Vilar slept through the night only to be woken, sweating, heart hammering, by a nightmare, the same nightmare he always had: someone was ringing his doorbell and he ran to open it, but his legs refused to respond, he could see the dark door at the far end of the hall, quivering from the intense ringing, he choked with fear at the thought of what would happen, panting as he tried in vain to run, and then suddenly he would find himself on the threshold, the door would open, and a sobbing man would place Pablo’s lifeless body in his arms and vanish into thin air, and Vilar would hear himself crying out as he hugged his dead son close, but when he finally looked down the face was not that of his son, the features faded, became blurred, anonymous, though in his mind he knew that it was Pablo, my son, my son, Ana, come quick, help me, but Ana did not come because the nightmare always stopped on that moment of utter isolation, that dizzying drifting through space, that howl as white-hot metal seared the terrible truth into his brain: Pablo is dead, Pablo is dead.
Vilar wiped away the tears streaking his face with the back of his hand and glanced at the clock radio. He waited for his pounding heart to be still, trying, as he always did, to picture the face of the man from the nightmare, who vanished as he howled with grief, a face that seemed ordinary, familiar, a mask at once recognisable and impossible to make out. But the pale screen of the ceiling remained blank as the morning light slowly crept over it, stealing through chinks in the shutters.
He got up. He did what people usually do in the morning, he did it unthinkingly, motivated only by the need to get moving, to get through another day. He wondered when these “heart-rending dawns” would end, tried to remember where that phrase came from, a poem maybe, something he had studied in some other life. Not his early-morning life, jolting and creaking like some rickety train along a disused railway line. Sometimes he reached for the communication cord, the emergency button that would stop the train, but could never quite bring himself to press it.
Courage or cowardice? He had weighed these words, measured their elusiveness, endlessly rehashed this fruitless argument. In the end he had decided to act according to his preference, or his utter lack of preference. To act on instinct.
He basked in the sun out on the balcony that morning, sitting on a plastic chair, sipping a cup of coffee. He listened to the birds trilling and rustling the leaves of the trees in the park. The heat was sufficiently mild that he closed his eyes and surrendered to it. The moment was sufficient unto itself: it evoked no past, aroused no feeling of nostalgia, and the longer he could drag it out the longer he could stave off the future.
The phone rang. Vilar felt himself rudely torn from this luminous interlude. Stepping back into the dark apartment, he could hear nothing but a faint buzzing.
“It’s Daras. We’ve tracked down the three people involved in the train station stabbing. They’re at 25 rue des Douves. We’re meeting up outside the police station at Les Capucins. Half an hour. Get your arse in gear.”
He felt a tingle beneath his skin. That nervous electricity, those galvanic shocks that shot down to his fingertips. He stood motionless, staring at the telephone, savouring this feeling, his eyes closed, massaging his temples with his fingertips, then he managed to get ready within five minutes. His movements felt easy, lithe, confident. He turned away from the window and all its pointless light.
The police station at Les Capucins, next to the covered market, looked like a matchbox laid on its side. A squat, narrow, brown building, it was singularly ugly, the windows conspicuously barred.
As he drew up beside the cars already parked there, Vilar imagined the possibility of the three duty officers having to withstand a siege some night, remembering a film he had seen years ago, John Carpenter’s “Assault on Precinct 13”, because the station’s layout and its surroundings lent themselves to that sort of sordid, violent scenario. The first man he saw as he got out of his car was taking a pump-action shotgun from the boot of a Peugeot and checking that it was loaded. His name was Garcia, and he wore a bulletproof vest. Vilar abandoned any attempt to consult his increasingly selective memory for the man’s first name – Didier, Denis? Or maybe Gérard? What did it matter, he thought, and shook Garcia’s hand.
“Is it war? Have they found Bin Laden?”
Garcia screwed up his mouth.
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
Ever since the destruction of New York’s Twin Towers, Garcia had made a personal crusade of tracking down terrorists. He saw himself as a soldier in the war between good and evil, between Western values and barbaric obscurantism. His voice took on a tragic quality whenever the subject was mentioned: Western civilisation was at stake, and he was not about to allow people to joke about such things. Rumour had it he had applied for a transfer to the intelligence services, the R.G. or the D.S.T., so that he could join the grown-up version of hide-and-seek, and jokers would ask him when he planned to take the entrance exam for the C.I.A. Vilar laid a hand on his shoulder.
