If Sandra de Melo was not dead, it was only because an old woman out walking her dog at about 1.00 a.m. had started screaming when she saw the guy kicking and punching something she dimly recognised as a human being, Only as she drew closer did she realise it was a woman. The yapping dog had dragged its arthritic mistress towards the hulking figure who was raining blows on the broken body that jerked and twitched but made no sound. The man had made his escape in a large estate car of unknown make, possibly grey – the old lady had very bad eyesight, and had been unable to make out anything at all of the number plate.
When the ambulance arrived, Sandra was lying curled up in a gutter, her head in a pool of blood. The paramedics quickly noticed a deep wound to the occipital bone and several fractures to the face – the nose, the jaw, the supraorbital arch – and diagnosed an intracranial haemorrhage. Her heart stopped beating but was restarted with a defibrillator. Vilar, who arrived just as she was being lifted into the ambulance, did not recognise the misshapen face with the bruised and swollen eyes, the split lip. He felt as though he were seeing Nadia as she had been on the day her body was found. Once more, the two women seemed determined to merge into one, but when he commented about this to Daras she shrugged and turned angrily away.
“I don’t give a damn about your disturbing insights, Pierre. I want this bastard stopped right now, do you understand? He kills, he murders victims, he kidnaps one of ours, shit, this guy didn’t get to be who he is in the space of a month. He has form, he’s got a record and I’m guessing not just for assault. Jesus Christ, I want a name at the very least, and before tomorrow night.”
She was trembling. For all the horrendous crime scenes the two of them had witnessed together, Vilar had never seen her so distraught. Without waiting for a response, she walked over to where Mégrier and his men were cordoning off the area and, since there was a whole team working the scene, Vilar decided to go home.
He had driven, oblivious to the chaotic tangle of cars around him, with the sensation of slowly emerging from the weight of this muggy night, as though stepping through a curtain of cobwebs which were impossible to brush away, that dusty glue that sticks to the hair, clings to the eyelids, the filthy hands, the futile gestures. He had slept for two or three hours with no dreams, no nightmares: perhaps, realising that he was exhausted, his little ghost had decided to leave him in peace for once. He had taken a barely lukewarm shower, drunk half a cafetière of coffee and polished off a packet of sponge fingers and felt almost fine by the time he went down to the garage to find himself in his car, out on the street, back in this city where he could no longer bring himself to look at anything. He needed a cigarette, and indeed would have liked another coffee and something to eat to go with it, he desperately wished he were anywhere but here, behind this steering wheel, and he tried not to think about the place he would like to be, because it was too far away and there was no way back.
He called the hospital. Sandra was still in a coma. The charge nurse in the intensive care unit, who spoke in a gentle, slightly weary voice, told him not to give up hope, that sometimes they saw catastrophic situations improve in a matter of hours. For the moment, the patient was stable. It was a promising sign that her condition had not deteriorated. They would have to wait. When she did not say anything else, Vilar suggested a time frame, though he knew it was pointless.
“Forty-eight hours?”
“Yes, that’s about right. Let’s say forty-eight hours. Well, if you’ll excuse me, someone’s calling on the other line.”
She had already hung up by the time he could say thank you. From what little he could guess of the extent of Sandra’s injuries, Vilar started weighing up her chances of surviving, and the long-term consequences if she did manage to pull through. He set the mobile down on the passenger seat and weaved between a parked bus and a truck that sat on the edge of a vast building site that had transformed this part of the ring road into a disaster area. He turned onto the cours de Médoc, slowing to a crawl in the early rush hour traffic. He called the station and discovered that Pradeau was still missing. They were moving heaven and earth to find him. “But given what he did to the girl, who knows what that fucker has done to Laurent. Everyone’s really worried,” Ledru said, a young lieutenant whom Vilar liked – somewhat nervous, but always reliable. “Otherwise, there are three of us combing through prison records for a con named Éric released between ’92 and ’94.”
“And?”
“So far, we’ve got seventy-six. We’re cross-referencing against the crimes they were banged up for.”
Vilar got him to promise he would call the minute they found something.
“Daras was looking for you five minutes ago,” Ledru said.
“I’m on the cours Balguerie. I’ll be there as soon as I can be. Tell her. She’ll know what I mean.”
