-one can hurt me anymore. As for the rest, I just told you.”

Vilar stared at Lataste who was staring at nothing, his eyes fixed on the clutter of notices pinned to the wall. He was slumped in the chair, his shoulders drooping, his suit suddenly seemed too big for him.

He glanced at his watch.

“I'd like to call home. I know I don't have the right, but …”

Vilar pushed the telephone across the desk, and Lataste dialled a number.

“Clem? It's Papa. How's my big girl? What did you have for dinner? Was it nice? And how was school today?”

He stared out of the window as he listened to his daughter's answers, a smile on his face, with the slightly inane expression of a zealot talking to God. He asked his daughter how her little sister was, said sweet, silly things and all Vilar could hear was the catch in his voice, something his daughter clearly heard too because at one point Lataste had to reassure her that he was fine, that everything was fine, then had to admit that Maman would explain everything. “Can you put Maman on the phone for me? Yes, darling. Big kiss … Yes, I promise.”

He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and shifted the receiver to his other ear. There was a tightness in his voice now that choked the air out of the end of his sentences, the words faded and he had to clear his throat and start over.

“Was it Caroline who called you? Yes … since eleven o'clock. Here at the police station, you know, opposite the skating rink. Yes, that's right. His name is Commandant Vilar. Yes … Call Sylvain, see if he
knows any criminal lawyers, because he works mostly in corporate and company law … I don't know. No … It's not good … I've got myself involved in a nasty business with that girl who was …”

He fell silent. Listened to what his wife was saying. He closed his eyes, nodding his head regularly every time another blow hit home.

Vilar remembered the small, hard inscrutable face of Lataste's wife, the strained jaw muscles.

“Slag me off if it makes you feel better, what do you want me to say? But there's something else … apparently, because I didn't tell the c—” He hesitated, then went on, “… didn't tell the police everything, a whole bunch of other shit happened. It's a complete clusterfuck … Yeah, all because I didn't say anything … Of course I've told them everything now. There's nothing I can say to defend myself, Mireille … When will I get out? When do you think I'll get out?”

He was breathing hard through his nose, his eyes filled with tears.

“Listen to me, Mireille, listen to me … You hate me, you despise me, fine, I can understand that, but don't tell the girls I'm a bastard, they're only little, let them keep their father more or less intact, I might be a swine, but I'm not a complete bastard. Please don't tell them that …”

He listened to her answer. His eyes and his nose were streaming, he did nothing to dry his face so that he looked like a small child so distraught it becomes little more than a paroxysm of tears and snot. “I … I love you … I love you all,” he stammered and slowly hung up, his hand still resting on the receiver, whimpering. Vilar told him to calm down, then called an officer to take him to the cells because he had seen enough, had enough of listening to this guy whine about himself, about his fucked-up life, his ruined career, what his kids would think of him, and because Vilar knew that people often feel self-pity because they are afraid to die or because they are forced to live, and we see ourselves weeping and sometimes it appeals to us, this tragic stature we think we attain in such situations, as though finally we have found our place in the endless, shifting vortex of the tribulations of this world.