“Relax, pal, and take it easy on the ammo.”
He spotted Daras talking on her car phone and walked over. She hung up and flashed him a half-smile.
“Glad you could make it. Hope I didn’t get you out of bed?”
“No. I was drinking coffee on my balcony, listening to the birds singing, that kind of shit. It was really sunny.”
She looked at him suspiciously. Unconvinced.
“Marianne, I was having a moment, O.K.? I was almost happy.”
A police radio crackled in her pocket. She brought it to her ear and listened, nodding.
“Game on.”
They piled into two cars. Daras, Vilar and a lieutenant from Galand’s squad in a clapped-out 306, the others in a brand-new Renault estate. It took only a few seconds to arrive in front of 25 rue des Douves. Two cars from the G.I.G.N. Special Ops unit pulled up at the same time and officers in combat gear jumped out: some took up positions with backs flat against the front of the building, others crouching in the hallway, waiting for orders.
As he got out of the car, Vilar noticed that the street was cordoned off at both ends and swarming with officers. Pradeau appeared out of nowhere, carrying a gun.
“One of the guys has a record for aggravated assault and possession of a firearm,” he said. “It was Daras who insisted we come tooled up. You’re not carrying?”
Vilar pushed back the flap of his jacket.
“No, I’ve got nothing. Just this. At least this way people will know who I am.”
He took a police armband from his pocket and slipped it over the sleeve of his jacket.
The apartment was on the first floor. They plunged into the dark hallway, Daras leading the way, as usual. Two men in helmets carrying a battering ram ran past her, and everyone else moved away from the entrance and out of the line of fire. The apartment door splintered like a Chinese paper screen and Garcia disappeared inside, waving his gun, kicking over furniture and roaring “Police!” The others following him spread out through a dark flat, stumbling over the junk strewn across the floor: chairs, clothes, glasses, bottles. The place reeked of dope and stale sweat, of mildew and smelly feet. A voice shouted “Light!”, someone threw open a shutter with a loud bang, and sunlight flooded into a living room looking like a rubbish tip, piled with pizza boxes, Chinese takeaway boxes, beer cans, and empty wine bottles. The ashtrays were overflowing with cigarette butts and the remains of spliffs. Hunkering down amid the chaos, an officer started to make an inventory.
They found the three suspects in the bedrooms, in bed – alone or accompanied – together with two others. They identified the girl who had been spotted at the crime scene by her short orange hair. When they asked her to stand up, the hulking skinhead she was snuggled up to hurled himself at the two policemen trying to prise them apart, and the ensuing tussle amid the sweaty sheets was swiftly concluded by a rifle butt to the recalcitrant thug’s face. The girl yelled something about making a formal complaint about police brutality, and one of the officers mockingly suggested she might like to get some clothes on first. Hands cuffed behind his back, her self-appointed bodyguard was left sprawled naked on the bed; someone would see to his bloody, broken nose later.
The two male suspects offered no resistance. The girl found in the bed of Jonathan Caussade, the man suspected of stabbing Kevin Labrousse, was a bottle blonde, something that was immediately apparent when she leapt out of bed, fighting mad, calling the policeman who told her not to move a “fucking cunt” and hoarsely spewing a torrent of abuse until Daras told her to shut her hole and instructed her to be taken out into the corridor and cuffed to a cast-iron radiator. Caussade simply fell back on the pillow, his palms turned towards the ceiling.
The last suspect burst into in tears and, lying flat on his stomach, his face buried in the pillow, the barrel of a gun pressed to the back of his neck, he sobbed that he hadn’t done nothing, that it was all Jonathan’s fault, that he’d tried to calm him down, that Carole would corroborate his story. Without even being asked, he gave them his name: Marc Chauvin, nicknamed Marco.
“You got a record?” Pradeau said.
“Yeah, had a bit of a run-in with the drugs squad, but I’m done with that shit now.”
“You can tell us all about it later,” Pradeau said. “Now shift your arse and get some clothes on. And don’t try anything stupid.”