The studio flat Nadia had used could not have been more than twenty square metres. Vilar sat in a corner watching the forensics team from l’Identité judiciaire taking prints and bagging evidence. At present, all he could hear was their surprise at the lack of any useable prints.
“Someone’s scrubbed this place spotless,” Lopez said after about five minutes, holding up a fingerprint brush. “We’ll see what we can get, but it doesn’t look promising. It’s like being in a sterile laboratory.”
The interviews with the neighbours had produced nothing: no-one had seen or heard anything. No particular comings and goings. The studio was on the first floor, making it easy to enter or leave without anyone else noticing. The police had found two champagne bottles in the fridge, a few snacks in the cupboards, two glass champagne flutes and some plastic tumblers and plates. In the bathroom, there were some clean towels. A tube of toothpaste but no toothbrush, some cotton buds and a dried-out bar of soap.
Vilar tried to get in touch with the owner of the building, and only reached his secretary. She tried to contact her boss on his mobile, Vilar could hear her talking on the other line, but could not understand what she was saying, perhaps because she had put her hand over the receiver or stood up to use her mobile. When she came back on the line, she told him that he could dial the number she was about to give him and Monsieur Vacher would answer straight away. Vilar rang off without saying goodbye and dialled the number.
He could hear machinery, men’s voices, banging, a plank falling, an engine starting up. A voice yelled down the line asking who was calling. When Vilar introduced himself, the man told him he was looking for a quieter place to talk because just now he was on a building site. And suddenly the racket faded and he stopped shouting.
Vilar explained to him that a studio flat in his building on the cours Balguerie had been rented by a woman engaged in prostitution, and that he needed more information because there was no record among Nadia Fournier’s papers of any rent having been paid.
“That’s probably because I never received any rent for that studio, monsieur.”
“May I ask why?”
“Because it hasn’t been rented for the past seven or eight months. I’ve been planning to do some work on it – the place is old-fashioned and doesn’t meet the typical standard of luxury in the area. So, to be honest, I’m wondering what you’re talking about.”
There was no trace of irritation in Monsieur Vacher’s tone. He sounded polite and surprised, and Vilar decided to be tactful because he sensed something was about to open up beneath his feet. Perhaps, as he expected, some kind of pit with an unpalatable truth at the bottom.
“I am in your studio right now, Monsieur Vacher, with two forensics officers, because the person who was living here was murdered two months ago. Which is another reason I find this story of a phantom tenant a little hard to credit.”
“She was murdered in the flat?” Vacher shrieked.
“No. But she was present in the flat on various occasions, as I said earlier.”
“This is dreadful. The poor girl … But she hadn’t been squatting, there was no forced entry? Nothing damaged?”
“The place is immaculate. There’s not so much as a fingerprint.”
“But I don’t get it. A.C.I. didn’t get in touch with me, something they usually do if they’ve rented out one of my properties. Honestly, I don’t …”
“A.C.I.? And who are they?”
“Aquitaine Conseil Immobilier. They’re reliable people, they manage all my properties. You have to understand, when you’re a property owner …”
“Thierry Lataste runs the company, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, he’s the managing director. Do you know him?”
“A little.”
Vilar cut short the conversation so he could calmly think things through. Before hanging up, Vacher expressed the hope that all this was not going to cause him any problems. Vilar reassured him, slipped the mobile back into his pocket and stared, without really seeing, at the two technicians packing away their equipment.
“We haven’t got much,” Lopez said. “Couple of hairs, half a thumbprint … We ran the forensics vacuum to pick up any trace evidence, but I tell you, I’d like the telephone number of their cleaning woman, I’d give her a couple of hours’ work around my house. Even cleaned the U-bend, if you can believe that.”
When they were gone, Vilar sat on the edge of the bed and looked around him at the banal décor: the wall at the head of the bed plastered with a huge poster of mountains, the thin, rough, royal blue carpet, the two armchairs upholstered in bottle-green velvet.
He stood up and covered the bed that his colleagues had unmade in order to run the vacuum cleaner. A telephone rang and rang somewhere in the building, but no-one answered. Outside the window he saw a small courtyard with a climbing rose. Virginia creeper covered one wall. Somewhere a pigeon was cooing. Vilar looked up at the misty sky where the sun was already beginning to swelter. The room was pervaded by a vague smell of dust, dirty laundry and other things he did not recognise. He tried to imagine how things would play out with Lataste, struggled to find the words that would shut him up, preferably in front of witnesses so he would be forced to back down. He called directory enquiries for the number of A.C.I. and dialled it to make sure that Lataste was there.