The guy nodded, staring fearfully at the gun pointed at him, and, snuffling, started picking up the clothes scattered around the bed.
A team of officers turned out the wardrobes, turned over the mattresses, raising clouds of dust that made everyone choke, so they opened the other windows and sunlight flooded in, thick with specks of powdered gold.
Vilar was rummaging through an old sideboard when he suddenly stopped and listened.
“Quiet, everyone!”
Garcia, who was holding a bag of grass, stared at him in surprise. Loud voices still came from the bedrooms.
“Everybody! Shut the fuck up!”
A child was crying. Vilar turned pale and stepped away from the sideboard, listening for the kid’s sobs in the sudden silence. They had searched all the rooms. The sound was not coming from the apartment.
“It’s coming from across the hall, from the flat opposite,” someone said. “Someone’s banging on a door, or a wall.”
Vilar stepped out onto the landing and went over to the closed door, pressed down on the handle and was surprised to find it unlocked.
The sobbing was louder now. It was coming from behind one of the two doors he could just make out in the darkness. He pushed the door to his right: it was a kitchen, but the chaos and the filth were such that it was a moment before he could take it in, he had never seen the like of it before. The smell, which he had not noticed at first, almost made him retreat. The sickly, almost sweet stench caught in his throat, making his gorge rise. The smell of rotting meat and rotting vegetables. A dozen bloated bin bags were piled up under the window; one had burst and was oozing a thick, brownish liquid like toffee. There was washing-up piled in the sink, on the gas cooker and on the kitchen table, one small corner of which remained relatively clear and was set with a bowl, a packet of biscuits and box of sugar. Before he closed the door, he heard the brigadier push open the front door and cough, offering to open a window to air the place.
The living room at the end of the corridor was in darkness. Vilar groped for a switch, turned on the light, and noticed three or four large boxes containing televisions, stacked in a corner right behind the T.V., and various other boxes that looked to contain computers and D.V.D. players. On a sideboard, in a red frame, was a photograph of the girl with orange hair, cradling a baby. At the far end of the room was a Marilyn Manson poster, pinned to a black door. Vilar stepped around the battered leather sofa, passed the coffee table, on which were two beer cans and a nearly empty gin bottle. He was surprised at how tidy this room was compared to the general squalor.
The black door was locked. He looked around for a key but found nothing. The crying stopped as soon as he rattled the doorknob.
“Don’t be frightened, we’re coming to find you.”
He wanted to break the door down, but he was afraid he might scare the child on the other side. A noise behind him made him start. Turning around, he saw Daras standing in the middle of the living room sniffing the neck of the gin bottle.
“What the hell are you up to? Where is this kid?”
He did not answer, he simply strode past past her and crossed the landing to the flat opposite.
The girl with orange hair was sitting facing Garcia, who was taking notes.
“Name’s Carole Picard. She’s twenty-four.”
Vilar grabbed the girl by the scruff of her T-shirt and pulled her to her feet. She screamed and called him a fat fucker. He dragged her into the narrow hallway. Her hands were still cuffed behind her back. She tripped on an empty bottle and she fell to her knees, crying out in pain and shock, but Vilar did not turn around, did not let go. He hauled her across the landing, kicking and screaming. Daras blocked his path.
“Jesus, Pierre. Take it easy!”
Vilar looked her in the eyes, but did not see her.
“Let me deal with this. Don’t bust my balls, Marianne. There’s a kid all alone in that room.”
She stood aside to let him pass, still dragging the girl who had managed to scrabble to her feet.
“Open it,” he said as they stood in front of the door.
She twisted her hands behind her back.
“And how exactly am I supposed to do that?”
He uncuffed her and told her to make it quick. He watched as she shifted a pile of magazines and retrieved a Yale key.
Together they stepped into the murky room, lit only by a small bedside lamp with a shade decorated with cartoon characters. An acrid smell filled the air. He saw a potty beside the bed.
And on the bed, hugging her knees, sat a dark-haired girl, about five years old, maybe six. Her black hair fell across her face and her eyes shone in the half-light. She stared at the two grown-ups curiously, without apparent fear. Snot had dried on her upper lip, and her eyes were wet with tears.
“It’s O.K.,” the girl with orange hair said. “Maman is here. It’s all fine, sweetheart.”
The girl got off the bed and trotted over to her mother and allowed herself to be picked up, made a fuss of, closing her eyes, a vague smile on her lips. Vilar looked away as they kissed and cuddled. Then the girl broke off and put the child down.
“Are you hungry? Maman will make you breakfast.”
“Are you taking the piss?” Vilar said.
Carole Picard turned as though she had forgotten he was there.
“Are you taking the piss?” he said again, his voice choking at the back of his throat. “I don’t think you have quite understood the situation, mademoiselle.”
He managed get the words out, but the effort left him breathless, almost trembling with rage.
The girl drew herself up to her full height, she looked defiant.
“Are you going to stop me making breakfast for my kid? Is that it? What right have you got? Is there a law against a mother giving her daughter something to eat?”
She didn’t see Vilar’s hand coming. He grabbed her under the chin and slammed her against the wall, banging her head.
“Now listen, you little slag: you better calm down, and quick, because you’re about to make me seriously angry. You leave this little girl alone, locked in a room with a potty, while you go and get off your head in the flat next door, and to listen to you, you’d think you were the perfect mother! Are you planning to make breakfast sitting on a bin bag in that shit-tip of a kitchen? And all the hi-fi gear next door, I suppose that’s her Christmas present? Don’t take me for a mug, or I swear I’ll deck you. The way I see it, the only reason you gave birth to this kid was to be rid of the weight, and you’ve treated her like an animal ever since.”
He said all this in a low growl, his hand still squeezing her neck, oblivious to the fact the young woman was having difficulty breathing. The little girl rushed to her mother, hugging her legs, wailing with terror.
Vilar felt hands on his shoulders, on his arms, pulling him away, forcing him to let go, he heard voices, among them Daras’ telling him to cool it, not to manhandle a witness. He took a few steps back, out of breath, and roughly shook off the hands of the others still holding him. Daras handcuffed Carole again and she was led away by two officers.
“Michel! Call the procureur’s office and the brigade des mineurs. Tell them you’re bringing in a child. And get me a car.”
She pulled up a chair and sat down close to the little girl who was still standing, petrified and silent, in the middle of the room amid the forest of legs of the motionless and now silent police officers.
“We’ll look after you. Your maman has to come with us so we can ask her some questions. What’s your name?”
The little girl looked at the gun one of the policemen was still holding.
“Could you give us some space, please?” Daras said quietly to the policeman, jerking her chin towards his weapon.
The man left without a word. Daras brushed a lock of hair from the girl’s face.
“What’s your name, sweetie?”
“Manon.”
“And how old are you, Manon?”
“I’m five.”
A female officer came in, taking off her cap.
“I can take care of her, if you like. We’ve got a free car. They’ll give her something to eat back at the station. I’ve worked with them before.”
Daras started to explain to the little girl what was going to happen. Vilar left the room, his head buzzing and filled with cotton wool. He crossed the landing and went back into the living room where his colleagues were collecting the spoils of their search: fifty grams of weed, a dozen rocks of crack, two hunting knives and an Astra revolver with no ammunition. The five suspects were sitting on the sofa, they did not move, did not speak to each other, did not look at anything, seemingly indifferent to what was going on around them. Only Carole Picard looked up and shot at Vilar a look filled with hatred to which he responded with a shrug.
He found himself suddenly useless and drained. He went out onto the landing and started down the stairs, dazzled by the solid slab of sunlight carved by the door onto the street.
“Pierre!”
Daras’ voice. Vilar kept walking, squinting as he came into the harsh sunlight. It was almost 11.00 a.m. He fumbled in his pockets for cigarettes, but he had left them at home. He saw a gendarme standing nearby light up and was going over to bum one when Daras’ voice caught up with him.
“Here,” she said, holding out a pack of cigarettes.
She was smoking herself. He was surprised, and gave her an ironic smile.
“You’ve started again?”
“Too right. Bought them last night. I’m allowing myself a cancer break.”
“Not a bad idea. That way you get used to the beast and you won’t be so shaken when it shows up.”
“Yeah, and then what? Shit …”
They smoked in silence. Daras calmly turned her face towards the sun.