He was working in his glass-walled office which looked out onto five or six cubicles, divided with partitions, within which people were busy making money for the business. He recognised Vilar immediately, blushed and leapt to his feet to come and meet him, hand outstretched, a cardboard smile pasted on his face. The policeman was about to take out his I.D. when Lataste moved to stop him, assuring him that he recognised him, that there was no need, glancing around him, but Vilar ignored the gesture and flashed his warrant card. “Commandant Vilar, police,” he said, and felt a wave ripple around the office and in each cubicle voices dropped to a whisper or fell silent, the click of fingers on computer keyboards slowed.
Lataste led him into his office and closed the door. He offered Vilar a seat, sat down himself and the smile vanished from his face like a mask that had suddenly crumbled to dust.
“What’s going on?” he said.
He seemed genuinely worried. He was better at feigning panic than nonchalance and Vilar felt like wiping the stage make-up from his face.
“Did I hear you right?” he said. “You’re asking me what’s going on?”
“Of course! You show up here unannounced, let everyone know you’re with the police, trying to embarrass me a little more, so I think I’ve got the right to know why, don’t you?”
Vilar stared at him hard, at once puzzled and astonished. He did not know whether this guy had the nerve of a true gangster or whether he was completely reckless and stupid.
“Are you familiar with a studio apartment at 145 cours Balguerie belonging to Monsieur Jean-Philippe Vacher? I’m guessing you remember Nadia Fournier, with whom you had a relationship for several months and who was murdered early in June? Well, this is what’s going on: we’ve just discovered that Nadia was using that studio flat to meet clients, because as I’m sure you’re aware she frequently worked as a prostitute. And we discovered that she paid no rent for that studio flat because, apparently, it was provided to her by Aquitaine Conseil Immobilier. And since I suppose you are the only person at A.C.I. who knew her, I have inferred, somewhat simplistically I’ll grant you, that you may have, let’s say, committed a breach of normal practice in your profession and loaned this studio, located in a building managed by you, to Nadia, so that you could meet her there and so that she could more easily carry on her professional activities. Do you have any comment you would like to make? Have I made any mistakes, left anything out?”
He reeled off this long speech without pause, knowing that in doing so he was suffocating Lataste. The man had slumped back in his seat, arms clamped to the armrests, and was staring at the calendar hanging on the wall behind Vilar.
“Monsieur Lataste?”
“No, no mistake. It’s all true.”
He took a paperclip from the desk which he began bending and twisting.
“So what’s the problem?” he asked after a few seconds.
Vilar shivered. An ominous shudder ran down his back and through his limbs. He wanted to step around the desk and slap this son of a bitch. Or maybe smash his face. Violently. Leave him bruised and battered on the floor, blood streaming from his mouth, his nose broken. He took a deep breath then got to his feet and opened the door.
“The problem,” Vilar said in a loud, clear voice, “is that in the eyes of the law you are a pimp. To be more precise, you are the pimp of a murdered woman and that makes you an obvious suspect. And there’s more: I believe you lied to me during our first interview to conceal the fact you were implicated in this murder. That’s the problem. So now, you’re going to get up and come with me to the police station where I plan to detain you for questioning. Now, Monsieur Lataste, I’d be grateful if you could come with me without offering any resistance.”
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.”
“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.
When Lataste had finally left, and the office was silent once more, Vilar tried to call Daras but was told that she was on her way back to the station having stopped off at the court. As soon as he hung up, the telephone rang. It was Ledru.
“We’ve tracked down the wife. Well, when I say wife … They’re not married. Her name is Céline Bosc, she lives in Mérignac, at Résidence Paul-Éluard, Apartment 28, Block D.”
Vilar had the man’s name, an address, almost a whole family. He could see a figure begin to form around the mocking voice that had been hounding him; soon he knew he would put a face to the voice. He felt the man was close, almost within his grasp. It was a feeling he had had once before, in Paris while tailing a suspect in the métro, a serial rapist: Vilar was standing right behind him, less than two metres away, inhaling the clouds of cheap aftershave the suspect had a habit of wearing.
He reread the note he had jotted on the piece of paper: “I’m coming, you little shit, I’m coming.”