“Is that it, then? Have you calmed down?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. You should have let me put the fear of God into that bitch. Maybe she might start to understand.”
“You understand everything, do you?”
Vilar shook his head, flicked his cigarette into the distance.
“What about the kid she kept locked up, do you think she understands? What are we supposed to tell her?”
“Her mother …”
“Mother? I’m not sure the word really applies.”
Daras blew the smoke far out in front of her and looked him in the eye.
“As I was saying, the mother said that one of the guys had a thing about the kid, which is why she kept her locked up while …”
“While she was getting her leg over in the neighbours’ apartment. Model fucking parent. Why don’t we give her a medal?”
Daras looked around and sighed, tight-lipped. The muscles in her cheeks twitched.
“I never said she was a model parent, I’m not stupid. But she’s still the girl’s mother, and I don’t suppose she got to be a mother all by herself. Did you stop to think about the father?”
She was standing close to Vilar, talking into his face. He stared back defiantly.
“She told us everything, because she’s terrified of her child being taken into care. The father was her boyfriend at university. She wasn’t exactly an innocent, a bit of a rock chick, and the guy was immature. When he found out she was pregnant, he was thrilled. Refused to let her have an abortion, threatened to leave her if she did. She believed him, she kept the baby. The little fucker showed up to the maternity ward just once. She never saw him again. He went back to his parents in Brive. A practising Catholic, with a degree in politics and a clean-cut image. He’ll probably be a cabinet minister before he’s thirty. After he left, the girl fell out with her parents and she had a tough time bringing up her kid. That’s the story. I’m not sure your macho morality lessons are appropriate.”
Vilar shook his head.
“The kid was locked up all by herself. She was scared stiff. There’s no excuse for that.”
“I’m not making excuses. I’m just telling you how it is. We’re police officers, not judges. Especially not in cases like this. We collared three fuckwits who stabbed and killed a random stranger. That’s what we’re paid for. But when it comes to her child, it’s not my job to judge that girl – and it’s not yours.”
Vilar was about to say something, but Daras put a hand on his arm:
“You have to stop losing it every time you come across some kid who’s had a tough life, otherwise one of these days you won’t be able to do your job at all.”
An officer came over and said they were taking the suspects down to the station. Daras checked her watch, swore under her breath, she had a ton of paperwork to get through that would probably keep them busy well into the evening.
Minutes later the police cars that had cordoned off the street since dawn had disappeared. Two officers stayed to keep an eye on the forensics team as they gathered up the evidence.
Caussade quickly confessed to the stabbing, but justified his actions because the victim, Kevin Labrousse, had been slow to give him a cigarette. Besides, he said, he had been up all night drinking. When asked if he had been aware that his actions might have fatal consequences, Caussade did not seem to understand the question, and when Pradeau, who was leading the interrogation, rephrased it, he sighed peevishly and said he had no idea.
Caussade’s answers were an object lesson in studied weariness. All these questions “were making his head spin”, he said. It was not his doing, he said, it was “fate”. At this, Pradeau kicked the chair out from under him.
“You’re the one who murdered him,” he yelled, “not ‘fate’!”
“Yeah, yeah, alright, fine!” Caussade grumbled. “No need to get all worked up, it’s not going to bring the guy back. It’s not like I wanted to kill him, I couldn’t give a fuck about him. Look, I was off my face, it just happened. Too late to fix it now.”
Carole Picard and Marc Chauvin claimed that there was nothing they could have done, that it all happened so quickly, and when asked why they did not report Caussade – who, after all, had killed a man who had never done him any harm – they both insisted it was a matter of loyalty – one of the few values they clung to – and besides, they said, they didn’t grass. Chauvin was panicked about the possible repercussions, but a man’s death barely seemed to touch him, it was something remote, abstract, it was meaningless. Like something in a video game. Neither expressed remorse or even a whit of compassion.
The procureur was kept regularly informed, and towards 11.00 p.m. the three accused were taken to the cells to appear before the court first thing in the morning.
The officers quickly headed towards the underground car park, each of them finally alone but done in. Engines roared into life, tyres squealed, and a procession of vehicles sped up the exit ramp, like gangsters making a getaway.
The first thing Vilar did when he got home was turn on his computer. Morvan had sent him an email an hour earlier: they needed to meet up, he had something to show Vilar, he could not talk on the phone. “It’s not exactly a lead, Pierre, don’t get your hopes up, but it’s interesting, we need to talk,” the former gendarme had written. Vilar sat for a long time staring at the two-line message on the screen, as though somehow more information would appear by magic. He felt as though he were on a slow merry-go-round watching familiar faces flash past, a dizzy feeling keeping him rooted to his seat.
Not a lead, no. The best Vilar could hope for was a snake-infested field of brambles, and maybe a few old footprints, all but worn away.
*
The following morning at 7.30 a.m. he called at the home of Thierry Lataste, the man in the Mercedes who had been dating Nadia Fournier when she died. Posh area, nice, two-storey middle-class house, a pretty wife called Mireille who could not hide her panic when he showed his warrant card and asked to speak to her husband. Without even asking what it was about, she stepped aside to let him in. Lataste appeared from the kitchen, holding a large mug and wearing a pale suit over a bottle-green polo shirt. He was about to leave for work, he said.
“Well, then, you’ll need to call and tell them you’ll be late.”
“Would you mind telling me just exactly what …”
Lataste had said the words a little too brashly, setting his cup down with a faint clink on a glass table and stepping forward in the hope of intimidating this interloper. Vilar sized him up: early forties, not bad-looking, and, as the head of a property advisory office, probably used to being obeyed, even feared, but now, behind the arrogant facade, he looked nervous. He glanced furtively at his wife who stood, frozen, leaning against the banister, staring at Vilar as though an exterminating angel had come to call.
“I believe you knew Nadia Fournier?”
Lataste shook his head.
“She worked for S.A.N.I., the industrial cleaners. You know them?” Lataste again glanced at his wife who was staring at him intently, willing him to answer but terrified of what he might say.
“Ah yes, I do vaguely recall someone of that name. A dark-haired girl. We sometimes ran into each other if I was working late. And?”
“Perhaps you might prefer to …”
“No, no, we can talk here … There’s not much to tell anyway, I have nothing to hide.”
Mireille Lataste suddenly seemed to emerge from her daze and took a few steps up the stairs. From the floor above came the sound of children chattering.
“I’ll leave you to it,” she said weakly. “You can tell me about it later. I’d rather give you some time to think about your version of events, it might make it a little less hard on me.”
Vilar wanted to hurt them, and he did not wait for the woman to reach the top of the stairs before saying, “You know Nadia is dead?”
Lataste’s wife stopped, but did not turn.
“How would I know that?”
“It was in the papers, it made the local news.”
“I don’t take much interest in the local news. I never read the paper.”
“You’ve got a short memory,” his wife interrupted. “We were watching T.V. together the other night, you got home early for once. They even showed her picture. A pretty girl, as I remember. I made a point of mentioning it.”
She came back downstairs and planted herself directly in front of her husband.
“Why are you lying?”
“I don’t think there’s much point me staying,” Vilar said. “I’m not going to get any straight answers.”
Lataste stepped towards Vilar.
“What do you mean? Go ahead, ask your questions and let’s get this over with, I haven’t got all day.”
“I’ve got all day, and all night too if you’re going to lie to me. It’s up to you. But since we got off to a bad start, maybe it’s better if you come down and explain it to me at the station, where we can write up a formal statement. But let’s be clear: a young woman has been murdered. Now you don’t seem to care too much about that, which is a little strange since you knew her pretty well to judge by the witness statements we have … If I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t be so arrogant and dismissive. But that’s up to you. Now, we can do this the easy way or keep up the cocky attitude and I’ll call for backup, have you dragged out of here and personally call the procureur’s office to inform them that you made false statements.”
Madame Lataste turned and ran up the stairs, a door slammed, and the children’s chatter trailed off.
Vilar had taken out his mobile and was about to call Pradeau, who was probably transferring the three suspects in the stabbing case to court.
“No, that’s O.K., I’ll come with you,” Lataste said, patting his pockets to make sure he had his wallet, mobile, whatever.
Before he followed Vilar, Lataste stood for a moment staring up at the landing, now utterly silent. He hunched his shoulders as though about to step out into the rain, muttered, “Let’s go,” and slammed the door behind him.
When Vilar explained why he had decided to bring Lataste in, Daras insisted on conducting the interview. She sensed that that man was more likely to respond to a woman, which would save them time. They left Lataste to sit and stew for a quarter of an hour while they had coffee and talked about how good it would be to get a week away from all this bullshit.
Daras went through Lataste’s I.D. papers, then laid a picture of Nadia Fournier on the desk in front of him, followed by several photographs taken at the crime scene. Vilar was sitting at the computer, taking down the statement.
“Can you confirm that we are talking about the same person?”
Lataste could not bring himself to look at the close-ups of Nadia’s lifeless body, ravaged from the beating and bloated from the early stages of decomposition. When he did not answer, Vilar said:
“We are agreed, aren’t we? That’s her?”
“Yes … that’s her,” Lataste said in a whisper.
Daras slipped the pictures back into a file and ramped things up a notch.
“A routine question, but a crucial one: when did you last see her?”
“I don’t remember exactly. Friday, maybe …”
He spoke in a distracted voice, his head bowed, his hands clasped between his thighs, as though thinking about something else, perhaps the repercussions of this whole business for him.
“What do you mean, ‘maybe’?”
“What exactly was the nature of your relationship?” Vilar interrupted.
“I …”
“So when did you last see her?” Daras said. “I trust you realise how important it is that you answer truthfully.”
“Were you having an affair? That might explain the tension between you and your wife.”
Lataste looked from one to the other. He had begun to cower a little.
“What do you mean when you say ‘yes’?” Daras said.
“Yes, we were sleeping together,” he said more loudly. “And we saw each other last Friday – I mean the Friday before last.”
Vilar checked the calendar.
“That would have been the eighth. O.K., when and where?” Lataste slumped back in his chair.
“We were together the whole day. I took her to Hossegor, I was supposed to be looking over a couple of houses we’re selling there.”
Daras came up behind him and hissed into his ear:
“And where were you on Monday, 11 June?”
He turned around and looked into her eyes. She jerked her chin, demanding an answer.
“Why the eleventh?”
“Answer the question.”
“I was in the office, obviously.”
“You didn’t visit any houses that day?”
“Only in the city itself, you can check with my colleagues or with the clients I saw.”
“Oh, we will check, Monsieur Lataste,” Daras said. “Make no mistake.”
“You’re saying you’re going to turn up at my office and question everyone about my schedule? Put calls in to my clients? That’s going to start people talking. Basically you’re going to destroy my reputation in a business that’s completely dependent on trust.”
“Yeah, because you’re really trustworthy, aren’t you?” Vilar said. “In our little meeting earlier today, you were – how shall I put it? – economical with the truth.”
“My wife was there, I was hardly going to confess that I was having an affair with that girl.”
“That girl, as you call her, how did you meet her?”
Daras had sat down behind her desk as she asked the question and now cupped her chin in her hands as she waited for an answer, obviously prepared for anything.
Lataste told the story in a monotone, betraying no emotion, and it was impossible to tell whether he felt nothing or whether he was struggling not to let it show. He and Nadia had met at the office one night. He was working late and they had slept together that same night. She had made all the running, and even now he wondered what it was about him that she had been attracted to, although at the time he had simply made the most of the opportunity and surrendered to a sort of feverish passion, watching himself live out the sort of sex scenes he thought only existed in movies.
The affair had gone on for about four months, made easier by Lataste’s frequent trips in the region and the fact that they could use the properties he had to visit for his work: empty houses, quirky old cottages, luxury or dilapidated apartments, barely completed studios in buildings where labourers would sometimes be finishing work on the other side of the partition wall … It had been his idea, this sort of furtive, itinerant existence which he found exciting and which Nadia seemed to get a taste for, though it was hard for him to know what she really thought or felt, she could be secretive, sometimes mysterious, lost in her own thoughts, and there were days when she just let him drive her around and fuck her, as though she were not really there at all.
No, she had never asked for money – what a ridiculous idea. Although thinking about it, perhaps she had been expecting something else, she was never completely happy, but for the most part cheerful enough during their jaunts together.
“It turns out you didn’t know her very well, then,” Daras said. Lataste stared at her, mulling over what he was about to say.
“I don’t think I gave a shit about knowing her. For me it was almost a dream, meeting this young girl who put the moves on me and going … well, going around and screwing in all these different places, you can’t imagine the freedom, the excitement … she was just a fuck buddy, really. That’s all. If she had wanted to stop, I wouldn’t have insisted on keeping it going. We didn’t talk about our lives. I knew she had a thirteen-year-old son, she knew that I was married, and that’s it.”
“How did you feel when you heard she’d been murdered?”
Lataste shrugged slowly. He could not bring himself to look up at Daras and he stared down at the desk.
“I don’t know. It felt weird. Like I was still in some sort of movie. Obviously I wasn’t about to say anything in front of my wife. For me, it was like a break from the real world, something that happened once or twice a week, that’s all. A sort of forbidden thrill.”
“With death at the end, just like in the movies? Is that why you didn’t get in touch with the police? Nadia’s death was the inevitable fate of a misspent life, in some way? You must have known that we’d track you down, surely?”
Lataste bowed his head and sighed.
“Obviously, I was hoping you wouldn’t.”
Vilar tapped away at the keyboard for a few seconds, then, unexpectedly, all was silence. The printer suddenly clicked and whirred. It was Lataste who finally spoke.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“We’re not bound to answer, but ask away,” Vilar said.
“Why did you ask if she’d ever asked me for money?”
Vilar and Daras exchanged a look, found themselves in agreement.
“We have every reason to suspect that Nadia Fournier was working, at least some of the time, as a prostitute. When a girl like that hooks up with your type, she usually shakes him down one way or another.”
“And what exactly is ‘my type’?”
“Filthy rich and dumb enough to mistake your life for a fantasy. I thought you were an arrogant prick, but right now I think you’re just a pathetic fucker.”
“Well you’re half right … I have been a bit of a fucker, and when my wife finds out about it I’ll be royally screwed.”
“Very good,” Daras said. “Nice to see you haven’t lost your sense of humour. You’re resourceful. Here we are practically standing over the body of the woman you were fucking not two weeks ago, and you’re making jokes.
“Maybe I’d make a good cop.”
“For that you’d need to know which side you’re on …” Vilar said.
He and Daras exchanged another look, and Vilar pushed the statement across the desk to Lataste. The man read through it and signed with a sigh.
“This statement will be on the case file,” Daras said. “I hope you haven’t forgotten anything, or kept anything from us. We’ll call you in again if we need clarification. And obviously if we do call, you’d better make sure you come. Do I make myself clear?”
“Perfectly,” Lataste said in a low voice. “Can I go now?”
The irony and superciliousness seemed to have drained from him. He trudged out slowly, closing the door softly behind him.
“So?” Daras said.
“So? We’ve found ourselves a true romantic, don’t you think? Led around by his dick with his brain in his Y-fronts.”
“Like most guys …”
Vilar smiled.
“Maybe … But he knows more than he’s letting on, at least about how Nadia supplemented her income. I can’t believe he didn’t suspect.”
“Agreed. We can keep up the pressure, but he doesn’t look like the type to buckle easily. Just when you think he’s about to spill his guts, he suddenly gets a grip. Funny guy.”
The mobile in Daras’ pocket rang. She took the call, heaved a sigh, and said she was on her way.
“I’ve got a meeting with Judge Dardenne in five minutes. I’d completely forgotten. It’s about the two corpses we found two years ago, the couple we found bled dry in Montalivet a couple of months dead? Chaintrier has been working on the case. From the witness statements, we’d assumed it was a woman who cut their throats, turns out it was a transvestite, the husband’s boyfriend! Sounds like it’s turning into a bit of a farce – Dardenne and I always did have trouble taking the case seriously.”
She went out, trailing a ribbon of citrus scent. Vilar slumped into his chair and sat motionless in the perfumed atmosphere, savouring the smell until the last fragrant molecules had dispersed. He thought again about Lataste, who had just had the shock of his life, a shock from which he might never recover because, at the end of the day, he was simply a middle-class pillock slumming it. An ignorant arsehole for whom ignorance was no longer bliss.